Google now lets you add friends as contacts for account recovery

Google announced new privacy and recovery tools to combat spam across multiple products related to Android, including detecting suspicious links in messages, signing in with a phone number, and recovery contacts.

Google is adding new ways to recover your Google Account without losing your information if you lose your device or your account is compromised by hacking.

The company is adding a new feature called Recovery Contacts. This will allow you to add trusted friends and family members as contacts to begin your recovery and verify your identity. If your account is locked out because you lost your device or forgot your password. This setting is located on the Security tab of your Google Account page.

If you are locked out, select Recovery Contact as your backup method and you will be issued a number that is valid for 15 minutes. You will need to confirm this number when you log back into your account. You can add 10 recovery contacts to your account, but you must approve your request to be added as one. Once you add a recovery contact, you won’t be able to use it again for 7 days.

The company is also adding sign-in using your mobile number as a recovery method. This is especially useful if you lose your device. This tool automatically identifies all accounts linked to a particular phone number. You can use your previous device’s lock screen passcode or pattern to verify your identity. This feature is gradually being rolled out worldwide.

The company has launched on-device protection of messages for Pixel devices to detect fraudulent and spam messages. Google is now improving detection of spam links in Google Messages for all users. If you click on a suspicious message, the app will issue a warning and stop you from accessing the page.

For those with more technical knowledge, the company is adding key verification functionality to Google Messages. This ensures that you identify the other party and that your messages are end-to-end encrypted and private. Users using Android 10 and above can scan a contact’s QR code to verify it.

Google is also introducing a new game called Be Scam Ready to educate users about various scams and scam use cases.