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An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

lauren.vortex.com

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Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#51

Post by fogzen »

My wife lost her life’s email despite knowing the password. Google didn’t recognize the device, asked to verify using a phone she doesn’t have access to anymore. Despite knowing her login and controlling the recovery email, she couldn’t login. Everything was tied to her email. She lost access to many other accounts connected to the gmail as a well. Lost contacts, lost YouTube account, and on and on. It was honestly traumatic for her, and maddening because she has the password.

Do not use Google for email. Just pay $5/mo for an email service that won’t ruin your life for no good reason.

Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#52

Post by em-bee »

franciscop wrote: post #32

> I recognize that there are many different kinds of google users. Some folks [...] need maximum security. (un?)fortunately this is not exactly true. While it's true that some folks do need "extra security", the steps in discussion here are fortunately still applicable for the general population. We as a society have decided (correctly) that leaking your private photos, conversations and data is an unacceptable risk,…

aren't those two different issues?

security against leaks needs to happen at the backend. security to access an account doesn't protect against leaks of the database. it protects against personal data or identity theft, which is not something companies get punished for

Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#53

Post by ocdtrekkie »

saagarjha wrote: post #20

> They’ve all basically hit the brick wall of Google suggesting that at their scale, nothing can be done about such “edge” cases. The thing is that at scale your “edge” cases are still millions of people. Companies love the benefits that come from scale, like having a billion people use their service, but they never seem to be capable of handling the other parts that come with it :(

The trick is regulation. A huge difference between the wildly profitable tech companies and most other large companies is that everyone else has to have customer service departments... large departments providing hundreds or thousands of jobs and salaries helping users with the product.

Very simply, Google and the like should be required by law to have customer service adequate to support user needs in every language they operate. Problem solved.

Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#54

Post by Narishma »

fogzen wrote: post #51

My wife lost her life’s email despite knowing the password. Google didn’t recognize the device, asked to verify using a phone she doesn’t have access to anymore. Despite knowing her login and controlling the recovery email, she couldn’t login. Everything was tied to her email. She lost access to many other accounts connected to the gmail as a well. Lost contacts, lost YouTube account, and on and on. It was honestly t…

> Just pay $5/mo for an email service that won’t ruin your life for no good reason.

Just because you're paying doesn't mean you won't get into these situations.

Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#55

Post by ajross »

wow00 wrote: post #44

A few weeks ago, I was in a similar situation, I needed to read an email on an old account. I typed my email, my password and then an error, it was blocked for some reason, it asked me to check my recovery email, except that email was never validated (there was a mistake in the domain extension). It should never have blocked an account with a valid password when the recovery email was never validated. I successfully…

> It should never have blocked an account with a valid password when the recovery email was never validated.

Should it not? Accounts get "blocked" because of reasonable suspicion that they're compromised. It's not just something they do to annoy you. The overwhelming majority of these situations are surely just password attempt exhaustion. You or someone else tried a little too hard to log in with a bad password.

So... your solution is to disallow that security layer for people who have typos in their emails and never went through the recovery process? That sounds like it's going to hurt and not help.

I mean, yes. It sucks to lose access to an email account. It sucks immensely more to be hacked. And to some extent those requirements are in conflict. There are tradeoffs to be made.

Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#56

Post by fsckboy »

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #49
neilv wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Google was first starting, savvy techies were aware of aggressive sociopath companies (e.g., Microsoft), and also that Google would probably be very powerful. Maybe Google had some of that savvy and that's why they instituted "Don't Be Evil". With all the supposedly smart people and resources that Google has, you'd think they could somehow figure out how not to be the cause of marginalizing people while dismissi…

"Don't be evil" was /killedbygoogle too :)

"don't be evil" was killed by "evil"

Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#57

Post by quink »

Narishma wrote: post #54
fogzen wrote: post #51

My wife lost her life’s email despite knowing the password. Google didn’t recognize the device, asked to verify using a phone she doesn’t have access to anymore. Despite knowing her login and controlling the recovery email, she couldn’t login. Everything was tied to her email. She lost access to many other accounts connected to the gmail as a well. Lost contacts, lost YouTube account, and on and on. It was honestly t…

> Just pay $5/mo for an email service that won’t ruin your life for no good reason. Just because you're paying doesn't mean you won't get into these situations.

Yes… but in Fastmail’s case when I encountered an issue I had a “We appreciate your feedback on your use case. We'll take it into consideration for future product planning.” (which is all I was really asking for) from Neil Jenkins, of JMAP fame, within three messages of mine, starting at the standard support form.

Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#58

Post by eviks »

ajross wrote: post #55
wow00 wrote: post #44

A few weeks ago, I was in a similar situation, I needed to read an email on an old account. I typed my email, my password and then an error, it was blocked for some reason, it asked me to check my recovery email, except that email was never validated (there was a mistake in the domain extension). It should never have blocked an account with a valid password when the recovery email was never validated. I successfully…

> It should never have blocked an account with a valid password when the recovery email was never validated. Should it not? Accounts get "blocked" because of reasonable suspicion that they're compromised. It's not just something they do to annoy you. The overwhelming majority of these situations are surely just password attempt exhaustion. You or someone else tried a little too hard to log in with a bad password. So.…

> of reasonable suspicion that they're compromised

Or more likely an automated unreasonable suspicion

> Should it not?

Yes, it should never ask you for a confirmation that is impossible, this is a simple nonsense of design. Also, months is not a useful tradeoff

Re: An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects

#59

Post by justin_oaks »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #53
saagarjha wrote: post #20

> They’ve all basically hit the brick wall of Google suggesting that at their scale, nothing can be done about such “edge” cases. The thing is that at scale your “edge” cases are still millions of people. Companies love the benefits that come from scale, like having a billion people use their service, but they never seem to be capable of handling the other parts that come with it :(

The trick is regulation. A huge difference between the wildly profitable tech companies and most other large companies is that everyone else has to have customer service departments... large departments providing hundreds or thousands of jobs and salaries helping users with the product. Very simply, Google and the like should be required by law to have customer service adequate to support user needs in every language…

In the case of a free GMail account, the user who doesn't get the support they need can get a full refund.

In all seriousness, how does it even make sense to regulate expensive customer support for a free product?

If you do, you may not have any free products anymore. But perhaps we'd be better off having decent customer support with no free products.

As for paid products, it does make some sense to have some minimum customer support, but I'll be surprised if there's a proper way to word the legislation to achieve what we want it to achieve.

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