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I got locked out of my Google account for a month

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Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail is great for this, in my opinion. I vastly prefer every single aspect of the experience. The web mail client alone is worth the switch away from Gmail, IMHO.

How does Fastmail handle lost passwords?

There was a discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15853477

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#82
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a large b2c website. Many users used the password recovery flow essentially as their login mechanism. Seriously.

So why not take advantage of that... instead of passwords just email the user a link they need to press to login.

That is a great idea. For many people that would be quicker and a nicer work flow.

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#83
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My AdWords account got locked a few years back. It was my first attempt to try AdWords on my website. I've loaded around $20 and it almost immediately got locked (not a single ad was shown/clicked). I could never unlock it or retrieve my money from it. So Google has my 20 dollars now.

Chargeback?

Chargeback plus time machine you mean?

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#85
It's my belief that if you enable 2FA it's a lot harder to be casually dissociated from your account. This is because you have to do more work to establish a chain of authority over the account to enable it, and because you precreate account recovery tokens you can save offline.

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#86

I think this is the money quote: “That same day I opened a second GMail account so I could have access to services like an email account if need be, [...]” So, this journalist is in the middle of a horrible experience with Gmail and responds by ... opening another Gmail account, because basically realistically imagining email as something other than Gmail is far too much of a stretch in most people’s minds.

But a Google account is not just email. It's also drive, calendar, and so on. There's a lot of time spent becoming familiar with those services, and to up and switch that entire suite would take a massive amount of relearning. Under the same circumstances as the author, I think I'd be back to Google. Remember, other services have their own issues as well.

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#87
post #75

In the era of cloud services, if it's not on your hard drive you could ultimately lose access to it at any time. People tend to think about reasons like companies shutting down services, getting acquired, etc. but this brings up an entirely new class of ways you could lose access to your cloud info: Locking yourself out. Maybe you forgot the password, your password manager had a bug, or the account was with an old sc…

I worked for a large b2c website. Many users used the password recovery flow essentially as their login mechanism. Seriously.

What's surprising about that? It's the easiest way to deal with a system where you need to log in occasionally.

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#88
Why don't they just offer some kind of emergency support with a hefty pricetag for these cases? Eg pay 200$ to have an actual human verify your identity? I don't think that would cost them anything and most people in this situation would likely pay any price to regain access..

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#89

I think this is the money quote: “That same day I opened a second GMail account so I could have access to services like an email account if need be, [...]” So, this journalist is in the middle of a horrible experience with Gmail and responds by ... opening another Gmail account, because basically realistically imagining email as something other than Gmail is far too much of a stretch in most people’s minds.

This happens all over the place -- for some reason, the majority of the people won't learn. They'll tell you horror stories about how they lost a lot of work (or even money!) because a provider never gave them support, yet, go back to that same provider.

A group of acquaintances had a Facebook group where they shared research and documents. It got deleted and they lost everything. Thrice. I suggested they used something else for document storage each time, but was just ignored or shooed off.

The root cause of the problem is kinda beyond me -- but it's clear that people are unwilling to learn from experience when it comes to these things, and that these free services will continue to behave as they do because there's no downside to doing so.

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#90
post #75

In the era of cloud services, if it's not on your hard drive you could ultimately lose access to it at any time. People tend to think about reasons like companies shutting down services, getting acquired, etc. but this brings up an entirely new class of ways you could lose access to your cloud info: Locking yourself out. Maybe you forgot the password, your password manager had a bug, or the account was with an old sc…

I worked for a large b2c website. Many users used the password recovery flow essentially as their login mechanism. Seriously.

Some companies understood and embraced this: Slack and auth0 can send you "login links" via email which log you right in.

Remove that pesky "password" from the entire "password reset" flow. Makes perfect sense (meaning: there's clearly users making use of it).

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