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

lauren.vortex.com

111–120 of 133 posts

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

#111
post #62

> 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 it would look like "Google is holding my account hostage unless I pay them".

I can't believe I'm writing this, but this is where a middleman could help. Companies can pay a fixed subscription to become "Google Gold Partners" and get privileged access to tech support resources. Users with issues don't pay Google directly, they pay those companies to solve their issues with Google products. In this way Google is still incentivized to solve problems as quickly as possible.

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

#114
post #27

> 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 :(

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…

Google seemed to change around the time they bought DoubleClick. That was around the time they stopped making anything new which was good, because they stopped making products which the people who worked there personally wanted to use and started making products which they needed to sell ads.

I’m sure that you don’t see people looking out for users for the simple reason that the money guys won and the way you get rewarded is by viewing your customers as cattle.

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

#115
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, I just used google takeout to generate a giant 18gig zip and then I downloaded it. I do that once a year. It takes a long time to download, but it’s actually fairly quick and I wouldn’t describe it as a slow process.

Where/how do you backup your takeout data?

A synology NAS and aws glacier.

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

#117
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…

> 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. A friend of mine has encountered this with the TOTP authentication code method. During a move from the US to Europe, they lost their phone. Google let them log in to their re…

I had this issue.

Next time I visited the city I usually logged in from years ago (i had moved), it worked no problem.

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

#118
80/20 solution: People want to use the gmail interface, so the ideal solution is to use a custom domain and point it there. You can still lose all that email but you don't lose the ADDRESS, so all the accounts that you use to login can be redirected to another email platform.

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

#119
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 :)

It’s still in their code of conduct. Check out the last line:

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

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

#120
post #73
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it would need to be some incredibly high number to keep fraud rates low, like $50000 per account.
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