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How likely is losing a Google account?

jefftk.com

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Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#61

Post by DontchaKnowit »

If anyone can help woththis,please reach out : My father owns a business that has been family owned and operated by my grandpa and my father for nearly 50 years. The name of the business contaibs our last name. The google street view of the business is my fathers home.

Recently my fathers domain registration lapsed and someone bought the domain. We changed the website to a different address and went to change the google listing for his business only to find that someone had also claimed the business. We have tried requesting ownership, we filed a formal 3rd party dispute, and we have requested a domain change. Through all of this we have just been completely ignored by google. I cannot figure out for the life of me how to get someone from google to help us verify his ownership of the business.

Its had a real impact on how many calls he's getting for work and has created financual hardship for my parents and there is seemingly nothing we can do about it.

If anyones been through this or something similar and has advice please leave a comment. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#62

Post by quietbritishjim »

blfr wrote: post #40

Google is too good not to roll the dice. I use Gmail in my own domain with a different registrar. Push comes to shove, I'll move, restore backups, and carry on. But damn are non-Google ecosystems bad. At work we use m365 and everything is atrocious compared to Google. Loggin in is a mess, email search is dreadful, OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe, integration with Android is weak, Ou…

> OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe

If this trivial complaint is the worst you can think of for OneNote then that shows what a good job they've done. I actually hate how good OneNote is because it doesn't work on Linux (as a native application) and there's no good alternative that does. The usual answer I hear is to use a wiki but one of OneNote's killer features is how good its offline capability is when using a notebook on a shared drive, and an online-only wiki is about as far from that as you can get.

(Ctrl+f to search current page, ctrl+e to search everywhere, by the way.)

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#63

Post by trinsic2 »

> Even if the risk is low, however, maybe it would still be better to switch to something else that is even lower risk? The problem is that security and policy lockouts are something you can find with any service. For example, in HN discussions people will often recommend Fastmail or Protonmail, but they've had their problems too (FM: 2017, 2020, 2022, PM: 2018, 2019, 2021). Especially given that these are much smaller services I'm not convinced that the risk is lower there. Any system is going to have to handle this sort of problem, and you're not going to find one that never has false positives.

Good breakdown for this person's use case.

I disagree with the conclusion above though. My experience (as a person who handles technical support around these issues, for customers of Gmail and more specifically ATT/Yahoo/SBCGlobal) is that many people that get locked out of their accounts do not understand all the options available to them to regain access. Also it appears, to me, that at least for Fastmail, their security protocols are a bit more friendly, less strict about how the security is applied (I.E not spamming customers to use the security methods, changing the methods willy/nilly without warning). Also Fastmail sends an email to your mail email account if you accidentally trying to use your main account password in an app specific use-case, I.E makes it easier to understand how the security measures are being applied.

Also the security measures implemented by providers that you pay for, appear to me, to be designed to be customer centric, rather than trying to create a blanket one size fits all approach to security that I feel google tries to implement (because they have so many customers). My meaning about this is that the control of the security options appear, to me, to be more in the hands of the customer to implement how they see fit, where as google security measures appear to be implemented from a cover our assess approach and not really designed for the customer per say.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#64

Post by edent »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #16
edent wrote: post #5

Yup - happened to me. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/11/the-day-google-deleted-me/ "Luckily" I had enough identity documents to prove to Google's satisfaction that I was who I said I was. But even after I recovered the account, it was all screwed up. Since then I've dropped my reliance on Google. I don't use them for sign-in, my mail gets regularly backed up, I use alternative apps where I can. Google scale only works…

but there is not process or person that has ever existed that has been infallible, therefore you are arguing that Google scale does not work?

That's correct.

Google boasts that it doesn't do customer service because it can't scale to meet the demands of their user base.

That can only work if their systems and processes never cause a user to have to go further than an FAQ page or community support.

Given that Google are fallible, you end up in a situation where users' have a poor experience and cannot contact someone to resolve it.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#65

Post by nix23 »

jeffbee wrote: post #54
Juliate wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do want that. But with proper (actual) procedures in place. The opposite of that is, you do not have a way of recourse, ever. Even states have some.

It is a fantasy that you can have humans adhere to procedures. That's the whole underlying problem of social engineering. Just take the human out of the loop.

> Just take the human out of the loop.

This i going to be funny if you get locked out of your bank-account or you have to lock-down your credit-card...computer says no.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#66

Post by gspencley »

> The problem is that security and policy lockouts are something you can find with any service.

This is one of the reasons I don't like or trust SaaS as an end-user, at least for critical failure points.

It's not just about policy lockouts; the company can go out of business or get sold and the product shut down. Data leaks and breaches can be a greater risk since you're too small to target as an individual but all users collectively is another story. Outages, both locally and service-level, can prevent you from having access to your data when you absolutely need it (doctor or legal appointment etc.). Oh and they will track you, make you a perpetual guinea pig for A/B testing purposes and can change critical features that you depend on at any time of their choosing without notice.

There are trade-offs in the other direction, like the mobility and the convenience to access data across multiple devices. For historically expensive products (like Photoshop and Pro Tools), subscription based models make services more accessible. It's just too bad that we can't seem to land on the best of both worlds as the common case. I'd like a subscription model and the ability to sync data across devices automatically (preferably using e2e encryption) without the software being at all "web based."

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#67

Post by edent »

Chinjut wrote: post #46
edent wrote: post #5

Yup - happened to me. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/11/the-day-google-deleted-me/ "Luckily" I had enough identity documents to prove to Google's satisfaction that I was who I said I was. But even after I recovered the account, it was all screwed up. Since then I've dropped my reliance on Google. I don't use them for sign-in, my mail gets regularly backed up, I use alternative apps where I can. Google scale only works…

Out of curiosity, in what way was the account screwed up after you recovered it?

As I said in the post, they set all my YouTube videos private. It also caused an issue with my Developer account.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#68

Post by nirvdrum »

jeffbee wrote: post #29
guptaneil wrote: post #13

It's true that every service has to deal with the same policy and lockout problems, but that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the risk is the same. I pay for FastMail because 1. if something goes wrong, I can reach a human without needing to write a viral blog post first. Other services pay for a customer service department. 2. I trust FastMail more to not shut down their product because they got bored. Sure Gmail…

"I can reach a human" is a huge security vuln. I don't want people social engineering my identity provider.

I'll take the limited risk. I've had to contact Fastmail support and it was a breath of fresh air. It's a bit absurd that something so fundamental as email has essentially no support from a company as large as Google; it's not a bug-free product.

I suppose eliminating humans is a security win, but HN is full of stories of AI systems failing and banning accounts for essentially nothing. Not having a human to appeal to is far riskier to me. It's not like these AI systems can't be gamed to knock people offline. I'll take the risk of having humans involved -- it's far less stressful.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#69

Post by gary_0 »

guptaneil wrote: post #13

It's true that every service has to deal with the same policy and lockout problems, but that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the risk is the same. I pay for FastMail because 1. if something goes wrong, I can reach a human without needing to write a viral blog post first. Other services pay for a customer service department. 2. I trust FastMail more to not shut down their product because they got bored. Sure Gmail…

Any company with a business model that takes your money and gives you service is inherently more secure than one that sells your eyeballs to advertisers in exchange for giving you free stuff. The former companies have a direct incentive to keep giving you service as part of their core business. The latter are really only paying attention to the money they get from advertisers.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#70

Post by jxf »

mattnewton wrote: post #42
dylan604 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2) Why in the world would Gmail get shut down? The veins of treasure to be mined from within the user's emails are vast and endless. It is quite simply a mother lode. The only bigger source within their direct control is the search input screen.

I think they are talking about some change to workspace effectively breaking the service for them. This has some precedent (with the old “dasher” personal accounts having growing pains for some people migrating IIRC) but also seems like a very low risk.

What are the "dasher personal accounts"? I haven't heard of that before and search results seem to think I'm asking about DoorDash.
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