This is the script of my national radio report yesterday on Google
users being locked out of their accounts and often losing access to
all their email, photos, and other data in the process. As always,
there may be some minor wording variations from this script as I
presented this report live on air.
- - -
So yeah, as we all know Google has an enormous number of users around
the world, and most of them depend on Google for important services
like email, storage of important and sometimes precious photos, and
many other sorts of data.
And the odds are pretty good that at some point you've heard of
someone who suddenly found themselves locked out of their Google
account and lost access to all of that, frequently permanently. And
indeed, this happens to innocent users of Google every day, and
frankly Google apparently just doesn't really usually care about most
of the ones who are forever cut off from all their Google data, even
when those users are completely innocent of any wrongdoing.
Combine this with Google's notoriously inadequate "customer support"
(and I use the term "customer support" very loosely when it comes to
Google), and it's really a recipe for disaster for users, often not
technically sophisticated users, who still have found themselves
needing to use Google just to deal with day to day necessities --
especially now that so many firms have drastically cut back on
traditional means of communications with their customers.
In a short segment like this I can't really get into the details of
why innocent users get locked out -- there are a bunch of reasons
ranging from password confusion or problems with Google's new
"passkey" systems (I'm not a fan of their current passkey
implementation), to changing devices, to Google's own opaque
mechanisms for trying to determine whether or not user logins are
legitimate or not, and many more.
But the bottom line is that once you get locked out, if you don't have
a currently valid account recovery email address and/or account
recovery phone number associated with your account, and these not
being present or still valid is not at all uncommon, you can easily be
just out of luck in terms of ever getting into your account again.
Google's so-called help forums are loaded with wrong answers that will
often lead you astray, and it is almost impossible for all but
high-level paying users to reach a human for help at Google except in
very limited situations.
Google will say that they can't possibly provide human assistance at
their scale, and certainly it's a tough job, but there are of course
many firms with many customers, where the firms still manage to have
human support escalation procedures. And the argument that if you're
only using free Google services you don't deserve good support just
doesn't wash. Google urges the use of their systems to protect your
crucial data, and leaving you out to helplessly swing in the breeze is
utterly unethical in any case.
Google will also say that they have to make account recovery "hard" to
protect against abuse, but again, that should not excuse Google to
leave innocent users locked out and desperate for access to their
email and photos and other important data.
To make matters worse, Google has steadfastly refused to even consider
relatively simple improvements -- I've been pushing various of these
to Google for many years -- that could make account recovery much
better and could be accomplished at relatively little or even no
additional operational cost to Google. It's like talking to a brick
wall.
So what can you do? One very important thing is to keep your account
recovery email and phone numbers up to date, though that isn't a
guarantee you won't get locked out anyway at some point. Use Google
Takeout proactively -- at google.com/takeout ("takeout" is one
word) -- to copy your Google data to your local computer if you have that
capability, and you must do this BEFORE you get locked out -- after
you're locked out you can't use it anymore.
Beyond that, unless Google comes to their senses about this, you could
cross your fingers and wish for the best, for all the good that's
going to do, and hope for good luck -- because when it comes to
Google, you may really need it someday.
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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