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How likely is losing a Google account?

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Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#201

Post by ghaff »

cameronh90 wrote: post #47
karteum wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm paying $5/mo. for that to not be that screwed (I have family who got locked out. It does happen.) But the article precisely addresses that: 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 syst…

Talking to a human doesn't necessarily make anything any easier. Lots of large companies have a bunch of customer support agents who are easy to get in touch with, but entirely powerless to solve these sorts of problems: "Computer says no". They are just, to be blunt, executing flowcharts, and have no scope to escalate beyond that. The only reliable ways to get decent customer support are, in my experience: - The CEO…

Right. Say you forget your password. Say you get to a customer support agent and they tell you how to get a password reset sent to your alternate email or phone number.

"Um, I don't have an alternate email and my phone number changed when I moved countries last year."

They'll probably (and correctly) maybe make sympathetic noises but basically say too bad. Presumably this wouldn't happen with a (non-trivial) company where there's some level of known identity. But for an individual there would presumably need to be a last-resort process that required real-world identity verification in some form.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#202

Post by jeffbee »

cycomanic wrote: post #155
remus wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you can make that judgement without extra context (that is almost certainly tightly held within google). For example, what actually is the error rate? How does that compare to improper access that is successfully prevented? Obviously any real person losing access to their account is a rubbish experience for that person, but an error rate of 0% is not possible with any system (including those with ple…

I highly doubt that Google even tracks the error rate. I mean that you somehow need to make a viral post on HN to get your account back is evidence of that, they don't even know they made a mistake. Also based on the number of posts that we see here it's a nonneglible error rate. How many users does HN have a couple of 10thousand. So 32 posts makes it maybe 1 in a 1000, even if it is a 1 in 10000 or even 1 in 100000…

> I highly doubt that Google even tracks the error rate.

Please. Google has an entire team devoted to account abuse quality research.

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#203

Post by theturtletalks »

creata wrote: post #123
jasmer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"is inherently more secure than one that sells your eyeballs to advertisers in exchange for giving you free stuff. " Not necessarily, and in fact this case I would disagree. I trust Google's security 10x more than that of FastMail. The 'advertising company' reaps in billions of $ with which they can get all sorts of good engineers for 0-day research, exploits, updates. They have a lot more of a reputation to defend.…

gary_0 seems to be using "security" to mean "sureness of their continued existence", as in "food security". I don't think there's any question that Gmail is more secure in the computing sense. > Except for the bit where they read my email and advertise to me on that basis, which is admittedly an ugly tradeoff. Iirc, Google reads your email, but explicitly says they do not use what they read to personalize your ads.

So what’s the reason for reading it then?

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#204

Post by fragmede »

jp191919 wrote: post #156
balboah wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I haven't have any problems with spam on PM, but I also don't give out my email addresses willy-nilly. I have junk emails for that.

What I'm hearing is that PM's spam detection is so poor that you don't feel like you can freely share your PM email address, out of fear that you'll get spammed. That's not a very convincing pitch for their product.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#205

Post by kioleanu »

kyrra wrote: post #178
kioleanu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also really needs to be mentioned that Google’s store was (is) absolutely awful for buying gear. I wanted to buy 2 pixels from them. Put the order in, no news for 7 days, at the exact 7 day mark my order gets cancelled. Tried talking to customer support with no success because there isn’t any. So I put the order in the second time and the exact same thing happens: after exactly 7 days, my order gets cancelled. I s…

Googler, opinions are my own. I work on payments, and have dealt with our credit card processing a bunch. As far as I know, we've never lost control of credit card numbers and had them leaked. We actually work very hard to make sure humans can never see card numbers (our internal controls are more strict than most banks and card networks). Also, I didn't think we would hold an auth on a card for 30 days (normally it'…

Hey, thanks for the reply. I got the info with the 30 days from my bank alongside with the options I had, so it may as well be from them - I use a VISA card in Europe.

Also thank you for the offer to check my account, but there’s no need for that as I will try to never ever buy anything directly from Google

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#206

Post by ptero »

joombaga wrote: post #161
ptero wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would split it into two parts. First and most critical, is to set up your own address in a domain you control. As long as you control the address you can move it between providers. Then you can decide whether to self-host (which I would not) or use a commercial service. The problem with home-hosted email is, as most folks said many times, that an email sent from a non-major provider would be marked as spam at best…

This is my setup too. One caveat w/ Proton Mail: you have to use their "bridge" software if you don't want to use Proton's client. Seems easy to configure, though I've never done it. Their web client is fine.

I use bridge and it is easy to configure and works great most of the time. And absolutely, completely and totally horribly a small fraction of the time.

Specifically, the bridge + Proton Mail combo reuses UUID. It is a known bug, which proton does not see as a big deal (we will fix it; someday; when we care enough). But what this means is that some messages may be mis-tagged, mis-labeled or mis-deleted between your mail client and the server.

I hit it when I was reorganizing my folder structure, freely adding and deleting subfolders from Thunderbird to create the structure I like. Then, the changes stopped reflecting and a fraction of my messages appeared gone. I finally was able to undo it through the web client, but the experience left me deeply suspicious of anything except the simplest operations with local client. And encouraged more diligence with making local backup copies of my emails.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#207

Post by creata »

theturtletalks wrote: post #203
creata wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gary_0 seems to be using "security" to mean "sureness of their continued existence", as in "food security". I don't think there's any question that Gmail is more secure in the computing sense. > Except for the bit where they read my email and advertise to me on that basis, which is admittedly an ugly tradeoff. Iirc, Google reads your email, but explicitly says they do not use what they read to personalize your ads.

So what’s the reason for reading it then?

Probably the relevant bit:

> To provide you features like smart inbox categories, Smart Compose, and spam detection, we use Gmail data to provide a more intelligent email experience and keep you safe. - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10434152?hl=en

Famously, a while back, at some Google subdomain, you could see a list of all of your payments extracted from your emails, but I'm not sure that still exists.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#208

Post by anonymous344 »

my customer had a corrupted gmail account that took google about 3 weeks to fix. he could not login for 3 weeks, it was quite a bad but what saved the situation was that hes ipad email was still logged in and working. after google did som fixing, the login started working

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#209

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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.

Should we do the same for accusations of crime, get rid of judge and jury, consult a decision tree on whether you get the electric chair

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#210

Post by sva_ »

It's kind of ironic, the US is often famed for having a great service sector (Germans love to say that we're comparably a "service desert"). Yet all these big tech companies have abysmal customer service. I wonder at what point exactly this disconnect appears.
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