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Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

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Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#91

Post by GoblinSlayer »

eminent101 wrote: post #58
klabb3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is an @gmail.com address is owned by Google, not you. Not only do you lose your contacts’ ability to reach you, but accounts tend to use email as a last-resort primary identifier. If you lose your ability to receive verification codes, you’re often screwed. While the crowd here can maintain a domain, that’s not a realistic option for most average people. In practice, most people’s digital lives can be lost…

> While the crowd here can maintain a domain And domains can be lost too. Missed payments, error in administrating the domain, government takedowns. Many failure modes exist for domains too. Nothing in the digital world is permanent! That's why I find it disturbing that so much of our digital identities are tied to our email addresses.

Maybe with a paid email service like sneakemail.com you can restore access just by paying later?

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#93

Post by 01jonny01 »

Ok this is what you do.

1) Incognito mode in Firefox 2) Use the same IP as before, or a private proxy with the same country and city as before 3) Goto Bing and search for gmail 4) Attempt to login 5) If asked to enter your full recovery email address - opt for this option 5) If you are then prompted for pva code use a fresh SIM which has same country code as the one you are in. 6) This might work

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#95

Post by EasyMark »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #27
taosx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tried, first screen: "Account disabled 'myemail@gmail.com', We noticed unusual activity in your Google Account and locked it to protect your information. Learn more" and a button "Try to restore". And now I got: "Too many failed attempts, Unavailable because of too many failed attempts. Try again in a few hours.". At least I got a new message.

Yeah... this is consistent with my experience. Try to keep calm and actually try again in a few hours. It sounds like you have 2FA enabled so an account takeover is very unlikely. It sounds like you haven't violated the TOS in some egregious way, so actual ban is unlikely. Most likely is there's some type of crazy cookie thing going on that is causing the auth system to vomit. It's shocking that this happens, but ala…

Also make sure you’re not on a VPN when trying any of this.

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#96

Post by Frederation »

Do what I did. Draft a formal complaint covering all of this. Document as well as possible, take it to get notarized, send registered mail to Google's legal arm. Worked for me but you have to prove as well as possible that its you. Good luck.

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#98

Post by drivebycomment »

readyplayernull wrote: post #94

Always remember to set a recovery email for your Google's account.

Recovery email is good but still not the most reliable way.

My #1 recommendation is to setup a passkey, and also set multiple security keys as the 2nd factor. All other authentication factors are subject to some form of heuristic defense.

Beyond that, a few optional things you can do in addition:

- Use Advanced Protection. - Use a platform that's more secure , which are iOS, ChromeOS and some android (e.g. Pixel), in general and especially during recovery attempt.

Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data

#100

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Loughla wrote: post #39
taosx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not on any socials. At this point I'm more ashamed of myself, I'm technical enough to build a homelab, I was just delaying the migration until I had something a bit more solid with k8s and ceph that I could share with a nice UI. Even a small job that would backup emails and data to S3 and a hdd once a day would have saved me all this embarrassment. Hopefully starting with 2025 will have something to share with HN…

No reason to be embarrassed. You put your faith in one of the largest companies that has ever existed. That is a logical thing to do.

It's not, considering the scale. The projected image of reliability and trustworthiness can't be than more of a facade, with only 'some' humans shepherding an endless army of 'zalgorithms on crack'. If any of their spasms is hitting YOU for whichever reason, you're usually out of luck if the expectation is normal, casual means of interaction/recovery.

For me that began with the necessity of providing a SMS-capable mobile phone number for recovery, which I won't ever give them.

They have alternative e-mails, fully verified, which were sufficient for opening that account.

Depending on where you are, that behaviour could even considered illegal, because they are weasle-wording around that necessity in their TOS, letting you make an account without that in earlier times, then changing that somewhere in their TOS later, which you have to agree to, or else...

But still just not explicitely stating that necessity when you're opening some account somewhere in googleverse right now, instead weasle-wording around in some of their fora, and censoring questions about that in there. No matter if in german, or english.

While having my full 'Ladungsfähige Adresse' ( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladungsf%C3%A4hige_Anschrift ) with POTS/Landline for other reasons.

(Imagine endless stream of CENSORED cusswords here...)

edit: If any of your services require a SMS-capable mobile-phone to operate, even if only for authentication/recovery, then F....... say so loud and clear, right from the start, for every service, any place, anywhere, any time!

But that would be too obvious, innit?

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