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> A few days ago, I was prompted to verify my phone number by Google. Immediately after completing the verification, I received an email notifying me that Googl
by atomicfiredoll 2y ago
> A few days ago, I was prompted to verify my phone number by Google. Immediately after completing the verification, I received an email notifying me that Google had overwritten all my personal information. It turns out that because my mom is the one paying the phone bill, they automatically "verified" the name on my account to be hers and updated everything on my account without my consent.
It sounds like someone at Google (not necessarily a programmer) needs to read "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers:"
> 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual
What a bureaucratic nightmare.
- GoblinSlayer 2y ago2020: hey, it's second factor for your safety 2040: 4 hour ago your body separated from your phone, drink a verification can
- metadat 2y agoImagine being the implementing engineer at ElGoog: Your manager / PM: "Make this change, it's how Google is doing things now." Yet it's so obviously wrong, but if you push back.. not good for you.
- atomicfiredoll 2y agoLots of us have had to implement changes we've disagreed with or pushed back on, but this one looks so obviously wrong, it's particularly mind boggling. I'm almost inclined to think maybe the process/tech isn't designed to do this and there's a bug, or somebody tasked with a manual verification made an outright mistake, or something else went off the rails. Any number of this could have gone wrong. Then I think of the number of sites and services that have started asking for phone numbers, as if they believe doing it over and over will somehow change the nature of telephony--it would probably be a mistake for me to give Google or any of these other companies the benefit of the doubt.
- kylec 2y agoLink to the Falsehoods article, it's a good read: https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHOODS.md https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHO...
- foota 2y agoUm... Does anyone else see the repo owner?
- layer8 2y agoThey meticulously document the falsehoods their programmers believe. ;)
- ffsm8 2y agoThese decisions haven't been made by programmers in over 10 years. These lists made sense in 2000-2010 when programmers had the autonomy ( in most corporations ) to decide on what feature to develop and how it should behave. This hasn't been the case since the industry introduced roles such as product owner. I've had to implement my fair share of anti patterns that I was fully aware would degrade the experience for the user. At the end of the day, the programmers have been reduced to essentially blue color workers that just do whatever the MBAs decide on.
- ketzo 2y agoProgrammers are some of the most in-demand workers in the world. You wield significant influence. And any even-slightly-functional workplace will at least try to listen to the word of their experts. Perhaps it’s possible you didn’t do enough to explain why you didn’t believe it was the right work to do, or if you did, perhaps there were other factors in play than “user experience.” Also, uh, “I have to do what my boss says” doesn’t make you a blue collar worker.
- ffsm8 2y ago
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> It sounds like someone at Google (not necessarily a programmer) needs to read "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers:" >> 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual But that has nothing to do with this. The idea here is that whoever is paying the phone bill is the same person who uses the phone. Nobody believes that.
- yellowapple 2y agoThe rationale of that falsehood¹ addresses that point: >> It wasn't even that long ago that mobile phones didn't exist, and it was common for an entire household to share one fixed-line telephone number. In some parts of the world, this is still true, and relatives (or even friends) share a single phone number. Many phone services (especially for businesses) allow multiple inbound calls to or outbound calls from the same phone number. ---- ¹ https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHOODS.md https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHO...
- Dylan16807 2y agoYour quote disproves you. That explanation does not address the point of who pays. It addresses what point 4 is actually about, multiple people sharing a number, which is not happening here.
- pyuser583 2y agoMobile phones date from the 1930s.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoHow does that address the point? They've got nothing to do with each other. Our example user isn't sharing a phone number with his mom. He's having his phone bill paid by his mom. It is correct to believe that the number uniquely identifies him. Explaining that "all phone numbers uniquely identify a single individual" is false doesn't matter in any way, because it isn't false as applied to the phone number that's giving us trouble. That number uniquely identifies an individual. This should be a hint that you've misdiagnosed the problem... shouldn't it?
- jsemrau 2y agoGoogle dies of many little papercuts based on decisions of incompetent people.
- pjmlp 2y agoWhich is kind of tragic given their famous hiring process that every wannabe great startup feels like copying. Maybe the process isn't that great after all.
- adamors 2y agoThat hiring process is for engineers tho, do we know how they hire the various product people that might end up making these decisions?
- pjmlp 2y agoWell, code quality on Android also speaks for that hiring process.
- saagarjha 2y agoI don't think it does.
- pjmlp 2y agoAn previous consumer of Android teams work, across NDK, Studio, Gradle, and userspace libraries, I think it does, and am quite happy that Android development is no longer something I have to care about.
- saagarjha 2y agoLook it’s not perfect but then I hear you sing praises about like Oracle® CORBA™ with Accenture® Access II™ and I’m not entirely sure we have the same standards for code quality.
- 2y ago
- formerly_proven 2y agoI'm actually fascinated Google can apparently query US service providers for the billing address given only the phone number?!
- pram 2y agoLiterally anyone could do the same thing with the telephone directory in the 80s ;P
- marci 2y agoIt was the fastest way to find Sarah Connors
- ta1243 2y agoIn practice in the 80s you could do a name->address or name->phone lookup You couldn't do a phone->name or address->name lookup
- devilbunny 2y agoThere were "reverse directories" for phone->name, though you didn't get one delivered to your house with your phone subscription. You could also call directory assistance.
- kbelder 2y agoYou could. Phone companies published reverse phone directories, with name and address listed by number.
- diggan 2y agoOr, change the country to Sweden and anyone can still look it up, even online :) Checkout hitta.se, ratsit.se or similar services. Which reminds me that someone claimed that the income/amount of tax paid is the most private data American citizens have (the context was the DOGE/payments stuff), meanwhile every Swedish residents income is very public information. Negotiating your salary is a whole other ballgame when you know your colleagues salary and your boss knows that you know :)
- RataNova 2y agoAnd the worst part? Instead of acknowledging the mistake and fixing it, they just double down on policy rigidity
- crote 2y agoThey are institutionally incapable of fixing it. Companies like Google are too big for that. Individual workers and even entire teams don't matter. They are just another cog in a massive machine. Customer service representatives are forced to follow a script, and they are technically unable to deviate from it. After all, if there's an override button, it just takes one of your tens of thousands of minimum-wage workers to go rogue to end up with a massive compromise. To fix it you need your manager's manager's manager to file a change request, which will be put on an endless backlog to be potentially looked at by two dozen teams a few years from now. And if it's not a frequently-occurring issue, it's not worth the effort. Google isn't going to fix it because as an organization they aren't even aware you exist. You are collateral damage, and they are totally fine with that. The only way around this is to shortcut the entire process. Post on HN and hope some manager high enough in the policy/tech chain can be bothered to personally agenda the issue.
- Telemakhos 2y agoI wonder if there's any sort of quiet constraint outside of organizational inertia at work here. Telephone numbers were (are?) one of PRISM/XKeyScore's favorite "strong selectors," and Google, like all major players in communications, does things to make its services play well with the current iteration of surveillance tools. I wonder if the current, seemingly boneheaded approach to applying phone company data to account data via phone numbers, including overwriting names, is some new requirement of the surveillance system.
- have-a-break 2y agoI wish I could find a the exact court case, but legally you cannot associate anything online with an individual.
- trueismywork 2y agoIndian govt does it do, to great success.
- sebazzz 2y ago> It sounds like someone at Google (not necessarily a programmer) needs to read "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers:" > > > 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual The whiteboard algorithmic interview didn’t prepare nor test for this.