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Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

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Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#121

Post by willhinsa »

stanleydrew wrote: post #103
joxel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, this is a complete farce. You’d think by this point google could offer a simple checkbox in the settings of your gmail account: “Do you want this account to be extra secure and for us to lock someone out of it with any activity deemed suspicious?” And then when you don’t click that box they don’t arbitrarily lock your account. But they don’t. Because they’re a dumpster fire company.

I'm not going to try to convince anyone that has their mind made up about "dumpster fire" companies or whatever. For anyone else reading, I'll just say that we all know there are tradeoffs between security and usability and we can actually have a good-faith discussion about that if we want to.

"Tradeoffs" that consumers don't get a say in. They don't deserve good faith discussions when they treat us like children and throw away the key when that infantilization destroys stuff in _our_ lives.

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#122

Post by Herbstluft »

Doubtme wrote: post #118

If you don't backup your data in 2022+ it's entirely your fault. After losing my own 10 year old Gmail and running around the internet hunting down employees for 5+ months only to get a canned automatic response. I learned to not trust any service. Ever. I've even been hacked by rouge employees of fortune 500 companies. Only because of my experience I was able to get my account back after being hacked for 5 - 10 minu…

Losing access to your mail account causes significant and critical damage without ever considering the existence of backups.

Backups don't help with the painful (and sometimes barely possible) migration of your accounts to a new address, updating contacts, loss of mails that arrived after you were locked out, et cetera

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#123

Post by harshalizee »

blacklight wrote: post #96

This is probably the #500 post on HN that reads "help I've been locked out of my Google account for Kafkaesque/inexplicable reasons and I have nobody to reach out to". If you're still using Google products as your primary drivers, then it's entirely your fault. Do yourself a favour in 2023: drop Google and all the filthy excrement that they produce. There's plenty of much better alternatives, and from a purely market…

But realistically how do you do it? I've stopped signing up for any new Google products for well over half a decade now. Even moved my email to protonmail.

I have a little over 500 accounts tied to my Gmail over the last two decades. Moving them is a pain but still possible.

The problem arises when it comes to existing accounts with byzantine financial institutions. Trying to change email addresses that are linked to you as the username is nigh impossible in many cases.

Quite a few institutions won't let you use an email that comes from protonmail or a custom domain. So, many times I'm forced back into using a Gmail address to prevent a whole host off other issues

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#124

Post by mindslight »

stanleydrew wrote: post #103
joxel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, this is a complete farce. You’d think by this point google could offer a simple checkbox in the settings of your gmail account: “Do you want this account to be extra secure and for us to lock someone out of it with any activity deemed suspicious?” And then when you don’t click that box they don’t arbitrarily lock your account. But they don’t. Because they’re a dumpster fire company.

I'm not going to try to convince anyone that has their mind made up about "dumpster fire" companies or whatever. For anyone else reading, I'll just say that we all know there are tradeoffs between security and usability and we can actually have a good-faith discussion about that if we want to.

The problem is that this trade off is between your usability and Google's security, so the choice of their security wins out every time.

I have never bought into this regressive corporate security model in which my desktop computer is supposedly less trusted than assorted web app accounts. Unless I've opted in to something different, knowing the password should grant basically full access to the account. If there are additional rules around changing the password or other sensitive meta tasks, then those need to be spelled out in a well defined manner, and not punted to some opaque fickle machine learning scheme based on IP addresses, browser vulnerabilities, phase of the moon, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#125

Post by Doubtme »

Herbstluft wrote: post #122
Doubtme wrote: post #118

If you don't backup your data in 2022+ it's entirely your fault. After losing my own 10 year old Gmail and running around the internet hunting down employees for 5+ months only to get a canned automatic response. I learned to not trust any service. Ever. I've even been hacked by rouge employees of fortune 500 companies. Only because of my experience I was able to get my account back after being hacked for 5 - 10 minu…

Losing access to your mail account causes significant and critical damage without ever considering the existence of backups. Backups don't help with the painful (and sometimes barely possible) migration of your accounts to a new address, updating contacts, loss of mails that arrived after you were locked out, et cetera

Welp that's the product you signed up for.

Much like PayPal stealing from millions of Americans for a full decade+

Can't backup money either. That doesn't stop these policies of zero human support and only infinity robot responses from remaining until today.

Writing a law and getting it passed to curtail this behavior absolute nonsense.

Complaining about the next 1000000 people to lose access without doing 1 single thing about it. Sign me right up!

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#126

Post by joe__f »

blacklight wrote: post #96

This is probably the #500 post on HN that reads "help I've been locked out of my Google account for Kafkaesque/inexplicable reasons and I have nobody to reach out to". If you're still using Google products as your primary drivers, then it's entirely your fault. Do yourself a favour in 2023: drop Google and all the filthy excrement that they produce. There's plenty of much better alternatives, and from a purely market…

I've been thinking to move away from Gmail for a while now, what alternatives do you suggest?

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#127

Post by incrudible »

joe__f wrote: post #126
blacklight wrote: post #96

This is probably the #500 post on HN that reads "help I've been locked out of my Google account for Kafkaesque/inexplicable reasons and I have nobody to reach out to". If you're still using Google products as your primary drivers, then it's entirely your fault. Do yourself a favour in 2023: drop Google and all the filthy excrement that they produce. There's plenty of much better alternatives, and from a purely market…

I've been thinking to move away from Gmail for a while now, what alternatives do you suggest?

Stop answering e-mails. No, seriously.

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#128

Post by koonsolo »

coffeeblack wrote: post #100
blacklight wrote: post #96

This is probably the #500 post on HN that reads "help I've been locked out of my Google account for Kafkaesque/inexplicable reasons and I have nobody to reach out to". If you're still using Google products as your primary drivers, then it's entirely your fault. Do yourself a favour in 2023: drop Google and all the filthy excrement that they produce. There's plenty of much better alternatives, and from a purely market…

This, plus if you have no Google Takeout backup.

Google takeout is horrible. It either doesn't work or partly works.

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#129

Post by [deleted] »

CrendKing wrote: post #28
marvindanig wrote: post #20

Google's strategy of locking out people from "everything" is just insane! Someone needs to lawyer up and make them pay through the nose for stealing access to individual’s personal data that doesn't even belong to them.

Even this "someone" wins, if it's not a class action, I doubt any amount of money out of the lawsuit would change anything for a big company like Google. And I doubt case of these could result in class action anyways.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#130

Post by ScottyAdams0 »

blacklight wrote: post #96

This is probably the #500 post on HN that reads "help I've been locked out of my Google account for Kafkaesque/inexplicable reasons and I have nobody to reach out to". If you're still using Google products as your primary drivers, then it's entirely your fault. Do yourself a favour in 2023: drop Google and all the filthy excrement that they produce. There's plenty of much better alternatives, and from a purely market…

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