If you look at the gmail login page, you may notice that they specifically recommend you sign in in incognito mode when using a device that doesn't belong to you.
Their expressed policy makes an interesting contrast with their behavioral policy of freaking out and locking you out of your own account if you ever try to sign in on a device they suspect might not belong to you.
And of course, they're godawful at recognizing whether a device belongs to you. They freak out and send me "urgent" emails (on a different gmail account) whenever my phone switches between wifi and the cell network. Responding "yes, that was me" does nothing to prevent this.
I imagine it has nothing to do with security and is more about tracking. A similar failure mode with apple is that I essentially need to own two apple products with the same account to accomplish things that should only need one apple product, like making a free download from the app store.
These features came online not long after there were news articles about journalists being hacked.
The fact that Google is inconsistent about it is probably due to Google generally not being good in UX and frequently making these kind of mistakes where it seems there are multiple teams doing their own things incompatible with each other.
>probably due to Google generally not being good in UX
You misspelled "product lifecycle management." Google's lack of accomplishments in this department is a testament to their research, innovation, and committment to the disciplines of Six Omega (6ω) process strategies.
Can relate on the freak out part. Recently I logged in and generated an app password and it triggered 3 emails per action and to 2 different emails I had as my backup.
Their expressed policy makes an interesting contrast with their behavioral policy of freaking out and locking you out of your own account if you ever try to sign in on a device they suspect might not belong to you.
And of course, they're godawful at recognizing whether a device belongs to you. They freak out and send me "urgent" emails (on a different gmail account) whenever my phone switches between wifi and the cell network. Responding "yes, that was me" does nothing to prevent this.