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Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

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Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

#561

Post by patmcc »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #180
jakub_g wrote: post #8

In one of the later posts, the OP writes that the homeless will lose any physical thing after N weeks. So what kind of 2FA would be homeless-proof? I don't see a solution. Also, fully acknowledging Google and other bigtechs 2FA is far from ideal: The other thing is, we want at the same time Gmail to be unhackable against best hackers and state sponsored adversaries for the billions of users, including high profile di…

>So what kind of 2FA would be homeless-proof? Drop the password requirement. Use fingerprints + face. Very hard to lose these, but not impossible. Note, this solution is 1.5FA, but would solve the issue at hand. (pun alert)

This assumes they have a device that can read fingerprints/face. I'm going to homeless folks are also more likely to be on library computers, old phones, etc. and not have access to biometric sensors.

Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

#562

Post by xg15 »

Bakary wrote: post #111
angry_octet wrote: post #19

This problem, and the not-my-problem responses, really highlight the self centered mindset we have encouraged. What if that homeless person was your substance-abusing sibling? A friend from school with mental health issues? We need to collectively take more responsibility for those in the worst situations. If you've every tried to teach an old person how to use 2FA you know it's an uphill battle. Using a fingerprint…

This is missing the forest for the trees. Of course we'd be more emotionally involved if it was someone we knew, that's not hypocritical. Most people aren't against fixing societal problems, either. As it stands, homelessness is definitely something that affects a ton of people so it definitely is our problem as long as we are city dwellers. The problem here is that misapplied empathy can lead to terrible decisions.…

> Maybe a high-autonomy low-powered KaiOS smartphone that can be attached as a strap?

May I introduce you to the concept of scissors?

Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

#563

Post by crooked-v »

yamtaddle wrote: post #488
mcshicks wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a bill to improve digital identity in the us Congress but I don't think it went anywhere. I wrote my congressman about it more than once. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4258 edit: Actually there is a similar bill being sponsored in the senate now this year. So something is happening https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/452...

Yeah, it's brought up from time to time but the right hates national ID programs and enough on the left don't like it (including elected officials, not just voters—the distinction's worth mentioning) that it'd take an implausibly-huge supermajority of Democrats to ever pass such a thing. Never mind that all the things they're worried about would barely even be easier with an official national ID versus what exists no…

I think it's worth noting here that the passive resistance to the idea of a national ID among Democrats has a lot to do with Republicans regularly hijacking voter ID bills to specifically make things harder for the poor and minorities, and the expectation that they would absolutely do the same for any national ID program that actually got Republican support.

Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

#564

Post by WaitWaitWha »

kyle-rb wrote: post #497
chimprich wrote: post #385

Google's 2FA is dreadful. 2FA is a good idea when it's added with consent, but Google adds it behind your back in ways that are both infuriating and brain-dead. I've been caught out recently twice: once I was away on work and had to access my email. Google demanded that I verify it using my phone that I'd previously accessed my work email with. However, this phone was just a phone I use for development, had never had…

Disclaimer: I work at Google. I've never seen this issue. I don't have 2FA enabled for any personal Google account. There are some dark patterns to try and get you to enable 2FA that I don't agree with, e.g. a big "add a phone number to your account" page after you log in, with a small "skip for now" button at the bottom.

Goog did it to me too. I was using a burner phone, and logged into the Goog account. Next thing I know, after I chucked the burner, Goog is demanding I authN using the burner phone.

If you are wondering how I authenticated the first place onto the burner, I used TOTP, but she would not let me use it again; she wanted my burner.

Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

#565

Post by xg15 »

thereddaikon wrote: post #389
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I'd love to fix homelessness in America! Really, I would! But Google's policies are causing people to get locked out of their accounts now , today. Google could put a toggle in Google Account settings titled something like "Allow anyone who knows my password to log in to my Google account (less secure)." It could sit above a description of the risks involved. It would need to be disabled by default, and it woul…

This is a result of taking a product made by someone else for a certain purpose and then using it for one it isn't intended. Its not Google's fault gmail is a bad fit here. They didn't design it with this use case in mind. The solution is to use one that is. Why are case workers directing the homeless to setup gmail accounts? Because they haven't been provided with a better solution by the system they work within. So…

> They didn't design it with this use case in mind.

Where on the gmail page does it say "not for homeless people, sorry"?

Adding (and forcing) 2FA was a recent decision from Google, which came a long time after Gmail the product was already introduced. There are millions of accounts which were created long before anyone had an idea what a smartphone was, let alone phone-based 2FA.

Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

#566

Post by ch71r22 »

zdragnar wrote: post #216
peatmoss wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually giving homes to the homeless would probably be cheaper than whatever we are doing now, even taking into account the mental illness and drug-abuse problems that factor into this. This point is worth reiterating. Homelessness can be solved by providing housing. Yes, homelessness is a complex multi-faceted problem, but the first order solution to the problem is to provide housing. Homelessness is a problem wi…

Some homeless people don't want to deal with the maintenance of a home. Some homeless people aren't capable of the maintenance of a home due to mental or physical issues. Some homeless people refuse to accept help for mental issues for fear of being trapped in a psych ward. Simply put, you need to split homelessness into temporary and chronic populations. For the temporary group, homelessness is the problem. For the…

Yes, some of them -- but not most of them.

Most homeless people do not have a severe mental illness (around 70%) [1]. For most homeless people, it's primarily an issue of housing affordability. The solution is to reduce the cost of housing.

For the people who need more support -- due to mental illness or otherwise -- the affordable, effective solution is permanent supportive housing [2].

[1] https://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/evidence-and-researc...

[2] https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/proven-solutions/

Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

#567

Post by danso »

Aunche wrote: post #429
angry_octet wrote: post #19

This problem, and the not-my-problem responses, really highlight the self centered mindset we have encouraged. What if that homeless person was your substance-abusing sibling? A friend from school with mental health issues? We need to collectively take more responsibility for those in the worst situations. If you've every tried to teach an old person how to use 2FA you know it's an uphill battle. Using a fingerprint…

More people ought to read this: https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth... . Google is already providing a free service to homeless people. It's not empathy to tell someone else to solve a problem that you care about. That's virtue signaling. If he cares, he should take matters into his own hands. Is it too much to ask a single person to build a free email service for all homeless people? Perhaps…

But many people consider LBJ to have been an empathetic president? I don't see how it's supposed to be self-evident that, because Johnson liked bragging about his johnson, that his focus on the Great Society must have been driven by hard-headed pragmatism. U.S. presidents have a wide array of problems to solve. LBJ didn't have to pick causes that are commonly associated with empathy for the downtrodden.

Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

#569

Post by crooked-v »

Personally, I find it particularly infuriating that more and more companies are demanding to use phone-based 2FA even when I already have 2FA authentication set up. This applies to Google, too, which has forced me to add a phone number and get a SMS 2FA code for accounts that already had non-SMS 2FA configured.

The whole reason I use an authenticator app is so that my accounts aren't dependent on having the same phone number forever!

Re: Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year

#570

Post by sneak »

ajhurliman wrote: post #552
sneak wrote: post #398

Your phone number is also your permanent cross-app tracking advertising identifier. This is why every app and vendor asks you for it. I change mine every 90 days.

Do you just go into the carrier's store and ask them to change it, or do you have some streamlined way of changing it? Every time I go into one of those stores it seems to take hours to get even the simplest thing done.

I just buy new $90 mint prepaid sims for cash. They work for three months. I have never talked to a CSR.
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