@ai6yr FWIW:

"There is no warning or heads-up. Google is apparently doing this without any kind of prompt."

Below is the email I received almost a month ago.

The "learn more" link at the bottom leads here: https://support.google.com/android/answer/7521240

Sounds super gross (as you'd expect from Google), but they did give an un-proofread heads-up about their grossness.

@ai6yr
The rich guy that died in the Florida airplane crash founded a company which did that for shopping sites. Tracking down visitors' email so they could send them commercial spam 😑

@ai6yr I found that after the last phone update, Google magically had a lot of permissions I hadn't given it in the past

worth checking, on Android phones

every one of them gave me a "if you turn this off you'll break your phone!" message but this hasn't proven to be the case so far 🙄

@ai6yr Figured lot of this type of thing going on with all the non FOSS platforms. Strongly suspect similar is being done by the big companies that encourage Passkeys, though not part of the standard would explain both their "buy in" and why they like to make it hard to switch them.

@ai6yr

The Community Garden I manage is set up on Google, so I have to use Google. I sign in with a password but they data mine so hard that I have to click several buttons to even get to the screen where I can enter a password without sharing biometric data and my phone number. They are pure evil.

@ai6yr That has happened twice now with me.

I wish I could get a Pixel w/ GrapheneOS or Huawei again to avoid the google crap...

@ai6yr I miss the days of BBSs when you could literally hang out with people in real life and you still called them by their handle. Real names? Only if you’re really close friends.:P