Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How likely is losing a Google account?

jefftk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 305 posts

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#71

Post by ocdtrekkie »

jeffbee wrote: post #29
guptaneil wrote: post #13

It's true that every service has to deal with the same policy and lockout problems, but that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the risk is the same. I pay for FastMail because 1. if something goes wrong, I can reach a human without needing to write a viral blog post first. Other services pay for a customer service department. 2. I trust FastMail more to not shut down their product because they got bored. Sure Gmail…

"I can reach a human" is a huge security vuln. I don't want people social engineering my identity provider.

On the contrary, I would argue this is the exact mindset that makes Google so bad at securing their systems. Every single large Google platform is also the leading distributor of its kind of malware, ultimately because computers are stupid and once you understand what they are programmed to handle you can work around them. Humans can become suspicious and can be held accountable, computers do what they're told and nobody is taken to task when something goes wrong.

I would contend that if you cannot reach a person, you cannot trust a system. And that has generally held in the entire history I've been on the Internet. I chose my web hosting by who had phone support, I've had the CEO of Fastmail respond to my support tickets before. I have yet to be betrayed or compromised by a single platform where humans were involved, but automated systems have failed me regularly.

This is true of offline systems as well. If you want a security system to protect your business, you may have keypads and sensors and things, but you also have a monitoring center staffed by people who can see events in real time.

I think our industry has had a fantasy that complex enough math problems can provide real security, but I would hope by now the cryptocurrency market would've put that silliness to bed by now.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#72

Post by bornfreddy »

blfr wrote: post #40

Google is too good not to roll the dice. I use Gmail in my own domain with a different registrar. Push comes to shove, I'll move, restore backups, and carry on. But damn are non-Google ecosystems bad. At work we use m365 and everything is atrocious compared to Google. Loggin in is a mess, email search is dreadful, OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe, integration with Android is weak, Ou…

Well yeah, don't compare them to Microsoft... MS Teams suck, all 365 is a mess.

Actually, don't compare to ecosystems at all. Specialized service providers are much much better.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#73

Post by unity1001 »

jeffbee wrote: post #27

I am amused by the way HN collectively expresses contradictory opinions on this topic. When presented as getting locked out of Google, a vanishingly small probability of losing access to your account, sometimes only temporarily and often through the fault of the user, is a crime against humanity. When framed as American-style "voter ID", a 15% false positive rate is just the natural price of ballot security. Maybe th…

With the government, you have legal recourses for anything. You can eventually get to someone to be able to recover something. You can even take them to court.

With the unregulated private tyrannies that the US tech corporations have become, you have no recourse if some algorithm or someone just nukes your account in some major provider. Your history, your business contacts, even your infra may be gone in seconds.

We still treat the Internet as if its mid-2000s and its still a mostly hobbyist thing with some big business doing their thing elsewhere while the plebs go about their lives in the fringes of some user-run websites and forums. Losing nothing was a problem then. But now everyone's lives, businesses & livelihoods, professional histories are hooked up to the Internet. Its no longer a hobbyist's ground.

Its amazing how corporations that could kill your business within a second have gone unregulated this long. If some company holds the livelihoods of millions of people in its hands, its not a mere business - its infrastructure.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#74

Post by layer8 »

Using your own domain with a well-reputed registrar is the way to go IMO. It makes you independent of the email provider used. Registrars don’t run algorithms to lock out domain owners. You can also move between registrars when needed. Domains can be locked ("Client Transfer Prohibited") and set to auto-renew, which nowadays is the default. You can have an actual paper trail proving your domain ownership. Depending on jurisdiction, you have certain rights associated with your domain.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#76

Post by r3trohack3r »

blfr wrote: post #40

Google is too good not to roll the dice. I use Gmail in my own domain with a different registrar. Push comes to shove, I'll move, restore backups, and carry on. But damn are non-Google ecosystems bad. At work we use m365 and everything is atrocious compared to Google. Loggin in is a mess, email search is dreadful, OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe, integration with Android is weak, Ou…

I had the opposite experience.

My google inboxes are full of spam. To catch the companies that were causing all of this spam, I setup a catchall email account on a non-google email service and switched every vendor over to a dedicated email address (i.e. hn@foobar.com, homedepot@foobar.com).

I expected to catch a tonne of vendors "red handed" sharing my email address, since spam was so prolific on gmail. Nope, I simply don't see spam anymore. In the last four years I've caught exactly one vendor sharing my email address (TicketMaster gave my email address to Warner Brothers).

Given I haven't changed anything materially with how I share my email address (it's still in my git commits as code@foobar.com, still on my website as website@foobar.com, etc., if anything I share it more freely now since I know I have control over each inbox), I'm lead to strongly believe GMail has a unique spam problem.

Dealing with GMail's spam problem isn't worth my time. That is amplified by the risk of me getting locked out of an email account. I have one Google account with files and emails dating back to grade school I can no longer access and no approach to "recover my account" has worked in the last 5 years - I've even paid Google for support to have someone tell me there was nothing they could do.

Google is a massive liability for me. They are a huge risk trusting them with anything that doesn't have a dedicated customer support team, a large part of their business model is to waste my time instead of charging me $$ for services rendered, and they do a pretty poor job of maintaining a level of quality in their products like GMail.

Whenever I have to deal with Google I get the distinct feeling that they consider their time infinitely more valuable than mine. I don't like doing business with people who are willing to waste my time like that.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#78

Post by GeekyBear »

jeffbee wrote: post #29
guptaneil wrote: post #13

It's true that every service has to deal with the same policy and lockout problems, but that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the risk is the same. I pay for FastMail because 1. if something goes wrong, I can reach a human without needing to write a viral blog post first. Other services pay for a customer service department. 2. I trust FastMail more to not shut down their product because they got bored. Sure Gmail…

"I can reach a human" is a huge security vuln. I don't want people social engineering my identity provider.

> I can reach a human" is a huge security vuln

Google's algorithms make entirely too many errors.

"I can't get my account back unless a viral account of my problem makes the front page of HN" is an unacceptable risk.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#79

Post by mmcgaha »

dspillett wrote: post #45
NelsonMinar wrote: post #24

Chargebacks can get your Google account locked. If you have a dispute with Google and protect yourself by reversing a credit card charge, Google might lock you entirely out of your account. The Google Pixel subreddit has a bunch of people's stories about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/search/?q=chargeback Not sure if this counts as "policy reason" for the article's purposes; he sort of dismisses payment d…

> My takeaway was that if I was ever in a dispute over a couple of hundred bucks for Google, I would not risk a chargeback for fear of retaliation. My takeaway from that is to never spend more than a few quid (i.e. money I'd care about losing) on anything linked that directly to Google.

Or get yourself a chime account or something that does not allow overdraft and put that debit card on your google account.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#80

Post by jmull »

blfr wrote: post #40

Google is too good not to roll the dice. I use Gmail in my own domain with a different registrar. Push comes to shove, I'll move, restore backups, and carry on. But damn are non-Google ecosystems bad. At work we use m365 and everything is atrocious compared to Google. Loggin in is a mess, email search is dreadful, OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe, integration with Android is weak, Ou…

Eh.

I had Google hosting my family's email for a long time (I had one of those grandfathered free custom domain setups).

It wasn't bad and it was free (!), but:

- Google threatened to cut me off. - Wife's account needed attention to keep it under the disk space quotas. - Google had creepy marketing based on private email content (making you worry about what else they are doing with my private email content). - It was free. (Yes, I list that as both a positive and a negative, since it means they have no real responsibility to me.)

I migrated to fastmail and it's every bit as good as gmail with none of the downsides, for a small $/month.

Sure, Google backed down from terminating my service, but that reminded me not to rely on "free" services -- free is always limited. So I thought, "Fair enough, time to pay." I considered Google, but they did not make the cut.

Post reply on HN