I think that for a lot of people, the added access is worth the security risk: they're more likely to forget their own password than to be hacked. One of my mo

I think that for a lot of people, the added access is worth the security risk: they're more likely to forget their own password than to be hacked. One of my moms friends had gone through the Gmail password reset process a few times, but she but she called me one day kind of frantic because she could no longer reset her password (or remember the old one). It seems that previously Google had allowed either a phone call or an SMS to the phone number on her account, but had recently taken away the call option. Her phone was a landline that couldn't receive SMS messages. She didn't have (or couldn't access) a backup account and couldn't remember the answers to any of her security questions, or at least not enough of them. I think she just gave up and switched to Yahoo.