PSA: If you are low-income, or you know low income people who do not have internet at home, you should check out ACP, the Affordable Connectivity Program[0]. I

PSA: If you are low-income, or you know low income people who do not have internet at home, you should check out ACP, the Affordable Connectivity Program[0]. It is a federal program that provides up to $30/month, paid directly to your ISP so that they can take that amount off your bill. I work for an ISP[1] that offers a $30/month, 200Mbps plan which is free when using ACP (we don't even take your credit card). Most ISPs now have an ACP section of their web site if you search for it. Having worked extensively on implementing this program at my company, I have seen exactly what this librarian is talking about. The people who need programs like ACP are also disproportionately people who have low tech literacy, and often poor literacy/education in general, and the existing systems don't work for them. I wrote about that recently in another thread[2]. When a customer is locked out of their ACP account, luckily the ACP support line is able to reset their password over the phone. But it's not always an easy process. Often, we need to have multiple, in-person meetings with these customers in order to get pictures of their ID, and often ACP will not do anything to an account unless the customer is physically on the phone or in person with us asking them to. If our customers could always get access to their Gmail, it wouldn't be nearly as big of an issue. They could reset their password the way you'd expect. But as the article is pointing out, if you're locked out of your Gmail there is absolutely no way in. It's really striking just how much work it is to be poor. Google needs to fix this, and remove one more barrier to people who need to use email with government services. [0] https://www.fcc.gov/acp https://www.fcc.gov/acp [1] https://www.flumeinternet.com/ https://www.flumeinternet.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32086589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32086589