I honestly can't remember who implemented 2FA in this case first, but it's not only a Google problem. People also end up locked out of their Yahoo and AOL accounts fairly regularly.
> The solution is so poorly delivered librarians are an ad hoc support team for thousands of people.
Well, yes. We're also expected to be teachers, social workers, etc. Everybody has been outsourcing/dumping the unprofitable work on us for decades now, why would Google and other tech companies act any differently? It's a problem that goes deeper than Google and the tech companies; it's a general assumption that infrastructure design can ignore the worst off parts of society and that people like volunteers and librarians will step in without considering whether or not we have the capacity for that as a society.
I just think instead of 'Google, fix it', it would have been wiser to make clear that this is a general problem (not a Google specific one) and to suggest things like partnerships between the GMail team and the PLA, etc.
I'm saying this in the spirit of 'yes, we need to take this territory but maybe a cavalry charge isn't the best way to do that given the other side has machine guns'.
> The solution is so poorly delivered librarians are an ad hoc support team for thousands of people.
Well, yes. We're also expected to be teachers, social workers, etc. Everybody has been outsourcing/dumping the unprofitable work on us for decades now, why would Google and other tech companies act any differently? It's a problem that goes deeper than Google and the tech companies; it's a general assumption that infrastructure design can ignore the worst off parts of society and that people like volunteers and librarians will step in without considering whether or not we have the capacity for that as a society.
I just think instead of 'Google, fix it', it would have been wiser to make clear that this is a general problem (not a Google specific one) and to suggest things like partnerships between the GMail team and the PLA, etc.
I'm saying this in the spirit of 'yes, we need to take this territory but maybe a cavalry charge isn't the best way to do that given the other side has machine guns'.