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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?

#111

Post by efsavage »

the_snooze wrote: post #103
gary_0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. If anything, companies try to double-dip and serve multiple masters. See: the security and privacy mess in smart TVs. Last I checked, LG wasn't giving their TVs away.

> If anything, companies try to double-dip and serve multiple masters. See: the security and privacy mess in smart TVs. Last I checked, LG wasn't giving their TVs away.

This is true, and you transition from customer to eyeballs once you take delivery of the product, but it is also tempered by the fact that they would like to sell you your next TV as well.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#112

Post by lolinder »

balboah wrote: post #99
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…

Used fastmail (and proton) for a year or two. Had to go back to google because there’s just too much spam otherwise

I've been on Fastmail for several years and I've had no spam in my inbox at all. Not a single email. That's a better track record than Gmail for me.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#113

Post by jefftk »

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.

This isn't just a hypothetical: a few years ago Fastmail support was socially engineered into giving access to a HN user's account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855081

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#114

Post by remus »

nirvdrum wrote: post #68
jeffbee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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'd be willing to bet that gmail has a couple of orders of magnitude more users than fastmail while also providing a substantially bigger inbox (than the cheapest fastmail option), and providing the whole thing for free. I dont think it's surprising that they make trade-offs to support that model. Just think of how many support staff you'd need to support 1.5 billion users!

> 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.

I don't think the trade off is that simple. There are plenty of stories of support staff getting scammed in to incorrectly providing access to accounts. Is one better than the other? It's not a clear choice imo.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#115

Post by jefftk »

unixhero wrote: post #57
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.

It will not go down, but you can get locked out by AI policies. This is likely.

Why do you say this is likely?

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#116

Post by MaKey »

unity1001 wrote: post #90
NelsonMinar wrote: post #24

Chargebacks can get your Google account locked. If you have a dispute with Google and protect yourself by reversing a credit card charge, Google might lock you entirely out of your account. The Google Pixel subreddit has a bunch of people's stories about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/search/?q=chargeback Not sure if this counts as "policy reason" for the article's purposes; he sort of dismisses payment d…

> My takeaway was that if I was ever in a dispute over a couple of hundred bucks for Google, I would not risk a chargeback for fear of retaliation And my takeaway is that it is high time that these corporations that hold people's livelihoods in their hands got regulated like public utilities...

Exactly! Maybe this way we could do something about mail delivery issues too. I think it shouldn't be okay to accept mail and then still drop it, yet Microsoft does it sometimes with new mail servers.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#118

Post by H4ZB7 »

jeffbee wrote: post #27

I am amused by the way HN collectively expresses contradictory opinions on this topic. When presented as getting locked out of Google, a vanishingly small probability of losing access to your account, sometimes only temporarily and often through the fault of the user, is a crime against humanity. When framed as American-style "voter ID", a 15% false positive rate is just the natural price of ballot security. Maybe th…

no. whats amazing is that a bunch of people who supposedly care about such basic fundamentals like having open protocols always unanimously agree with "the company has an advanced proprietary risk analytics model to decide whether and how you get to log in. we can't talk about it because of security reasons".

well, the article is just wrong but i don't feel like going into the nuances of how identity works with a bunch of zero attention span web devs but i blame UN*X for this situation by making computers too hard to use (both securely and at all) with contraptions like email and PGP. all authentication should be done with public keys. open protocols require solid foundations which include the user being security-competent. you can layer on the "poor old dumb user" stuff on top of that, for example by letting him have a 3rd party company hold his private key. but again, this article is just wrong and scoped into very specific things people like to "debate" while having no clue about the big picture. it's absurd to even imagine that the web meta (a bunch of dot com boomers who dont give a fuck about anything other than going with the flow and creating solutions looking for problems, and knee jerk solutions to current problems) represents anything about established security engineering literature

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#119

Post by hnbear »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #76
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…

I had the opposite experience. My google inboxes are full of spam. To catch the companies that were causing all of this spam, I setup a catchall email account on a non-google email service and switched every vendor over to a dedicated email address (i.e. hn@foobar.com, homedepot@foobar.com). I expected to catch a tonne of vendors "red handed" sharing my email address, since spam was so prolific on gmail. Nope, I simp…

I do something very similar, and have a similar result - almost no cross-sharing/selling of addresses.

The two sources I have: - Leaks - Guesses - eg. webmaster@domain.com - Kickstarter

Kickstarter gives over your email to projects, and now I get get lots of kickstarter type spam where it's clear projects have shared it out. It's annoying. My fault for using a real email with kickstarter years ago.

I'm pretty sure all the spam I get on my original account (20 year old email, first@firstlast.com) are also more leak related than anything else. That email has been around for so long, and is in a lot of leaked cred dumps. Whenever there's a new dump I get a small spam uptick.

I've been segregating passwords for several years, but nothing like the age of my original one true email.

I recently bought a whole new anonymous domain too, to keep non-personal email off my personal domain (it's firstnamelastname.com). It's fun to have a second domain and totally unique emails per vendor, but doesn't seem to do much. I suspect this is also a volume/value thing for spammers. Everyone has a gmail so search/guess/spam those and it's easy. Individually targeted attacks on domains with very small address lists aren't worth it, and almost worth removing from your spam attack because someone with a small custom domain isn't likely to fall for it. Similar to the delivery typos approach of selecting for people who aren't sensitive/cautious to correct language.

I find Fastmail does a really good job at detecting spam in general too.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#120

Post by malepoon2 »

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…

4. I like separate services/accounts. So many stories of people being locked out of their account because of YouTube or something.

I feel much better now that my Google account is only used for Android and YouTube.

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