[HN Gopher] My Google Workspace account suspension
___________________________________________________________________
My Google Workspace account suspension
Author : zenincognito
Score : 325 points
Date : 2026-04-05 11:48 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zencapital.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zencapital.substack.com)
| pluc wrote:
| Time since paying Google customers had to resort to social media
| outrage to obtain decent resolution: 0 days
|
| Good luck to you
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| This should be illegal. Megacorps eat more and more of our life
| and regular people are increasingly at mercy of these hostile
| entities. They should be pushed more against. If we can't have
| proper anti monopoly splits like AT&T, then at least ways to
| prevent them exerting too much power are long due. If you provide
| an essential service, responsibility should match that.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Excreting power. What an awesome mental image.
|
| "Exerting" would be more correct I guess but less fun.
| neom wrote:
| Funny because I have dyslexia and read excreting power as
| exerting power, and then had to read your "Exerting"
| underneath 4 times to understand the mistake. I guess it's
| the phonics, dyslexia is so weird tho, ha.
| Loughla wrote:
| Hey do you have certain fonts that are better? I was
| working with a dyslexic student last week trying to find
| fonts that work better for his online classes. All the
| research pointed towards a handful that didn't seem to
| really improve processing for the student.
| neom wrote:
| They tried all sorts with me in school, I seem to recall
| it's related to trying to add shadow to hint to the brain
| the direction the letter should be etc. I found it more
| annoying than helpful. Probably a very unpopular opinion
| but I think teaching someone with dyslexia to read and
| write neurotypically is probably unhelpful and finding
| audio visual learning methods is a considerably better
| way to have them retain knowledge. I think you can get to
| a basic level of competency but speed and recall, at
| least with me, never really came. One thing I found once
| that was cool was an app that present each word at a time
| only in the center of the screen, but it felt extremely
| mechanical I was so focused on the words once I was done
| there was basically no meaning left if that makes sense.
| I'm autistic with dyscalculia also, FWIW. I mostly think
| in sounds, pictures and movies, for whatever reason my
| brain doesn't have a great framework for symbols that
| don't have those things inherently attached to them.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| justinclift wrote:
| Was this one of the font's they tried?
|
| https://opendyslexic.org
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, there needs to be a government public service counter
| where you can go with all your BigTech issues and complaints.
| dotandgtfo wrote:
| This is one of the goals of the digital services act.
| amelius wrote:
| The EU isn't as bad as some Americans want to believe.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| They aren't perfect but at least they try. All our
| government does is bomb brown people and cut taxes for
| the wealthy.
| brookst wrote:
| The EU's heart is in the right place, which can only
| rarely be said of the US.
|
| But the EU's approach is often backwards. When product
| managers have to ask the government if it's ok to ship a
| feature, something is wrong. When the government responds
| that it can't say in advance, you'll just have to ship
| and see if you get fined, something is really seriously
| broken.
| amelius wrote:
| If a company is about to produce millions of physical
| products, I think it is quite ok if they first check with
| the government to see if that is a good idea.
|
| Same with social media features that are rolled out to
| millions of users.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| This is about Digital Services Act, not physical
| products.
| jjav wrote:
| There needs to be a law that every cloud-based service which
| has accounts for more than (say) 1% of population, must have a
| physical service counter presence in every major town staffed
| by an employee who must be empowered to resolve all account
| access issues.
|
| Notice how phone carries manage to have a shop in every little
| strip mall, you're never more than a few miles from the nearest
| one. Google takes in far more revenue, can easily afford the
| same. Or they could even just partner with the phone carriers
| and have a staffed desk in every tmobile/at&t/verizon shop.
| cube00 wrote:
| Staffed desks would just tell you they need to open a ticket.
|
| No company will give full account unlock control to field
| employees.
|
| Even the bank teller behind the glass needs to phone their
| internal fraud dept to unlock accounts.
| nottorp wrote:
| > needs to phone their internal fraud dept
|
| Except the bank teller has already authenticated you and
| internal fraud will pick up the phone...
| shevy-java wrote:
| "Despite repeatedly explaining this, they ignored my assertions
| and continue to hold my email hostage."
|
| Well, you have become the product here. That also happens by
| other "free" email providers too. I had this happen to me on
| inbox.lt; the guy demanded I use a smartphone to "prove" my
| identity. At that point I realised they want to connect this data
| to the account and sell it to others who are interested in that.
| dagss wrote:
| Google Workspace isn't free, it is a paid for plan.
| zenincognito wrote:
| its $13 per month for a basic plan.
| izacus wrote:
| What do you add to humanity with this crappy take? Why are you
| shitty to the victim?
| techteach00 wrote:
| Because his honest and accurate diagnosis for why mega tech
| corps treat people inhumanely is the first step towards
| stopping it. In my opinion of course.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 1. they're wrong in their basic understanding; this is not
| a free product
|
| 2. the response is glib and lacks any empathy
|
| 3. there's no suggestions of possible action or resolution
| path
|
| 4. it is all opinion and low value / low effort
|
| So even if it's an "honest and accurate diagnosis" that you
| agree with, it's not helpful, valuable or even comforting.
| We can do better.
| walterbell wrote:
| What's a good alternative to Google Workspace for SMB
| customers?
| samlinnfer wrote:
| Office365?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Microsoft 365 is a reasonable alternative. It's easy to
| buy and even tiny Customers can get a degree of real
| human (read: tier 1 is unhelpful contractors that you
| have to fight thru) support.
|
| It's still repugnant to me, as compared to self-hosting,
| but I would never self-host for a greenfield SMB Customer
| today. The economics don't make sense and the talent pool
| of knowledgeable and reasonable sysadmins is dwindling by
| the day. (I wouldn't want to make a Customer so beholden
| to me if they were willing to pay for it.)
|
| I miss being able to spin-up an on-prem email server on a
| box with reasonable hardware redundancy, some external
| USB disks to rotate for off-site backup, a UPS, a couple
| consumer-grade "business class" Internet connections, and
| a contracted "backup MX" to catch email in the event of
| an outage. It was a good enough for a lot of small SMBs
| who had a physical office, and was cheap.
| Lihh27 wrote:
| The economics make perfect sense once "30 days of a
| suspended business email with no timely recourse" shows
| up as a line item. That USB disk and a UPS is looking
| pretty cheap right about now.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| OP really should be moving the MX somewhere else and
| going into disaster contingency mode. It sucks, but
| there's a level of survival there they should be willing
| to accept, at least temporarily.
| pbowyer wrote:
| Dealing with Google is a nightmare. I'm one of the volunteer
| sysadmins for https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/, a DIY and self-
| build forum. For 10 years it ranked very well on Google,
| particularly in the UK, and then on 28 December 2025 it
| disappeared from Google's index.
|
| Nothing has helped, the Google forums are tumbleweed and there's
| no one to reach out to for what could be an algorithm change or
| something gone wrong. I'm a paying Workspace customer and it's
| made me think I need a backup plan in case I'm ever suspended.
| Reports like this don't encourage.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Nothing has helped, the Google forums are tumbleweed and
| there 's no one to reach out to for what could be an algorithm
| change or something gone wrong._
|
| The own-brand forum (Google, Microsoft, Apple) seem to be
| infested by netizens from lower-income countries trying to
| build online customer support portfolios by providing utterly
| useless answers.
|
| That, or trying to game the system and getting shortlisted for
| a free trip to Google HQ for one of their contributor summits.
| mjlee wrote:
| I am genuinely curious if anybody knows of a non-trivial
| problem being solved on one of these forums, at least for a
| huge company that's palming off customer support. It just
| feels like screaming in to the void, only for someone to
| (deliberately?) misinterpret your question and give you some
| generic advice.
| locao wrote:
| It depends on what you call "non-trivial". I found answers
| on how to circumvent dumb macos bugs on Apple forums at
| least twice in the last 6 months. One related to displays,
| I was about to return a new USB-C monitor which wouldn't
| turn on. A silly issue, but it's a bug on my book, I
| wouldn't find the answer on the docs.
| omcnoe wrote:
| Every suggestion when encountering a Windows OS bug is "run
| sfc /scannow" - has this ever solved a problem for anyone?
| samlinnfer wrote:
| I can't believe I'm praising Microsoft (Office365) here but it
| actually has a track record of actually having support, support
| people that you can talk on the phone with and knows how to
| navigate the dark corners of their convoluted systems and
| actually solved my problems (even if it was caused by Microsoft's
| horrific UI in the first place).
| masfuerte wrote:
| An article here a couple of days ago said that the automation
| behind the scenes in Azure is piss poor and the whole thing is
| held together by thousands of contractors manually fixing the
| endless failures.
|
| On the plus side, it does mean they have thousands of people
| who know how to fix problems.
|
| edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
| faidit wrote:
| At Google there is one guy who knows how to fix the problem..
| he's a monk who is also in 700 different teams and the only
| one who remembers how the systems were built. You have to
| climb all the way up to his mountain abode, hope that he is
| home and pray that he will hear your cries and help you
| prerok wrote:
| There's a long queue up that mountain, though.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Any painful automation story feels very different from their
| customer service. MS has always been superior to their
| competition with customer service - especially paid service
| contracts - because it's far closer to their identity: very
| long-term, tightly integrated enterprise. Google has never
| had this; even the idea of paying for support came very late
| (and reluctantly) to them.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _MS has always been superior to their competition with
| customer service - especially paid service contracts -
| because it 's far closer to their identity: very long-term,
| tightly integrated enterprise. Google has never had this;
| even the idea of paying for support came very late (and
| reluctantly) to them._
|
| If we're comparing cloud services, surely GCP has customer
| service? I can't imagine any big enterprise using it
| otherwise.
| pzmarzly wrote:
| I guess one way to protect yourself from this would be to use
| another IAM solution for SSO login to Google Workspace, but is
| there any reasonable choice for small businesses other than Entra
| ID or Okta?
| gchamonlive wrote:
| There's always keycloak you can rollout yourself. It's not
| trivial but it's quite doable.
| walterbell wrote:
| Thanks for the pointer,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47649354
|
| edit: looks like there are affordable managed hosting
| providers for keycloak.
| watusername wrote:
| Instead of Keycloak, I would recommend giving Kanidm a try:
| It's much more lightweight and covers most of what you
| usually need (one notable exception being SAML).
|
| https://github.com/kanidm/kanidm
| protimewaster wrote:
| I think Google has done some cool stuff, and I think in a lot of
| ways they're, at least historically, one of the less evil big
| tech players.
|
| I gotta say, though, that my experience with trying to get them
| to sort out any kind of issue with their services makes me
| reluctant to spend any money with them.
|
| I bought a Pixel phone. As per the sales terms, the phone came
| with one year of Gemini AI Pro service. Except, the redemption
| process to get the year of service didn't work for me. I
| contacted Google, they never fixed it or offered any solution. I
| simply didn't get the year of service I was promised.
|
| My friend, who bought a Pixel around the same time, also wasn't
| able to get the year of Gemini they were promised.
|
| That same friend has a Google One subscription, billed through
| their phone carrier. Recently, Google (or the provider?)
| discontinued that specific Google One plan, as well as the option
| to bill via your carrier. This was all covered in an email sent
| to my friend. As consolation, the email explained, my friend was
| given the option to switch to a different plan, billed monthly by
| Google (instead of their phone carrier), with 6 months free.
| Except, the new plan, and the 6 months free, wasn't selectable as
| a plan type for their account. So my friend emails Google about
| it and, to my complete lack of surprise, Google was
| unwilling/unable to provide any resolution.
|
| At this point, I legitimately don't understand why, unless I had
| no other option, I would pick Google for services. They clearly
| put no real effort into resolving any service issues for any
| customer that's not spending millions with them.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment, but I wanted to call out that
| they've always been just as evil as other big tech companies.
|
| I think their motto of "don't be evil" was some pretty clever
| PR.
|
| I started questioning it c. 2008 when they ghosted me on
| resolving an issue with my blogspot site that was a bug in the
| platform. All I could get was a condescending non-response from
| a "diamond" volunteer on a forum. They were apparently the
| gatekeepers to reaching actual support.
| mhitza wrote:
| They weren't always evil, not in my opinion.
|
| Back in the day they bought Feedburner, and merged it with
| their internal equivalent. In that process, my subscriber
| list was affected. They apologized and even sent out some
| swag. That was nice, for a small inconvenience at the time.
|
| Today? humans don't even seem to be involved.
| protimewaster wrote:
| I definitely don't think they've ever been super nice, but I
| still they still have a few much more user-friendly
| approaches than others. E.g., one of the reasons I bought a
| Pixel is that Google is one of the only phone makers that
| manages to have respectable security practices and still
| respects users enough support them choosing to modify the
| software on their devices and run alternate operating
| systems.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Disagree. Even with their issues, they're still less evil
| than MS, Apple and especially Oracle or Meta.
|
| If they didn't have all their issues (discontinuing products,
| bad customer service) they'd probably be bigger than MS and
| Apple combined. But here we are.
|
| Also for better or worse, I pay for bundled Google storage +
| Gemini and YouTube separately, it's still worth it, even
| without free months or whatever. And still better than being
| in MS or Apple's ecosystem.
| tartoran wrote:
| > it's still worth it, even without free months or whatever
|
| Until you go of the rails of their processes and have your
| account closed with no recourse.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Sometimes I worry about this but everytime I see an
| example of it I feel better (because most examples
| involve the person doing weird things).
| roelschroeven wrote:
| I think their "Don't be evil" was pretty close to the truth,
| as much as it can be for large corporations, until around the
| time Google purchased DoubleClick. That was in 2008, so that
| seems to match your experience.
| lokar wrote:
| Well, the actual phrase came from an engineer.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Also, the executives 'retired' the official 'Don't be evil'
| slogan some time ago. I guess they didn't want to be
| limited. Seems fitting to the suits.
| subscribed wrote:
| Same. Purchased Pixel 9 Pro XL, didn't get my year of Gemini or
| Google One, technical missuport couldn't be bothered circling
| between all the investigation steps I did and re-did already
| and tej "fixes" that have been verified ate not fixing
| anything.
|
| "Support" agents couldn't be bothered - this feels like AI
| trapping me in the tarpit maze to save a few USD on the disk
| storage and infefence cost, effectively scamming me.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Sounds more like a question why there isn't a class action and
| deregulation push against them.
|
| People really fail to unionize when they can just piss in the
| wind.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > I contacted Google, they never fixed it or offered any
| solution. I simply didn't get the year of service I was
| promised.
|
| Contract violation. The problem is it's simply too burdensome
| to go to small claims court.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| If you do, it's also possible they ban your personal account
| Evidlo wrote:
| Anyone have an idea whether it would be practical to go to
| small claims court? I'm curious if this is a path consumers can
| take if a corporation breaks an agreement?
| profsummergig wrote:
| You'd have to go in the same jurisdiction as they're
| incorporated. I think (IANAL).
| tartoran wrote:
| I think a service chasing google around in courts for
| disputes would do quite well.
| ajb wrote:
| Depends on your jurisdiction, of course. (I am not a lawyer
| and this is not legal advice, merely my impressions). In the
| UK this would likely be worth it if the injury is a specified
| financial amount. So for people who have paid for something
| and simply not got it, a small claims court is a good bet for
| getting a refund. A lot of the time however, the injury is in
| the consequences of relying on one of these companies
| services, and having it withdrawn without notice, as in the
| OP. Usually, you want service restored, as that is in fact
| the least costly action for both sides. But small claims
| courts (in the UK) do not make that kind of order. In theory
| you could sue for the financial consequences of the abrupt
| withdrawal, but I'd guess that's too complicated for a small
| claim.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > ... my experience with trying to get them to sort out any
| kind of issue with their services makes me reluctant to spend
| any money with them.
|
| When you pay for Google Workspace you are the client, not the
| customer and they _do_ answer phone calls for support. The only
| two times my wife and I needed them for our SMEs, they picked
| up the phone and helped us resolve our issues. Super
| professional too. Haven 't needed to give them a call in
| something like 8 years now.
|
| Don't know about Pixel phone and Google One subscriptions but
| for SMEs Google Workspace is a godsend: it's incredibly cheap
| per employee and it's the way out of the Microsoft mediocrity.
| Everything only requires a browser, no matter the OS (wife
| works from Linux and now added a Mac Mini, for example):
| Windows can, at long last, get the middle finger in SMEs.
|
| I'll forever be thankful to Google for allowing me to help many
| people get rid of Microsoft products, including Windows.
| deanc wrote:
| It took me 13 years to get them to unban my adsense account. To
| this day I still have no idea what happened and have assumed it
| was a competitor sending fake clicks or something.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I think Google has done some cool stuff, and I think in a lot
| of ways they're, at least historically, one of the less evil
| big tech players.
|
| It's been a decade since Google broke their promise not to use
| information gleaned from your use of their services to sell
| ads.
|
| > Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand --
| literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that
| promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In
| its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing
| habits "may be" combined with what the company learns from the
| use Gmail and other tools.
|
| https://psmag.com/news/googles-broken-privacy-promise/
| nhuser2221 wrote:
| Protonmail is the solution, or hosting your own email server
| but that one is more complex.
| puppycodes wrote:
| unfortunately hosting your own email server is nearly
| impossible if you want reliable delivery. If you don't care
| about being put in the spam box then it can work.
| JimmyBiscuit wrote:
| They sold me a Pixel phone with a broken battery (I think 6a?
| Where the battery fails after 400 charging cycles). I got an
| email and the offer to just get 100$ in cash from them instead
| of sending my phone away to get it fixed. I never received the
| money after filling out all the forms. Fuck google.
| rustyhancock wrote:
| My pixel 7 battery was dreadful, and despite it being
| promised to come with 3 months of YouTube premium and Music I
| didn't successfully redeem either.
|
| I admit once it didn't work I didn't reach out to support but
| the entire experience was shit sandwich after shit sandwich.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| I had to disable 5G on my pixel 8 to get decent battery
| life
| greyb wrote:
| >I bought a Pixel phone. As per the sales terms, the phone came
| with one year of Gemini AI Pro service. Except, the redemption
| process to get the year of service didn't work for me. I
| contacted Google, they never fixed it or offered any solution.
| I simply didn't get the year of service I was promised.
|
| I fixed this by deleting the subscription data for Google One
| (which also refunded me a prorated amount for my Google One
| plan), and then waiting a day.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Once upon a time at Google: The year was 2013, and I'd been
| selected to be among the first 8,000 people to get Google Glass.
| I had to go to Google HQ in NYC from my home in Virginia to get
| it and be instructed 1:1 on how to use it. I was given a toll-
| free phone number to call for support by a Glass expert,
| available 24/7/365.
|
| Not only did they answer immediately whenever I had even the
| smallest problem or question: I twice broke my Glass, and each
| time I'd call the support number to ask for a replacement.
|
| Google's policy was that no matter how you broke it or how many
| times it happened, they'd replace it free. They'd immediately
| send a box to return the broken device (prepaid) and a couple
| days later a brand new Glass would arrive.
|
| Like I said, once upon a time....
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| The thing here is the 8.000 Glass early adopters vs the
| hundred-millions (billions maybe?) of Google workspace users.
|
| It's not the same league, not even the same sport.
|
| PS: Not defending Google here, their support for some products
| is abysmal
| bookofjoe wrote:
| You are correct. I agree 100%. It's easy to be great when
| it's on a tiny scale.
| blueboo wrote:
| Billions in profit may unblock scaling customer support
| beyond scrappy startup minimums
|
| However (and I loathe this logic) if you can get the
| marketplace to accept that minimal level, and the brand
| harm is inconsequential, why not pocket the savings
| anjel wrote:
| Those are not matter-of-fact saving, but rather
| significant savings
| justinclift wrote:
| > and the brand harm is inconsequential
|
| That's the thing though. Google have destroyed their
| brand through these kinds of actions, over many years.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| You were a volunteer employee. The very least they could do is
| make sure you can keep doing the job.
|
| I think organizations have a very hard time staying motivated
| once the product's concern has moved away from any one team.
| While you test the product for them there's likely people whose
| jobs depended on you and 7999 others doing so. But eventually a
| product will be considered shipped and all the various talent
| now pays attention to what's next.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Well put.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Google's policy was that no matter how you broke it or how
| many times it happened, they'd replace it free.
|
| Yes, because they were using you to figure out where it needed
| improvements for every day wear and tear. It wasn't charitable,
| it was R&D expense.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| True. I loved my Glass, it was amazing.
| livinglist wrote:
| Still remember the excitement I felt when I saw this Google
| Glass concept video in 2012:
| https://youtu.be/5R1snVxGNVs?si=sVS7wzZ8jYH-oGMM
| bookofjoe wrote:
| How about this real-life Glass video I made in 2013 a month
| after I got mine; forty minutes long, recording the entirely
| of a 5K race!
|
| https://youtu.be/Pu8HTrXI84g?si=puSZt5fYbR69yslo
| livinglist wrote:
| Very nostalgic, thx for sharing!
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| That's fascinating. The stabilization is surprisingly good.
| And there's a kind of out-of-focus _pulsing_ that happens
| to the video periodically. I 'm wondering if that might be
| your pulse against the Glass, abruptly moving the Glass in
| a way that its stabilization couldn't compensate for.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| I bought the Google 3-pod wifi system when it first came out.
| There was an 844 number for support on the back. I remember
| calling it when I didn't understand something and got an
| instant pickup by support staff.
|
| With this comment in mind, I just now called that same number
| with an instant pickup telling me they no longer take support
| calls at that number.
| themafia wrote:
| Yep, monopolistic loss leaders can feel great when they're
| showering you with expensive marketing, right up until they
| reliably pull the rug in an effort to screw everyone or recoup
| their losses.
| ctippett wrote:
| It was only a few years ago that they offered all of their
| Stadia subscribers a full refund for every dollar they ever
| spent on the platform. By this point their reputation for
| customer service was well and truly known, but colour me
| surprised when I received a not insignificant sum credited to
| my bank account from Google.
|
| I saw it mentioned in a comment elsewhere in this thread, but
| the level of service you get really seems dependant on which
| pocket of Google is responsible for the product you happen to
| be using. Unfortunately Workspace is a giant pocket with many
| billions of users with suboptimal and/or perpetually exhausted
| support.
| fortran77 wrote:
| At least he owns his own domain and can eventually switch over. A
| few years ago we decided to switch our personal emails from gmail
| accounts to domains we own (though the email is still handled by
| google.) This way if we ever lose our google account, we can
| switch the MX and be able to get all our recovery emails, bank
| second factors, password recoveries, etc.
| l72 wrote:
| They could switch their domain to another email provider and
| start getting emails, which is great. The problem though, is
| they also used their Google Account to log in to all the 3rd
| party services (payroll). I have no idea how you would get back
| into those services. Some _might_ let you switch off the Google
| Sign-in SSO, but I imagine that is a headache.
| vednig wrote:
| Been there done that, none of it works, till this date my YouTube
| account is suspended and they can't do a thing about it.
|
| Google Drive & Workspace are their most poorly designed products
| with the shittiest support ecosystem. Google would rather bleed
| money than work on it.
|
| That's one of reason I started DoShare Personal Cloud[1]
|
| [1] https://getcloud.doshare.me
| 0xpgm wrote:
| Instead of getting more dependant on Big Tech's AI products, I
| think the perfect use for AI is develop tools and workflows that
| decouple one from Big Tech.
| oybng wrote:
| This occurs to dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of people
| on a daily basis. It happened to me many years ago. This is your
| opportunity to escape, instead you cry out here for attention.
| How pathetic
| cj wrote:
| Using a Google Workspace Super Admin account for your non-admin
| day to day needs is similar to using your AWS root account
| instead of IAM users.
|
| In my experience Google Workspave support is very good. I've
| always been able to get a knowledgeable person on a call to debug
| issues without much difficulty.
|
| But yea, if you're locked out of your admin account, that's
| another story. Very sjmilar to if you get locked out of your AWS
| root account. It's a nightmare to recover.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _Using a Google Workspace Super Admin account for your non-
| admin day to day needs is similar to using your AWS root
| account instead of IAM users._
|
| It sounds like the mistake here is not appointing another Super
| Admin, and making sure _they_ don 't use their account for day
| to day needs. Or just having two Super Admin accounts
| controlled by the same person, heh.
|
| I can't see how not using one's Super Admin account wouldn't
| prevent tripping some kind of fraud lockout that's impossible
| to recover from.
|
| Randomly, I just remembered that I lost a GCP account because I
| tried logging in from Laos, and they asked me for the front and
| back photos of a payment card that I used ages ago that I
| didn't bother making scans of before it was lost. Urgh.
| pfooti wrote:
| Make a primary super admin (admin@ whatever) and only log
| into it for admin purposes. Make an actual user (you@) for
| day to day line of business work. This has the benefit of
| making some categories of spear phishing and xsrf attacks
| harder if the account that gets compromised doesn't have
| root.
| ValentineC wrote:
| That's what I've been doing.
|
| It doesn't address this thread's concern that a single
| Super Admin could be locked out with no recourse, since
| Google's customer support is horrendously bad.
| e40 wrote:
| So you're saying for a simple setup of 1 user, you really need
| to pay for 2 users. The admin account and the real user you
| want to use, which doubles the cost.
| cj wrote:
| In an ideal world, 3 users, because you want a backup admin
| in case your primary admin is lost.
|
| I don't love it either, but these are Google's published best
| practices / recommendations
| r1ch wrote:
| I recently had to go through the recovery flow for an admin
| account and it was wild. Despite Google manually unlocking the
| account and giving me a reset link, every login was forced to
| authenticate via SMS using the (removed) phone number. Luckily I
| was able to get a hold of it and get the code, but even after
| adding a TOTP and security key 2FA, further logins still required
| SMS.
|
| It feels like the security team made this change to reduce
| account hijacking but it's at complete odds with the recovery
| flow and modern security practices. Better hope your phone number
| doesn't get hijacked or recycled because it's the key to your
| account now, security keys be damned.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Google enabled 2FA on my Gmail account without any prior
| notice. I have the username, password, recovery email, and all
| emails from the account are forwarded to my Fastmail, but I
| can't ever log into the account again because it is trying to
| do 2FA by SMS to a number I don't have.
|
| I've tried everything to find someone inside Google to fix
| this, but so far no luck. At least with Meta you can find
| someone on a forum like Swapd who will take a small bribe to
| fix these issues.
| justinclift wrote:
| > At least with Meta you can find someone on a forum like
| Swapd who will take a small bribe ...
|
| That sounds like its own kind of problems. (!)
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| Very similar situation. I could even see information being
| sent to the recovery email. So, when the time came to setup
| my business, I chose Zoho and avoid Google whenever possible.
| subscribed wrote:
| My SO has identical situation. Identical. She still receives
| emails for this account because she set forwarding years ago,
| I still get notifications because I'm set as a recovery
| account, but without the phone she doesn't have for the last
| 15 years we have no way of logging in.
|
| We have everything else but this alone is not enough.
| subscribed wrote:
| You could rephrase this meta thing as "Meta employee can
| successfully coerce an adult into sex by promising Instagram
| account unban" - more accurate IMO: https://showtime-
| fqi8q.s3.amazonaws.com/onlyfans-star-slept-...
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| Google needs to understand that watching this nightmare scenario
| play out over and over again is actively destroying trust in
| their platform. When your email, authentication, documents,
| payroll, and CRM all flow through a single provider and that
| provider can lock you out overnight with no meaningful recourse,
| you've invited customers to place their entire digital presence
| into a house of cards. The fact that this same story surfaces
| almost daily should be a wake up call to existing and prospective
| customers. Every unresolved lockout is one more reason to start
| planning an exit. Google has led the effort to lower the bar so
| much that it's commonplace and somehow acceptable to ghost paying
| customers who youve locked out or even worse bounce them through
| a gauntlet of AI chat bots with the illusion that you are even
| aware of the damage you've caused.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Yeah, loss of a google account in certain cases can destroy
| entire small businesses and there's no recourse. In the old
| world we had extremely deep bodies of case law around utilities
| and commercial leases and road access, insurance and all kinds
| of things to make business operation legally predictable, but
| for the digital equivalent it's still the wild west and
| everyone just throws up their hands like its unavoidable.
| macintux wrote:
| Imagine being homeless, and your Gmail account is your online
| identity for what little financial presence you have, and how
| in the world can you recover from its loss?
| Rastonbury wrote:
| On the surface it seems like it would be a good idea for all
| these users who were suspended to do a mass arbitration like
| what happened to Uber to get them to start taking it
| seriously, this comes up like monthly people getting account
| pulled up from under them and impacting business. Maybe there
| a legal differences or something https://www.mbelr.org/mass-
| arbitration-how-ubers-own-alterna...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I don't disagree, but the reality is SaaS is the model that
| most companies depend on and these risks exist everywhere.
|
| If your business is dependent on services you need to take a
| modicum of effort to protect yourself - the posts author was
| literally walking around with his entire business at risk from
| him dropping his phone or having it pickpocketed.
|
| At the end of the day, the protagonist in this story is mad
| because Google won't allow him to social engineer access to his
| company. He deleted his sole token (Google makes it trivial to
| add _many_ ) in the most fraud signally way possible.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > He deleted his sole token (Google makes it trivial to add
| many) in the most fraud signally way possible.
|
| Are we reading the same blog post? He had his password, 2FA
| authenticator set up, and backup codes -- everything Google
| asks you to have to be on the "golden" auth path.
|
| He only deleted his SMS authentication path (one thing I
| don't understand is how he was able to do this in the first
| place without being logged in), which is in any case the
| _least secure method of 2FA_. Also, It should be fairly
| obvious that SMS is not expected to work seamlessly while
| traveling, how is this not a scenario that 's hit by millions
| of Google users worldwide?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| We're hearing one side of the story from a frustrated user
| recounting a borderline traumatic and stressful event.
|
| The SMS only fallback is when other things have failed and
| they suspect that there's been a takeover. Microsoft does
| something similar to tie it to some tangible thing. I'm not
| excusing Google. Their exception handling is poor at best.
| I've seen issues at customers where phones left in flight
| get flagged because of GPS disruptions due to Middle East
| conflicts, for example. (Phones flagged as having been in
| Syria or Russia can be kryptonite) One scenario was a VIP
| whose kid was in Europe with their other parent and the
| VIP's tablet, signed into work email.
|
| Other factors apply too - there may be multiple accounts
| tied to the number that are in different locales, for
| example. No idea what obnoxious rules Australia and UK add
| as well.
|
| Point is, this type of shit happens and you should have a
| contingency.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > Point is, this type of shit happens and you should have
| a contingency.
|
| Let's work through what the contingency could have been.
| Always make sure you buy international roaming everywhere
| you go? Always be able to switch your MX records (from a
| provider whose account _isn 't_ tied to a Google-
| controlled email)?
|
| They seem to get increasingly less practical to be
| honest. People travel all over the world everyday, this
| shit shouldn't be hard for a company like Google that
| supposedly ingests mountains of data.
|
| More to the point, I think email has become sort of a
| fundamental right given how much of your identity depends
| on it. Companies that control this sort of identity
| foundation need to be heavily regulated, and perhaps
| nationalized.
| welder wrote:
| > I removed my phone number from the account. I am travelling to
| the UK for a short period and did not want to have roaming on my
| Australian phone.
|
| So for my own notes, removing a phone number from my Google
| account before travel will risk account suspension. Hope OP
| resolves it, but also need to make sure this never happens to me.
| r_lee wrote:
| this is actually scary as fuck
|
| I thought with Workspace you'd actually be spared from this kind
| of BS
|
| I guess not?
| Lihh27 wrote:
| you're paying for the privilege of getting locked out by the
| same algorithm that locks out free accounts. the only
| difference is you get an invoice.
| andrewjneumann wrote:
| If you're operating Google workspace without a well oiled
| Enterprise behind the scenes, a single admin account is a single
| point of failure.
|
| I had this happen a couple years ago when I was migrating to a
| different domain. The only difference was all of the
| authentication that I supplied Google said was an adequate and I
| got into some sort of a login loop where Authenticator, SMS, DNS
| record nor pass key would provide enough authentication for me to
| get in.
|
| I got the automated got bought to finally send me the mythical
| form, after completing that I was told that they were unable to
| authenticate me further. I ended up emailing their support
| multiple times and threatening lawsuits multiple times when I got
| a magic call from a human at Google. They also sent me the link
| that put me into a login loop however after chatting with them
| for nearly an hour I got a different magic login link form which
| appeared to work.
| jimbocyou wrote:
| OP triggered every possible red flags for suspicious account
| takeover in Google systems: deleting his recovery phone number,
| moving to another country and cellular provider. And then he gets
| surprised that the account is in 30 day cool down period??? I
| don't understand people sometimes.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| They didn't willfully delete their recovery phone number. They
| tried to delete a shitty, known-broken 2FA mechanism after they
| had set up passkeys. Poor UX conflated the two things, so their
| recovery phone number ended up being deleted. This is 100% on
| Google.
|
| Why the fuck would Google care in which country I live? It's a
| personal decision, and no corporation should have any say in
| this. They certainly don't have to flag an account for that,
| especially not if the account has 2FA enabled. This is on
| Google, too.
|
| Your comment is victim blaming.
| jimbocyou wrote:
| The problem is the rapid succession of changes to recovery
| phone number, country, cellular provider. There is no way to
| differentiate, at scale, between an account takeover
| currently in progress that needs to be stopped immediately to
| minimize damage, and a legit user deciding to change all his
| personal info at once.
|
| 30 day cool down period is a reasonable response, at scale.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| > The problem is the rapid succession of changes to
| recovery phone number, country, cellular provider.
|
| Aren't cellular providers inherently tied to the country
| they're in?
|
| How do you move to another country without changing
| cellular providers at the same time?
| jimbocyou wrote:
| Of course you can keep your provider. It's called
| roaming, per OP story: "I am travelling to the UK and did
| not want to have *roaming* on my Australian phone."
|
| For cheaper rates than roaming, typically you install a
| secondary eSIM for the country you're traveling. 99%
| modern phones support dual SIM for this reason
| sfmike wrote:
| you keep the old number forever and when travelling get a
| data sim only
| zenincognito wrote:
| Have backup codes, Passkey, access to the said number, same
| laptop logged in, phone logged in, recovery email address
| access and nothing works...
| hayatofujihara wrote:
| Tough situation. A good reminder to set up a backup recovery
| method before removing the existing one, especially when
| traveling.
| e40 wrote:
| This is why I do full Google Takeout every 2 months and have my
| own domain with Workspace. I don't rely on cloud file storage.
| The calendar is important, but I could switch easily.
|
| IMO, the worst part of this is Workspace support is immune to ANY
| explanation. I mean, credit card companies are well used to "is
| this your transaction?" emails.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's been [0] days since the last "Cloud provider banned me and I
| lost everything" article.
|
| Everyone who depends on the good graces of a cloud provider for
| something (not just Google, but Amazon, Microsoft, Apple,
| whatever) needs to at the very least, take a moment, and figure
| out what their plan is when they are suddenly banned and locked
| out permanently, without any way to contact the company.
|
| Does life just go on, since you don't have anything important
| hosted there? (Best Case)
|
| Do you lose some precious family photos and use it as a tough
| learning opportunity to stop doing what you're doing? (Next best)
|
| Do you lose access to your E-mail and are suddenly not able to do
| 2FA, reset passwords, communicate with the company or the
| Internet in any way, and so on, and now have to panic?
|
| Do you complain online, hoping that someone in the company sees
| your post and has the ability to restore your account, which you
| then continue to use because you learned nothing?
|
| Having an online account suddenly suspended is a real, non-zero,
| but unlikely risk. You should at least have a disaster plan if
| you rely on these things for anything important. Or better yet,
| stop relying on them for important things like your identity or
| precious files!
| chromacity wrote:
| > Everyone who depends on the good graces of a cloud provider
| for something (not just Google, but Amazon, Microsoft, Apple,
| whatever) needs to at the very least, take a moment, and figure
| out what their plan is when they are suddenly banned and locked
| out permanently, without any way to contact the company.
|
| This is one of the most common sentiments I hear expressed on
| HN, next only to "if you're not building your software business
| around Claude Code, you're gonna left behind".
| mppm wrote:
| "A guy on HN told me one time, 'Don't let yourself get attached
| to any cloud services you are not willing to walk out on in 30
| seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.'" --
| Robert de Niro
| supliminal wrote:
| To me, the action is the juice.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| google is worst because normal people with no tech experience
| can accidentally get banned from the only email account they
| ever had since 2005 which has all their insurance tax resumes
| family photo etc , never even understand how it happened , or
| fix it
| tsoukase wrote:
| I'm one such person among the billions worldwide, that is a
| minority on this forum.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > It's been [0] days since the "business I contract with to
| provide services locked me out of the building we rent, ghosted
| me, and threw all my shit out" article.
|
| We really need to just fix the laws.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > We really need to just fix the laws.
|
| This. There are something like 150 million Americans with a
| Google account, and these days it is more important than a
| phone number to have a working email.
|
| Email is a utility. Email companies should be heavily
| regulated and controlled like phone or other utility
| companies.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I don't know if I agree it should be regulated like a
| utility, however I believe contracts and suspensions should
| require more work than a click of a button.
| thephyber wrote:
| The ease of suspend isn't the problem here. It's that
| there is functionally no recourse once the suspension
| happens, justified or not.
|
| The only people who seem to get un-suspended are the ones
| who can generate news media outrage or who can call their
| friend who is a director/exec at the company. (Obviously
| this intuition is flawed, but it's hurting the
| reputations of these SaaS providers.)
| 827a wrote:
| Google's customer support is interesting. Its definitely a case
| where you'll sometimes hit pockets of the company where clearly
| there was someone who made it their life's work to fix this bad
| reputation they have; while other pockets make it clear that they
| deserve the reputation.
|
| I had a Nest subscription that became a total mess. If you've
| ever tried to use Nest before, or are coming from a legacy Nest
| account, and/or also have a Workspace account that somehow got
| wrapped up in the mess, you'll understand how much of a clusterf
| Nest is for the Google ecosystem. I had signed up for this
| subscription on a personal Google account, cancelled it, but was
| still being charged for it, and the credit card being used made
| me think it was getting charged on my Google Workspace account
| (which isn't officially supported, and would never let you sign
| up for it, but DID share an email address with my legacy Nest
| account I had migrated into the non-Workspace personal account I
| was using for Nest).
|
| They had to escalate the problem a couple times, which took ~24
| hours. Once that happened, their rep had it resolved in minutes,
| and refunded me two months on the subscription.
|
| The biggest piece of advice I can give when dealing with Google
| is: Never be weird. You cannot ever put yourself in a situation
| where your account isn't like the other billion accounts they
| have. If you do, something will go wrong and its rolling the dice
| on whether you'll ever reach someone who can help you. If you've
| used Google enough, you know: Their multifactor settings are
| _weird_. You cannot set it up exactly how you want; it 'll always
| trigger some auth method you didn't configure but they have
| "LATENT KNOWLEDGE" you should be able to authenticate with, like
| a phone number you configured six years ago, or gmail installed
| on a tablet that's 400 miles away, and you can't turn it off,
| even on Workspace.
|
| My favorite bit of Googleism: Go to any site you sign in with
| Google SSO and watch the URLs in the eight redirects it has to do
| before it signs you in. You'll see a "youtube.com" in there. Even
| on a Workspace account. Youtube.com is a load-bearing website in
| their core auth flows.
|
| Mess of a company. I hope they invest some effort in improving
| things, but I was saying the same thing in 2018. They probably
| won't.
| nullc wrote:
| > like a phone number you configured six years ago
|
| I've put in a heroic effort to make sure they never get a phone
| number, specifically so they can't start handing my account
| over to the first clown who simswaps me, and have been
| successful. Unfortunately, this makes my account weird, which
| as you noted is fatal.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| > My favorite bit of Googleism: Go to any site you sign in with
| Google SSO and watch the URLs in the eight redirects it has to
| do before it signs you in. You'll see a "youtube.com" in there.
| Even on a Workspace account. Youtube.com is a load-bearing
| website in their core auth flows.
|
| I assume that's just because they need to set a cookie on the
| YouTube domain in case you visit YouTube later on the workspace
| account, and not "load bearing"in the manner you insinuate
| 827a wrote:
| If the youtube.com 302 failed to itself 302 back to the next
| destination; because the site is down; would that not be load
| bearing?
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you wanted to intentionally trigger every account abuse system
| at Google, follow this guy's script.
| sfmike wrote:
| people who travel shouldn't trigger account abuse
| jeffbee wrote:
| Changing your account recovery and 2FA settings then
| immediately trying to recover your account from an unusual
| country should temporarily lock out your account, every time,
| and this is what all normal users want.
| Arcuru wrote:
| If a service offers "Login with Google/Apple/Facebook/etc" you
| should never do that if they offer a username/password. It just
| increases the single point of failure. Avoid places that only
| offer the "Login with Foo" if at all possible (looking at you
| Tailscale).
|
| As an ex-googler, the only reason I was comfortable keeping even
| my personal email there was because I could reach out internally
| if there was a problem. I left Google, and left gmail behind too.
| gib444 wrote:
| > Avoid places that only offer the "Login with Foo" if at all
| possible (looking at you Tailscale).
|
| Tailscale is the only serious company that I can ever recall
| offering /only/ third party login. It's bit bizarre on the face
| of it. Anyone know the reason?
| drcongo wrote:
| Curious isn't it, especially as it's such a bad fit for their
| product - authenticating with GitHub in order to ssh made the
| whole thing so much more painful than it needed to be. I
| subsequently tried switching to using a passkey when that
| became an option, but it's not possible to make the passkey
| user the owner of a tailnet created by a GitHub org user, so
| I'm stuck with two users in my Tailscale and can't delete the
| GitHub org user. It's the main thing that keeps me looking
| for a reliable alternative to Tailscale.
| mkl wrote:
| ZeroTier. It works well for me. I chose it over Tailscale
| because it doesn't require a third party for login.
| ratorx wrote:
| I think I read somewhere (but could be wrong) that it was
| because they didn't want to own any "authentication"
| services. Their infrastructure was zero trust (as in they
| don't hold any passwords or private keys), just a discovery
| server for different devices.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| My other annoyance lately is companies that don't let you set
| a password. It's either passkey only (which I'm not sold on,
| yet), or "we'll email you a login link". Great, now I have to
| wait for the email to show up, click the link, hope it
| doesn't expire if I get distracted while waiting, and then
| also delete your emails, sometimes multiple times a day?
|
| What a shit tier authentication mechanism.
| drcongo wrote:
| I despise this. Slack keeps doing this even though I _have_
| a password and 2FA configured.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Vercel won't even let you set a password.
|
| "Sign-in methods: Email, passkey, Google account, Apple
| account, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket".
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Perhaps they are not a serious company after all?
| antonvs wrote:
| Is Tailscale really a serious company?
| huslage wrote:
| I use my own OIDC connection to Tailscale. I don't use a
| third party for login. It's not hard to set up.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Tailscale offers custom SSO for free
| nottorp wrote:
| Shouldn't a service that may be the only way of remotely
| accessing your devices be ... independent of a 3rd party
| authentication service?
| zrail wrote:
| Passkey auth is also available as a first-class option.
| shakna wrote:
| One of the other articles on HN's front page right now, is that
| Germany's implementation of eIDAS will require a Google or
| Apple account.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I genuinely feel like there is something happening where
| hackernews articles come in bunch/reference-to-each-other :]
|
| So one of the comments on one hackernews post on front-page
| almost somehow always refer to something within a hackernews
| post on the same front-page. I have seen this witnessed too
| many times that it might be time to name this phenomenon.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| We offer Login with Google and Login with Facebook on our apps.
| The fun part is both FB and Google started blocking Selenium
| and any other automated agents from logging in. So basically
| there's no way to run end to end tests that confirm the login
| flows using FB or Google, which have wrinkles that our normal
| login doesn't hit.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > We offer Login with Google and Login with Facebook on our
| apps.
|
| This has the nefarious side effect of allowing Google or
| Facebook to track people across the Internet and apps.
| Webmasters like you are, often for no imperative reason,
| complicit of this by providing such login options.
| thephyber wrote:
| "For no imperative reason"
|
| App developers have repeatedly stated that offering those
| options increases user account creation. There is lower
| friction to using "login with <big tech>" than to create
| username/password creation flow. My guess is that most of
| the world hasn't figured out a password manager workflow
| that works for them (or they aren't willing to pay for it).
| glenpierce wrote:
| This is an issue that regulators need to address. Asking
| small businesses to forego the significant impact on their
| business of not implementing common features that users
| demand is not a good solution to public policy failures.
|
| I don't know what the exact revenue/growth difference is,
| but if my paycheque depended upon getting more users to
| sign up, I don't think I could justify making it into a
| political stance when Google isn't going to notice my tiny
| boycott.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| > On Saturday, April 4, at 5:06 AM, I received a notification
| saying my authenticator had been removed. It hadn't. The
| authenticator was still active on my phone - it was the recovery
| phone I had removed. Google apparently conflated the two.
|
| This is a massive bug here. I was also surprised recently that
| Google won't let you enroll multiple Authenticators. If we had
| functional security regulations I think there would be some
| pretty large fines for Google's error here.
| caerwy wrote:
| These kind of stories led me to explore de-googling my digital
| life. And honestly its been a fun journey and given meaning and
| purpose to my homelab. 100% recommend. Own your digital life, run
| local, reclaim the web.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| Thanks for the great reminder to detangle myself from Google.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I discovered this same issue, you are required to have a phone
| their auth system is bugged me.
|
| I just set up google workspace and I didn't have recovery phone
| or anything,just password and recovery email. I didn't login for
| 1 week (life stuff). When I came back it allowed me to login but
| didn't allow any admin stuff saying it didn't recognize me and
| that I must use a known browser.
|
| Well, that was the only browser I logged in with.
|
| The solution was a weird thing where I was able to add phone
| recovery and authenticator, but then had to wait 2 weeks
| (couldn't use it). After that I performed authentication as
| usual.
|
| It's horrible.
| finaard wrote:
| It's quite entertaining to read - most of the article is pretty
| much elaborating a chain of bad decisions by the author which all
| lead to this now being a big problem. If he'd have written a
| similar dependency tree earlier and just thought about it for a
| few minutes that should've been avoidable.
|
| > Update 1 - I know I can simply change the MX record to someone
| else but It has its own challenges.
|
| I don't quite get that attitude. He's describing that he needs
| his business emails. Not just getting a mail server back online
| for that, even as interim solution, points to the opposite. In
| the time it takes for MX TTL to expire he could easily just throw
| up a postfix+dovecot on some VPS, with enough time to spare to
| add something like sogo if he feels fancy.
| bartvk wrote:
| That's what I didn't get either. And you don't even need to
| configure a VPS, there's Fastmail, Protonmail, Zoho, Kolabnow,
| Purely mail, Migadu and so much more.
| jzl wrote:
| Why victim blame him for removing the phone number? He had a
| logical reason for doing so, and with Google supporting many
| forms of authentication it's perfectly reasonable to think that
| removing one wouldn't jeopardize the other methods.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| I was a bit worried when I saw the title of the article because
| I have one of these accounts but geez he made some bad choices.
| Deleting all phone numbers and the recovery and swapping to a
| new authentication method and then accessing from a different
| country??? No wonder it got flagged.
|
| I probably wouldn't believe him either. Google should have an
| option to revert to the last trusted config after some
| verification method. Google support is bad, I'll give him that.
|
| All this to avoid roaming charges? And then refusing to share a
| personal email in this scenario and missing meetings because of
| that.
|
| I'd argue that changing the MX to fastmail or Microsoft would
| be much faster than a postfix+dovecot solution on a VPS but I
| think he's just refusing any solution based on his principals.
| bradley13 wrote:
| With phone numbers, you can move from one carrier to another,
| while retaining your number. This helps with competition.
|
| We need the same for email.
|
| Sure, it may not work with the ancillary services, but keeping
| your email address would solve a lot of issues.
| phpnode wrote:
| I mean, you can do that already, you use your own domain name
| and can then change email providers at will, in theory.
|
| But maybe you logged in to your domain registrar through google
| oauth. If your google account is locked you can't now get into
| your domain's settings to change your MX records.
|
| The real problem isn't the email address itself, it's all the
| access that google owns on your behalf. Lose access to Google,
| lose access to everything.
| rglover wrote:
| Just had to fix an AWS account lock out this morning. Why?
| Despite having a $0 balance and payment info on file, until I set
| a budget (a new feature per their UI), all of my Cloudfront-
| hosted files were just unavailable on my business' site (I
| Cloudfront all static assets so all images, fonts, etc were just
| broken all of a sudden).
|
| These are the limits of scale. Too big, too complex, and not
| enough skilled people to maintain and/or support it. And our
| hubris as humans prevents us from accepting it. Why? Why can't we
| accept smaller but more functional things/systems?
|
| We don't have to live like this.
| deepsun wrote:
| I tried to read it assuming the blog post author is a hacker. The
| hacker could have stolen an OTP device with DNS access, but
| couldn't steal for the phone number (so they removed it, there
| was no explanation why phone number is removed). And honestly,
| how else could they prove they are legit? What if they really are
| a hacker?
|
| It would be cool if Google (and other media giants, especially
| IdP ones) had an office where you could bring your passport and
| verify it's you. I don't think there is.
| alwa wrote:
| I'd hate for the "government-name" verification to become a
| _requirement_ , but I've long wished services would at least
| offer that as an optional add-on. For certain important
| accounts, I'd be eager to place my government identity on file
| with the company ahead of time.
|
| The Americans have done something kind of interesting along
| those lines, as far as an in-person IDV option to establish
| e-government accounts [0]. You start account setup online, then
| take a barcode to a post office along with your identity
| documents.
|
| I have to imagine it's hard to make a commercial case for such
| a system, though... especially these days with so much momentum
| toward the approach I resent--that is, requiring ID checks just
| to be online in the first place.
|
| [0] https://www.login.gov/help/verify-your-identity/verify-
| your-...
| wvenable wrote:
| Now try and read it assuming that instead of a screw up, this
| user was actually hacked. How do they recover?
|
| Honestly, if you are using Gmail as your primary email I could
| probably ruin your entire year. I could just try and hack you
| (not even successfully) and Google will just shut down your
| entire life rather than attempt to work out who's right.
| gck1 wrote:
| > I could just try and hack you (not even successfully) and
| Google will just shut down your entire life rather than
| attempt to work out who's right.
|
| Had this happen to me. Fortunately the 'attacker' wasn't
| actually trying to do this, so damage was limited, but it's
| chilling when you think about what some motivated script
| kiddy can do with your Google account just by requesting
| password resets.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I failed the Apple Developer ID verification four times due to
| technical issues and now my account is ineligible to become a
| developer.
|
| Forever.
| drnick1 wrote:
| Run your own email server, and give Google the middle finger.
| Letting Google own your email, and freely spy on your
| communications is insane. I think this incident clearly
| demonstrates that you cannot leave critical infrastructure like
| this in the hands of a third party.
| zenincognito wrote:
| Update: A kind stranger from Google reached out and this is now
| resolved. Thank you HN for helping me through this.
| entrox wrote:
| It is quite frankly ridiculous that you need to be in the "in-
| group" to get things like this resolved and it is not the first
| time this has been reported, be it Google or Meta or any other
| big tech corpo.
|
| These players MUST be regulated or treated like utilities;
| hoping the EU will ratchet up the pressure even more.
| storus wrote:
| I keep paying ElevenLabs for 3 years after some early AI agent
| project where I used it as my payment data is bound to a google
| account associated with a phone number that expired in the
| meantime. I thought adding the google authenticator to the
| account and switching to it as a secondary authentication method
| from the phone number would allow me to cancel the subscription,
| but for some reason Google insists I verify using the expired
| phone number...
| tsoukase wrote:
| The full text of Google's slogan is: Don't be evil (to customers
| that click ads from which our largest income share comes but not
| to developers who in the future might be our competitors).
|
| It's just too long to fit on a T-shirt but not to memorise.
| latchkey wrote:
| > 3) Removed recovery phone
|
| Never put your phone in there in the first place. You can
| actually skip that step.
| kkfx wrote:
| It's simply about time to own your digital life instead of being
| slave of someone else.
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