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Makes sense, but 1) Google still has a HUGE spam account problem and 2) this is going to hurt a whole lot of innocent people. Phone number as unique person ide
by eli 5y ago
Makes sense, but 1) Google still has a HUGE spam account problem and 2) this is going to hurt a whole lot of innocent people.
Phone number as unique person identifier is hugely problematic for a lot of reasons. I wonder how many accounts you could hack just by constantly acquiring new numbers in area codes where the supply is small and then trying to reset various things by phone number.
- johndfsgdgdfg 5y agoThat's my impression too. This is a developer's forum. Readers here should have better undertanding than normal population that why this feature has been implemented. I am very surprised to see all these very negative and hostile comments. Instead a better discussion should be what's a better way to handle tricky situations like this, if there's any.
- malka 5y agoThe negative reactions are not about the feature. It is about the crappy Google support. > if there's any. Have support.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoI'd also like to add that Google has atrocious customer service. In fact, the help forums are often just volunteers who don't even have the power to relay information to an actual support engineer. I recall seeing a few submissions here on HN about paying customers of Google's services getting banned or flagged by some algorithm by accident and then having no way whatsoever to actually get the situation straightened out. They even contacted Sales and those employees had no way of sending a ticket to anyone inside google capable of helping them. So I sense some of the anger is due to google's reputation in this regard.