Comment by megous

5 years ago

It's especially nice when traveling. I was once asked by a client to do something while I was in other country about 5k km from regular location. Couldn't login to the apps account for this reason (no backup email or phone set). So I didn't do the work.

I suspect it's some work-life balance enhancing thing. :D

I don't really mind, since it also helps me bash Google services in front of my clients who still use them, without being aware of these failure modes.

Personally speaking, it's absolutely a no go service. I can probably handle service loss at home quite fine, but if I relied on google or other services with these "anti-abuse" features while traveling that would be very stressful. I usually print out everything important before departing so I don't rely on any electronics, anyway, because none of it is as reliable and as quickly accessible as a piece of paper or a bunch of cash.

8 comments

megous

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thaumasiotes  5 years ago

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.

  • ouid  5 years ago

    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.

    • thrashh  5 years ago

      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.

      1 reply →

  • blntechie  5 years ago

    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.