Google Support Person Out of Control?

Sounds like at least one may hold grudges. [Link]

Now, since bringing this up on a related thread, I had one commenter (Beldar) suggest that this is happening because of Google’s recent Blogger outage, or some related reason. I asked for examples of people who, within the last 24 hours, were asked for their phone number. I am especially interested in anyone who was asked in the last 24 hours.

One commenter, Dana, said she was asked for her cell phone number, but she was able to hit a link called “save and continue” and bypass the question. A couple of other commenters reported being asked for a cell phone number, but have not yet answered my question as to whether they were REQUIRED to provide a cell phone number to restore their Google account. Dana, who didn’t criticize Google, was not required to hand over the cell phone number. I was.

I am convinced that Google has given this fellow nitecruzr the authority to flag accounts and require them to hand over cell phone numbers. (And if, instead, they are just asking for cell phone numbers wholesale, that’s a concern as well.)

Google, do something about this clown. GIve me back my Gmail without making me give you more personal information of mine.

In short: don’t be evil, Google.

UPDATE: A sixth person, B.E., has written to say that he too was locked out of his account. It is important to understand that the six of us — Aaron Worthing, Dead Dog Bounce, Hoystory, B.E., EnigmatiCore, and me — were all told that unusual activity had been detected on our accounts. We were required to give up our cell phone numbers to regain access. There was no “save and continue” option or other way to bypass the requirement. I even rebooted my computer and cleared my cache, and was unable to get into Gmail.

Other people have said Google asked for their cell phone numbers recently. But the six of us are different. We were required to give up a cell number.

And each one of us had criticized nitecruzr.

That’s strong circumstantial evidence that he flagged our accounts. We were disabled from accessing our e-mail because we criticized this guy’s rudeness and dishonesty.

That’s a real problem, Google. The word is spreading.

What are you going to do about it?

Where is the oversight?