Google now lets you add friends as contacts for account recovery

Google is announcing new privacy and recovery tools to combat spam across multiple Android-related products, including suspicious link detection in messages, sign-in with phone number, and recovery contacts.

If you lose your device or your account is compromised through a hack, Google is adding new ways to recover your Google Account without losing any data.

The company is adding a new feature called Recovery Contacts, which lets you add trusted friends or family members as contacts to start your recovery and verify your identity. When you lose your device or forget your password so you’re locked out of your account This setting is under the Security tab on your Google Account page

When you’re locked out, you can select a recovery contact as a backup method, and they’ll get a number, valid for 15 minutes, that you’ll need to verify to log into your account again. You can add up to 10 recovery contacts to your account and they must approve your request to be added as one Once you add a recovery contact, you can’t use them again for seven days.

The company is also adding sign-in with mobile number as a recovery method, which is especially helpful when you lose a device. The tool automatically identifies all accounts linked to a specific phone number. You can use your lock-screen passcode or pattern from a previous device to authenticate yourself. This feature is slowly spreading worldwide.

Company launched On-device protection for messages for Pixel devices To detect scam and spam messages. Google is now baking spam link detection into Google Messages for all users When you click on a suspicious message, the app will warn you and prevent you from visiting that page.

For the more technically inclined, the company is adding a key verifier to Google Messages. This helps identify the other person and ensures that your messages are end-to-end encrypted and private. Android 10 and later users can scan a QR code for your contact for verification.

Google is also bringing a new game called Be prepared for scams Educate users on various fraud and scam usage cases.