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having unrelated personal accounts locked because they're set as the recovery account for an account that was tangentially related to a ToS violation is absolut

having unrelated personal accounts locked because they're set as the recovery account for an account that was tangentially related to a ToS violation is absolutely unacceptable. there's no plausible reason for that other than to inconvenience as many people as possible.

guessmyname 8y ago
I read that and got genuinely preoccupied. I immediately started reviewing the recovery options of my corporate account and de-linked all my personal information (personal email address, personal phone number for two-factor authentication, etc). I prefer to have my corporate account hacked for not having 2FA enabled than to risk my personal Google account to be locked. I went ahead and created a non-personal account with another email provider for the recovery options and tomorrow morning I will request my employer for a corporate phone number to set-up 2FA.
- dannyw 8y ago
  Don't worry. even if you don't have any recovery emails set up, Google's anti-abuse systems still link accounts that it believes are related (same cookies, same Chrome SafeSearch / phone-home headers and IDs, etc).
  - eh78ssxv2f 8y ago
    This seems pretty outrageous. Do you have any source for this?
perl4ever 8y ago
I had an interesting problem with my gmail account - I had a backup email address and my phone linked to it. Then I needed to reset my gmail password, but I no longer had access to my backup email (was at an organization I left). So, even though I still had access to my phone and even though I was still logged in to the gmail account, and even though I had many archived emails, I could never log in to it again and had to abandon it. Automated recovery didn't work and of course they wouldn't say why. Having a backup seems like a trap or catch-22 when it becomes the single point of failure.
- kuschku 8y ago
  Similar here, except the phone number ran out (prepaid numbers run out after 6 months unused here). I tried everything, messaged friends at Google, nothing. In the end the only solution that worked was waiting until a new person by random chance got allocated the same phone number, calling them, and getting them to send me my reset code they got via SMS.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    What's funny about you mentioning this recovery strategy is that it is now a common scam/way to trick people into giving up their 2FA codes.

guessmyname 8y ago

I read that and got genuinely preoccupied. I immediately started reviewing the recovery options of my corporate account and de-linked all my personal information (personal email address, personal phone number for two-factor authentication, etc). I prefer to have my corporate account hacked for not having 2FA enabled than to risk my personal Google account to be locked. I went ahead and created a non-personal account with another email provider for the recovery options and tomorrow morning I will request my employer for a corporate phone number to set-up 2FA.

dannyw 8y ago
Don't worry. even if you don't have any recovery emails set up, Google's anti-abuse systems still link accounts that it believes are related (same cookies, same Chrome SafeSearch / phone-home headers and IDs, etc).
- eh78ssxv2f 8y ago
  This seems pretty outrageous. Do you have any source for this?

perl4ever 8y ago

I had an interesting problem with my gmail account - I had a backup email address and my phone linked to it. Then I needed to reset my gmail password, but I no longer had access to my backup email (was at an organization I left). So, even though I still had access to my phone and even though I was still logged in to the gmail account, and even though I had many archived emails, I could never log in to it again and had to abandon it. Automated recovery didn't work and of course they wouldn't say why. Having a backup seems like a trap or catch-22 when it becomes the single point of failure.

kuschku 8y ago
Similar here, except the phone number ran out (prepaid numbers run out after 6 months unused here). I tried everything, messaged friends at Google, nothing. In the end the only solution that worked was waiting until a new person by random chance got allocated the same phone number, calling them, and getting them to send me my reset code they got via SMS.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  What's funny about you mentioning this recovery strategy is that it is now a common scam/way to trick people into giving up their 2FA codes.