[HN Gopher] Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose ac...
___________________________________________________________________
Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a
year
Author : horseAMcharlie
Score : 707 points
Date : 2022-10-07 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| matthewcford wrote:
| N26 I see (as my phone died and needed to setup a new one) uses
| facial recognition to determine identity, you take a selfie video
| when signing up.
|
| IMO this approach would be a good way to confirm identity over a
| sms.
| sb057 wrote:
| FWIW I have pretty much given up on trying to use any sort of
| online banking or other financial website because I do not have
| cell service at my home, and practically every financial
| institute requires SMS 2FA these days.
| jochakovsky wrote:
| Some carriers have apps to allow you to receive an SMS over
| data (eg. Message+ on Verizon)
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I will offer an unpopular take. Maybe we should not be focusing
| on ensuring homeless have access to email. Maybe we should be
| focusing on ensuring basic services do not require email and/or
| cell phone.
| sholladay wrote:
| I wonder how WebAuthn Passkeys will fare here, as they can
| replace both passwords and existing 2FA systems.
|
| With Passkeys, your credentials will automatically sync between
| devices. So as long as you have some way to log in to your main
| account (Apple/Google/Microsoft, etc.), then you should be able
| to maintain access to all other accounts, even if you're always
| moving between devices.
|
| And there is a solution to the single point of failure problem as
| well, because there is a built-in flow where you can copy the
| credentials to other platforms, in case you lose access to your
| main account.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Yep. Recent changes to Gmail security make Gmail a bad fit for
| the homeless.
|
| What are the best available alternatives?
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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!
| Liquix wrote:
| Being strongarmed into giving up your phone number is as much
| "for your security" as manifest v3 is "for your privacy". They
| could care less that you have 2FA enabled, they want that phone
| number. Many people never change their numbers and enter them
| into hundreds of sites, creating a wealth of data which can
| then be profitably correlated with your email content, google
| account activity, searches, location, etc.
| beauHD wrote:
| SMS as a second factor should be deprecated. I got locked out
| once because my phone was stolen that had the SIM inside, and I
| couldn't get back into my Google account. Now I just use a
| Yubikey and am _never_ asked for OTP codes that are sent to my
| phone.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Just one more way in which being on a lower rung of the
| socioeconomic ladder is a self-reinforcing situation.
|
| In this case it's not even a criticism of Google. I don't see an
| easy solution here that couldn't introduce a more gameable system
| for hackers.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| Perhaps an opt-out version for homeless users?
| [deleted]
| danpalmer wrote:
| I agree there should be more explicit support here, but can this
| not be "solved" with backup codes? One or more could be given to
| a trusted person - a family member, a friend, or even a trusted
| librarian - or a backup code could be remembered.
|
| The tough issue here is that these access edge cases look a lot
| like malicious use. The aren't but authenticating someone who has
| no device or ID or really much else to authenticate themselves is
| a Hard Problem. Passwords also aren't the solution here, the
| industry is moving away from them precisely because they provide
| poor authentication, particularly for vulnerable people.
| smelendez wrote:
| This is potentially a solution for some but it's not perfect.
| If they had a trusted friend or family member who could store
| backup codes and deliver them as needed, they could probably
| also just stay logged in on that person's phone or even have
| emails sent you that person. Keep in mind that they have
| limited transportation and likely lose their contacts when they
| lose their phones, and many will have strained relationships
| with the housed people in their lives.
|
| A library solution may not scale. Sure, a librarian might
| develop a personal relationship and do this as a favor for
| someone. But the author mentions talking to about 30 people
| with this problem in his neighborhood, which suggests that if
| word got out a librarian was doing this and they tried to
| institutionalize it, a library might have to store codes for
| dozens or hundreds of people it has no way to authenticate.
| jamesrr39 wrote:
| I think there are possible solutions here for a library, off
| the top of my head, taking a picture of your face when
| dropping off the codes, so that when you come back and ask
| for your codes, the librarian can ID you against the picture
| they have. Basically what is done when verifying your ID
| card/passport when you travel/go to the bank etc...
|
| It wouldn't be a librarian doing someone a favour, but rather
| a service that libraries provide.
|
| This could be a great evolution for libraries. They are
| already a distributed, public system, that people in general
| trust, but their role in society has changed with the rise of
| the internet and online services, and this could be a really
| useful role they could fill.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Yes this is sort of what I was envisioning. Not as much one
| trusted librarian doing a favour, but a librarian team
| having a filing cabinet full of backup codes and an ID
| process that they trust and that is appropriate for their
| community.
|
| This is the sort of thing that I think Google could support
| explicitly with more access control around it, but I don't
| think that's entirely necessary to get the benefits.
| bombcar wrote:
| Backup codes could work - but if they have the support of a
| trusted person they likely can be assisted in other ways, too.
|
| Defining a state-sponsored email account that can only be
| logged in from specific government machines (imagine a kiosk at
| the DMV, say) where there are trained clerks who can identify
| homeless in some way could work.
| danpalmer wrote:
| An interesting idea, but I suspect it just pushes the issue
| back one more step. How do you authenticate for login to that
| email account? Specific machines limits but doesn't
| fundamentally change the attack surface.
|
| If the person has ID, then many options work, but if they
| don't what can a DMV and trained clerks do that others can't
| in some way?
|
| Lastly, I'm not from the US but even I've heard that the DMV
| is a hellish place with queues hours long. Putting more
| barriers in front of those who are already in a tough spot
| (and may need to spend that time working, queueing for
| shelters, etc) is a big ask.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, you have to keep falling back - my idea was that
| assuming homeless don't move very rapidly from one location
| to another, you'd have people at the DMV or shelter or
| wherever you put this who actually recognize the person and
| can "vouch" for them.
|
| It's not an easy problem to solve with "one quick trick" by
| any means. Part of the reason the DMV can be hellish (in
| the US at least) is they have to deal with _everyone_ who
| has an ID, not just the "good customers".
| etchalon wrote:
| This could be remedied with "Custodian" 2FA, couldn't it?
|
| Allowing for a case-worker, for instance, to act as a secondary
| 2FA method, and making it easy for the custodian to update the
| users information.
|
| Wouldn't be all that different than corporate ownership policies
| or family accounts.
| krzyk wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised, homeless people have phones and email
| addresses?
|
| Sorry for question, but it is a bit mind blowing for me, in my
| country homeless people are rare and the ones I see don't worry
| about anything besides something to eat and alcohol. So having a
| mobile for them would be like having cash to buy the mentioned
| things.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I was walking to a convenience store two nights ago and I saw a
| girl venmo'ing a homeless man money. Realistically it's hard to
| exist without a phone and bank account, and there are a lot of
| financial aid/benefit programs for homeless people to pay for
| these sorts of things
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Most homeless people aren't permanently homeless. Of the
| homeless population at any given time (very) roughly 50% will
| only be homeless for a few days, 20% will be homeless for a few
| weeks, and 30% will be homeless for months or longer.
| Comevius wrote:
| They are homeless not Amish. People can have jobs too while
| being homeless, since you often can't afford rent in many parts
| of the world with just a single income. You have to choose
| between a roof over your head, or eating and having a car to be
| able to go to work. Or you can get a second income, either
| another job or a relationship, but that's not always an option,
| hence why so many people live in their cars. Around 200,000
| people live in their cars in the United States alone, but that
| number is climbing rapidly and will reach a million in a few
| years, because housing is a luxury now.
|
| And just to compare, the cheapest completely useful (4G, 3GB
| RAM, 3000mAh battery, Android 11) smartphone is $30, the
| average monthly rent of a two-bedroom apartment in the United
| States is $1300.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Just turn off 2FA
| Maursault wrote:
| Finally. Everyone seems to assume that 2FA is a great idea, but
| it is, in fact, a problem in itself, and a much larger problem
| than unauthorized access ever was. Unauthorized access was
| never an ubiquitous problem like 2FA definitely is.
| Unauthorized access was an exception. The only UA I had heard
| of prior to 2FA being rolled out was with users of Yahoo Mail.
| I can understand that some institutions may have experienced it
| more because they had so many users, but 2FA punishes
| _everyone_. Just consider the sheer amount of time it has
| wasted since being rolled out everywhere, 30 seconds at a time.
| It 's centuries of wasted time by now to solve an issue
| affecting as little as 1% of users.
|
| And 2FA can be defeated through social engineering, and it is
| defeated constantly in this way. I would far preferred password
| requirements with 80-bits of entropy than everywhere I log into
| requiring I collect a 6 digit number from an email, app, SMS
| message, etc.
|
| But nearly everyone here seems to think this extra little bit
| of work at every login is a good thing, assuming they would
| ever have an account compromised. Seriously, how many here ever
| was compromised prior to 2FA? I've been online since 1983, and
| I had never come across it personally until after 2FA was
| rolled out.
|
| Ignoring the personal inconvenience, 2FA's inconvenience
| increases exponentially for every 10 users being supported.
| Supporting 2FA among 10K users globally, just 2FA in itself,
| becomes a full time job for more than one administrator, when
| previously, those 10K users were commonly supported by a single
| tech.
|
| Frankly, I'd far far rather take the risk of unauthorized
| access than being strong-armed into using 2FA. The amount of
| time 2FA wastes is far more than the time wasted by
| unauthorized access. The solution is far worse than the problem
| ever was.
| jakub_g wrote:
| 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 dissidents,
| journalists, and senators who will inevitably have accounts; and
| at the same time to homeless people who can't keep any physical
| thing. It's kinda difficult to meet those conflicting
| requirements well at the same time.
|
| Maybe the solution should be to have some basic free state-paid
| email provider for those people. They are not forced to use Gmail
| specifically (albeit the number of non-sucking and free email
| providers is probably close to zero).
| nirimda wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is not a technical problem and should not be automated
| away.
|
| Rely on trustworthy third parties. Universal utilities like
| Google should have retail outlets which are adapted to local
| conditions and can exercise educated judgement. In some
| countries, the police might certify the identity of the
| individual, and then Google could trust that certification. In
| another place, it might be some combination of the Red Cross
| and a public hospital. Obviously some identifications will be
| easier and others harder - if a person in New York claims they
| are the owner of an account based in Spain, the employee should
| be suspicious and require a higher burden of proof (and the
| reactivation might be logistically more difficult).
|
| > 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 dissidents,
| journalists, and senators who will inevitably have accounts;
|
| I'm not really convinced high profile dissidents, journalists
| and senators (why senators?) should be trusting Gmail to
| protect them from state sponsored adversaries. Google generally
| wants to do business in territories controlled by states which
| means they have to follow laws and will sometimes be subject to
| intimidation; but they have no intrinsic motivation to be
| unhackable.
| kweingar wrote:
| > Universal utilities like Google should have retail outlets
| which are adapted to local conditions and can exercise
| educated judgement.
|
| Sorry but this just isn't happening, and if there is
| regulation to make something like this happen, companies will
| just turn off their services. Plus this would essentially
| seal off competition: want to run an email hosting startup?
| Guess you have to manage real estate all over the world and
| work with every government.
|
| This whole conversation seems backwards to me. Yes, it should
| be easier for people to recover their accounts, but should
| governments be totally reliant on private email providers for
| communicating with people who need services?
|
| The story, as I understand it, goes something like this: a
| case worker emails a homeless person, the homeless person
| can't access their email, and then the case worker denies
| them access to programs because they never got a response.
| That is not solely an email problem---it's also a huge
| problem with these programs and services! Why don't _they_
| provide identity services and retail outlets to help people
| get the resources they need? Why are governments shoving this
| responsibility into the private sector?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't think there's any universe where a company runs an
| international chain of retail outlets in order to support a
| free email service. If that were the standard, free email
| providers just wouldn't exist outside of bundles with other
| services.
| snotrockets wrote:
| We treat email almost as we used to treat postal mail: we
| expect it to be available to all ("digital transition"
| replacing human-fronted public services with digital one).
|
| If we treat it as a utility, it's fine to regulate it as
| such. If <big corp> want to make money, directly or
| indirectly, by offering email service, they should have
| some standard of service. If they can't we can just make it
| public service, which wouldn't let <big corp> make money
| out of it, but would also guarantee it's available to all.
|
| Either way, eating the cake and leaving it whole, like it
| is now, shouldn't be an option.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > So what kind of 2FA would be homeless-proof? I don't see a
| solution.
|
| There are three factor categories, what you know, what you are,
| and what you have. A password is what you know. A phone is what
| you have. Biometrics are what you are - facial recognition,
| thumbprints, etc.
|
| 2FA in one manner or another is used by various services,
| because the security recommendation is to pillar identification
| by at least two of the three factors.
|
| For your question, there are any two from the three factor
| categories that could be used.
|
| However, there are also limited versions of a single category
| that are often used as a backup when 2fa is not available. In
| this case, google uses backup codes when "what you have" is not
| available. Backup codes are functionally equivalent to
| passwords, except that they are limited to a single-time use.
| Limiting use is often a method of using a single factor
| category, when another factor is not available.
|
| Another method is to rely upon another authority, such as using
| a physical ID card that can be validated in order to let a
| person back in.
|
| And so forth.
| skybrian wrote:
| One possibility would be to solve the "can't keep anything on
| them" problem with a bracelet or something like that, like they
| do in hospitals. Something more durable and less valuable than
| a cell phone.
|
| If they truly can't keep anything on them, someone who
| recognizes them needs to represent them. (A locker won't do -
| they'll lose the key.)
|
| And if they have no friends they can trust (which is likely)
| then it probably needs to be a government worker of some sort,
| who has their photo on the computer.
|
| I mean, unless you want to have retina scans to log into
| library computers or something. Or really reliable face
| recognition.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >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)
| patmcc wrote:
| 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.
| radford-neal wrote:
| > ... 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.
|
| How about the homeless person remembers a good password, and
| that's all that's needed for authentication? You know, just
| like it used to be. What exactly is wrong with that?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > How about the homeless person remembers a good password,
| and that's all that's needed for authentication?
|
| Gosh, I don't know, how about literally _all of the problems_
| that 2FA solves in the first place? Passwords alone are a bad
| solution (often forgotten, easily re-used insecurely) for
| people _without_ all of the challenges and frequent mental
| issues that accompany homelessness, why would you think they
| 'd be a good solution for people who, as the OP says, aren't
| capable of keeping track of a physical device for more than N
| weeks?
|
| I'm not unsympathetic to the problems of the homeless ant the
| burdens 2FA entails, _but_ I 'm also not willing to ignore
| the huge problems the 2FA _solves_ , and realizing there will
| often be a tradeoff between making it very difficult to hack
| into accounts and making it easy for people with mental and
| other problems access their accounts.
| clint wrote:
| Many of the reasons 2FA is added by product managers and
| engineers is because they are too lazy to actually solve
| the problem in a way that is empathetic to actual,
| breathing humans and instead bulldoze through the problem
| in the least usable method possible, call the problem
| "solved" and move on to shinier problems.
|
| Just because 2FA "solves" the extremely narrowly defined
| problem, doesn't mean it is the best solution or even
| something that people can and will actually use. Upon those
| metrics alone, 2FA is usually one of the worst "solutions"
| to the problem.
| krick wrote:
| If you forget your password -- it's YOUR fault. If you
| reuse your password and it gets leaked -- it's YOUR fault.
| If for some reason you cannot fix yourself, and have to
| rely on Google 2FA for that -- good. Somebody who can
| manage their own passwords alright shouldn't suffer because
| of you. How about his just using his password, and lose his
| accounts because he fucked up, not because Google (or
| anybody else) suddenly thinks (incorrectly) that it's not
| him anymore, who uses that login and password.
| upofadown wrote:
| >...often forgotten...
|
| The great thing about something like an email service is
| that password guessing can be extremely rate limited. You
| miss three guesses and you can't log in for several hours.
| So an easily remembered password is perfectly fine unless
| it is blindingly obvious. As a homeless person loosing
| access to a phone on a regular basis, I am going to be
| comfortable with the risk that the Gmail password hashes
| might get leaked. I think others would be quite comfortable
| with that risk as well...
| LightHugger wrote:
| 2fa is a good option, but there are many situations where a
| plain password is just superior. if you ignore this
| reality, that passwords are legitimately more secure and
| better for a lot of people, then you're undermining an
| existing working security system and will just cause chaos
| and loss for people.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| And to generalize, I'd say that...
|
| _" There is an imperfect existing solution, with a
| problem, therefore we will ban the existing solution and
| move to a new, better one"_
|
| ... should require extraordinary certainty in
| completeness of ones new solution before banning the
| previous.
|
| There are very few times when the legacy method should be
| deprecated, and Google is the poster child of someone who
| shouldn't be trusted to recognize them.
|
| (Looks pointedly at Chrome mv2/3 hubris and
| implementation clusterfuck)
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| > Chrome mv2/3 hubris and implementation clusterfuck
|
| I'm not sure why you think MV3 is a clusterfuck, it seems
| like it's doing exactly what Google wants. If you're
| confused by that, remember, you're the product, not the
| customer.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Assume I'm talking about something deeper than generic HN
| cliches. ;)
|
| Pushing an implementation cutover by +6 months, and
| changing it from a hard to a soft date, because it has so
| many unresolved issues, incomplete APIs, and angry
| developers seems a fair definition of "clusterfuck."
| timmytokyo wrote:
| >why would you think they'd be a good solution for people
| who aren't capable of keeping track of a physical device
| for more than N weeks
|
| Homeless people have no physically secure place to store
| their possessions. The reason so many of them lose cell
| phones is because they get stolen or destroyed. It's not
| because they're incapable of "keeping track" of them.
| mplewis wrote:
| OK, so what solution are you proposing for someone who
| doesn't have permanent, safe storage for their property?
| xani_ wrote:
| > Gosh, I don't know, how about literally all of the
| problems that 2FA solves in the first place?
|
| Well, it isn't solving this one. Option to opt out would be
| nice.
|
| > aren't capable of keeping track of a physical device for
| more than N weeks?
|
| Bit ignorant of you. They could be just plainly stolen by
| someone else. A piece of rag working as a tent doesn't
| exactly have best physical security...
|
| > I'm not unsympathetic to the problems of the homeless ant
| the burdens 2FA entails, but I'm also not willing to ignore
| the huge problems the 2FA solves, and realizing there will
| often be a tradeoff between making it very difficult to
| hack into accounts and making it easy for people with
| mental and other problems access their accounts.
|
| It's not either or.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| How do you remember a complex password? By practice? On what
| device? I'm sure those involved have bigger things to worry
| about/remember than a complex password to email.
|
| I don't think that is the solution. I also don't know what
| is.
|
| Public services that somehow provide safe access to email
| etc?
| franga2000 wrote:
| Complex doesn't mean hard to remember. XKCD936-style
| passwords (four words with no special chars) are nearly
| uncrackable and quite easy to remember. Something even
| simpler like [mother's name][father's name][year of birth]
| is also very strong when you aren't being targeted
| specifically (you almost certainly aren't, especially if
| you're homeless). The remaining issue is password reuse,
| but that's mostly solved by having two passwords - one for
| your email and one for everything else.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| The same way I remember everything else: I think about it
| enough. There are plenty of good memorable password
| mnemonics out there, too. So that seems a non-issue.
|
| In any case, I'm sure those involved would prefer the
| option of remembering a password to not having that option
| and getting locked out forever. Seems like a good solution.
| There may be better ones you can implement once this one
| is, always room for improvement you know
| laptop-man wrote:
| I always recommend a easy to remember sentence as a
| password.
|
| with spaces, punctuation, some sort of capilatiozation
| scheme (cap every last letter, or every other ,etc) and
| throw a number in there.
|
| lot easier to remember than 32 random bits.
|
| purposely misspelling something, adding spaces, and your
| own cap scheme make it a secure password.
| pflenker wrote:
| What works great for me is using _songs_ , ideally a
| sentence not directly from the chorus of a lesser-known
| song, complete with punctutation and some obvious
| replacement rules (such as `and` -> `&` ) . The reason
| why this works so great is that many people have some
| obscure song "in them" that they know by heart but which
| are not super widely known.
|
| I only had to change one of my passwords once when my
| coworkers discovered I was reliably whistling "Stayin'
| alive" after logging in.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Quite simply there are multiple factors at play here. Do you
| force 2FA on almost everyone and reduce hostile account
| takeovers to negligible? Do you allow for no 2FA and permit
| the homeless use case?
|
| I think Google faced a trolley problem and made the right
| decision. You need a different tool "homeless mail" for them.
|
| It's Gmail. You don't have to use it. There's a lot of mail
| providers out there.
|
| Whatever, if this guy won't set it up I will. I'll stick a 20
| msg / hr, 100 / day limit on it and call it a nice anti-spam
| day.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Many people exist and use email _before_ becoming homeless.
| When that email is gmail - they actually do have to use it
| when they become homeless!
| SkyBelow wrote:
| The average person cannot remember a good password without
| some help, be it using it everywhere, writing it down, or
| using a password manager. Homeless individuals, on average,
| have many more stressors in life, much higher rates of
| traumatic brain injury, and a number of other factors that
| make their ability to remember good passwords much worse than
| the average person. Given this solution doesn't work for the
| average person, it will have even less success applied to the
| homeless.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| How many passwords does an homeless person need to remember
| ?
|
| I'm with you that an average person is probably using at
| least dozens of services that need credentials, but these
| people are probably not login on Amazon or checking their
| 401k online for instance, nd can probably get by with a a
| very limited set of stuff to remember.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Over on /r/sysadmin there was a discussion this morning about
| email systems for dementia patients. How do you provide for
| someone that is forgetting that they are forgetting?
|
| Pretty much EVERYONE will have cognitive decline in their
| twilight years. It would be nice if we could have
| communication systems that are compatible with basic human
| biology.
| kweingar wrote:
| > It would be nice if we could have communication systems
| that are compatible with basic human biology.
|
| At some point, this becomes a problem better suited to the
| government.
|
| Imagine you have a loved one who has dementia or is
| homeless and incapable of administering their digital
| accounts with traditional authentication methods. You want
| to take over their accounts.
|
| You will need to present evidence that:
|
| - they are indeed incapacitated
|
| - they are who they say they are, aside from you vouching
| for them
|
| - you are who you say you are
|
| - you legitimately represent this person
|
| - there isn't somebody else who has a better claim at
| representing that person
|
| I personally don't want _any_ tech company in the position
| to sort through all of that on a case-by-case basis and
| decide which accounts to unlock or transfer ownership to.
| Let the government or the courts figure that out.
| googlryas wrote:
| That's literally how it was before 2FA. You can just look up
| the reasons for 2FA to answer your question.
| IncRnd wrote:
| If a person can remember a password that is a minimum of
| 8-digits, they can remember an 8-digit backup code that is
| already provided by google. They are functionally equivalent,
| but a backup code is one-time use.
| tmnvix wrote:
| Using a password multiple times helps you remember it.
| [deleted]
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| People can't remember many good passwords. So they start
| reusing them. If one site has a leak, everything is lost
| without 2FA.
| sph wrote:
| So the choice is for them to permanently lose access to
| their email?
|
| Homeless people aren't stupid and strong password don't
| have to be incredibly hard to remember. I'd rather get my
| accounts hacked because of password reuse than lose access
| to my email, forever.
|
| There is literally nothing more important than your email.
| Even stuff like your bank account has secondary means of
| recovery, whereas if you lose access to your email you're
| pretty much fucked.
| bombcar wrote:
| I would rank a home as more important than email; I'd
| certainly rather lose access to my email than my home.
|
| But by definition, the homeless have already lost a home
| (assuming they weren't born homeless) - and I've
| forgotten passwords before. So "the stupid homeless just
| need to memorize their password" isn't a solution.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| It's not a solution, but it's a heck of a lot better than
| locking them out of their accounts _even if they still
| know their password!_
| everforward wrote:
| > I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password
| reuse than lose access to my email, forever.
|
| This is functionally the outcome of getting hacked, if
| you want any kind of decent security measures.
|
| Any way that Google can give you access back on a
| password-only account is going to be rife with bad actors
| using social engineering to gain control of accounts. As
| long as that form/page exists, it is a threat vector.
|
| What you're asking is for the password to be the only
| proof that someone owns an account, which means a hacker
| can demonstrate ownership just as much as you can.
|
| Banks have more options for account recovery because
| we're willing to give them a lot more info. They can
| force me to come in to a branch and compare my ID to my
| face, or ask for my SSN, or any number of things we're
| not comfortable handing over to Google (especially over
| the web).
| judge2020 wrote:
| Who's to say that your email account getting hacked is
| less dire than losing access to it? Attackers can easily
| search your inbox for 'verify your email', visit any
| website of value, and use their access to change the
| account away from your email to an address that they own,
| effectively removing your access to your third-party
| website accounts entirely.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I don't know that it is less dire, but I do think it's
| less likely. Are homeless people's email accounts getting
| hacked three times per year?
|
| Also... maybe getting hacked is worse, or maybe loosing
| access is worse, but the user should have the right to
| make that decision! Google can set the default, but the
| user knows his or her own life.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Are homeless people's email accounts getting hacked
| three times per year?
|
| The aversion to 2FA makes them seem like easy targets if
| I'm looking for addresses to use for spam.
|
| > maybe getting hacked is worse, or maybe loosing access
| is worse, but the user should have the right to make that
| decision
|
| Getting hacked makes losing access considerably more
| likely. This ain't one or the other.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > The aversion to 2FA makes them seem like easy targets
| if I'm looking for addresses to use for spam.
|
| If you want to spam people, why not just sign up for your
| own gmail account?
| sph wrote:
| Because you can still use an account everybody knows the
| password of.
|
| It's a terrible place to be in, but isn't nowhere as bad
| as being a homeless person with no access to HN and
| Twitter, having Google delete your account and nowhere to
| complain about. Because that is even worse.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > So the choice is for them to permanently lose access to
| their email?
|
| If an attacker breaks in and changes your password, you
| already do very likely permanently lose access to your
| email. Account recovery from that point is a hairy
| process even for people who have a place to safely store
| important documents, let alone those who don't.
|
| > Even stuff like your bank account has secondary means
| of recovery
|
| Those rely on forms of identification that the unhoused
| disproportionately lack (for the same reasons that they
| are more prone to lose access to phone numbers). This is
| also among the reasons why being unhoused tends to
| correlate with being unbanked.
| syrrim wrote:
| > I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password
| reuse than lose access to my email, forever.
|
| step 1: get your account hacked
|
| step 2: hacker changes password
|
| step 3: lose access to your email, forever
|
| What you've presented is not in fact a dichotomy, for any
| practical purposes.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > I'd rather get my accounts hacked because of password
| reuse than lose access to my email, forever.
|
| When your account is stolen the attacker changes your
| password. You lose access to your email forever _and_
| lose access to all of the services that use your email as
| a recovery platform.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Is it though? Just because a password leaked doesn't mean
| it will actually be abused. A homeless person without a
| credit card in their Google account is naturally limited in
| the amount of damage that can be done.
|
| Security questions are probably enough, at least for people
| who can't handle 2FA.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > How about the homeless person remembers a good password,
|
| Which would go one of two ways:
|
| 1. One uses the same password one uses everywhere else, and
| now one is much more vulnerable to credential stuffing
|
| 2. One is reliant on a book of passwords or a password
| management app on one's phone, resulting in the same exact
| problem we're trying to solve
| LightHugger wrote:
| being homeless doesn't mean you don't have the ability to
| remember a good password. good means not duplicated.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Even people _not_ dealing with the stress and trauma of
| being unhoused have trouble remembering passwords - even
| when they 're shared across accounts, let alone when
| they're unique. This ain't a "homeless people are dumb"
| argument; it's a "humans gonna human" argument.
| radford-neal wrote:
| No. One can just remember a good password for gmail, and
| either use other passwords elsewhere (maybe bad, re-used,
| ones, or maybe good ones, not relevant if we're talking
| about gmail), or just always authenticate elsewhere using
| your gmail account.
|
| Remembering one good password is not too onerous. Easier,
| it seems, that keeping any physical object in your
| possession if you're homeless. (I would assume that most
| losses are not due to cognitive failure, but instead are
| things like thefts when one is asleep.)
| rbone80 wrote:
| A good password is one that is difficult to crack which
| potentially means it will be difficult to remember. Long
| phrase passwords are recommended to be the most secure, but
| ironically the more convoluted the password, the harder it is
| to remember. In the case that a service requires a new
| password every x months, remembering a secure password is out
| the window. This type of practice encourages unsafe and
| easily guessable passwords such as "password1", "password2",
| etc...
| out-of-ideas wrote:
| I've often wondered that with a valid ID, that the gov does not
| give us an email noawdays. Especially one that does not require
| this asinine phone-validity garbage. I'd even suggest that
| _maybe_ not use email-addresses as a login-name along with
| plenty of alias 's for inbound and outbound that do not expose
| your "main" or account.
|
| And google is not alone here; many other major "free" email
| providers require a phone as well (dagger eyes at you, MS,
| yahoo, ect); and the icing on the cake are some websites even
| require a particular set of domains to register with them to
| prevent multi-accounts/bots/spammers/ect => just a big ol
| download-spiral of decisions that feed into eachother, just to
| put a physical ID on anybody to tag-em-to-sell-em
|
| The biggest gripe is that it is mandatory; it is not an option
| and nothing we can do about it other than "vote with our
| wallets" - and google does not even allow ToTP use as an
| alternative to phones, lol
|
| The beatings will continue until morale improves; always has
| been, always will
| [deleted]
| esperent wrote:
| So if there are certain vulnerable categories of people who
| cannot use any form of 2FA, where does that leave 2FA?
|
| Seems to me it should mean that it has to be optional, at least
| until we solve that problem.
| pydry wrote:
| >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 dissidents,
| journalists, and senators who will inevitably have accounts;
| and at the same time to homeless people who can't keep any
| physical thing. It's kinda difficult to meet those conflicting
| requirements well at the same time.
|
| It's only hard if you adopt a one size fits all approach to
| security.
|
| Google's proclivity towards treating its users as an
| undifferentiated commodity isnt proof that its users couldnt be
| treated differently.
| zoredache wrote:
| > So what kind of 2FA would be homeless-proof?
|
| Almost certainly is a bad idea. But the first thing that seems
| like it could work would be an implantable nfc yubikey. Then
| making more devices support nfc.
|
| I know I would be pretty tempted to get an implantable 2FA
| device if one was available and seemed like it would have both
| broad and long term support.
| xani_ wrote:
| xvector wrote:
| How could you possibly come to the conclusion that a homeless
| person could afford a surgically implanted 2fa token?
| indrora wrote:
| Ah, yes
|
| I can read the headline now
|
| "GOVERNMENT PROGRAM TO CHIP HOMELESS PEOPLE LIKE DOGS TO
| PROVE IDENTITY"
|
| I implore you to read The Scarlet Letter and perhaps read up
| on [similar such things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identi
| fication_of_inmates_in_G...).
| Cerium wrote:
| Maybe we don't need to meet all those requirements
| simultaneously. The on boarding process could try to
| determining if 2fa would actually benefit you or not.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >The on boarding process could try to determining if 2fa
| would actually benefit you or not.
|
| How?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| By asking you?
| macspoofing wrote:
| Well .. yeah. And I think that's what OP (of the twitter
| thread) is advocating (without explicitly stating it).
| Namely, that 2FA doesn't work for homeless.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Ask. Default to yes but allow to opt out.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| ,,Maybe the solution should be to have some basic free state-
| paid email provider for those people."
| gmm1990 wrote:
| Probably a dna solution, not that you'd want google to have
| that info directly.
| cdot2 wrote:
| The problem with biometrics like that is that if the data is
| stolen or otherwise accessed then it can't be reset. If an
| attacker has your fingerprint and you use that for 2FA you
| can't reset that to prevent them from having access.
| xani_ wrote:
| Or just let people to disable 2FA. That's simplest and easiest
| solution. Slap a red warning label if you need to.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Maybe the solution should be to have some basic free state-
| paid email provider for those people. They are not forced to
| use Gmail specifically (albeit the number of non-sucking and
| free email providers is probably close to zero).
|
| You don't need to use Gmail. There are a lot of good free mail
| providers.
| xani_ wrote:
| Yea till they add 2FA too...
| fknorangesite wrote:
| And what happens if I've already been using that gmail
| address and _then_ become homeless?
|
| I guess too bad! Should have thought of my future
| homelessness when I was signing up for an email service a
| decade ago!
| macspoofing wrote:
| OK ... who are you arguing with?
|
| OP stated "Maybe the solution should be to have some basic
| free state-paid email provider for those people."
|
| I replied that there are a lot of good free email providers
| already.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| You, when you said "they don't have to use Gmail".
| WithinReason wrote:
| Then you change your password to a strong one and turn off
| 2FA
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| ravel-bar-foo wrote:
| Gmail allows users to generate 10 one-time use 2FA codes at
| a time. Even if you are not going to become homeless, you
| should generate these and write them down somewhere secure.
| You never know if your phone battery will suddenly die.
| joshka wrote:
| Replace something you know, something you have with something
| you know, someone you know or something similar.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| They should try other free email services. It'd be nice if Google
| voice was still free and somebody could help set that up as their
| persistent number. That said, Google 2FA is mission critical for
| many people's online identity and is protecting them from a world
| of online evils, this is not a reason to step back from a
| security posture that Google has rightly decided protects its
| users.
| bArray wrote:
| Again, this idea of "secure by default" should at least have an
| option to opt-out. A few misunderstandings about phones:
|
| 1. Somebody has a phone
|
| 2. Somebody has a smart phone
|
| 3. They are in contact with the phone 24/7
|
| 4. They are the unique user of that phone
|
| 5. The SIM card and/or number cannot be taken from the phone
| (virtually or physically)
|
| I currently have to use this for work, with the only positive
| being that if I get locked out, I can go tell the admin team to
| let me back in. With someone like Google, it's not even possible
| to get them on the phone to explain, let alone have them believe
| it is really you.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Last time I checked Google will issue backup codes, the
| individuals and this person can both hang on to them when the
| phones go missing.
| bongoman37 wrote:
| arbuge wrote:
| You lose your entire Google account if you lose your 2FA device
| or number (assuming it's a phone number), for any reason. Even if
| your Google account is set up with a non-Google email address
| which you still have access to, and you still know the correct
| password. And there's nobody you can reach at Google about it, no
| appeals process, nothing.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33098261
| edgecasestdio wrote:
| I verify that this is true at the time of posting. In previous
| volunteer work at a non-profit run by university students, the
| organization assigned a free Gmail account to each executive.
| Each year, we ran into a problem where the executives would
| change, and we needed to transfer the Gmail account to the new
| person.
|
| Problems would happen when the new person tried to log in to
| the account. Since the login was from an unrecognized device
| and an unrecognized IP address, security was tightened. Even
| after inputting the correct password and entering the right
| backup email, it was mandatory to enter an SMS message from the
| phone number tied to the account, even after various
| troubleshooting and attempted workarounds. That meant getting
| ahold of the previous executive, who may be busy or changed
| their number.
|
| You could argue that Gmails weren't meant to be used this way,
| which is fair; the goal of this comment is just to provide
| additional evidence that the description provided by the parent
| comment is true. (In the end, we went for a low-cost, reliable
| email service to fix the issue in the long-term. We also found
| that registered non-profits are eligible for free Google
| Workspace or Microsoft Outlook email plans subject to certain
| eligibility conditions, though we did not have a need of
| becoming an officially registered non-profit at the time.)
| pfooti wrote:
| FWIW, if you're the administrator of the organization, you
| can disable 2FA from the admin console for that user's next
| login. I've done this a few times for similar reasons.
| edgecasestdio wrote:
| Thanks for the tip, though this just works for a paid
| Google Workspace email plan (or a free Google Workspace for
| Nonprofits plan) [1]. We couldn't do this because we were
| using free personal Gmail accounts at the time (by
| transferring the credentials from retired executives to new
| executives) as we lacked budget and formal non-profit
| registration (to be eligible for the Nonprofits plan) since
| the group was fairly small and undergraduate student-run.
|
| The difficulties were to be expected as personal Gmails
| weren't meant to be used like this (the goal was just to
| share an anecdote about the difficulties of phone numbers
| used for two-factor authentication with the free service
| even once a year). The long-term solution we used was to
| pay for a reliable but low-cost (in comparison to Outlook
| and Google) email host initially recommended on HN and a
| few sysadmin forums, to gain access to organization-wide
| admin features.
|
| [1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/2537800?hl=en#zippy
| =%2Cc...
| mihaaly wrote:
| I took three steps against this happening: 1)
| Not providing phone number for 2FA. Never. 2) Using
| multiple (3 pcs.) physical keys for 2FA (like Yubikey and
| similar). Authentication app is an alternative for one choice
| of 2FA (but not the sole one!) 3) Only using a limited
| set of Google functionality. Use for secondary purposes mostly.
|
| Well, the last one is mainly to mitigate the consequences if
| happens anyway, for other reasons too (like with that poor guy
| who made picture of his own naked baby for a remote diagnostics
| with his doctor and the Google locked him out for months - and
| still counting at the time of the article - for child
| pornography)
| aliqot wrote:
| I took one step: 1) Don't use anything
| Google.
| ugjka wrote:
| I get funny looks when people ask for my email. I have
| @protonmail.com email
| mihaaly wrote:
| I have that too! : ) That is dedicated for the important
| things.
| aliqot wrote:
| My sympathies go out to you, I get similar looks for not
| having a phone.
| indrora wrote:
| You took a step that requires a _lot_ of skill, wealth, and
| privilege.
| alpentmil wrote:
| Please tell this to all homeless people.
| [deleted]
| arubania2 wrote:
| This is what one-time backup codes are for.
|
| Alternatively you can purchase a hardware key and store it in a
| trusted place, but admittedly they are expensive, so OTBC is
| the usual route.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| That link involves someone with no backup email address
| connected to their google account for recovery purposes, for
| what it's worth.
| arbuge wrote:
| You can set a backup email address for Google accounts if
| they're using Google email addresses, but you can't do this
| if they're using non-Google email addresses as the primary
| address, such as the one in that link.
|
| I'm logged in to such an account right now and there's no way
| to do this. The account primary email is also set as the
| recovery email address and there's no way to add another.
|
| It's actually deceptive to the user to even call it a
| recovery email address in this case, since Google will never
| offer to alternatively send a verification code there if the
| 2FA device is unavailable.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| One of the many reasons why I switched from GMail to Fastmail.
| arbuge wrote:
| Google accounts are required for many other Google services
| besides Gmail. Replacing Gmail is the easy part.
| GraphenePants wrote:
| Agreed. It's irresponsible that the homeless don't have $50 a
| year for Fastmail. It's worth going hungry to be the customer
| and not the product.
| ineedasername wrote:
| It's this sort of thing that has prevented me from activating
| 2FA on my gmail account. I pay for Google Drive (as a tertiary
| backup) and would be willing to pay more for service that
| include _actual customer service_. At this point though I feel
| locked in. I could switch (any suggestions on paid email with
| *real* support available?) but it's a pretty big burden to go
| through every site & service that uses my email as either a
| login or password reset vector and change things over.
|
| Heck, here's an idea for a startup: a digital "moving" service.
| IRL I could pay a company to take everything I own, pack it up,
| ship it somewhere else, and even unpack it too. I'd like to see
| a digital equivalent.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Wtf is "unhoused".
| golemotron wrote:
| It is the next step on the euphemism treadmill. Apparently,
| "homeless" is tainted or declasse now.
| himinlomax wrote:
| I wonder what the next step will be. Probably an acronym,
| PWFA (Person Without Fixed Abode).
| RichardCNormos wrote:
| My city government here in California calls them "people who
| live outside".
| sicp-enjoyer wrote:
| I wonder how much time is used for 2fa in the entire economy each
| day.
| yellowapple wrote:
| An elegant solution here might be to allow users to designate a
| list of other users who can "vouch" for them; if multiple people
| who you previously designated as trustworthy say "hey, this is my
| friend's new phone number, use it instead of the old one for
| account recovery", then that should satisfy the "who you are"
| authentication factor (and set the new "what you have" factor).
|
| Similar idea behind web-of-trust or multisig cryptocurrency
| wallets, except without the cryptographic mumbo-jumbo.
| rch wrote:
| It seems to me that the government service responsible for
| providing the phone should be expanded to provide a permanent
| digital identity, including email, and a lasting phone number. A
| permanent address (open and scan, with selective forwarding) for
| physical mail would also be worth investigating.
| hammock wrote:
| Is homeless a temporary or permanent state?
|
| How many homeless have been so for longer than four months?
| charcircuit wrote:
| It is temporary because they can just buy / rent a home
| tiku wrote:
| Just stop being poor or mentally ill, easy.
| l72 wrote:
| Every single American should be able to get a free, permanent
| email account through our Postal Service!
|
| We shouldn't have to rely on Gmail for what may be the only way
| to get information/apply for on basic government services!
| alpentmil wrote:
| This. The provider/USPS will then realise how challenging it is
| to do verify identity.
| mcshicks wrote:
| There was a bill to improve digital identity in the us
| Congress but I don't think it went anywhere. I do think govt
| issued digital id, while in some ways problematic would be a
| step in the right direction
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4258
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| "Unhoused people"?
| virtualritz wrote:
| Won't using e.g. Authy with Gmail for 2FA alleviate the need for
| a phone number after the initial setup (i.e. requiring a number
| only once, to initially enable 2FA)?
|
| https://authy.com/guides/googleandgmail/
| jffry wrote:
| The issue is described further in the Tweet chain: Physical
| property retention is more or less impossible; these people
| typically end up getting their phones stolen every month to 4
| months. The same would be true of IDs or other paperwork that
| could be used to prove their identity.
|
| They get phones from a government program. Each new phone has a
| new number, and due to the above challenges, it'd be
| challenging to port numbers and keep a consistent number.
|
| Authy accounts are keyed to your phone number, and to set one
| up on a new phone you have to receive a verification call/text.
| [deleted]
| Taek wrote:
| Yes, but that's a highly technical solution. I've been trying
| to get my girlfriend to use Authy for 6 months now, and the
| solution we landed on is that my Authy app has all of her 2FA
| codes, and she just calls me if she needs one.
|
| To you and me 2FA doesn't seem that complicated. But to less
| technical people it's just overwhelming and they don't want to
| bother with the learning curve.
| kioleanu wrote:
| What learning curve? Setting up the account in the first
| place? Sure, that's a tad complicated, but I really don't
| understand why your girlfriend finds it easier to call you
| when she just has to open the app and the code is simply
| there.
| macspoofing wrote:
| There are various approaches to 2FA, from backup codes, to SMS,
| to external physical keys - none of them workable for the
| specific use-case OP defined: person is homeless and losses
| their stuff every few weeks.
|
| For that situation no 2FA solution is going to work.
| valenterry wrote:
| Of course there is. For instance a printed paper tan list.
| Yes, this is not as safe a proper 2FA device. But it's easy
| to access, cheap (just go to a copyshop and 10 cents to print
| it, then put in a plastic bag) and it's so small that it's
| easy to put it somewhere where you don't lose it and is hard
| to get stolen.
| macspoofing wrote:
| You're not arguing with me, you're arguing with the author
| of the twitter thread.
|
| "Any solution requiring long-term retention of a physical
| 2FA key or high-entropy secret will not work."
| valenterry wrote:
| No, I'm certainly arguing with you. :)
|
| Maybe, on top of that, I'm also arguing with the author.
| But I assume he implicitly talked about Google (which
| doesn't provide that option).
| macspoofing wrote:
| >But I assume he implicitly talked about Google (which
| doesn't provide that option).
|
| Google provides backup codes. You can print them on any
| kind of paper you want.
|
| Regardless, OP argued that printed backup codes don't
| work because everything is lost every few weeks.
| valenterry wrote:
| Oh really? I didn't see that option. Maybe it's new? If
| so, that's good!
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Or maybe they don't exist any more because I still have
| mine on an index card from ten or so years ago.
| abraham wrote:
| How do you use Authy if you lose all of your possessions every
| few months?
| [deleted]
| saghm wrote:
| From what I remember when I used Authy briefly (Google
| Authenticator finally added the ability to mass import/export
| codes shortly after I ended up trying Authy), you create a
| login and set a master password, and then you have access to
| your codes on any device when you log into the app. Of
| course, this means that you have to trust Authy with your
| codes being stored externally, but this might be one of the
| sets of circumstances where that's preferable.
| faller_slive wrote:
| Authy recovery requires you to have access to the same
| phone number when you want to restore to a new device.
| saghm wrote:
| Oh, interesting, I didn't even realize that when I used
| it! I guess that goes to show how easy it is to take
| something like that for granted
| faller_slive wrote:
| I did some more research. It looks like there is a way to
| recover if you don't have the phone number or the old
| device. They have an online form you fill out with your
| old phone number and new phone number. Then they have
| some process to verify ownership of the phone numbers
| which they say will take several days for security
| purposes.
|
| https://support.authy.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/115001953247-Pho...
| dexterdog wrote:
| Authy doesn't store your codes. They store encrypted
| copies. They are encrypted on your device and only
| decrypted with your password which does not leave your
| device. As long as their encryption is not broken your
| codes are secure.
| courgette wrote:
| It's a valid point that I don't expect Alphabet to address.
| Honest question : what about those security code? I'm not
| homeless but I expect my phone to die anytime. It's from 2015. I
| want to bring it to 2025 but it might not make it.
|
| As a result I planned for that phone stopping to work and my
| understanding is that I will be able to emergency 2FA with those
| code once it broke. Am I wrong?
| nyuszika7h wrote:
| How do you expect homeless people who can't hold on to their
| phones to hold on to the backup codes?
| spoonjim wrote:
| Probably a genuinely useful application of biometric
| authentication.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It feels like having a way for them to transfer the Obamaphone
| numbers would solve this, and probably some related issues.
|
| Since I've been able to keep the same number through various
| phones and Sims, this seems technically possible.
| [deleted]
| exabrial wrote:
| 2FA that delegates to SMS needs to be illegal and addressed by
| congress at this point. Whats "actual" happening is you're
| delegating authentication to another company that performed
| either a hard credit check the person (the vast majority of us)
| or has a prepaid (likely the situation above). In both cases,
| it's delegating of IDV and needs to be outlawed.
| aaron695 wrote:
| errorik wrote:
| How about building a solution (or a possible solution)?
|
| I think it is fair to guess that many people reading this have
| achieved some level of success building solutions to technology
| problems. Much like solving for malicious use for the average
| user with 2FA - or privacy with things like protonmail - why
| shouldn't some of us attempt to solve this rather than
| expect/complain that Google hasn't?
|
| Mail hosting isn't particularly expensive - companies like
| mxroute are sub $1 per GB per year with deliverability, etc taken
| care of - or at least well enough to make it better than
| constantly changing addresses.
|
| I know that I personally would be willing to invest time and non-
| trivial amounts of money to offer a solution and gauge adoption
| and feedback.
|
| Some opinions (open to feedback!) on where to start:
|
| 1. Use existing mail provider from the start - mxroute looks like
| a possibility
|
| 2. Overprovision storage by some reasonable factor - say 1GB
| accounts with 10x overprovisioning - interested to hear from
| those who know more than me about this but I wonder if more
| unhoused/homeless people generally use email for mostly
| transactional purposes not 20mb JPEGs, etc.
|
| 3. Ensure the webmail interface (possibly build it) is Ultra
| simple and Super accessible - screen readers, text to speech, and
| of course mobile first. Again I (perhaps naively) imagine that
| features like tagging, rich content composing, and filtering are
| super low priority here.
|
| 4. Have a sign up flow that is mildly fraud resistant - mobile
| number verification (VoIP not accepted) with a cool off before it
| can be used for another account (how often do Obamaphone numbers
| rotate/deactivate once stolen?) and an (accessible) captcha type
| system to avoid mass sign ups. This could then in V2 be expanded
| to include more corner cases - possibly invites in lieu of phone
| numbers, etc. If fraud/spam became an issue it should be easy to
| detect given these will generally be low volume users.
|
| 5. Require only a modestly secure password for login. Use
| malicious use detection to trigger recovery/verification mode
| (see next).
|
| 6. Have a recovery/verification mode that fits the user group -
| need ideas here - but 5 questions that you have to answer 4 of
| and have some verification that the answers are not just simple
| words at setup? Combine that with verify with a real (but
| possibly different) mobile (non-VOIP) number that hasn't been
| used in X days to verify another account? Trusted friend recovery
| address? Seems like lots of possible solutions to explore here,
| and no doubt lots of people smarter then me who could provided
| ideas.
|
| Is there interest in doing this? Am I the only one that feels
| frustrated when we (including myself) debate what google should
| do, or why people are unhoused (or what to call people how are)
| when many of us are capable and financially able to at least try
| to offer a solution?
|
| With 500k-1M homeless/unhoused in the US (no reason it couldn't
| be international, just starting somewhere) - let's say it was
| crazy successful and had a 10% adoption rate of actual active
| usage. Maybe that's 7.5 TB of storage. I'm sure a reputable
| provider would be willing to partner to provide that at
| $1/gb/year or less (plus hosting webmail, etc) - I'd be willing
| to pay that bill personally for that kind of adoption/benefit.
| Would others? Would others dedicate their time?
|
| Homelessness is multifaceted - that seems to be the one thing
| everyone agrees on - so offering possible solutions to any given
| facet - from fragmented communications to safe shelter - is at
| least a start and possibly a small part of making a difficult
| life situation a little easier to overcome/deal with.
| bgro wrote:
| Does anyone else notice old accounts that were working fine in
| the past randomly get demanded to enter your phone number for
| verification. "We detected unusual activity" is such an obvious
| lie.
|
| When setting up thunderbird, I've had multiple Google accounts
| lie about suspicious activity and demand I go through about 10
| captcha checks and enter my old password and answer my security
| questions and verify my phone number. After passing all of that
| without error, they STILL won't let me log in with a blanket
| statement about security.
|
| Why oh why would they ask users to jump through extreme hoops
| just looking for any possible questionable failure to point to as
| an excuse, but still reject you after passing everything? If
| you're not going to let people use their account, farming free AI
| detection and personal information out of them doesn't seem like
| a legitimate tactic one should be doing.
|
| They discriminate against some phone numbers too. They have to be
| in whatever they think the correct country is, they often can't
| be VOIP or VOIP related, and there's unknown blacklists of some
| famous numbers sometimes.
|
| What happens when we run out of phone numbers? I won't be
| surprised when accounts start getting banned for "sharing" or
| "ban evading" phone numbers (aka getting a new phone number for
| any reason) because it screws up their ad tracking of you... Or
| they'll force you to first log into an account in order to delete
| it even though it belongs to somebody else. Or your new phone
| number you bought specifically for authenticating a separate
| account is banned (just like voip number) because a previous user
| was banned using it.
| ynbl_ wrote:
| [deleted]
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| I don't think access to email is the biggest concern the homeless
| have.
|
| It sucks, but there are alternatives besides gmail and if google
| is going to spend time on this, I'd rather they not and instead
| spend time on getting homeless into homes.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| What about when you want to apply to a job or an apartment
| which requires email?
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| I would expect it to require a phone number and physical
| address before an email.
|
| I also wonder if this person on twitter would be willing to
| let his friends use his email or phone.
|
| The homeless have challenges, no doubt, but that does not
| imply google worrying about 2FA for the homeless is the best
| way to solve those challenges. It wouldn't even BE an issue
| if they weren't homeless in the first place, for example.
| lxgr wrote:
| Did you even read the linked thread, of a person apparently
| actually working with homeless people? It explicitly
| mentions that email is the preferred method of
| communication for many of them, for reasons also mentioned
| in the thread.
|
| > The homeless have challenges, no doubt, but that does not
| imply google worrying about 2FA for the homeless is the
| best way to solve those challenges.
|
| You seem to be under the impression that improvements to
| the condition of people's lives are only ethically
| acceptable if they happen ordered strictly by descending
| impact. In my experience, that's not realistic.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| And you seem to think doing the easiest thing is actually
| useful.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yes, I do think that doing something useful is useful,
| even if it is easy.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| and thus does the problem continue because those who
| could help are too busy making themselves feel better
| with as little effort as possible.
|
| It's 2FA ... for homeless people.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Partial solutions that take minimum effort are great.
| It's like replacing a single incandescent light with an
| LED. Sure it doesn't solve climate change, but it
| definitely helps, and doing easy helpful things is way
| better than not doing them and complaining that the
| problem is big.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| pretty much every ineffective strategy has been
| rationalized at some point.
|
| email implies internet, 2FA implies realtime internet.
| The lack implies very poor at the very least up to and
| including homelessness.
|
| "this one company uses 2FA, we should bitch at them until
| they remove that need" doesn't actually help anything.
|
| This person who posted the tweet could offer their
| personal phone, email, and internet for these homeless
| friends they have. Why don't they? I bet they'll say it's
| because it doesn't solve the "real" problem.
|
| Yeah, neither does asking google to spend money on
| removing 2FA for the homeless.
| lxgr wrote:
| Who do you think would be spending time on this at Google? I
| highly doubt that their software engineers and product managers
| in charge of 2FA would, when idle between pull requests, go out
| and help the homeless.
|
| Why not lobby those engineers and product managers to improve
| something that they are actually have agency and arguably a
| mandate to improve, helping users homeless and otherwise?
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| I don't understand the question, google cannot attempt to
| solve this without assigning someone to spend their time on
| it.
|
| If they do so, I would rather they put that money into
| actually helping the homeless.
| lxgr wrote:
| I think you vastly overestimate the fungibility of
| engineering resources in large corporations.
|
| Also, which one do you think the involved stakeholders at
| Google would have an easier time getting signed-off:
| Decreasing reliance on stable phone numbers as an
| authentication factor, or firing a couple of people and
| donating their salaries to an organization helping the
| homeless?
|
| Sometimes, depending on the probability of success, the
| pragmatic choice is also the ethical one.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| oh stop it, tech people always think the world works in
| binary.
|
| Apparently this multi-billion dollar company can't see
| fit to help humanity because it's literally hard (or
| impossible?). That somehow I, as an individual, have more
| of an effect because charities only ever accept money
| from individuals and not billion dollar corporations?
|
| seriously, just stop.
| tzury wrote:
| The title "Gmail 2FA causes" is misleading. Every phone-based MFA
| will lock out users once phone is lost, and no proper back up was
| taking place.
| tiku wrote:
| You could tattoo your recovery code somewhere on your body
| perhaps? And the re enter it in your 2fa app. Not ideal but
| unloseable.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Tattoos are not cheap and recovery codes are 1-time use.
| kazinator wrote:
| Separately from the Gmail 2FA cluster fuck, maybe that Obamaphone
| program should fix its number nonportability problem?
| pmarreck wrote:
| Doesn't Authy persist Google Authenticator codes through devices?
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| An authenticator app is a much better 2FA solution that I opt for
| at every opportunity.
|
| Google's authenticator app is brain dead because they want to
| encourage 2FA over SMS. Why? Because it has the wonderful side
| effect of destroying your privacy. With your phone number, Google
| can easily identify you personally. Ain't that special ---
| privacy invasion wrapped up in security clothing! Much too
| tempting for Google to resist.
|
| Google didn't invent OTP so there are other apps that are
| perfectly compatible.
|
| Word to the wise, it should be obvious by now that all things
| "Google" are synonymous with "privacy invasion".
| sp332 wrote:
| How are you going to sign in to your OTP app on a new device?
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Reinstall the app and restore private keys from off device
| backup.
|
| The lack of key backup and restore is one big reason not to
| use Google's authenticator app. Other compatible apps are not
| so brain dead. I backup every time I add a new sign in.
|
| If you don't have the ability to sign in from multiple
| devices and the ability to install access onto any new
| device, then you're doing it wrong.
|
| Phones are highly portable devices subject to being stolen,
| damaged or just dying for no obvious reason --- so always be
| prepared. This is simply not possible with 2FA over SMS.
| Kalium wrote:
| The problem here boils down to this: how does this help
| people who don't have secure, reliable storage for off
| device backup?
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| pcloud.com
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Replace sms with yubikey and he first part of this post is
| correct. But it invalidates the second part.
| lxgr wrote:
| SMS 2FA needs to disappear (or be relegated to a strictly
| optional, discouraged method) yesterday, and so does using a
| phone number as the primary user identifier.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > SMS 2FA needs to disappear (or be relegated to a strictly
| optional, discouraged method) yesterday, and so does using a
| phone number as the primary user identifier.
|
| A lot of the downsides are mitigated by using Google Voice as
| the SMS number, since attackers can't migrate your number away
| from Google.
|
| But in general, I totally agree with you from a security
| perspective. I just think that it's a difficult thing to get
| people to use authenticator apps. Apple has resorted to baking
| the functionality into their OS.
| lxgr wrote:
| That's what I'm doing, and it works fairly well - until I get
| to one of the many corporations regarding VoIP numbers as
| inherently insecure, and they don't let you use it for 2FA
| purposes... (Nevermind Google supporting robust 2FA for
| logins, and my phone operator not even offering 2FA for eSIM
| swaps.)
|
| And that's disregarding the elephant in the room, i.e. Google
| inevitably pulling the plug on Voice at some point.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Fundamentally this is a hard problem - how do you have "something
| you have plus something you know" which is security best-
| practice, for somebody who will regularly lose all their
| possessions?
|
| I mean I've always fantasized about getting NFC into everything
| so that NFC-based tags could provide convenient "something you
| have" taps. Like, give me a simple ring on my finger to tap-in to
| a scanner on my keyboard rather than having to meander through an
| app on my phone.
|
| The other problem is that with every org running their own auth
| systems, if you're trying to help a person with this problem you
| have to set them up on a dozen services. I really wish something
| like Mozilla Persona had took off.
| kuwoze wrote:
| sorry but why are they losing their phones ? stolen ? sell it for
| drugs?
| kotaKat wrote:
| Shit gets stolen nonstop, and not just by fellow unhoused. When
| the police come and tear down camps, there's no expectation of
| recovering anything left behind. 9 times out of 10 they're
| followed by a public works crew throwing everything into
| dumpsters. Good luck getting your phone (or any of your other
| possessions) back.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| When you are on the street your stuff gets stolen a lot.
| webdoodle wrote:
| I went cellphone-less 2 years ago, and have experienced this
| first hand. I've been locked out of my Gmail, Ebay, LinkedIn, and
| other services multiple times. I was unable to apply for
| government services either, until I finally found a decent soul
| that used there own phone to register me. But they shouldn't have
| needed to do that, and we shouldn't be required to have a spy
| phone just to be part of society.
|
| These spy phones and the apps they peddle have become a plaque
| upon humanity. They use addiction and coercion (denied services)
| to keep you under there spell. The worst part is that they are
| being forced upon our children, way worse than the tobacco
| industry ever tried.
| from wrote:
| I want out the ability to opt out of this 2FA nonsense. I'm not a
| journalist in a war zone, I'm just a guy who wants to read his
| email (with a 64 character password containing random ASCII
| characters). 2FA is just an excuse to make the abuse departments
| life easier by raising the cost of botting accounts.
| [deleted]
| hatware wrote:
| "Unhoused people"
|
| The newspeak is strong with this one. There was never anything
| wrong with the word homeless.
|
| Have progressives gone too far?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Maybe. Look up George Carlin's soft language skit. It's
| happening to "homeless" now.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| Back in Seattle the lingo was "persons experiencing
| homelessness". I feel like the more syllables you can get in
| there, the more PC it gets.
| BulaVinaka wrote:
| ifqwz wrote:
| I hate services that forcibly enable 2fa on you. Even if you have
| it disabled, if they detect that you have changed browsers, IP
| addresses, etc. they make you go through 2fa whether you want it
| or not. Or just lock you out, or even suspend your account. Fuck
| that.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| maybe just.. don't use gmail? if it happens twice then that
| should tell them something
| angry_octet wrote:
| 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 reader isn't even
| doable for some. And we're all going to be old one day.
|
| Practically, we need ideas like to 2FA to gain tractionas widely
| as possible, while realising that isn't _everywhere_. And some
| people will never use 2FA, need higher thresholds for triggering
| lockouts, and need alternative methods for re-establishing
| identity to their ID provider (google in this case). For some
| people that might be their local librarians or community shelter,
| legal aid groups, and banks.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| "Not-my-problem" is a bad response, but the actual response is
| that without 2FA _even more people_ lose access to their
| accounts. Anything that makes it harder for adversaries to take
| over an account almost necessarily adds friction for the users
| themselves. This isn 't a "fuck the people who don't have
| regular access to a phone, they don't matter" situation. It is
| a "there is an aggravating balancing act in this situation and
| no solution will avoid harming everybody."
| dmix wrote:
| Yep, reducing standards for everyone in an attempt to help a
| small minority is _also_ a growing trend in the west. Schools
| dumbing down so everyone gets A's type of top level decision
| making.
|
| Sometimes you have to make hard choices where some people get
| burned because the alternatives are worse. That doesn't mean
| you don't care.
| paganel wrote:
| > to help a small minority
|
| In this case the people asking for 2FA are the "small
| minority", and the rest of us have to suffer through 2FA-
| authentication hell because of them.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > In this case the people asking for 2FA are the "small
| minority", and the rest of us have to suffer through 2FA-
| authentication hell because of them.
|
| How many people don't like 2fa because they don't know
| about all the times it's saved them from total account
| takeover?
| arubania2 wrote:
| AKA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
| valenterry wrote:
| > but the actual response is that without 2FA even more
| people lose access to their accounts
|
| This is not black and white. It is possible to encourage 2FA
| but allow to opt out. The same for phone numbers.
|
| And that's why companies enforce 2FA: they want your juicy
| phone-number or other data. And yeah, maybe they also want to
| reduce support costs and avoid bad publicity. Still, it's not
| in your interest, it's in theirs.
|
| If they at least would allow for a sufficient number of
| options. Like paper-tan (even self printed), yubikey or
| similar, second email address, an authenticator, ... but even
| big companies often only require a phone number.
|
| EDIT: Yes, Google offers more than a phone number when
| creating a gmail account. I didn't say they don't. However:
| they don't make it easy and I would even go as far as saying
| that they are evil here. If you don't believe me, try to
| create a gmail account right now and don't google/search how
| to do it without phone number.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > And that's why companies enforce 2FA: they want your
| juicy phone-number or other data.
|
| It is possible. And, as far as understand it, the teams at
| Google in charge of this have evaluated this option and
| found that it leads to more lost accounts.
|
| The people responsible for user authentication at Google
| are in a _completely_ different part of the company as
| advertising and, in my experience, are especially stubborn
| about their focus on security. "This is about phone
| numbers" doesn't make sense to me given my personal
| experience.
|
| > If they at least would allow for a sufficient number of
| options. Like paper-tan (even self printed), yubikey or
| similar, second email address, an authenticator, ... but
| even big companies often only require a phone number.
|
| We are talking about Google specifically here, which offers
| all of these options.
| hdjsksjd wrote:
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| > It is possible to encourage 2FA but allow to opt out.
|
| You might be surprised to learn that this is how it works
| for Google accounts: it is default-on but you can turn it
| off.
|
| > If they at least would allow for a sufficient number of
| options. Like paper-tan (even self printed), yubikey or
| similar, second email address, an authenticator, ... but
| even big companies often only require a phone number.
|
| You might be even more surprised to discover that all of
| these options are supported for Google accounts.
| valenterry wrote:
| Not only have I not said that Google doesn't offer 2FA -
| yes they do.
|
| However, Google tries _very hard_ to prevent people from
| e.g. creating a gmail account without a phone number. Try
| it if you don't believe me.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I definitely vividly remember needing it a few years ago,
| but right now I can try to sign up and it says "Mobile
| Number (optional)" (Maybe that's based on some security
| heuristics).
| valenterry wrote:
| Yeah and it also only works on your phone (or if you know
| how to make Google think you are on your phone) and in
| certain countries. All to my knowledge and based on my
| tests.
| nahkoots wrote:
| I just did it from Firefox on Linux in a private tab near
| Washington, D.C.. Fake name, no phone, no backup email. I
| was able to log out, sign back in, and send an email
| without any trouble.
|
| No doubt they're letting me through because some security
| heuristic says I'm a real human, and I'm sure they'd
| eventually make me provide a number if I continued using
| the account (this happened to me with my university G
| Suite account a couple years ago and I needed to contact
| my IT department to manually disable the phone
| challenge), but so far I can't see any evidence that
| they're doing anything unreasonable.
|
| Perhaps they're requiring you to use a number because
| you've tested it a lot.
| a_JIT_pie wrote:
| I thought the same but I just tried on firefox desktop
| (Windows) and spun up a new google account with email,
| password, fake first+last name and fake bday. Really, I
| was expecting to be stopped at "Phone Number required"
| but it is indeed optional.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Google only allows non-U2F 2FA methods (like TOTP) to be
| enabled AFTER enabling a hardware U2F device. And signing
| up without a working mobile number is impossible. Anyone
| who says that's not true hasn't actually tried in the
| last several years.
| nyuszika7h wrote:
| I definitely had TOTP before I had U2F. I think you mean
| after enabling _SMS_ 2FA, not U2F.
| exodust wrote:
| Can't turn it off for Google Ads account any more. Won't
| let you in. This is a real pain for shared google account
| in a small team like ours. Sick of Google removing user
| choice.
|
| We all knew password, no problems at all. Now it mandates
| 2FA. And because they mandate it for Google Ads, now it's
| on for everything like Google Drive etc.
| awinder wrote:
| Gmail offers all of these (except for the second email
| address): paper backup codes, hardware authenticators, non-
| Google/gmail authenticator apps. The problem is that
| homeless people can/do routinely lose the "thing you have"
| part of 2fa.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Huh? Gmail most certainly supports paper codes, hardware
| authenticators, and non-google auth apps.
| awinder wrote:
| Ugh yeah that was punctuation hell, updated
| james_pm wrote:
| For our product, 2FA is pretty important as a security
| feature (domain registrar). That said, if you don't want to
| use it, that's on you as the user. We help out in a
| different way for those users - we make it impossible to
| disable account sign in email notifications if you don't
| use 2FA and those email notifications include a "nuke all
| active sessions and lock my account" button that can (and
| has) saved users if their account is compromised due to
| things like leaks of credentials that they've reused on
| multiple sites.
|
| 2FA is a major hassle for support when users get locked out
| because they smash their phone or change phone numbers or
| somehow lose access to the 2FA method. But, the benefits of
| 2FA largely outweigh those downsides for the majority of
| users. Offering the choice though, is something we think is
| important.
| valenterry wrote:
| > For our product, 2FA is pretty important as a security
| feature (domain registrar). That said, if you don't want
| to use it, that's on you as the user.
|
| That's all I'm asking for as a user - thank you for being
| on the good side. Optimally you allow for multiple MFA
| options, so that I can e.g. use an authenticator app and
| a yubikey, as well as a recovery code in my bank.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Still, it's not in your interest, it's in theirs.
|
| Which is okay, because it is a business.
|
| If society wants homeless people to have reliable access to
| email without having SMS 2FA or whatever requirements a
| business requires, then society should elect a government
| to provide it as a utility.
|
| There is no reason to expect or want businesses to pick up
| the slack for the government not providing adequate safety
| nets. Let businesses be businesses, and let governments
| handle redistributing wealth.
| md_ wrote:
| I think this is a better answer than it first appears.
|
| Initiatives at for profit corporations will always exist
| within some business constraints, shareholder
| obligations, and so forth.
|
| It would be very reasonable for governments to provide
| tax-supported digital services. I could easily imagine
| that spending a few dollars per year to provide the
| homeless with basic digital services would pay off simply
| in easing administrative overhead.
|
| But we don't do it, because, in America, our sense of
| what government can or should provide is atrophied, and
| we, mistakenly, look to private actors to provide basic
| public services.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >But we don't do it, because, in America, our sense of
| what government can or should provide is atrophied, and
| we, mistakenly, look to private actors to provide basic
| public services.
|
| I don't think this matches reality. The US government is
| doing more today than any time point in the past.
| Spending and taxation as a percent of dgp is at an all
| time high.
|
| There's also a sense that nobody should have to do
| anything themselves. There's nothing stopping anyone from
| talking to a homeless person and helping them set up an
| email account without 2fa.
| md_ wrote:
| That's fair that I shouldn't make such an unqualified
| statement.
|
| While public spending as a % of GDP has indeed increased,
| that's primarily driven by two things: increased defence
| (and related) spending, and increased spending on health
| costs.
|
| In the US, the growth in social assistance spending over
| the last 3 decades is driven almost entirely by the
| latter: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-
| expenditure-as-per....
|
| At the same time, we continue to believe in privatizing
| basic government services: outsourcing social assistance
| to charities (including religious charities), outsourcing
| military and intelligence functions to mercenaries, or,
| on point for this thread, outsourcing ID verification to
| VC-funded private startups.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Looking at your numbers or just social spending, it is
| increased 50% since 1990 as a portion of GDP. Real GDP
| adjusted for inflation itself has increased more than 3x
| since 1990. This means that us social spending in terms
| of inflation adjusted purchases has gone up more than
| 450% from 1990 levels.
|
| This excludes military spending and is adjusted for the
| purchasing power of those dollars.
|
| I don't know about you, but I don't feel like we are
| getting 450% more value out of the government services.
| The numbers are pretty clear that the government is
| collecting more and more inflation adjusted dollars from
| people's income than ever before.
|
| I Suspect we would probably agree that the government is
| not being a responsible steward of this money that it is
| collecting.
|
| My primary point was that I don't think that the belief
| that a decrease in government spending and Revenue is
| reflected in the numbers. Further, I think it is
| important to push back on the idea that the systemic
| issues we see can simply be solved by throwing more money
| into an increasingly inefficient system.
| md_ wrote:
| Sure. My point was indeed to suggest we rethink what
| government _can_ do.
|
| Can governments (not necessarily the federal government)
| run a public service internet system? Sure, and probably
| more easily than we can, as another poster suggested,
| regulate tech companies into providing the right
| tradeoffs for housed and unhoused users.
| valenterry wrote:
| > Which is okay, because it is a business.
|
| It might be legal and maybe even legitimate, but OP said:
|
| > This isn't a "fuck the people who don't have regular
| access to a phone, they don't matter" situation.
|
| So yeah, those people don't matter (enough) in the sense
| that it's not worth to offer more methods of 2FA. Let's
| not pretend otherwise.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Am I pretending otherwise? Obviously businesses value
| certain people more than others. It is a business.
| valenterry wrote:
| Not you, but the OP certainly gives this vibe.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| I find your worldview overly constrains the range of
| possibilities and eliminates reasonable ones, like
| expecting companies to not disproportionately harm those
| in our society who are least able to recover from or
| avoid the harm
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Businesses are not harming anyone by not providing
| charity.
|
| I struggle to see a reasonable possibility to the
| government either directly or legislating others to
| provide identification and communications services. One
| of the greatest utilities in the US is USPS, a monumental
| accomplishment to be able to provide communications to
| all people in the US.
|
| Tacking on email (and identity verification services -
| which USPS already does via passports) should be a no
| brainer.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| IMO it became plainly a good idea to have the US Post
| Office provide email service no later than a decade ago.
| md_ wrote:
| > If they at least would allow for a sufficient number of
| options. Like paper-tan (even self printed), yubikey or
| similar, second email address, an authenticator, ... but
| even big companies often only require a phone number.
|
| Google seems to support all of those?
| valenterry wrote:
| Did you recently try to create a gmail account? If not, I
| suggest you try it right now. Maybe you will be
| surprised.
|
| Hint: it is still possible to create a gmail account
| without phone number, but it has become quite tricky to
| do so.
| md_ wrote:
| Oddly, I suspect if Google provided no free accounts at
| all--if you had to give a credit card and pay $5 to sign
| up--nobody would be complaining about this.
|
| Which leads me back to the point made elsewhere in this
| thread: we have too high an expectation for what private
| companies can or should do, because they have taken the
| place in our minds if government.
|
| And our expectations for what government can or should do
| are too limited, because we've convinced ourselves
| government is ineffective and unaccountable.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > Oddly, I suspect if Google provided no free accounts at
| all--if you had to give a credit card and pay $5 to sign
| up--nobody would be complaining about this.
|
| That is like saying 'if the DMV didn't offer IDs to
| people, no one would complain about not being able to get
| an ID'.
|
| The fact of the matter is that email is 'de facto' online
| ID, and gmail has positioned itself into this role. They
| are now a societal need, not a luxury. They need to be
| regulated.
| vel0city wrote:
| _Email_ may be a societal need, but Gmail === Email. They
| 're _one_ email provider in a sea of providers. There are
| dozens to hundreds of free email provider choices out
| there.
|
| One doesn't _need_ Gmail to have a functioning email
| address.
| md_ wrote:
| My point was that this is a dumb argument.
|
| If email is a societal requirement--and maybe it is, or
| should be--public utilities should provide it.
|
| It's easy to build an email provider. Why shouldn't your
| state or local government provide one?
| valenterry wrote:
| I can assure you that this suspection is wrong, at least
| about me.
|
| I've personally bought/subscribed to various companies
| both personally and professionally. Just recently (a
| couple of weeks ago) I evaluated a couple of
| mailproviders. I discarded all of those that enforced 2FA
| with a phone-number.
|
| For instance mailgun. At least the support helped me:
|
| > Hello XXX, > > Thanks for bringing this to our
| attention. > > At this time, I have successfully
| activated your account so that it is now fully
| operational and you are all set! You may need to log out,
| then back in, to reflect this change. Also, your users
| can indeed utilize Google Auth without using a phone
| number. > > Please reach back out if any other questions
| arise. > > Regards, > XXX | Mailgun by Sinch
|
| Others weren't as flexible. E.g. Sendgrind:
|
| > Hello, > > Thanks for reaching out to Twilio SendGrid
| Support and for your interest in our products. My name is
| XXX and I'll be more than happy to assist you in this
| matter. > > I am sorry for the inconvenience caused by
| the 2 Factor Authentication process, but this is
| mandatory for all accounts, as a security feature. > The
| only options available are to setup 2FA through Authy: to
| receive an SMS code or use the Authy app, which you can
| download here. > > I apologise for the inconvenience
| caused by the fact that we do not have any other options
| available at the time. > > Please do let me know if you
| have any additional questions in regards to this matter
| and I will be more than happy to further assist. > > Kind
| Regards, > > XXX | Technical Support Engineer Twilio-
| Sendgrid
|
| Forcing me to use your own homegrown authenticator or a
| phone number? No thank you.
|
| In the end I decided for a provider that offers 2FA but
| offers multiple options and doesn't enforce it.
|
| Doesn't matter if I pay or not, really.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > it is still possible to create a gmail account without
| phone number
|
| Nope. Not possible.
|
| Oh how I would love to be proven wrong though.
| valenterry wrote:
| It's possible. Try to do it from your phone with your
| browser in incognito mode.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| That's also a bad response. The tech industry literally
| exists to invent things. That's its entire purpose. Why
| should we satisfied with a status quo that neglects the most
| vulnerable among us? What is the point of technology if not
| to solve these problems?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Is there a solution?
|
| The claim in the link is that homeless people lose every
| single one of their possessions after a period of time.
| They also have minimal access to support structures that
| could be used as a recovery system. We've had decades of
| work on authentication and pretty much every solution
| either involves using a password manager to create unique
| passwords or having possession of a physical thing.
| nyuszika7h wrote:
| Password managers are absolutely not required. While
| they're a good idea for most of us who don't have to
| worry about having somewhere to sleep, homeless people
| can still most likely memorize a password and remember it
| after a few tries. They can't do that if 2FA is forced on
| them.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Everybody sucks at memorizing unique passwords. I'd be
| _stunned_ if homeless people are consistently not reusing
| passwords. Credential stuffing is the #1 form of account
| takeover and 2FA is the solution.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Consider that the decades of work has probably been done
| with the exact same blind spots we're discussing now.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I'm really curious. What would you propose?
|
| The best I can think of is trusted backup accounts, which
| already exist. A homeless person with regular attachment
| to a family member or a social worker could set up that
| person's account as a backup. But this already exists and
| is likely to fail for a large number of homeless people,
| who tend to struggle at maintaining long term
| relationships with family members or social workers who'd
| be able to help them.
| nyuszika7h wrote:
| > I'm really curious. What would you propose?
|
| The solution is very simple. Don't force 2FA. I'm sure
| most homeless people would rather risk the unlikely case
| of their accounts being hacked if they didn't choose a
| strong enough password to memorize than risk getting
| locked out of their accounts permanently.
|
| You can encourage 2FA but forcibly enabling it for
| everyone does more harm than good, especially to homeless
| people but also non-tech-savvy parents and such (though
| the latter would be more likely to have a working
| recovery method).
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > The solution is very simple. Don't force 2FA.
|
| And then in alternative-universe HN people are
| complaining about the rate of account takeovers via
| credential stuffing and calling Google irresponsible for
| making it easy to disable a powerful security measure.
|
| > You can encourage 2FA but forcibly enabling it for
| everyone does more harm than good
|
| I'd wager that pretty much the only people on the planet
| who can definitively say this are the people who handle
| account takeovers and lockouts of large email services.
| My understanding is that the folks at Google responsible
| for this have concluded that making it behave the way it
| currently does is the setup that causes the fewest people
| to lose access to their accounts.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| I don't have one. I'm not a security expert or researcher
| or anything like that. But the tech industry has invented
| thousands of things that to most people would have been
| inconceivable beforehand. That doesn't mean there's a way
| to improve on the tradeoffs we have now -- but the fact
| that no one's invented it yet doesn't mean it can't
| exist.
|
| The tech industry self-styles as the smartest people in
| the world, who try to solve the hardest problems. All I'm
| saying is that we shouldn't throw our hands up when we
| can't immediately come up with a solution to something we
| only learned about five minutes ago.
| Arainach wrote:
| This isn't something we learned about five minutes ago.
| It's been known that people lose their phones for a very
| long time. The tradeoffs were considered when designing
| the system.
|
| Treating the tech industry as a magical black box that
| can "solve anything" is disingenous and dangerous. This
| is the exact same attitude that leads to things such as
| legislation that says "find a way for any communication
| to be decrypted upon subpoena. You're tech people, figure
| it out"
| b3morales wrote:
| > The tech industry self-styles as the smartest people in
| the world, who try to solve the hardest problems.
|
| I think this is a good point, but the catch is that
| there's an implicit footnote that needs to be attached to
| "the hardest problems*": "*Which generate sufficient
| monetary returns". This particular problem isn't one that
| has much revenue potential.
| GraphenePants wrote:
| The 3-2-1 backup strategy requires an offsite backup.
| It's unclear what advantage was forseen by the homeless
| when the decision was made to forgo this guidance.
| bombcar wrote:
| Surgical implanting yubikeys.
|
| That won't at all bother anyone homeless, because there's
| never been a homeless person who was a conspiracy
| theorist.
|
| (Obvious sarcasm detected)
| yellowapple wrote:
| An only-slightly-less-sarcastic solution would be to get
| a tattoo of the recovery codes.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| I wonder how many people suffer identity theft versus how
| many have a working recovery email but are denied to use it
| because some algo finds it suspicious that you moved country
| or logged in from a linux machine?
|
| The key takeaway is not about how we should promote 2FA or
| how we should promote long ass passwords, the main issue at
| hand is google's neglectful lack of customer support.
|
| I was once caught in this non-sense many moons ago. But I
| learned my lesson, I absolutely do not rely on any google
| products for anything that has any potential to impact me
| personally (with the unfortunate exception of the Android OS
| on my phone).
|
| Google as a brand is absolutely dead in the water for anyone
| that has woken up from the 'Don't be evil' kool-aid of the
| early days.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > the main issue at hand is google's neglectful lack of
| customer support.
|
| Customer support is the main entrypoint into 99% of sim
| swapping attacks and would be similarly for any targeted
| account takeovers. What sort of information do you possibly
| think would be enough to prove someone actually owns a
| Google account over the phone?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I've heard of some system for reviewing identification
| like drivers licenses in extreme cases, but homeless
| people are largely not going to have access to this
| either.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| that is a phenomenal question that deserves to be
| answered by the highly paid engineers at Google
|
| they're smart, I'm sure they can find a way, even if it
| contains such horrible, detestable ideas like "more
| support staff" and "more training for support staff"
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Companies with highly trained support staff regularly
| fall for these attacks.
|
| The answer has been figured out by the highly trained
| engineers. It's "don't provide account recovery options
| that bypass 2fa". Yeah that sucks for a segment if
| people, but it sucks less than regularly getting your
| account stolen due to a social engineering attack. There
| really, truly, doesn't exist a panacea. You don't have
| and can't create an oracle that knows when an account
| recovery attempt is legitimate or not.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Why don't we expand physical IDs into the network space.
| We need some way to verify ourselves online that doesn't
| rely on a private company and a TOS.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > the main issue at hand is google's neglectful lack of
| customer support
|
| Imagine Google had a full service customer support system
| for account recovery that everybody could access rapidly.
| How would a homeless person use it? They lose all their
| possessions regularly so they don't have a reliable form of
| identification. They'd need to enroll their drivers license
| (which they probably don't have) in the system and then
| still have that license when they need to recover their
| account. Or they could be vouched for by a pre-enrolled
| trusted party account that does have strong authentication
| systems. But... homeless people are often transient and
| don't have access to regular support networks like a family
| member or social worker who could be enrolled as a backup
| account. In fact, you can _already_ enroll as backup
| account if you want to.
|
| > Google as a brand is absolutely dead in the water for
| anyone that has woken up from the 'Don't be evil' kool-aid
| of the early days.
|
| Google has a pretty bad reputation at this point on tech
| blogs and forums. But, believe it or not, it actually shows
| up near the very top of trusted brands when 3rd party
| analysts do surveys on the wider population. Maybe this
| data is wrong, I don't know. But it is interesting.
| everdrive wrote:
| Right now, technology has reached a point where it's expected
| to be ubiquitous, however is not as accessible as other
| ubiquitous and necessary services. This has been brought up
| before, buy can someone in their 70s keep up with the changing
| UIs and websites and security requirements these days? This is
| all fine for something like Netflix or Spotify. But for
| government services, access to jobs, and fundamental
| communications this poses a problem.
| bombcar wrote:
| We're crippling along depending on family, libraries,
| charities, and other NGO support services.
|
| The DMV works with people like this all the time; perhaps
| something could be done there where you have a government
| issued email address that you can't lose or be locked out of
| (worst case you take your ID to the DMV and the nice clerk
| helps you reset your password/sign in).
| paganel wrote:
| > someone in their 70s keep
|
| I'm in my early 40s, computer programmer, and I've
| temporarily lost access to my WhatsApp account because I
| don't have a recent enough mobile phone, and the phone that I
| do have doesn't have a relatively recent OS installed.
|
| It's a 4-year old (I think I've got it for 4 years) iPhone
| SE, on which I never updated the OS because I hadn't feel the
| need to do it. When I started getting pop-ups that "hey, our
| app will stop functioning on your phone unless you upgrade
| the OS" was already too late for that, I was afraid that
| upgrading the phone to the latest OS will cripple it
| permanently in terms of performance (the battery is already
| on its way out by this point).
|
| So, assuming I get to 70, in no way I'll be up to date by
| then in terms of having the latest OS installed and all that
| crazy stuff, who has the time and the nerves for that?
| (especially the nerves).
| flerchin wrote:
| If your face hurts, maybe you should stop punching yourself
| in the face. Update your software.
| paganel wrote:
| Equating lack of software updates to punching oneself in
| the face is part of the whole problem.
| flerchin wrote:
| It's not though. No one writes perfect software on first
| release. Even perfect software adapts to the changing
| realities of our world. Staying up to date is not
| optional.
| arubania2 wrote:
| What's your speciality in programming?
|
| Keeping all your software, and that includes the OS, up to
| date, is one of the most important aspects of personal
| security.
| paganel wrote:
| I also don't have a WiFi password at home, if it matters.
| Of course, I don't have Internet banking nor do I do much
| (if at all) money-related things with my phone, something
| tells me that makes me more secure than people who trust
| Apple and Google with their money (at least the local
| banks have to answer to the authorities).
|
| What's your employment specialty that makes you trust
| Apple and Google?
| flerchin wrote:
| That something would be wrong. I can steal all your money
| with the information on the front of one of your checks.
| Kalium wrote:
| OK. Let's play a game.
|
| Let's say I care. Let's say I care _a lot_. I care so much that
| I 'm willing to make it my personal problem to address the very
| real, very pressing needs of a critically vulnerable and
| marginalized part of my community from inside Google.
|
| What am I going to do? Is anyone going to be happier if I stand
| up and proclaim loudly how much I care? Probably not.
|
| Could I say "Gee, what if we just let everyone put themselves
| in the group of people who don't do 2FA"? Yes, if I wanted to
| be responsible for a lot of people not securing their accounts.
| Could I outsource identity verification to a wide assortment of
| groups (libraries, non-profits, etc.)? Absolutely, so long as
| I'm alright with this being used to gain improper access to a
| LOT of accounts outside the target segment. Could I offer more
| password chances and friendlier lockout times? Sure, so long as
| I'm OK with the negative consequences of this for a lot of
| people.
|
| OK. Let's end the game now. We don't really have any major
| steps towards real solutions here. Empathy is very useful for
| showing where a problem is. Demanding what amounts to lowering
| the global bar for account security is perhaps not the ideal
| approach here.
|
| Sometimes problems are just _hard_. Taking ownership and
| feeling empathy and sincerely wanting to solve the problem does
| not render them easy.
| themitigating wrote:
| Empathy is the motivation and starting point. Even if you
| don't go beyond that step you can vote for those that will.
|
| "Sometimes problems are just hard. Taking ownership and
| feeling empathy and sincerely wanting to solve the problem
| does not render them easy."
|
| No one said it did and it's better than not caring at all.
| Kalium wrote:
| While I agree that empathy is the motivation and starting
| point, I do want to note that a lot of people in this
| discussion do seem to sincerely believe that this problem
| would be easy for Google to solve if they just cared
| enough. The framing of "Google's product designers should
| talk to my unhoused friends" in the tweet linked seems
| invested in this idea.
|
| What if the most empathetic answer here is "This isn't
| really the right service for you"?
| gsatic wrote:
| What do you think the moral of Jurassic Park was?
|
| If you dont know how to control what happens in the park you
| build, then the park will be shutdown.
|
| In the case of Google its not hard to speed up the process of
| shutdown. I just encourage them to keep working on more and
| more mindless ivory tower trash like Pixel phones, watches
| etc and inject more Ads into everything. They dont have the
| imagination for anything else but want a pat on the head for
| whatever they build. Give it to them.
| Kalium wrote:
| It seems to me that Google is in full control of what
| they've built here. They've chosen not to put in the effort
| to find a way to meet the needs of this portion of their
| user community.
|
| On the one hand, this can be quite reasonably derided as a
| lack of imagination. Surely there must be a way to do it!
|
| On the other hand, well, we as a society accept that
| businesses are generally allowed to decide they just don't
| want to be in a market segment or produce some features.
| Bridgestone is not compelled by law to have a store in
| every neighborhood. Montblanc is not forced to produce
| disposable ballpoint pens.
|
| Perhaps we should treat this as Google admitting the limits
| of what they're willing and able to build. There is no
| shame in knowing your limits.
| x0x0 wrote:
| It seems likely that enabling insecure account usage
| would be a net negative to huge swaths of their user
| base.
|
| Gmail is functionally the root of trust / skeleton key to
| millions of people's online lives. The only real
| competitor is Facebook and, for some, Apple. I think
| Gmail is far better (more secure, more privacy
| respecting, less capricious) than Facebook.
|
| With the admission by Chad that that homeless he
| advocates for can't retain mobile numbers, or ID cards,
| or 2fa keys, I have no idea how he thinks any secure
| access could possibly work.
| Kalium wrote:
| I have the nagging sense that what we're seeing amounts
| to throwing one's hands in the air and exclaiming "There
| must be a way!"
|
| As others have pointed out, turning off 2FA is available.
| Apparently that doesn't work either because the people in
| question forget their passwords. So I guess we should add
| passwords and biometrics (not available on all hardware)
| to the list of things that aren't going to work.
|
| Like you, I'm left wondering what there is to anchor any
| level of security.
| hairofadog wrote:
| I guess I don't see a lot of difference between the practical
| results of loudly proclaiming empathy vs. loudly proclaiming
| cynicism.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tdehnel wrote:
| Someone with a drug addiction or mental health issues needs
| treatment _now_. Access to email is a lower priority.
| stevesearer wrote:
| My dad helps people navigate the system to find housing.
|
| Recent story was a 65yo + veteran living in a shelter. They
| hadn't started collecting social security due to some debts and
| was worried it would ALL be garnished.
|
| After explaining that veterans get expedited in line for
| housing and that they would still get almost all of their SS,
| they have applied for it and should be housed soon.
|
| It doesn't surprise me at all that 2FA causes problems after
| hearing many stories similar to this one.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > They hadn't started collecting social security due to some
| debts and was worried it would ALL be garnished.
|
| Is this common? I knew a guy who had the same mindset. I
| ended up paying him in cash for some work, he was convinced
| that if he made any money in a traditional role it would be
| instantly garnished.
| canuckintime wrote:
| > They hadn't started collecting social security due to
| some debts and was worried it would ALL be garnished.
|
| Your contractor's actions makes a some twisted sense to me
| as he's still receiving 'undisclosed' cash. The homeless
| veteran doesn't make any sense to me as he was not
| receiving the social security funds at all.
| bombcar wrote:
| If I told you that you had a bunch of forms to fill out,
| and after doing all the work you'd get no money (and it
| would all go to your hated ex-wife or something), you
| might not bother doing it.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| The above example was someone who FEARED all of their
| money would be garnished. Not someone who was TOLD all of
| the money would be garnished.
|
| That isn't the same thing.
| acdha wrote:
| First, anyone skipping out on their responsibilities
| shouldn't be getting a sympathetic reaction (and, yeah, I
| know they always have stories about how it's justified in
| their case - my dad spent a lot of time hanging out with
| other deadbeats but every time details came out,
| surprise, surprise, they were leaving out a lot).
|
| Paying people under the table has a lot of potential
| liability for you and it almost always catches up with
| them. Especially now it's just not viable to live off the
| grid (e.g. hoping you don't get sick isn't effective) and
| all this does is ensure that the amount they owe the IRS
| is unaffordable when the bill finally arrives, usually
| when their earning potential has gone down.
| bombcar wrote:
| Sure - all of those are true; just explaining why someone
| might not sign up for social security, even if the
| reasons don't actually pan out.
| bombcar wrote:
| It is unfortunately common. We're not perfectly rational
| robots, and so for a decent subset of the population, they
| go off what has happened to them.
|
| And being paid $1k and assuming they'd have $1k and then
| discovering they only had $500 because of garnishment tells
| them "don't accept checks, cash is the only safe method".
|
| And then it's not a step much further to be "it's not worth
| setting up social security because it'll all be taken".
|
| People forget that there is a population group where fines
| are MORE HARMFUL than jail time. At least with jail, you
| can serve your time and be done.
| 8note wrote:
| Don't you still leave jail with new debts because they
| charge you for your stay?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| You do realize jail isn't some magical unifying force of
| social justice right?
|
| A while back a guy destroyed a vehicle of mine and drove
| off. Per criminal law in my jurisdiction, he should have
| served at least 45 days for that offense. But it isn't
| like that would ever give me my property back. It's also
| unlikely to deter that particular crime in the
| population.
| bombcar wrote:
| Sure, jail isn't a solution in many cases, but fines
| aren't either.
| stevesearer wrote:
| In many cases I think it has more to do with having to jump
| through a bunch of hoops with no assurance of what the
| outcome will be.
|
| Another person needed an ID. In order to apply for the ID
| they needed a birth certificate. In order to apply for it
| they had to fill out the application, mail it with money,
| and then have a permanent place to have the birth
| certificate mailed an unknown amount of time later. At
| which point they then needed to apply for the ID and go
| through that process.
| deelowe wrote:
| It's no different than people not investing in their 401k
| and getting the free match because they're worried about
| paying "penalties" when they take it back out. My employer
| has a 50% match and early withdrawal penalty is only 10%
| and yet, people still refuse to do it.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Real, actual people exist who turn down raises because
| they're convinced it'd cause them to lose money, because
| they don't understand how marginal tax rates work. I don't
| mean low-income earners who may in fact lose out or not
| gain from a raise due to benefits cliffs, I mean people
| earning low-six-figures who think if their pay goes any
| higher "my tax rate will go up and I'll lose money" and are
| weirdly resistant to being convinced otherwise.
| kodah wrote:
| It sounds like they're used to being nickel -and-dimed or
| having money taken away from them.
| [deleted]
| Bakary wrote:
| 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. Having Google change their 2FA system for
| this group would be one such decision. It's similar to the
| 'think of the kids + terrorism' attacks on encryption. It's
| socially difficult to argue against these ideas because you are
| then labeled as a terrible and non-empathetic person, but the
| solutions themselves make one other thing worse without really
| being helpful other than for garnering retweets and likes.
|
| In this case, we actually aren't being ambitious enough. Why
| are we having a system where we give out phones every 12 weeks
| to each homeless person? We'd probably save money for the
| program by developing some sort of dedicated device designed to
| be harder to steal or lose. Maybe a high-autonomy low-powered
| KaiOS smartphone that can be attached as a strap? It's not like
| the current devices are working.
|
| Why is it such a hassle to keep the same number after a theft?
| We could investigate there too. Improving this would be better
| than decreasing the effectiveness of gmail's measures.
|
| Heck, if we want to focus on Gmail, why not focus on why it's
| the default choice for the homeless to begin with, as opposed
| to removing features.
|
| We could try to solve the problem structurally but we prefer
| the caseworker approach, because it's more easily packaged
| 'empathy' than actually fixing the homelessness issue. It's
| like people who travel to developing countries to 'help', when
| the locals need investments and training facilities, not extra
| warm bodies. 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.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| I would argue yours is a poor point of comparison and you
| have missed the forest.
|
| google isn't requiring specific 2FA data, like address,
| because they are stalwart guardians of data. They are
| _harvesting data_ because that is their business.
|
| The homeless don't have enough data to be of value to an
| entity like goolge
| Bakary wrote:
| If Google were to shrivel up and dissolve, I would not mind
| at all. But what's currently happening is that a metric ton
| of people are using their free email service and won't stop
| doing so any time soon, and so they had an incentive to
| hand-hold and force along 2FA that coincides with some form
| of public utility: fewer security breaks and financial ruin
| for massive globs of vulnerable, tech-illiterate people.
| blfr wrote:
| Google demands 2FA because popped accounts are used to
| abuse their services.
|
| Homeless people don't have enough of anything to be an
| attractive target for advertisers.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The problem here is that misapplied empathy can lead to
| terrible decisions.
|
| That's not the problem, that's a vague wave at a generic
| class of innuendo that could be used just as easily to
| rationalize not allowing your child to eat ice cream or
| Japanese internment. You have to make the case _why_ Google
| changing their 2FA system is so much more important than the
| homeless having phone service, you can 't just say
| "sometimes, empathy can be bad."
|
| I'm not getting that from the rest of the comment, which
| seems like a gish gallop around a bunch of other things that
| we're also not going to do for the homeless, and about which
| you or somebody else can say "it's only human to be worried
| about other people going through these issues, but empathy
| can be bad. The answer isn't that HUD should change the
| second line of the third section of Form B, it's that we
| should fix the homeless problem completely."
|
| edit: We can't use as an excuse for not making small changes
| that we should be making larger changes. The excuses that one
| makes to avoid making small changes will apply more so to
| larger changes.
| Bakary wrote:
| I can make a very specific case for it. Out of 1.5+ billion
| users, millions of which are barely tech-literate and
| vulnerable, with gmail a constant target for malicious
| entities. That means intuitively at least hundreds of
| thousands of vulnerable people getting cleaned out of their
| life savings. Changing things for billions in exchange for
| a marginal benefit to thousands is bizarre.
|
| It's not a 'gish gallop' but a framework for looking at the
| issue. I'm not saying that empathy is sometimes bad, I'm
| saying that it can't be the starting point for our
| reasoning. It can be the impetus that makes us act, but the
| actual solution should come first. Sure, maybe none of the
| things I'm proposing will be implemented. Maybe they're all
| godawful ideas, but I can't fix the problem in the five
| minutes it took to write the post or even five decades of
| intense research on my own. But it's clear that keeping to
| that pseudo-empathy performative martyrdom mindset is an
| active roadblock against the more ambitious solutions. And
| it leads to truly awful ideas such as getting rid of
| encryption, rights, and so on.
| rini17 wrote:
| So you don't want Google to do anything or what is the
| purpose of all this verbiage? Which moreover, unjustly
| dismisses whole issue as "marginal benefit to thousands".
| Being able to keep/recover email address is so much more
| than a marginal benefit, and there are many more than
| thousands of homeless in the US alone.
| peatmoss wrote:
| > 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 with huge externalities to society.
| Put another way, homelessness is an enormously expensive
| solution to the problem of providing space for humans to
| live.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Or by removing barriers for new housing. A lot of these are
| govt created barriers.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-
| st...
|
| But yeah let us blame Google.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| warent wrote:
| Unfortunately it's more complicated than this. There have
| been nonprofit organizations and government initiatives to
| give homeless people space in unoccupied hotels for
| example.
|
| What ends up happening is they generally just destroy the
| living space in a variety of ways.
|
| It's because the majority of homelessness is an issue of
| mental health. In the USA, there are pretty much zero
| mental health resources for people in poverty.
| acdha wrote:
| What sometimes ends up happening. It's true that we have
| huge gaps for mental health and substance abuse but there
| are examples (famously, Salt Lake City) of such programs
| working. The mixed history says we need to take the
| problem seriously, not give up.
| faitswulff wrote:
| There's a positive feedback loop between mental health
| and housing, so it takes more than tilting either end of
| the equation to fix it.
| clint wrote:
| What you describe is not "giving the homeless a home" its
| giving them a temporary, poor substitute for a home that
| they have no personal interest in"
|
| Also your sweeping statement about the destruction of
| their living space smells to high heaven prejudiced
| thinking based on myth or hearsay rather than actual
| data.
| Entinel wrote:
| > It's because the majority of homelessness is an issue
| of mental health.
|
| This isn't true or at least it doesn't start that way.
| What people don't understand is that there isn't a single
| homeless population. You have people who are temporarily
| homeless and people who are chronically homeless. The
| temporarily homeless are people who lost jobs, fell on
| hard times, etc etc. The simplest solution for them is
| yes to give them housing. The chronically homeless is
| where things get more complicated and those are the
| people who typically need mental health and abuse
| services. The simplest and most efficient thing we can do
| is help the temporarily homeless and prevent them from
| becoming chronically homeless.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| We're pretty good at getting the temporarily homeless
| into housing. Obviously any improvements are good, but
| fundamentally the issue is with the chronically homeless
| who often have other factors going on.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> We 're pretty good at getting the temporarily homeless
| into housing._
|
| I'll take tautological statements for $200 please Alex
| vorpalhex wrote:
| This is the industry term for people between housing
| (they can't make rent, they got kicked out, etc). It
| differentiates from the chronically homeless who can not
| be rehoused simply by giving them a place to live.
| rolph wrote:
| yes there are different castes of homeless, some do quite
| well, and are not problematic. others are of disorganized
| psyche, and cause much of thier own problems, resulting
| in no one wanting them around.
| carapace wrote:
| That's a good argument for giving them some other housing
| arrangement. It's not an argument for leaving them on the
| street.
| peatmoss wrote:
| > What ends up happening is they generally just destroy
| the living space in a variety of ways.
|
| Citation very much needed here. This certainly does
| happen. But, I don't believe this the _general_ (i.e.
| typical) outcome. From what I understand talking to
| acquaintances who work in this area, wrecking the place
| is not the typical outcome. And property damage is
| generally cheaper to address than the constant provision
| of emergency services.
|
| I agree that mental health (and substance use) are major
| factors in homelessness, but those issues are more or
| less impossible to address when people are living on the
| street with no permanent address and no place to keep
| e.g. a cell phone without it being stolen.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| At least a data point here - my city of Austin is buying
| a hotel to convert into housing for the homeless.
|
| This has gone badly. The property sees intense vandalism
| and destruction, the neighbors are afraid for their
| safety, and the whole thing is an amazingly expensive
| boondoggle.
|
| [0]: https://www.foxnews.com/us/austin-hotel-purchased-
| homeless-s...
|
| [1]:
| https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2022/05/16/austin-
| homel...
| Vvector wrote:
| That's a bad example. The unoccupied hotel was vandalized
| before the homeless were moved in. Yes, it a boondoggle,
| but nothing to do with homeless.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I don't think it was the local homeowners stealing live
| copper from the walls.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Sounds like it could be a ring of criminals who are
| connected to those who can buy copper.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| But it also wasn't homeless people being legally housed
| there. If your point is "people who live there take
| better care of the space", then that's what Austin is
| trying to do. Convert squatters stealing copper to the
| kind of people who live there.
| Ardon wrote:
| We also don't know it was the homeless, that kind of
| thing is often actual gang activity
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Where do you suspect that homeless are storing their
| caches of copper? Do you think they're carrying them
| around with them at all times?
| zuminator wrote:
| Seems like a bad situation. But follow the timetable:
|
| 1) Austin buys the property
|
| 2) Begins renovations on vacant premises
|
| 3) Vandalism takes place
|
| ---------------
|
| 4) The conversion is complete
|
| 5) Property officially offered to homeless residents
|
| Steps 4 and 5 haven't happened yet. So homeless people
| who "generally just destroy the living space" isn't a
| good fit for what's going on. This is simply a situation
| of an unsecured construction site that has attracted
| squatters and vandals.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| The problem is multifaceted. And homeless people are not
| a monolith. There are large cohorts for whom simply
| receiving a home _would_ make life significantly easier.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| themitigating wrote:
| Source on both mental health being the majority and that
| generally the homeless will destroy the space they are
| given?
| foobarian wrote:
| > Homelessness can be solved by providing housing.
|
| They used to be called asylums, and the problem is what to
| do if the homeless person refuses to go. I wonder why you
| don't hear about homelessness in totalitarian states...
| Hitton wrote:
| >I wonder why you don't hear about homelessness in
| totalitarian states...
|
| Because vagrancy is punishable by prison time there.
| jotm wrote:
| Heh, well homeless people are voluntold to gtfo the
| streets and go to a homeless shelter or get a fine or
| jail time in Europe...
| themitigating wrote:
| Asylum is one type of housing for people.
| etchalon wrote:
| Because totalitarian states don't talk about them?
| zdragnar wrote:
| 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 chronic group, it is a
| symptom. Treating the symptom will not have a long-term
| impact on much of the population.
|
| Source: conversations with a social worker friend who spent
| years working with the homeless population in our metro
| area.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _Some homeless people don 't want to deal with the
| maintenance of a home._
|
| You've got a good point. These leaves are really starting
| to pile up, and the snow will be upon us soon. I think
| I'll just say fuck it and sleep under a bridge, and leave
| the grounds keeping to the parks department.
|
| You did set up a straw man solely to get knocked down,
| right? In actuality, the idea of giving "housing to
| everyone" doesn't mean an idyllic single family stick-
| and-drywall dwelling with a yard, but rather something
| communal - like a less-populous more-dignified shelter
| with a modicum of persistent personal space. The
| maintenance would be institutional, and come out of the
| same operating budget as administration, utilities, etc.
|
| I feel like most of the "some homeless just want to be
| homeless" argument revolves around baking in assumptions
| that public housing should come with a bunch of strings
| attached, to make the residents' lives "better". In your
| comment, this is the responsibility for maintenance or
| mental health treatment. Such conditions are what turns
| people off, not some intrinsic love for sleeping rough.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| How many of those chronic homeless would have only been
| temporarily homeless if they had the security of housing
| early on before their situation went even further
| downhill?
|
| Sometimes mental issues are purely genetic but often they
| can also arise from or be exacerbated by trauma. And
| homelessness sure is traumatic.
| ch71r22 wrote:
| 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/
| bsder wrote:
| Wait, what? That's precisely opposite of what your source
| [1] says:
|
| "70% were receiving mental health treatment or had in the
| past." "An April 2016 survey of New York City's homeless
| population reported that unsheltered homeless individuals
| were most likely to be severely mentally ill single
| males." Something like 1 in 5 of the homeless in San
| Francisco have a _traumatic brain injury_.
|
| None of these people are going to be fixed with mere
| "housing".
|
| Even worse, putting these people who desperately need
| medical treatment in "mere housing" is very likely to
| cause the "mere housing" program to _fail_ when it could
| have succeeded. The homeless who need "mere housing"
| don't want to be near the homeless who need "significant
| medical treatment" any more than anybody else does.
|
| Homelessness has an "Amdahl's Law" nature to it. You have
| to separate out the different types of homelessness and
| apply the correct solution. And you will only gain the
| improvement for the group you "solved".
|
| Consequently, you can solve 20% of the homeless problem
| and people will still say you "failed" because 80% of the
| homeless are still in their vision.
| [deleted]
| highwaylights wrote:
| To be fair, some of us have been calling attention to this
| problem for a long ass time, and nothing is being done about
| it.
|
| E-mail needs to be a regulated utility, given that getting
| locked out of one's email happens all the time with
| catastrophic consequences.
| themitigating wrote:
| Why does email need to be a regulaty utility when there are
| other methods of communication?
| highwaylights wrote:
| Great question!
|
| The long version (if it's patronising please skim
| forward, I'm writing as an explainer for anyone else that
| comes along):
|
| E-mail was originally a means to communicate informally
| between two participants over the Internet.
|
| In this early version of the system the message would
| leave your machine, go to your Mail server, then the
| recipients mail server, then their inbox. This would
| complete the transmission and a copy would exist at both
| ends.
|
| Companies providing ostensibly free online e-mail inboxes
| have slick sign-up funnels that on the surface seem to be
| offering a very similar system as the one above, with
| very little in the way of regulation around either the
| sign-up funnel or the mailbox (and which do not explain
| the catastrophic life consequences that can occur as a
| result of losing access to your mailbox).
|
| These new mailboxes work differently from those of the
| early Internet, though:
|
| 1) Your mail is sent to your mail server. A copy may or
| may not be retained locally.
|
| 2) Your mail server transmits the message to the
| recipients mail server as before.
|
| 3) The recipient receives a notification of the e-mail
| and may or may not retain a copy locally.
|
| This infrastructure is ubiquitous and now not quite 30
| years after the early Internet we have an issue where
| you'll be required to have an e-mail address for almost
| all public services and common accounts that have little
| to no online component. Your entire life, more or less,
| may pass through that inbox.
|
| If one day you lose access to the account (in that you
| insert your password and the provider says no), you will
| lose access to your entire e-mail history.
|
| You may attempt to reset some passwords for essential
| services, but you can't, because they're sending e-mails
| to verify your identity - which you'll never be able to
| receive.
|
| You move on, create a new account, and attempt to start
| over. However, e-mails - potentially important e-mails
| containing personal information - continue to be
| delivered to a mailbox that you can't access ever again.
| Maybe you miss some important alerts.
|
| Perhaps it was a gmail account that had your entire photo
| and video history in google photos. That's now gone too.
| With your passwords, if you're using chrome passwords.
|
| You rebuild, and a couple of years pass, and perhaps
| someone else gets access to your account (either through
| a hack, or a rogue employee with access rights, or
| someone who guessed a badly thought out password).
|
| You never find out that the account was accessed, so have
| no-one to complain to, and maybe you end up with savings
| or 401K/pensions getting emptied. Which in a lot of cases
| wouldn't be discovered until they're due to be collected.
|
| Some of the above might sound far-fetched, but you'd be
| surprised how much having access to an email inbox is
| accepted proof-of-identity in 2022.
|
| Hence the need for regulation.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Really Original e-mail, the mail server was your computer
| (mainframe) where your account was. It's Greg@ because
| that's Greg's username when he logs in. Greg doesn't need
| outlook because his mail is just a folder of text files.
| There's a mail agent but it's running on Greg's computer.
| pas wrote:
| Don't single out email. The problem is much larger than
| that. Any big megacorp nowadays figured out that the best
| way to do whatever they are doing is to provide the service
| to the median consumer, and just cut the rest out as
| perfectly as they can. It started with the idiotic get a
| number to wait in line at the branch offices, IVR audio
| labyrinths on the phone, completely useless self-service
| portals, and now there are no branch offices anymore, and
| in many cases the "helpdesk" is just a dumb caricature of a
| robot in a fucking submenu of a tragedy of a hacked
| together mobile app.
|
| Sure, it's great that gmail is cheap, after all "it's
| free". But Google (and MSFT, fuck outlook.com in particular
| for their completely anti-competitive spam "protection"
| that only accepts email from other big providers) cross-
| finances gmail from their ad business, completely
| distorting every kind of service and product markets.
|
| ---
|
| For email in particular what's needed is a LetsEncrypt-like
| community-driven solution for reputation management and
| acceptance of emails from reputable sources by the big
| inbox providers.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| 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 wouldn't help users who don't
| know about it. It certainly would not fix homelessness in
| society. But it would do a lot of good for a lot of people!
|
| Would this option lead to some increased number of hacked
| accounts? Probably, but these would be accounts that
| explicitly opted in to that risk! I think it's excessively
| paternalistic to not provide the option. Every life situation
| is unique, and people know their own lives better than Google
| does.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| That wouldn't help at all unless it was the default.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Why? The homeless aren't stupid, and we have libraries
| and other institutions that can provide education.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| The case workers could have an email account to use as the
| recovery email account. This already exists.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| While I don't think that's a bad idea in some situations,
| it means trusting the case worker with access to the
| entire account (as they could use the recovery email to
| reset the password). It's also an extra burden to put on
| the case worker, and the individual who has to coordinate
| with the case worker.
| notabee wrote:
| Additionally, this only exists in some magical,
| fantastical world where the unhoused only have one case
| worker. In reality the unhoused bounce between a
| patchwork of government and non-profit services, and
| because of the soul-crushing workload and emotional labor
| of those jobs the individuals in each role are also
| subject to frequent turnover. So the only way this would
| work is an account that's shared between everyone who
| might work with that unhoused client at each organization
| (there are often multiple handling different aspects such
| as housing, mental health, money for groceries, etc.),
| and as clients move geographically or do other things
| that make them eligible or ineligible for each
| organization's services, that recovery account would also
| need to change or transition to some new org. Even a
| single recovery email address is just a totally
| unworkable solution for the reality they face.
| puglr wrote:
| While your proposal is perfectly reasonable, I couldn't
| help but notice that your opening was an example of the
| "'think of the kids + terrorism'" mentioned by GP.
|
| > Look, I'd love to stop CP distribution in America!
| Really, I would! But Google's encryption policies are
| preventing law enforcement from intercepting pedophile
| communications _now_ , today.
|
| It's the same "think of [vulnerable group]" type of
| statement.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The purpose of that sentence was to bring us back to the
| issue at hand. GP was essentially saying (as I
| interpreted it) that we should focus on the root causes
| of homelessness instead of worrying about day-to-day
| concerns like how the homeless access email. I think we
| should do both, especially when the latter would be
| relatively simple.
|
| But also, yes, there are in fact many times when it's
| important to consider the needs of different groups of
| people! That isn't to say that the ends always justify
| the means--it depends on what the means are--but
| reasonable accommodations should be made where possible.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| How about just don't use Google services, Tutanota is free
| and is just as good.
| everforward wrote:
| The problems are downstream of that.
|
| Not having 2FA is going to allow some portion of users to
| get hacked. When those users do get hacked they will need a
| way to regain control of the account. Methods of regaining
| access to an account are notorious for bad actors social
| engineering their way to gaining control of accounts.
|
| 2FA relieves some of that, because even if you do get
| hacked you can provide a token from the authenticator that
| was attached to the account, proving that you do in fact
| own that account.
|
| > I think it's excessively paternalistic to not provide
| that option.
|
| I don't find it paternalistic. The goal is to cut down on
| support costs by reducing the number of users who get
| hacked and need assistance regaining access to their
| accounts, and to force users to have a method of
| demonstrating they own the account even if they can't log
| in. That it confers some additional security to users is
| nice, but not really the end goal.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Not having 2FA is going to allow some portion of users
| to get hacked. When those users do get hacked they will
| need a way to regain control of the account.
|
| I don't think they do! This would be part of the
| tradeoff.
|
| Currently, people who cannot use or rely on 2FA are
| getting locked out of their accounts even if they _weren
| 't_ hacked _and_ knew their password! Isn 't that worse?
| chaostheory wrote:
| Doesn't Google offer the option of disabling 2FA?
| jotm wrote:
| What, how?
|
| I got "hacked", I mean yeah it was a hack using an
| Android phone and Google's automated recovery system.
|
| If not for the latter, my incredibru strong password
| would've saved me.
|
| They also removed the phone and backup email from that
| account because I recovered the account _once_.
|
| I sure hope 2FA cannot be removed once someone gains
| access (not without a call to the 2FA number/whatever)
| lol.
|
| Either way, I'm not using it because it's a pain in the
| ass. I already hate that they lock me out if I try to log
| in from another country.
|
| Gee, yeah I travel between EU countries, that's very
| unusual for most people.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Currently, people who cannot use or rely on 2FA are
| getting locked out of their accounts even if they weren
| 't hacked and knew their password! Isn't that worse?_
|
| Not if it's happening to fewer people than the
| alternative.
| everforward wrote:
| > Currently, people who cannot use or rely on 2FA are
| getting locked out of their accounts even if they weren't
| hacked and knew their password! Isn't that worse?
|
| I don't think so. You seem to presume the end state of
| both is that the user is locked out, which is only half
| true.
|
| With a lost 2FA device, the user and everyone else is
| locked out of the account.
|
| With a compromised account, the user may be locked out
| but the hacker is not. The hacker is free to impersonate
| the user to social services, hospitals, potential
| employers, etc. If there's no mechanism for the user to
| regain control of the account, the hacker will have that
| access until the user can contact all of those people and
| give them a new email address. That could take a while,
| especially if we're considering that the user has a high
| chance of not having a phone at the moment.
| elcomet wrote:
| But the locked account is much more likely than the
| compromised password in the real world.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > I don't find it paternalistic. The goal is to cut down
| on support costs by reducing the number of users who get
| hacked and need assistance regaining access to their
| accounts, and to force users to have a method of
| demonstrating they own the account even if they can't log
| in. That it confers some additional security to users is
| nice, but not really the end goal.
|
| So we should be mindful of Google's profit margins,
| instead of homeless people's access to vital services?
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| If the service is truly vital it should be provided by
| the government, not Google. The government would also be
| free to set security policies and provide support at the
| level and cost demanded by the public. It is not and
| should not be the role of a private enterprise to act as
| a backstop for the fabric of society when it is not in
| their interests or their customers' overall interests.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The vital services are provided by the government, but
| require an email address. Some people have trusted Google
| to be their email provider, and Google is failing some of
| those people by denying them access unnecessarily.
| 8note wrote:
| If vital services rely on email, email is a vital service
| paintman252 wrote:
| umm you DO know that Gmail isn't only free email, right?
| Like, just use another one which doesn't force 2FA. Why
| is this become an issue? I don't get it
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I'm saying that if the public/government doesn't feel
| like Google's security policies are compatible with the
| homeless, the simplest solution is to set up a
| government-run email host.
| parineum wrote:
| We should probably not force private companies to spend
| (or lose, no difference) money to solve societal problems
| that they are in no way responsible for.
|
| That's like forcing pepboys to change the tires of senior
| citizens for free because social security isn't paying
| enough.
|
| Maybe we should put our efforts towards fixing problems
| instead of asking private companies to put a bandaid on
| it at their expense.
| lancesells wrote:
| Is Google a vital service or is email a vital service?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Neither. Gmail is an email provider which has provided
| access to an account that these people have registered
| with providers of vital services.
| paintman252 wrote:
| And? Not every service is homeless-friendly. That's fine.
| There are literally hundreds of free email services.
| themitigating wrote:
| It's security vs homeless access to vital services. I
| think it's a diffiult line to draw
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I don't think it's difficult!
|
| * The people who want security get to keep all the
| security they get today.
|
| * The people who don't think about security and leave
| default settings intact keep all the security they get
| today.
|
| * The people who explicitly ask for less security get
| less security.
|
| * Some of the homeless will get increased access to vital
| services.
|
| It's a win-win--unless you believe, for some reason, that
| people should have security _forced_ on them even if they
| explicitly ask to not have it. I fundamentally don 't
| understand this mindset. People should have the right to
| do dangerous things if they are warned of the risks
| involved.
| Karunamon wrote:
| > _The people who explicitly ask for less security get
| less security._
|
| The problem with that is less security is almost always
| more usable than more security, which leads to the
| greater amount of people being in that state, which is
| not just a danger to the user making the choice, it is a
| danger to others.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| Not sure why this is being downvited. You could argue
| that forcing security upon users is why everyone knows
| about password-based logon today. Same could be said
| about the initiative for HTTPS everywhere.
| slavik81 wrote:
| Keeping wrong people out is only half of what is required
| for security. You also have to let the right people in.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| This seems like something the homeless services are best
| positioned to fix by providing email hosting to their
| clients. They know their clients are actual humans, not
| hackers, so can provide the continuity that the giant
| providers can't.
| [deleted]
| jonas21 wrote:
| That's almost exactly what Google has done. Here's how you
| turn off 2FA on your account:
|
| 1. Go to myaccount.google.com
|
| 2. Press "Security"
|
| 3. Press "2 step verification"
|
| 4. Enter your password
|
| 5. Press "Turn off"
|
| 6. Confirm the dialog that says "Turning off 2-Step
| Verification will remove the extra security on your
| account, and you'll only use your password to sign in."
| aetch wrote:
| Those steps don't actually turn off 2FA for Google
| accounts.
|
| If you login from a new computer or unrecognized IP,
| Google forces you to use the YouTube app on your phone to
| enter a "code" to login. It sometimes doesn't even let
| you get a text code. God forbid I lose my phone or delete
| the YouTube app and login from a new IP. I don't know how
| I would even get into my account.
|
| I don't know how this isn't a wider spread issue
| affecting more people but I guess Google developers live
| in a perfect world where the YouTube app auth can never
| fail and you never lose your phone.
| astura wrote:
| That's Weird, I've never had to do that. I can just login
| to Google with my username/password. If it doesn't
| recognize the device it just pushes a notification of the
| sign in to my phone
| hirsin wrote:
| That's exactly what they are describing - the push
| notification to the phone _that the user has lost_.
| astura wrote:
| It's just a _notification_ , it can be ignored (for me).
| I don't usually even notice its there until hours later.
| You don't have to acknowledge it in any way.
|
| It also has nothing to do with the YouTube app, and there
| is no code I have to enter anywhere.
|
| I've never had any form of 2FA on my Google account.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| You may have never experienced it, but it does happen.
| Not just a notification.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Then don't use Google for email. There are plenty of
| other free email providers that do not employ that much
| security. Problem solved
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| I recall that the problem was broader than 2FA. They also
| re-verify accounts that have been idle, or that are being
| accessed from a new location. Or issues if you've
| forgotten the password and don't have a phone.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| This is exactly it. And if you don't have a verification
| method on file, Google will just lock the account if it
| thinks something about your browser or IP address is
| unusual. Even if you know your password.
| mrec wrote:
| Speaking as a long-time Gmail user who doesn't have a
| mobile, this is kind of terrifying. Sounds like I need to
| look into moving to Fastmail or somesuch pronto.
| professorTuring wrote:
| I can understand your statement, but by doing that you will
| find that A LOT of people will check the insecure options
| because "that a not going to happen to me".
|
| Remember you have the "rescue keys" from google to avoid
| these kind of problems.
|
| The bigger problem is how you teach those people how to use
| the services in their situation.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 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)."
|
| Google allows someone of your choosing, who must also have
| a GMail account, to takeover one's account after x months
| of inactivity. It's not great but it's better than nothing
| and it has the benefit of being an option that exists
| today.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| 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 its the government's problem to fix. They are the ones
| handing out phones and setting the expectation to
| communicate through email. So they can either design an
| email service themselves that fits their needs. Or they can
| work with an industry partner, such as google or someone
| else to provide the service.
|
| Normal gmail is a one size fits all commodity solution. It
| works well enough for most people, most of the time.
| Specialized problems call for specialized solutions.
| Complaining that google didn't think of you is misplaced.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| If Google is going to position itself as the face of the
| internet, then it has to live up to that responsibility;
| it can't go, hm yes, use our browser and our email
| service and our phones, but only if you fit into this
| category of prescribed users.
| dublin wrote:
| Of course they can. It's the only thing they've ever
| done. I honestly can't think of a company that thinks
| less of its users than Google does - that's because in
| their view, they have no users - they only have eyeballs,
| that are worth anywhere from fractional cents to hundreds
| of dollars every time they can grab them.
|
| Using "support" and "Google" in the same sentence is
| laughable. They barely support the ad clients that pay
| their freight. Google's entire business model is built
| around NEVER providing support for the users of their
| technologies, and killing off any products that don't
| monetize.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Gmail is a perfect fit in theory. Google provides a
| product, workspace, where you can hand out gmail
| addresses and reset them at need. Given that the cost of
| providing such accounts is actually less because the
| support burden falls on the city it might be possible to
| convince Google to provide them at less than the standard
| cost.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _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.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Should users with poor vision also have to use a special
| blind-person email provider? Because, I'd expect
| supporting screen readers to take significantly more
| effort than adding the setting I outlined.
|
| Also, if I was homeless, I wouldn't want my email address
| to indicate I was homeless.
|
| I broadly agree that it isn't Google's job to cater to
| _everyone_ , but in this instance, the ask seems
| overwhelmingly reasonable--and less than what we expect
| in other circumstances.
| Kalium wrote:
| What is the ask that is overwhelmingly reasonable? As has
| been pointed out to me and others, Google already offers
| a way to turn off 2FA -
| https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1064203
| Naively this seems like it should solve the 2FA problem
| for the unhoused community members in question.
|
| With this in mind, what else should Google do?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Even when 2FA is disabled, Google will insist on
| additional verification (phone, recovery email, etc) if
| it thinks something about your browser or IP address is
| unusual, even if you know your password. If you don't
| have a verification method (or cannot access it), Google
| will literally just lock you out. I have personally
| experienced this.
|
| It should be possible to turn this off!
| Kalium wrote:
| OK. That raises all sorts of follow-up questions, as
| turning off security measures can be expected to have
| consequences.
|
| What should Google do in the scenario that this
| purposely-low-security-for-the-unhoused account is
| breached? What about abuse? Are we OK with Google just
| shutting off accounts in that scenario? Are we prepared
| to accept that the members of our community experiencing
| being unhoused will find themselves constantly creating
| new accounts as their old ones are shut off or rendered
| unusual from the consequences of purposely-low-security-
| for-the-vulnerable?
|
| Remember, things like gmail accounts are under constant
| attack. Security measures, the very ones we're talking
| about disabling, help keep those attacks at bay. Each of
| those things that triggers verification actually lines up
| with real attack patterns.
|
| So while this may be a small-ish thing to ask for, I'm a
| little concerned about the consequences. We're literally
| asking to offer the most vulnerable and marginalized
| members of society shittier security and ignoring the
| effects of this.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Are we OK with Google just shutting off accounts in
| that scenario? Are we prepared to accept that the members
| of our community experiencing being unhoused will find
| themselves constantly creating new accounts as their old
| ones are shut off or rendered unusual from the
| consequences of purposely-low-security-for-the-
| vulnerable?
|
| I am, yes, if the alternative is that they loose access
| to their account every few months!
|
| Also, at least this way people have the _ability_ to keep
| their accounts truly safe _if_ they choose a strong,
| unique password. If Google just locks them out no matter
| what, there 's no recourse.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The state could run an email service.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Bakary wrote:
| Is that really your only takeaway here? Feels like a parody
| of HN comments. It could be any other equivalent, I don't
| know. Even if it's KaiOS the homeless probably have other
| things on their mind than the CCP or whatever.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| > You do realize that KaiOS is Chinese, right?
|
| What's the point of this comment?
|
| Google is American, so what? And people all over the world
| still use it regardless.
| yardstick wrote:
| And Linus is Finnish!
| j_k_eter wrote:
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| I like your comment because it gradually stumbles upon the
| actual solution. We aren't being ambitious enough, but
| developing a device designed to be harder to steal or lose is
| timidly incremental. By the last paragraph, we're talking
| about ending homelessness entirely. _That_ is an ambitious --
| but achievable! -- goal, and one that actually addresses the
| root of the problem.
| Bakary wrote:
| If you mean a stumble in the sense that I'm not truly aware
| of the implications of what I'm proposing, that's not
| really the case. I personally believe we could be yet more
| ambitious than what I am describing here, but I realize
| that most people aren't going to be on board. So the next
| best thing is to propose a different framework of looking
| at the problem and a different methodology for looking for
| solutions. A dedicated device would be incremental, yes,
| but what matters is that if we unlock the capacity to think
| towards this sort of innovation the big changes will follow
| naturally.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Just to clarify, I meant "stumble" as in it seemed to be
| somewhat stream of consciousness; just happening to end
| up at "give everyone a home" rather than planning a route
| there from the opening sentence.
| tbagman wrote:
| Homelessness in the US is a complex problem. I found the Soft
| White Underbelly interview series by Mark Laita insightful
| when learning more about it:
| https://www.softwhiteunderbelly.com
|
| Mark spent considerable time earning the trust of LA's skid
| row population - a large roadside tent community - and has a
| series of 1:1 interviews with a slice of the population,
| exploring their histories, challenges, preferences, and
| culture.
|
| Mark doesn't believe that many (most?) of the skid row
| population would benefit from being provided with housing,
| and that issues of trauma, mental health, and childhood
| family environment are what he believes would have the
| highest leverage on the problem.
|
| This is of course just one perspective on the problem, but
| Mark's perspective taught me quite a bit.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I have a feeling that the issue isn't homelessness really,
| but the kinds of people that end up homeless cause problems
| anyway. Someone won't stop being violent or committing
| crime because they got moved from a tent to a studio.
|
| I don't think the temporally homeless, like someone down on
| their luck. makes up the issues people have with homeless.
| You see some crazy person, then you see that person is
| homeless, your answer to that is "oh give them a studio
| apartment!" and not lets help them with their issue. Police
| should be policing violent people, for some reason instead
| of that we want to build homes in the middle of nowhere and
| drop them off their. They're still going to cause issues.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I think people would be a lot more compassionate towards
| homeless people generally if the violent and destructive
| subset of homeless people were put in prison where they
| belong. With the awful ones out of the way, the peaceful
| sympathetic homeless people would become the public face
| of homelessness and the general public would be much more
| willing to to address their problems constructively (e.g.
| provide housing to them.)
|
| But instead the justice system is set up to give
| effective impunity to the worst sort of homeless people;
| they're back on the street days after being arrested (if
| they are even arrested in the first place.) They cause
| incredible damage and commotion, so they hog all the
| public attention and give all homeless people a very bad
| name through association.
| spinlock wrote:
| Yup. Why break 2FA when we could have the Obamaphone program
| work with the case workers so that they don't loose track of
| people in the first place?
|
| Also, homelessness isn't the problem we think it is. It's
| millions of problems. Any solution will never help more than
| a subset of the homeless population. We need to iterate on
| small solutions to make progress.
| tdehnel wrote:
| Utter nonsense. Mandated treatment for drug addiction and
| severe mental illness would tackle half the problem.
|
| Then provide contingent housing based on staying sober,
| sticking to your treatment plan, and getting a job. You can
| graduate when you're able to pay your own way.
|
| For non-addict/mentally ill homeless, it's housing
| contingent on employment, graduate when you can pay your
| own way.
|
| This would solve 90% of the problem.
| bArray wrote:
| > Having Google change their 2FA system for this group would
| be one such decision.
|
| It could be opt-out.
|
| > It's similar to the 'think of the kids + terrorism' attacks
| on encryption.
|
| No, it's not. Nobody choosing whether _they_ enable 2FA
| affects your decision to use it or not. It's more like
| forcing drugs down somebody's throat because you believe it
| benefits them and everybody else is doing it anyway.
|
| > Why is it such a hassle to keep the same number after a
| theft? We could investigate there too.
|
| Sim-jacking. Somebody could claim to have lost it and just
| take your number. This has happened before. The problem of
| authentication is fundamental in security and Google are just
| passing the buck onto phone service providers.
|
| > Heck, if we want to focus on Gmail, why not focus on why
| it's the default choice for the homeless to begin with, as
| opposed to removing features.
|
| Because it's free and the emails don't bounce. Most big tech
| has 2FA now.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Maybe a high-autonomy low-powered KaiOS smartphone that
| can be attached as a strap?_
|
| May I introduce you to the concept of scissors?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _homelessness is definitely something that affects a ton of
| people so it definitely is our problem as long as we are city
| dwellers._
|
| We have to break out of the stereotype that homelessness is a
| city problem. It isn't. Far from it.
|
| Homelessness is more obvious in cities because there are
| fewer places for homeless people to be. But there are plenty
| of homeless people camped out in rural and suburban towns, if
| you know what to look for.
|
| I recently lived in a snooty city suburb where most of the
| homes cost from $600,000 to $10 million, and guess what --
| the drainage tunnels beneath the Home Depot, the maintenance
| underpasses in the parks, the undeveloped wooded lots were
| all full of homeless people.
|
| Promulgating the notion that homelessness is a city problem
| is what allows suburban and rural politicians to cut funding
| for homeless services because "it doesn't affect _my_
| constituents. "
| Bakary wrote:
| What I mean is that it's almost impossible not to be
| affected if you are a city-dweller, it's a lot harder to
| ignore. Most will ignore it, but still acknowledge it as a
| problem for them. Even in a cynical and dehumanizing way.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| If you can't notice it is what makes it not a problem for
| most people.
| reaperducer wrote:
| It's absolutely noticeable, even obvious, but people
| choose to not see it.
| scythe wrote:
| >In this case, we actually aren't being ambitious enough. Why
| are we having a system where we give out phones every 12
| weeks to each homeless person? We'd probably save money for
| the program by developing some sort of dedicated device
| designed to be harder to steal or lose. Maybe a high-autonomy
| low-powered KaiOS smartphone that can be attached as a strap?
| It's not like the current devices are working.
|
| You're putting the cart before the horse. The _far_ simpler
| solution is for the government to provide the homeless with
| email. Now the auth can work however you want.
| Bakary wrote:
| I agree that it would be a good start. What I'm saying is
| that the system of having to replace phones every 12 weeks
| is dysfunctional on its own and probably should be looked
| at.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _What if that homeless person was your substance-abusing
| sibling? A friend from school with mental health issues?_
|
| I think we also have to realize that not everyone who is
| homeless has problems that can explain it away.
|
| It's easy to look at someone who is homeless and tell yourself,
| "Oh, he's a dope addict. He did this to himself." It's only
| very rarely true, and you're only making excuses for not
| helping another human being.
|
| Just last year there were newspaper articles about how a
| shocking number of perfectly normal public school teachers in
| California live out of their cars, just because they cannot
| afford a place to live on what they're paid.
|
| Most people, especially in the SV bubble, would be shocked to
| learn how many of the baristas, maids, security guards,
| convenience store clerks, and other people they encounter every
| single day are homeless, living in their cars, or sleeping on
| other people's couches through no fault of their own.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Just trying to motivate some empathy, "there but for the
| grace of God go I." You are correct than many homeless people
| are not carless, or they suffer from housing uncertainty
| (couch surfing, itinerant sleepers rolling through difficult
| family situations and severe housing shortages). Probably
| they can manage 2FA though.
| bombcar wrote:
| The "quiet homeless" who can hold down a job are also likely
| to be able to keep track of a phone or other two factor
| device.
|
| If we can "solve" the problem for the dopest of dope addicts,
| the problem will also be solved for the homeless barista.
|
| That still doesn't solve the problem for homelessness, of
| course.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > The "quiet homeless" who can hold down a job are also
| likely to be able to keep track of a phone or other two
| factor device.
|
| While I agree that there's a lot of generalization here, a
| lot of the point of supporting the homeless in the first
| place is that big tech should support everyone, even if
| they are indeed someone who "can't keep the same cell phone
| number for more than 4 months at a time" (via the source
| twitter thread) as if they're a government that must cater
| to its citizens.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > For some people that might be their local librarians or
| community shelter, legal aid groups, and banks.
|
| What's stopping any of those groups becoming a homeless
| person's 2FA?
| tpoacher wrote:
| > we need ideas like to 2FA to gain traction as widely as
| possible
|
| No, 2FA needs to die in a fire. Easily circumvented in most
| social attacks that actually matter, false sense of security,
| massive timewaster/usability-hell/pain in the butt, acts as a
| novel social/corporate/accessibility barrier to technology for
| a large number of previously unaffected groups, and poses a
| threat to software freedoms.
|
| There are many ways to strengthen security and this has got to
| be the shittiest one.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| What are the other ways?
| Aunche wrote:
| 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 the good news is
| that he doesn't have to. Google already allows you to disable
| 2FA [1]. He could have started a campaign to disable 2FA on
| homeless people's phones, but instead he uses this as an
| opportunity to shame Google to boost his own Twitter follower
| count.
|
| I think that empathy is highly overrated. I doubt anyone
| notorious for flashing their big Johnson is particularly
| empathetic, yet LBJ expanded social services more than any
| other President. The problem isn't that people have too little
| empathy these days. It's that people are too easily impressed
| by broadcasting their intentions rather than actually trying to
| solve a problem.
|
| [1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1064203
| replygirl wrote:
| looks like loder is talking about problems their own friends
| face, and the post is not directed at anyone in particular.
| venting is not virtue signaling
| Aunche wrote:
| Loder has 130k Twitter followers without any claim to fame
| besides Twitter, so he knows exactly what he's doing. If he
| had vented about his friends cutting themselves with a
| knife that's too sharp, he would have been ridiculed, but
| in this case he can hide behind the Google hate bandwagon.
| danso wrote:
| 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.
| Aunche wrote:
| He didn't just brag about his dick. He went out of the way
| to show it off to his colleagues. I mean it's possible that
| his fetish outweighed his empathy, but it's more likely
| that he simply didn't care about making people feel
| uncomfortable.
|
| He did progressive things, but to me it sounds like he was
| influenced by philosophical ideals rather than empathy.
| They based Frank Underwood from House of Cards on an
| exaggerated version of LBJ.
| ynbl_ wrote:
| > Practically, we need ideas like to 2FA to gain tractionas
| widely as possible, while realising that isn't everywhere.
|
| thats just one opinion on security. you see this world where
| google is an identity provider, and you prove your identity to
| it via a librarian or bank. i dont. an internet service should
| absolutely never require any form of government id nor separate
| network like cell.
| president wrote:
| If we all spent our collective efforts to make sure everything
| in this world is accessible to every single human being, we
| would have zero progress as a society. We are not even
| guaranteed the right to live in this world and yet you are
| advocating for the right to email service? It is shocking that
| someone could even have a thought process like this and receive
| so many upvotes.
| mplewis wrote:
| This is entirely untrue. We can build an accessible society
| for everyone. We clearly have the resources for it.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Hopefully we will be able to get digital credentials from state
| and local entities that will help with this sort of issue.
|
| It's a problem all around - the elderly are most vulnerable to
| the types of account takeovers that MFA will prevent.
| ouid wrote:
| >Practically, we need ideas like to 2FA to gain tractionas
| widely as possible
|
| Why, to sell more fucking cellphones?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 2FA is not only SMS 2FA.
| sicp-enjoyer wrote:
| In practice SMS or mobile specific applications seem to be
| the only usable option. Some sites do allow email.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Yes, but what else?
|
| A hardware token can be lost as well, and "in app" push
| notification (or whatever the app does) you stil need the
| telephone or at least the SIM/same telephone number, don't
| you?
| angry_octet wrote:
| No the device auth prompts are completely independent of
| mobile number, you don't even need a Sim card.
|
| Giving homeless people a secure and convenient place to
| stash documents would be a great outcome. Birth
| certificate, military discharge papers, licences, 2FA
| codes. Many homeless people live in cars and have all
| this stashed somewhere in the car, but then the car gets
| stolen/towed (e.g. because they haven't paid car
| registration) and then they're sleeping rough, without
| docs.
| jaclaz wrote:
| >No the device auth prompts are completely independent of
| mobile number, you don't even need a Sim card.
|
| Sorry, I don't understand, I believed that the
| independence from the SIM for an app was for an app
| already installed and authenticated on the specific
| device.
|
| If you lose the smartphone (with the app), and the SIM,
| how can you install the app and be authenticated on
| another device?
|
| I mean short of a SMS or a code via e-mail (both not
| receivable/accessible).
|
| >Giving homeless people a secure and convenient place to
| stash documents would be a great outcome. Birth
| certificate, military discharge papers, licences, 2FA
| codes. Many homeless people live in cars and have all
| this stashed somewhere in the car, but then the car gets
| stolen/towed (e.g. because they haven't paid car
| registration) and then they're sleeping rough, without
| docs.
|
| A sort of luggage deposit, you mean?
| remote_phone wrote:
| No, people like you really highlight the "If they don't help
| everyone then they are being immoral" mentality. Which is
| wrong.
|
| Down grading security for the benefit of a tiny minority with
| an especially ridiculous use case is not the greater good. If
| the homeless people think they are at risk of losing their
| phone then they should pick another free email vendor.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| This is a simplification of the problem. Both:
|
| 1. Vulnerable populations need more assistance accessing
| essential services required to participate in society
|
| 2. Service providers need to maintain a reasonable level of
| security for their customers
|
| Can both be true. Saying that maximum (or minimum) levels of
| security are required at all time completely misses the point
| of security--which is to _mitigate_ risk. How much risk is
| appropriate varies a lot by context.
|
| Beyond the context of risk, there is reasonable debate to be
| had on how to best provide access to essential services to
| vulnerable populations. It's pretty important to have an
| email nowadays and if you're not tech savvy or an
| individual/community has little to no money to spend it's not
| unreasonable to have the reality of the matter be that there
| may simply not be many good alternatives (or awareness of
| alternatives) to GMail.
|
| I'm not sure what a correct answer here looks like, but I
| don't think ignoring the need is an approach that gets us to
| a better society or enables vulnerable populations to better
| care for themselves.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > there is reasonable debate to be had on how to best
| provide access to essential services to vulnerable
| populations.
|
| What is the debate? The government can collect taxes and
| provide services, like they do for multitude of other
| needs.
|
| > I'm not sure what a correct answer here looks like, but I
| don't think ignoring the need is an approach that gets us
| to a better society or enables vulnerable populations to
| better care for themselves.
|
| The correct answer is not depending on the largesse of
| businesses. It is using government resources to provide
| methods for identity verification, communications, and
| various other bare minimum needs for living.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > The correct answer is not depending on the largesse of
| businesses. It is using government resources to provide
| methods for identity verification, communications, and
| various other bare minimum needs for living.
|
| To be fair I don't see how any government system can do
| better regarding identity on the internet. Login.gov is
| one of the best services I've used for access to
| usajobs/SSA/etc but it follows some of the same security
| best practices people are complaining about here with no
| real way to re-gain access to your login.gov account
| should you lose your 2fa methods (afaik).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The US government uses the USPS to do identify
| verification for passports. If it can handle identity
| verification for passports, why would it not be able to
| handle identity verification for other purposes, such as
| replacing or reauthorizing one's MFA device?
|
| Hell, it should be trivial to offer federal government
| provided emails with ID verification with customer
| service in the event of loss of device/loss of
| ID/death/etc.
| angry_octet wrote:
| The USPS and banks would be ideal identity validators.
| Having run a few mail servers I don't think the Govt is
| best placed to do that, but they could outsource it to
| google, with a few tweaks to allow identity attestation.
|
| Many other countries have a central government portal
| with secure messaging, with federated identify. Heavily
| reliant on 2FA of course.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Passports require the most paperwork out of anything -
| your in particular, a birth certificate, a second form of
| ID including a driver's license, a photo, and $130+$35.
| The USPS isn't just looking at a face and issuing a
| passport.
|
| 0The issue here is that homeless don't hold onto anything
| physical for 4 months; identity verification breaks down
| in-person immediately as shelters/libraries can't be
| expected to run a facial recognition operation, and
| specific shelter employees/volunteers aren't guaranteed
| to be there anytime a homeless person might walk in and
| need those backup codes, but it breaks down even further
| online since 2fa is inherently 'what you know' + ('what
| you have'/'who you are').
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Passports require the most paperwork out of anything -
| your in particular, a birth certificate, a second form of
| ID including a driver's license, a photo, and $130+$35.
| The USPS isn't just looking at a face and issuing a
| passport.
|
| The point is the hardest part of the problem is already
| solved - which is the physical infrastructure and labor.
| As for not holding onto physical items, USPS also has
| little boxes that people can keep their belongings in.
| dahart wrote:
| > what is the debate?
|
| The debate parent mentioned is what to do with the money,
| not where to get money. You can see that there are lots
| of possible options, right? But you say use taxes like
| it's 'duh, easy' or something. Now we're in the realm of
| the debates actually happening every day in the US,
| _whether_ to provide social services at all, before we
| even discuss how much money they need, what to do with
| it, and where to get it. A huge portion of people this
| country seem to believe that they don't benefit from
| taxes and would prefer safety nets for other people not
| come out of their pockets.
|
| > The correct answer is [...] using government resources
| to provide methods for identity verification,
| communications, and various other bare minimum needs for
| living.
|
| This also sounds like you think it's easy, without
| considering the implications. (If govt resources is the
| solution, why do we still have a problem?) We don't have
| municipal or federal Gmail or Facebook, and there are
| reasons to believe programs like that would take a long
| time and cost a lot of money. The 'bare minimum needs'
| have changed dramatically in 20 years, and will probably
| keep changing just as fast for a while, with the homeless
| population growing in the mean time because the tax-
| funded social safety net we have isn't doing the job.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > A huge portion of people this country seem to believe
| that they don't benefit from taxes and would prefer
| safety nets for other people not come out of their
| pockets.
|
| Exactly, and they love it when people waste time and
| energy blaming businesses for not providing charity. This
| whole tweet storm should not be directed at Google, but
| directed at the US federal government.
|
| > This also sounds like you think it's easy, without
| considering the implications. (If govt resources is the
| solution, why do we still have a problem?)
|
| Because it is purely political. Stalling progress on
| providing essentials for life helps keep people from
| getting help, and hence keeps taxes lower. If the US
| government can do identity verification for passports at
| USPS offices, it can do the same for other purposes.
|
| >We don't have municipal or federal Gmail or Facebook,
| and there are reasons to believe programs like that would
| take a long time and cost a lot of money.
|
| If the world's leading country cannot setup email
| infrastructure, then we have huge problems. Presumably,
| it already does for the how many million federal
| employees?
| gubernation wrote:
| scrollaway wrote:
| Counterpoint, I taught several older relatives in my family how
| to use 1Password.
|
| UX for good security can exist, but it does need a little bit
| of education.
|
| We will all be old one day but I have trouble believing we will
| just forget how to use computers. On the other hand, we do need
| to carefully consider the role google plays in our lives...
| especially for us Europeans, who are just at the mercy of a US
| company's whims.
| soneil wrote:
| I have a sibling who's "no fixed abode". Teaching him how to
| use 2fa isn't the problem. It's that all property is transient,
| so the 2nd-factor can't be tied to property. It doesn't matter
| if that's his phone or his socks. "Something you know and
| something you have" does not account for those who have
| nothing.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Not only Google.
|
| A much less critical or important thing but underlines the bad
| attitudes: I just tried to renew my cancelled Netflix membership
| yesterday. I am not allowed to do that without providing a phone
| number (I used Netflix for ca. 8 years without it). I do not
| provide that because I do not want to. I do not tie every aspect
| of my life to my phone number. In fact I do not want to tie any
| aspect of it to my phone exclusively. Phone number based
| authentication is not safe and reliable anyway (can loose,
| stolen, damaged, then I'll have a cascading effect of problems
| instantly).
|
| I talked long to the helpdesk lady and the conclusion is that I
| am not allowed to renew my Netflix account without providing a
| phone number. End of story.
|
| I permanently remain a non-Netflix user this way. Their loss
| actually.
|
| (A secondary trouble with them is that they are trying to
| misinform me, giving false reasons! The support lady reasoned
| that they need the phone number for validating bank transaction.
| Since they - Netflix - want to use this to send a code in text
| that I am required to type into their - Netflix - system it has
| nothing to do with my bank and with authenticating the
| transaction! (my bank would never use phone for authienticating a
| transaction btw, I am not even sure if I updated my phone number
| with them, they reach me other electronic ways). She was just
| bullsh%ting! Also the renewal pages stated differently, saying
| that authenticating my account is where the phone number is
| required. Not to mention that a friend of mine registered
| recently and for him the reason to register a phone number was to
| retrieve password recovery messages. Three sources, three
| different reasons, one of them is complete bullsh%t. Very
| repelling kind of practice, I am actually glad staying away.)
|
| (A third smaller aspect was that the helpdesk lady tried to
| interview me about my phone usage strategy and my reasons instead
| of answering my question about alternatives. It is not her
| business how I use phone and trying to pressure me into some
| rigid lifestyle strategy they determine. There are many
| alternative ways to carry out the same task, they should provide
| more and better choices.)
| logicchains wrote:
| >A much less critical or important thing but underlines the bad
| attitudes: I just tried to renew my cancelled Netflix
| membership yesterday. I am not allowed to do that without
| providing a phone number (I used Netflix for ca. 8 years
| without it).
|
| If you've got some spare time, have you considered taking them
| to small-claims court for refusing to cancel your membership
| and still charging you? It'll cost them a huge amount if they
| show up, and if they don't then you get a judgement against
| them by default. Or if you signed some contract agreeing to
| only use specified some Netflix-specified legal intermediator,
| use that.
|
| If everybody who was screwed over by tech companies took legal
| action against them, it'd cost the companies a huge amount of
| money and they'd have to improve the way they treated people.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > (my bank would never use phone for authienticating a
| transaction btw, I am not even sure if I updated my phone
| number with them, they reach me other electronic ways).
|
| Phone numbers are often included in billing address inputs, so
| I imagine it's at least logged in the bank's system and perhaps
| used as a heuristic signal for fraud.
| s0rce wrote:
| Very confusing title, I thought there was some weird schedule
| that needed address verification. It's when a phone is lost which
| is on average every 12 weeks according to the twitter post.
| craniumslows wrote:
| Why not educate the people in need about the tons of other free
| email services that exist? Outlook, tutanota, protonmail, yahoo,
| gmx, fastmail, zoho theres plenty more but you get the idea.
|
| The only way to win is to not play the game.
| spoonjim wrote:
| I don't think changing Gmail to meet the needs of the homeless,
| at the risk of everyone else's security, makes any sense. Instead
| there should be a different email service that the homeless use,
| perhaps government provided if there's no business model in it.
| ENOTTY wrote:
| This might not be a problem that matters to the Google bean
| counters, but it would be a problem that a responsible, moral,
| and just company would solve.
| chimprich wrote:
| 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
| a sim card inserted, and was on my desk at home. I hadn't agreed
| that it should be used for 2FA. It was tremendously inconvenient
| because I needed to find where my hotel was.
|
| Another time recently I managed to destroy my phone in an
| accident and got the phone replaced. Despite taking the sim card
| from the old phone and putting it in the new one, doing a factory
| reset on the old one, and it not being active for a week, Google
| still demanded I 2FA authenticate on the old one.
|
| I feel these problems could have easily been avoided, but it's
| typical latter-day Google experience: a tin ear for the customer
| experience and a general attitude of automation knows better than
| users.
| icehawk wrote:
| Yeah I had a similar issue. I had TOTP 2FA set up on my google
| account, and connected an android phone to it purely to
| download something from the app store.
|
| Google then decided that it was going to ignore TOTP set up and
| prefer the "Trusted mobile device."
|
| In a way it actually made my account less secure, since that
| was a testing device and had no passcode on it.
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| Apple does it too. I have three iPhones, one much older than
| the other two. Recently, in one of my new iPhones, Apple
| decided to ask me about my passcode I used in my
| "giggleupstairs's iPhone" for some special verification
| scenario. Now, what? I have THREE iPhones, how will I remember
| which iPhone is this generic looking iPhone name referring to?
| I kept entering what I thought was the correct passcode for at
| least three times before realising what was happening. I
| shudder to think I could have ended up locking up my account
| like this.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| 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.
| chimprich wrote:
| This doesn't involve a phone number, and I haven't enabled
| 2FA either. This is a security check that's activated under
| some combination of unfamiliar location, WiFi network, or
| device. It requires you to confirm your identity by using the
| app.
|
| If you delve though GMail's settings, under "Sign-in and
| recovery": Trusted mobile devices
| Google can verify that it's you by sending sign-in
| notifications to a private phone or tablet. You can
| remove it in your recently used devices.
|
| There's no way to turn it off as far as I can see. You can
| remove a device from the authorised list, but that's not very
| helpful if you don't realise that it's been added.
|
| It's idiotic. It's essentially: "confirm that you're allowed
| to access your email by confirming that you already have
| access to your email".
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| 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.
| susanasj wrote:
| I think the answer here is not that Google makes bad product
| design decisions it's that we shouldn't live in a society of
| incredible wealth but some people still don't have homes and have
| to sleep in places where they are constantly the victims of
| property crime.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| I had never considered this thanks for sharing it. Yes the
| typical "something you know and something you have" 2FA
| authentication approach doesn't work when unable to reliably
| "have" something.
|
| Even backup otp keys would be a challenge in this scenario.
|
| What solutions would help with this? I would think even having
| two passwords on the account (as in you need both to log in)
| would be an improvement over plain password auth.
| ifqwz wrote:
| >Unhoused people tend to get their phones through the
| "Obamaphone" program, which means that replacing a lost or stolen
| phone results in a completely new phone number.
|
| Maybe that's part of the issue. Why recycle numbers so
| aggressively? Give the user a few months to recover their old
| number if they can prove they are the same person.
| est wrote:
| Reminds me of an anti-CAPTCHA argument, there are many people in
| this world who have never seen a fire-hydrant in their life.
| xxs wrote:
| or American buses, or anything culture centric. The US version
| of hydrant is just not present around here.
| jupp0r wrote:
| GMail requiring a password makes my grandparents loose their
| access what feels like every time I visit them. I can imagine
| that homeless people are facing that problem on top of the ones
| described in the thread as well.
|
| GMail offers backup codes to somewhat solve the phone number
| problem by the way.
| xen0 wrote:
| There is a huge disconnect between two types of companies.
|
| The majority of companies seem to view email addresses and phone
| numbers as largely permanent identifiers.
|
| Then there are the companies that actually provide you those
| things. To them, what they provide you is definitely not
| permanent.
| [deleted]
| themagician wrote:
| Solution: Don't use Gmail.
|
| There are many other (free) email providers. Not all require 2FA
| via SMS.
| codegeek wrote:
| Maybe we can build some sort of a "reverse proxy" solution where
| you can get a number from Twilio etc and just forward to an
| actual phone number from your carrier. Bonsu, you can add some
| "firewall" rules and boom. If you lose your phone from your
| carrier, your twilio number is the same. Just change the rule in
| Twilio ?
|
| Isn't there a service like this already ? If not, there is your
| billion dollar startup idea.
| dexterdog wrote:
| And how do you authenticate to Twilio?
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Won't work. VOIP numbers can be easily identified and Google
| and most other providers refuse to accept them.
| 99112000 wrote:
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Did you even click on the link?
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I understand they get stolen
| permo-w wrote:
| I know this will sound "let them eat cake"-ey but just don't use
| gmail then?
| concordDance wrote:
| I don't understand why governments don't provide everyone with an
| email address.
|
| E.g. John.doe1234@people.gov
| dexterdog wrote:
| Because google funds campaigns
| tiku wrote:
| Estonia does this for their eResidents.
| RichardCNormos wrote:
| The government doesn't need copies of my communications living
| on their servers.
| googlryas wrote:
| Here's the solution: Since OP is regularly in contact with 30+
| homeless people, he can offer to be their backup email account.
| He can then confirm the identity of people if they lose access to
| their account and help them get it back.
|
| Or, he can safely store their 2FA backup codes in his house.
|
| The homeless make up like 0.1% of society. And not every homeless
| person has this issue. It would be insane to make _any_ feature
| for like 0.02% of the population. Especially a feature which
| diminished security. Because yes, those 0.02% of people might
| have an easier time accessing their accounts, but probably 100x
| that amount of people are going to end up getting tricked into
| de-securing their account, or do it by accident, and end up
| getting compromised.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > Here's the solution: Since OP is regularly in contact with
| 30+ homeless people, he can offer to be their backup email
| account. He can then confirm the identity of people if they
| lose access to their account and help them get it back.
|
| > Or, he can safely store their 2FA backup codes in his house.
|
| Why even have security? Your solution practically screams for
| those 30+ people to be taken advantage of.
|
| Just use a different email provider whose procedures align with
| how you regularly change your phone number.
| googlryas wrote:
| Why would Chad Loder take advantage of them? Yes, it gives
| him the _ability_ to, but that doesn 't mean he will.
|
| Why have security? So some random, untrusted person can't
| compromise the account. If Chad holds the codes, then only he
| can compromise the account, and maybe their relationships are
| good enough that they would trust him.
|
| Using a different email provider also works, but I assumed
| there would be some reason that doesn't work - android
| effectively has a built in gmail client, non-tech people
| might just autocomplete "@gmail.com" and mess up someone's
| address if it is a non-expected domain, etc.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'll accept the downvotes, but I don't feel like optimizing for
| the subset of homeless people who regularly lose their phones and
| their recovery codes is a good use of resources. I'd change my
| mind if someone could cite reliable sources that say this is
| actually a large community that Google as a corporation should
| really be paying more attention to, but just this one guy on
| Twitter is not enough for me.
| IncRnd wrote:
| This is a non-issue. When signing up for 2FA google provides a
| set of backup codes and instructions on how to use them when
| access to your phone number is lost.
|
| I don't work for google, and recognize they have many other
| issues, but this person on twitter is incorrect. There are other
| methods in addition to backup codes. There are voice
| authentication and id upload. I've even had Google call me back,
| and I spoke to a person who manually authenticated me.
|
| This particular system isn't broken.
|
| Of course, there are many other email providers. Why would
| someone keep choosing the same provider, when it doesn't act in
| the way they expect?
| googlryas wrote:
| The article mentions that "maintaining possession of anything
| physical is difficult" for the homeless. Let's say they print
| out the backup codes...but then their backpack gets stolen. Or
| it just rains and ruins the paper.
| [deleted]
| topherPedersen wrote:
| Yeah I don't like that feature either. You can't get into your
| gmail unless your phone is working. If you don't have access to
| your phone # you are kind of screwed.
|
| EDIT: It looks like you can turn off 2FA, I think I'm going to do
| that now so I don't get locked out of my Gmail.
| miki123211 wrote:
| This is yet another example of the "accessibility, privacy,
| fraud-protection, choose any two" problem.
|
| You can force people to use 2FA, but then you discriminate
| against people who can't. You can build an account recovery flow
| that requires government-issued proof of ID, but then you
| sacrifice privacy. You can do neither, but then you make accounts
| easier to compromise and harder to recover. There's no good
| solution here, it's all tradeoffs.
|
| Captchas are another situation where this problem arises. You can
| implement easy audio and text captchas, available in all the
| languages your signup form supports, but then you get a lot more
| fraudulent signups. You can eliminate captchas altogether,
| relying on invasive user fingerprinting instead, but then you
| sacrifice privacy. You can do neither, but then you discriminate
| against visually impaired users. Once again, no good solution,
| just tradeoffs.
| civilized wrote:
| Maybe each individual should be allowed to "choose the two"
| that work best for them.
|
| Most of us have at least one email account that's already under
| our real name, where we have no big interest in hiding our real
| identity, but we do have a big interest in not being randomly
| shut down by Google. We hear about such shutdowns every few
| weeks on HN, if not more.
|
| Google has unfathomable financial and technical resources, much
| of which goes to projects of speculative value at best. I can't
| help but feel that they could provide a slightly more
| customized login experience to help diverse people with diverse
| needs.
| Balgair wrote:
| There are a lot of email providers out right now that fit one
| of the three possibilities OP set out.
|
| But most people aren't aware of any of this, choose the one
| they know of or see first, and get angry when 'it doesn't
| work right'.
|
| Like OP said, all cover is temporary.
| civilized wrote:
| Appreciate the principle, but not all of us have time to
| change everything we don't like the moment we don't like it
| a little bit.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| The only email provider I'm aware of that still doesn't
| require a phone number during sign up is protonmail. Maybe
| tutanota but IIRC they wouldn't let you sign up over a VPN.
| labanimalster wrote:
| You mean 4 times a year...every 12 wks
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| I think you really mean once. How do you "permanently lose"
| anything more than once? If it is permanent then you can only
| lose it once.
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| I just buy new $90 mint prepaid sims for cash. They work for
| three months. I have never talked to a CSR.
| modeless wrote:
| Why is this guy mad at Google for implementing security (which I
| guarantee has saved a lot of homeless from account takeovers),
| when he could be mad at the government program for failing to
| provide people with a stable phone number? Constantly changing
| your phone number has a lot of other bad consequences which have
| nothing to do with Google.
|
| And maybe the government should consider providing an email
| account too. The cost would be negligible compared to buying
| people new phones every 12 weeks...
| bbarnett wrote:
| Google has a lot of issues, but the gist of these twitter posts,
| is that homeless people lose their phones multiple times a year,
| and their phone number, and this makes 2fa hard.
|
| But, I mean, why are they not railing on the phone companies, to
| make it easy for the homeless to keep the same phone number?!
|
| Why is this Google's fault?
| dgan wrote:
| but nobody ever advertised phone numbers to be assigned "for
| life".
|
| People lose their phones all the times, I personally lost
| countless phones, and I am very far from being homeless.
|
| The problem is forcing 2FA on everyone
| ZiiS wrote:
| If you have a permanent address the are lots of ways to
| ensure you keep your phone number when you loose your phone.
| This is a very different problem.
| [deleted]
| lxgr wrote:
| It really is every company's fault that jumps on this absurd
| trend of seeing SMS-2FA as the be-all and end-all of user
| identification and verification.
|
| Google is actually doing much better than the competition here
| in many aspects (e.g. it is possible to operate a Google
| account completely without a phone number for 2FA or account
| recovery), but as far as I understand, one is still required to
| initially create an account.
| pilgrimfff wrote:
| > it is possible to operate a Google account completely
| without a phone number
|
| This is only true for a limited time. I've tried to use a
| couple Google accounts this way and inevitably I log in from
| a new IP and Google's 2FA system kicks in - forcing me to
| either furnish a phone number or lose access to the account.
|
| It's similar to how Twitter forces phone numbers out of
| people - just not as immediate.
| lxgr wrote:
| Do they really ask for a phone number, or would a Yubikey
| work as well?
| bbarnett wrote:
| A yubikey would be as useless in this article's specific
| case, as the problem is losing valuable things (eg,
| phones). A yubikey is no different.
|
| It too would be lost.
| lxgr wrote:
| That's definitely a problem, and a tricky one to solve in
| the context of 2FA: One of these factors is usually
| knowledge (your password); the other then has to be
| possession or inherence, and the latter has problems as
| well.
|
| Essentially, if you rule out possession, your choice is
| between server-side validated biometrics (if offered at
| all), or "double knowledge" (e.g. a password and email
| 2FA, with the email account also only protected by a
| password), which is pretty phishable.
| Semaphor wrote:
| This is not just the homeless, there was a post on HN from a
| librarian talking about the same issues for the elderly and
| socially disadvantaged. The issue is that Google forces 2FA on
| them, even if they otherwise don't have a phone.
| bertman wrote:
| Yep,that's what I thought of as well. Discussion from two
| months ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320
| Semaphor wrote:
| Wow, my sense of time is horrible. I thought it was about
| 1-2 years ago :D
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This post was also very misleading. The concerns the
| librarian raised _were actually addressed_. The doc was old
| and made public by somebody other than the librarian, who
| edited it after it blew up to make it clear that the content
| was out of date.
|
| ======
|
| Addition, 08/02/2022, 3:03pm: I don't know how this got
| shared to HackerNews. I appreciate all of the positive
| responses we have gotten. However, this was not an open
| letter. It was meant to be shared internally to Google. It
| went directly to the security team and we had a conversation
| about it about a year ago. Things have improved significantly
| since then and this is no longer a daily problem. Please stop
| calling the branch or emailing me about it. It's interfering
| with my work. Press inquiries can be made through
| https://libwww.freelibrary.org/contact/ and the public
| relations department will be in touch with you.
|
| If you want to learn more about patron privacy and support
| librarians advocating for patron privacy and against big tech
| please check out https://libraryfreedom.org/ which is a
| wonderful organization I am a part of that does work like
| this. I still firmly believe in and stand by everything that
| I wrote. But this particular action was not meant to be a
| public letter.
|
| Also! If you're in Philadelphia you should check out this big
| program we're doing on August 12th called Empathy Versus
| Misinformation where a panel of experts will address
| questions and misconceptions about transgender youth!! Boy am
| I relieved that this was a Google Doc and I can just put
| whatever I want onto the front page of HackerNews now :)
| Semaphor wrote:
| There was a followup comment on HN:
|
| > Doesn't sound like it was completely resolved. In fact,
| it sounds like Google may have treated it as a "squeaky
| wheel," and only that library is getting better help.
|
| -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32309190
| UncleMeat wrote:
| So on one hand we've got the actual author of the
| original document saying one thing and on the other hand
| we've got an uninvolved internet poster saying something
| else.
| Semaphor wrote:
| The original author is not _saying_ anything to disclaim
| what the HN comment said.
| borissk wrote:
| What makes you think Google cares about homeless?
| notThrowingAway wrote:
| What makes you think Google cares about anyone?
| borissk wrote:
| Stupid question.
| peanut_worm wrote:
| Don't they have backup codes?
| benpxu wrote:
| Sidenote from something I noticed from the rest of these
| comments: SMS is not the only form of 2FA. It is the most common
| type, but also one of the most insecure versions of it. You
| should not be using SMS for 2FA.
| remote_phone wrote:
| The biggest fallacy we have right now use that all use cases need
| to be treated equally and if they don't then somehow they are
| being immoral.
|
| Google is not being immoral.
|
| The homeless people can use a different service.
|
| Dealing with the use case of someone losing their phone every few
| weeks when you have billions of others to worry about is
| unreasonable. I think handling that situation should be
| considered out of scope.
| bombcar wrote:
| Perhaps not immoral but kafkaesque or something - if a
| government support service requires an email address to be
| used, and the government doesn't provide the email address,
| there is a dependency on the market to provide such.
|
| And if they don't give a list of "workable free email
| providers" then the government has failed.
|
| Imagine the howling if you had to have an email address to
| vote.
| olalonde wrote:
| You can disable 2FA[0].
|
| [0] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1064203
| rkagerer wrote:
| I feel for these folks. I'm housed and never wanted my email (and
| a host of other services) to become dependant on my phone number.
| I've gone so far as telling service providers "I don't have a
| phone, deal with it" (which is getting harder and harder).
| Bakary wrote:
| I can definitely understand not realizing that you could lose
| access to your account if you lose your phone number. But once it
| happens the first time, could you not pick any free email that
| does not require 2FA, and warn fellow homeless to avoid gmail?
|
| I disagree with the idea that because a very, very niche audience
| is in dire straits that the design decisions should be based on
| their needs. The forced 2FA system has probably prevented
| identify theft and financial loss for a very large number of
| people. I'm saying this as someone who thinks Google is a shady
| and dangerous entity in general.
|
| It's similar to the idea that hard cases make bad law.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| > I can definitely understand not realizing that you could lose
| access to your account if you lose your phone number. But once
| it happens the first time, could you not pick any free email
| that does not require 2FA, and warn fellow homeless to avoid
| gmail?
|
| Almost every free email service I've tried now requires a phone
| number to setup. Even protonmail required it for a brief while,
| although they now are back to captcha and a stern warning. I
| actually can't think of another free service besides protonmail
| that this isn't now true for.
|
| An annoying trick some of them use is to allow you to setup the
| account and then lock it some time later. I've seen on
| immediate login (irritating waste of time) or after you've used
| it for awhile (what you used the account for is now held
| hostage unless you cough up a phone number).
| tomxor wrote:
| > because a very, very niche audience is in dire straits
|
| Not very niche.
| sp332 wrote:
| There are over half a million homeless people in the USA right
| now. And only a quarter are "chronically homeless", meaning for
| ober a year or more than once. There are many, many people who
| will be homeless for a few months at some point during their
| lives.
| Bakary wrote:
| There are 1.5+ billion gmail users. I don't have stats, but
| that intuitively means millions of vulnerable people who
| could be scammed or phished or whatnot because they would
| never think of using 2FA at all.
|
| Among those half a million homeless, how many use gmail and
| are unable to change for whatever reason? Among those, how
| many have issues with 2FA? Thus we advocate for increasing
| the vulnerability of millions to do something that would not
| even help the homeless that much. The whole problem of having
| to replace their phones every 12 weeks sounds like a far more
| pressing issue to investigate and find solutions for.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| And what, find every system that has your existing email
| address and change it?
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| The phone number decision is stupid. I up and jump countries
| every few years. Each time, I'm switching to a new number. I'm
| the opposite of homeless, I'm that jet set elite. The idea that
| you want, need, should or will tie your identity to a phone
| number where people can always reach you is long outdated.
| xani_ wrote:
| > The idea that you want, need, should or will tie your
| identity to a phone number where people can always reach you
| is long outdated.
|
| Yeah I have no idea why phones still use numbers. It would be
| so easier if same address for e-mail worked for voice, just
| add some DNS records that point at my phone provider to
| domain and done.
|
| Then again, spam calls would probably be so much worse...
| uup wrote:
| So use one of the other 2FA options.
| esperent wrote:
| Not always a possibility. Many banks require phone number
| based 2FA, for example. And you're required to use it any
| time you want to make a transaction that exceeds some
| threshold.
| netheril96 wrote:
| We are talking about Google here, right?
| jbay808 wrote:
| (FWIW, my bank does not provide any other 2FA options.)
| wavelen wrote:
| afair you need to set up a phone number before you can
| choose to add another 2FA option (which is stupid imho)
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Even if this is the case, this isn't a problem for the
| poster. They have _a_ phone number, it just changes
| frequently. They can sign up, enroll in a TOTP or U2F
| system, and then they are set.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Except if you're using e.g. Google Authenticator and you
| lose that phone, you've now lost your TOTPs. The most
| unhoused-friendly solution _there_ would be to use
| something like Authy instead (which is another password
| to remember, but at least it makes it easy to recover
| your TOTP keys on a new device without needing the old
| one); next best would be to use something like andOTP
| which supports backups (but then you 'd need someplace to
| store those backups, which introduces the same problems
| as safely keeping a phone on your person).
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The context for this post is a person who moves between
| countries frequently and therefore gets new phone
| numbers. This person has consistent access to the same
| phone.
| borissk wrote:
| It's not stupid - Google wants to track everyone
| everywhere and a phone number is a good way to link an
| account to a real world person.
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| Sticking my German sim card into my phone for fifteen minutes
| in all sorts of random countries and continents and waiting
| for a number to come through always feels absurd.
|
| I pray for the rise of esims! I feel like it's on the cards.
| xani_ wrote:
| Eh, I greatly prefer ability to move the very reliable
| thing from one phone to another, just use another phone
| instead of going into paperwork to move it if my phone gets
| damaged or something
| Timpy wrote:
| I thought I got everything moved over to an authenticator
| app before leaving home but I forgot one, I got a "check
| your phone for verification SMS" earlier today. My American
| SIM could get the text but my foreign sim was giving my
| laptop internet access. Big pain in the ass.
| lxgr wrote:
| I've been using eSIMs for the past couple of years for this
| specific use case, and while they certainly help, it's
| really just a stop-gap measure:
|
| You still need your phone and cell signal to receive them
| (at least many European carriers don't support SMS over
| VoWIFI); the eSIM is "stuck" in your phone if it physically
| breaks (and on many carriers, you can't re-use an eSIM QR
| activation code in any case); in many countries, SIMs
| expire after a couple of months or even weeks of
| inactivity, losing your number permanently, to name just a
| few.
|
| I've found Google Voice to work quite well as a workaround
| for almost all of these problems, but unfortunately, many
| US companies insist on not allowing VoIP numbers for 2FA or
| even plain account creation purposes. I usually try to
| avoid these companies.
| mwint wrote:
| > the eSIM is "stuck" in your phone if it physically
| breaks
|
| Wait, does this happen?
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| That's overly dramatic, of course you can re-create it on
| the other phone. But what's true is that you can't
| physically transfer it.
| lxgr wrote:
| I wasn't trying to be dramatic here: Without deleting an
| eSIM profile from a device, all implementations I know
| indeed disallow reinstalling the profile on another
| device. (The eSIM standard effectively enforces the
| singleton nature of an instantiated eSIM profile.) But of
| course most providers can re-issue eSIMs if required,
| just like they can mail a physical SIM replacement.
|
| But in many cases, they either charge for it, require
| more or less involved bureaucratic acrobatics (including
| sending the QR code via physical mail as proof-of-
| address, because they've been burned badly by eSIM
| swapping), or both.
|
| So the assumption that an eSIM activation (QR) code is
| more or less like a bearer token that you can keep in
| your password safe and use whenever required often does
| not hold true, especially when needed most (traveling
| internationally etc).
|
| Fortunately, my provider is pretty good about it (I can
| instantly self-serve reissue an eSIM in their portal free
| of charge), but that seems to be the exception, and I
| also don't know how I feel about that, security-wise.
| (They don't offer 2FA, as far as I know.)
| jaclaz wrote:
| More common case.
|
| Your phone breaks (broken screen, swollen battery,
| whatever).
|
| With a physical SIM you can physically extract the SIM
| and insert it in another (spare) phone (and you can even
| borrow one for a few minutes).
|
| To transfer an e-SIM you need to authorize the transfer
| on the old phone (the one that doesn't work):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32138466
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I've lived in different countries along the years, it's
| simple and best to just keep a permanent phone number in the
| country you consider the most like "home". Get a cheap phone-
| only plan, stick the SIM into a dumbphone or your second SIM
| slot. Done.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| What's painful is that I've ported my phone number out to a
| VoIP provider similar to Google Voice for exactly this
| purpose, but something like 25% of providers now block using
| SMS for 2FA unless it's tied to an approved mobile phone
| operator.
|
| Turns out 2FA is also being used as a low-effort form of a
| captcha in addition to being a tool for data harvesting and
| "device identification". I wouldn't be surprised if
| legitimate users simply never receive a 2FA SMS because
| someone used a prepaid phone or something.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| It is more that generating thousands of phone numbers is
| extremely expensive. It is cheap for real users, but
| scammers and spammers have to pay a lot.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Was just reading about how Overwatch 2 won't let people
| register with a prepaid phone number.
|
| I'm sure there is some good reason to want to avoid people
| spinning up free or ultra low cost phone numbers to make
| extra accounts but some users were like, "I've been using
| TracPhone for a decade" or something like that. Also pretty
| surprised that it's this easy to detect the carrier.
| Guessing we'll see this more and more!
| danuker wrote:
| The problem will solve itself. People unwilling to sign
| up for a mobile plan for playing a game will
| automatically boycott the likes of Overwatch 2, which
| will result in revenue lost (perhaps to competing games
| that allow prepaid cards).
|
| I have only ever used prepaid cards. I would rather be
| cut off from communication (or buy a local prepaid card)
| than get a surprise bill of hundreds of euros for
| visiting a country outside the EU.
|
| I guess a lot of people have the same thought process as
| me around Europe, because there are lots of smartphones
| available with dual SIM cards.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Using mobile phone numbers as a makeshift captcha is the #1
| tool any security team has to prevent fraudulent signups.
| Because they're expensive to get, it puts any attack at a
| baseline cost $x, so many would-be attackers that only
| stand to gain $y just don't carry out the attack when $y <
| $x.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Wtf Calling homelessness a "niche" .. peak apres moi le deluge
| Bakary wrote:
| This is the sort of performative response that is the
| problem. Let's say we force Google to switch off 2FA. Now we
| have exposed millions of people who don't know any better to
| phishing attempts and financial loss. And the group we are
| trying to help isn't really better off. There are so many
| other questions we could be asking. Why are they directed
| towards picking Gmail by default? Why is the system to give a
| replacement phone every 12 weeks instead of investing in a
| dedicated device that's much harder to damage or lose? Why is
| keeping the same number a hassle? Why are we tackling the
| problem with caseworkers instead of something more ambitious,
| that would ironically be less costly in the long run? There
| are so many angles we could go for, but instead we are stuck
| on this performative nonsense that gets retweets. It's
| pseudo-empathy at best, because it's not oriented towards a
| real solution.
| xani_ wrote:
| > This is the sort of performative response that is the
| problem. Let's say we force Google to switch off 2FA. Now
| we have exposed millions of people who don't know any
| better to phishing attempts and financial loss.
|
| Could be just option hidden somewhere in the settings.
| Don't need to turn it off for all
|
| > And the group we are trying to help isn't really better
| off.
|
| That's just your assumption
| Edman274 wrote:
| > Why is the system to give a replacement phone every 12
| weeks instead of investing in a dedicated device that's
| much harder to damage or lose? Why is keeping the same
| number a hassle?
|
| If you're homeless, you're getting robbed. It doesn't
| matter that a yubikey would be worthless to a person
| mugging you, they'll take everything including the
| worthless stuff. Or you're being picked up by an ambulance
| and taken to a behavioral health center after a mental
| health crisis and when they do that they take your clothes
| off and stuff goes missing, even if it's worthless.
|
| Keeping the same number usually requires paying into an
| account which requires being able to make consistent
| payments, which is not easy to do. Or a credit card or bank
| account is required. You are maybe unbanked in this
| scenario.
|
| > Why are we tackling the problem with caseworkers instead
| of something more ambitious, that would ironically be less
| costly in the long run?
|
| Caseworkers make practically nothing. Does your solution
| get rid of human beings to act as agents for people who
| sometimes lose touch with reality? Will there be an AI
| assistant to guide someone through a schizophrenic break
| and get them to a hospital and help get them reoriented
| after they regain contact with reality? That's what's
| necessary and you're treating actually understanding what
| they're going through as if it's virtue signalling.
| esperent wrote:
| Exactly. The word people should be looking for is
| "vulnerable". They are not a niche category, they are a
| vulnerable category, and need protection, not dismissal.
| Kalium wrote:
| You're absolutely right.
|
| Now let's talk about how much effort and what level of
| resources it's reasonable to expect a commercial entity to
| invest in extending protections to vulnerable people in
| need who happen to not be customers.
|
| Perhaps we're asking the wrong entity to address this
| problem? This seems more like a public service
| infrastructure problem.
| nyuszika7h wrote:
| Google is a multi-billion dollar company, they barely
| have to lift a finger. They simply have to provide an
| option to opt out of 2FA. Add a bunch of warnings if you
| must. Even if Google was a small startup it would be
| trivial for them to do this.
| Kalium wrote:
| To be clear, your answer to vulnerable people needing
| protections is to lower the minimum level of security for
| everyone using Gmail. Do I understand correctly?
| WithinReason wrote:
| No, please reread.
| Kalium wrote:
| Ah! Then the problem is solved, I suppose.
| WithinReason wrote:
| There is already an option to opt out of 2FA:
|
| https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1064203
| everforward wrote:
| In the US, they are a niche at 0.2% of the population. Vegans
| are an order of magnitude larger at 2%.
|
| They are a vulnerable niche, but a niche nonetheless.
| ruph123 wrote:
| Gmail != Email.
|
| There are many other usable (and free) email providers out there.
| It doesn't have to be Google.
| AngeloAnolin wrote:
| Every solution/alternative would always impose challenges that
| can be considered an edge case initially until it becomes
| permanent.
|
| For example, if Google wants people (who have a tendency to lose
| their 2FA devices more often) to always use this feature, and in
| case they lose access to their device, they could use a trusted
| designate who can verify on their behalf that they are the ones
| signing into the service. But then again, this alternative will
| impose some new challenges such as:
|
| - What if the designate is not available? - Designate is
| available but also lost their access to verify the other person?
|
| As with this case being raised here, it will always be a process
| wherein Google (or any other organization) will have to explore
| and find meaningful solutions that is both inclusive and
| considerate on specific conditions.
|
| The variability alone of such premise is huge that I am quite
| sure when the next edge case comes up, there are other edge cases
| boiling down that will become the next set of issues.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| I have lost access to Tinder and Transferwise because I moved
| between the UK and Australia and thus changed my phone number.
| Whatsapp also silently fails to send me private messages now,
| even after I went thru their official inbuilt 'I changed my
| number' process - only my group chats work now. The messages
| appear to send to the sender, they don't even know I didn't
| receive them.
|
| One of the worst examples I've heard is that Overwatch 2 not only
| requires a phone number, but they actually check with your
| carrier if it's a prepaid number, and if it is, you're banned.
| Sorry poor people, Blizzard doesn't want scum like you playing
| their game.
|
| Assuming someone's phone number never changes, or that they'll
| have access to their old and new numbers at the same time, is
| simply wrong and does not work.
|
| I haven't been locked out of Google yet, somehow, but maybe it's
| just a matter of time.
| dtx1 wrote:
| If you rely on a free google service for _anything_ in _any_
| situation, you are one random AI decision away from being
| completely fucked anyway. If losing 2FA access often is a problem
| for you, chose a different provider or if you have to use google
| for some reason, use their google authentication app and save the
| authentication credentials somewhere save. If you cannot keep a
| strip of paper with a few recovery codes safe, don 't use the
| internet, it's not for you.
| RenThraysk wrote:
| More evidence how different groups in society have no idea how
| the other groups live.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Google doesn't even care about their paying customers. You think
| they care about the homeless?
|
| Just stop using Gmail. Here is a very small number of other
| providers: https://www.ionos.co.uk/digitalguide/e-mail/technical-
| matter...
| [deleted]
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Homeless, people facing criminal charges, incarcerated, etc.
|
| None of these folks are desirable advertising targets.
| krick wrote:
| I don't even know what this has to do with the homeless. I don't
| want ANY of my internet accounts to depend on my phone (which I
| can lose, and I just don't want it to be a big deal) or, worst of
| all on "my" _phone number_ , which IS NOT, never was and never
| will be controlled by me -- but by my cellphone operator. Who
| isn't my friend. Both problems seem to be so obvious, that I
| don't see how pointing out (also rather obvious thing) -- that
| life out there on the streets is a bit different than in your
| [home-sized] cubicles -- can help.
|
| And since it's always more productive to assume malice, not
| stupidity -- obviously, this is the point. Somebody _wants_ you
| to depend on your phone number, something you don 't really
| control and cannot easily change. This isn't about comfort and
| security, it never was. What else is new.
|
| But, I mean, if I have to pretend that it's not about me, but
| about homeless people for something to be changed -- I guess I'm
| homeless' rights supporter #1 from now on.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| Amazing that we let Telecoms become the arbiters of identity
| online.
| kweingar wrote:
| The USPS should operate a free public email service and provide
| support at every post office.
|
| The government has the resources to navigate complex situations
| that digital safeguards can't.
|
| If someone has no paperwork, lost the device they made their
| account with, and cannot remember a password they made--no tech
| company has the resources or expertise to handle this at scale as
| well as local institutions can. If someone needs to take over an
| account of a loved one that they have legal guardianship of, you
| don't want a support agent at a call center to make these
| decisions.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Just the other day had an experience where someone in need,
| freshly moved to a new country, asked to use my phone to email a
| relative asking for money to buy a phone. When I realized they
| would need to log in to their gmail, I felt sorry knowing it
| almost certainly won't work. It didn't. Thankfully Facebook
| worked.
| topherPedersen wrote:
| Today I learned you can turn this feature off. Just disabled 2FA
| for my Gmail so I don't get locked out if something happens to my
| phone/phone-number.
| calibas wrote:
| Potential solution, the Obamaphone program keeps using the same
| phone number for an individual instead of totally new ones every
| time they lose a phone.
| MAGZine wrote:
| this feels like a workaround.
|
| We should not be treating phonenumbers as SSN round two, where
| everyone relies on it for your identity, and it should never be
| changed because of how much shit was needlessly tied to it.
|
| I rue the day I need to change my phone number and my digital
| identity becomes a huge headache, especially for far flung
| services that decided they wanted my phone number, but I
| wouldn't have considered going explicitly to them to update it.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| The correct solution to this _and a shitload of other
| problems_ is a real, national ID program. But there 's enough
| resistance to it in _both_ US political parties that it can
| 't happen. The lack of it causes a ton of stress, over the
| population, and is a drag on the economy, but we're just
| never gonna fix it. Instead we'll de-facto have one (or more)
| anyway, including 99% of the risks that a real one would
| carry with it that everyone's so hand-wringy about, but
| without the benefits of the real thing.
| mcshicks wrote:
| 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...
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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 now. Let alone hard /impossible
| without one.
|
| But no, we just suffer though tons of wasted time for all
| bureaucratic processes and all kinds of hassle keeping
| our documents in order and tons of fraud and abuse
| instead. For no benefit. So we can pretend the government
| can't already "make a database" about dissidents or gun
| owners or Christians or whoever _very nearly_ as easily
| and effectively as if we had an official national ID, if
| they wanted to. Sigh.
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| xani_ wrote:
| Uh, no, that's even worse thing to give to the for-profit
| companies as indentifier.
|
| Now they have country-unique ID of a person that will never
| change so it can be linked to a person regardless of where
| that person logs in
| syrrim wrote:
| It already is that, which is precisely why google is using it
| here. Google is an american private company. Phone numbers
| have government mandated systems around the world that allow
| a individual to keep using them even when they lose their
| phone. Google uses it because it lets governments solve the
| identity problem in the fashion and to the degree they deem
| acceptable, and leaves google in the tech business. Some
| countries have issued ID cards which support encrypting and
| signing documents. If that becomes more widely practiced,
| then google could switch to that instead, but until then I
| imagine they'll keep using phone numbers.
| calibas wrote:
| It's not ideal, but phone numbers already are how we verify
| identity online and sometimes offline. There's been other
| methods proposed, but they've generally been rejected because
| of concerns over privacy.
|
| I'm not proposing a solution for the real issue, simply a way
| of making things easier for people who have a hard enough
| time already.
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