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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

#71

Post by ocdtrekkie »

justin_oaks wrote: post #59
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everyone pays for Google, just not necessarily via their credit card.

And to be blunt: Considering the vital nature of email to modern communications and livelihood, if free email cannot include a method to regain access, free email should not exist. The amount of damage Google just not caring about people's problems causes is immense.

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

#72

Post by lamontcg »

justin_oaks wrote: post #59
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google isn't doing it for free, they're doing it because you're the product.

We actually do need to demand customer service for free services.

They're exploiting our information, and using the fact that they're exploiting us "for free" to give nothing back.

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

#73

Post by x0x0 »

sho wrote: post #62
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 :(

What I don't understand is why there isn't some kind of paid escalation option. I fully understand why they don't provide free human support for a billion unpaid users, but couldn't there be a $50 "OK, we will actually take a look at your issue" option? Surely that wouldn't be a money loser. Hell, you could outsource it. It seems instead that they just don't even want to touch it.

Because there's probably lots of accounts worth $50 to get into.

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

#74

Post by istillwritecode »

I fully expect to someday lose access to my gmail account because I regularly delete cookies and I won't give them a phone number. If they won't accept a password as proof of ownership on an account, then the account will someday be dead.

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

#75

Post by flangola7 »

franciscop wrote: post #42
clipsy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We as a society have decided (correctly) that leaking your private photos, conversations and data is an unacceptable risk, and punish the companies strongly for it. On what planet do companies get punished strongly for leaking PII? It happens to me multiple times per year and if I'm lucky I get a pittance from a class action suit years later. The executives who raked in huge bonuses cutting security don't get punis…

Punish companies is not the same as you getting compensated. It happens (at least in EU) harsher with the GDPR, so yes it's fairly recent, but so is security online (just 10 years ago not even half of the sites used HTTPS). There's dozens of high-profile fines every year due to data mishandling from Europe, just a quick search: > Data protection supervisory authorities across Europe have issued a total of nearly EUR1…

Those fines are laughable. There should be another zero or two on them

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

#76

Post by Dylan16807 »

em-bee wrote: post #41
jamiek88 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I don’t see how that is better than two or three remote backups? Do I need to change my strategy?

it depends on what your remotes are, and what your risk profile is. consider the problem that your internet access may go down and you are cut off from all your backups, unless one of those is your parents house where you can get to without internet.

I touch my backups less than once a month and I lose internet less than once a month so I think I'd just shrug if those overlapped and I didn't have local backups.

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

#77

Post by speed_spread »

justin_oaks wrote: post #59
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you may not have any free products anymore

Problem solved then. Companies giving away things "for free" is the original dark pattern.

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

#78

Post by tempestn »

noisy_boy wrote: post #45
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know about Takeout, right?

If it is just email, it is more ergonomic to setup a local POP client like Thunderbird to download the emails. You don't have to use it to send email, just configure once and bring it up regularly to fetch the emails. I have a full copy of my gmail mailbox this way (already moved banking/govt services to fastmail anyway).

Yeah, this is what I do for email as well. Lets you seamlessly transition your backup to another service if/when you stop using gmail too. Though I use imap rather than pop, so that I don't end up with duplicates or other weirdness. (I keep incremental backups of the drive where the email is stored, so I'm not worried about a situation where both the cloud and backup copies get wiped.)

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

#79

Post by Narishma »

fogzen wrote: post #67
Narishma wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hey it’s your email, trust Google with it if you want. Just know if you ever run into a situation there is no support and they will not help you regain access.

I didn't say otherwise.

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

#80

Post by shortcake27 »

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…

Weird, I’ve had the exact opposite problem. Added a recovery email years ago before Google required the recovery email to be verified. Then I needed to recover the account, but I was not allowed to do so as the recovery email wasn’t verified. Despite the fact I was never asked to verify it in the first place. What’s the point of a recovery email if it can’t be used to recover the account?
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