Note: This is a question about a possible change in policy that, should it really be coming, one would do well to act on well in advance of its adoption. If you are not a Google employee, please do not try to answer it. Your guesses might be interesting, but nobody can really speak for Google but Google.
Here we go: First of all, a policy change that went in toward the end of last month - to get a new gmail account, one must have a cell phone that allows one to receive text messages. See:
http://freewareelite.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/gmail-now-requiring-cell-phone-number/
If one does not have a cell phone, Google suggests that one find a friend who has a cell phone, who, one must assume, doesn't want a gmail account of his own and is willing to let one use his cellphone for these purposes. Good luck finding one of those, especially given the circumstances which I'll mention in a few paragraphs.
Quoting the post:
"Until recently, GMail has been IMHO the best web-based free email on the planet, because of it’s quickness and ease-of-use. However, starting yesterday, new GMail users from the USA have been required to supply their cell phone numbers in order to create an account.
This means that your mobile phone is going to be spammed?! Why does Google want to do this? They say that this requirement will spread to new users outside the US soon, and later to all GMail users."
which would imply that those of us who have gmail accounts, but not cell phones that they own or can borrow, will lose access to their gmail accounts at that point. Pretty bad already if one was relying on that gmail account and gets surprised, but it gets worse.
Last night, a friend of mine tried to create a new Google account for a non-Google address, and ran head on into a notice that he had to provide that mobile phone number, with text messaging capability, because Gmail required it - even though he was not, at that point, trying to set up a Gmail account! Just a standard Google account, one of those things that lets one post to Googlegroups under one's non-Google email address and, most significantly here, lets one log into and post to Blogger.
Which leaves us with the question - when we lose access to our Gmail Accounts, at some time in the unspecified but apparently not very distant future, will we also lose access to all other Google services that we have to log into to use, including Blogger? I ask, because my main personal blog is currently located on Blogger, and if I'm going to have to move it elsewhere, I'd like to begin that process as soon as possible, for reasons all too familiar to anybody who was around for the Yahoo 360 fiasco. Also, I had been thinking of making fairly extensive use of a few more of Google's services, especially the Knol feature, which I was going to use to start posting some mathematics related material - I find the offerings of material above the sophomore year undergraduate level to be surprisingly limited online - but obviously, if I'm about to get locked out of this account, devoting much time to building up a presence here won't make much sense. That would be like laying bricks as the wrecking ball came into sight - severely bad craziness.
I mentioned a reluctance that friends might feel over lending one their cell phones for this purpose. Let's take a look at this post to see one reason of why that might be:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/gmail_advertising/3319645.htm
"Gmail trying to access my cell phone logs
Here is a strange occurrence... I installed Gmail and maps onto my Blackberry phone which I have high security settings on. 15 min later I get a pop up stating that Gmail was trying to access my phone logs. Does anyone know what Google would want with our cell phone history logs?"
Not exactly a moment that builds a large amount of trust in the company. Cell phone numbers are generally considered to be private information. To help me in this way, my friends, if they had cell phones - and few of them do - would have to breach their own privacy, leaving them open to telemarketing calls and the possibility that a company that they don't really know might try to put that information to inappropriate use. That would be a lot for me to ask of them, and I wouldn't blame them one bit for saying "no", because I would seem to be asking it of them very lightly, if I were to ask them to help me through this new procedure.
As for getting a cell phone of one's own, if one is doing that just to hold onto one's Gmail address, that will have become one very expensive "free" email account, even when the Blogger membership is thrown in as a fringe benefit. At that rate, one could get one's own domain name, run Wordpress on it, get a paid email account, and skip the cell phone - getting more functionality, more customer support and more security, at a much lower cost. Why would the user choose to pay more to get less, as he would be doing here if a cell phone was something that he just wasn't that interested in having, which, at over $50 / month, is far, far more expensive than some of our Internet connections? Especially since, under the cell phone powered option, he has apparently opted in to telemarketing calls (see comments following post behind the first link).
So, is it time for me to start packing and looking for a new online home?
