PSA: Google is silently linking your phone number across all signed-in accounts

Your Android phone is deeply integrated with a number of Google services, but a quiet background mechanism is currently causing a stir among users. A growing number of Android users are only now learning that Google automatically verifies and associates their phone number with every Google account logged into their device, without any explicit confirmation prompt.

As spotted in a recent Reddit thread, users report receiving confirmation emails out of the blue from “noreply-phone-verification@google.com” stating that their phone number has been verified. The feature, known in Google settings as “Phone number verification,” links your active phone number across all Google accounts signed in on the same phone, including secondary profiles, work accounts, and throwaway handles.

While our team has not seen these specific notification emails land in our own inboxes, several colleagues checked their device settings and found the auto-verification toggle was quietly enabled across their active devices.

Google’s support documentation has long noted that it periodically re-verifies your device’s phone number to keep communication and recovery features up to date. However, this support page was updated sometime between August and October 2025 to add this rather aggressive behavior of turning on phone number verification by default, as well as adding all phone numbers to all Google accounts signed in on the device:

As you’d imagine, silently associating a phone number(s) across multiple accounts poses obvious privacy headaches for anyone who intentionally segregates their primary SIM from secondary accounts. Long-time Android users are bound to be caught off guard by this change, since this wasn’t an opt-out feature before.

How to disable Phone number verification on Android

If you would rather keep your phone number decoupled from secondary accounts, you can disable the feature through your Android device:

• Open your phone’s Settings app.
• Tap on Google (or Google services and preferences).
• Switch to the All Services tab.
• Under the Privacy & Security section, locate Phone number verification.
• Toggle off Verify phone numbers automatically.

Note that turning off the phone number verification toggle only prevents future linking. If Google has already attached your number across secondary accounts, you will need to open your Google Account Personal Info page, head to Contact info > Phone, and manually remove the number from each profile where it doesn’t belong.

Some Reddit users have complained that disabling phone number verification does not persist, and the option re-enables itself when you return to the above screen. While this particular report is a few months old, others have also complained about the same in the first thread. However, we were unable to replicate the behavior. Disabling phone number verification sticks for us (for now).

We have reached out to Google for a statement on this opt-out behavior for phone number verification on Android. We’ll keep you updated when we learn more.