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Comment by brandon272

1 month ago

Ran into the same issue with my dad the other day. Has a passkey set up on his Google account. Bear in mind that he doesn’t know what a passkey is, so Google obviously sent him through a pattern at one point to get him to create one.

He didn’t have access to it the other day and we needed access to his account. He didn’t remember his password, and we were unable to reset it because you need the passkey! No other options to authenticate for a reset were available.

Add in the fact that I was trying to help him with this by long distance call and you can imagine the frustration.

17 comments

brandon272

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psunavy03  1 month ago

As someone with elderly parents, the Googles and the Microsofts of the world really don't seem to give a shit about the elderly anymore, if they ever did. Random UI updates and workflow changes with no announcements, thinking they're "intuitive."

One of these days the product managers who push these things thinking "oh, it's easy, you just . . ." are either going to be explaining it to confused Mom or Dad, or they're going to be elderly and irritated themselves. Until then I hope they stub their toe or step on random Legos regularly.

  • hedgehog  1 month ago

    I'm not even elderly but I would really like an e-mail client with a stable UI. I used to like Apple Mail but it's been a buggy mess since Catalina. It doesn't even sort or search mail reliably any more. It's basically a trope at this point but a robot-rewrite-in-Rust seems inevitable at this point.

    • Terr_  1 month ago

      A while ago I helped an elderly relative migrate off off a copy of Eudora that they'd been using for many years. (To Thunderbird.)

      Originally it was about difficulty migrating to a new laptop with a different version of Windows, but I was quite firm about it because when I realized it wasn't able to do secure connections for some reason, so the instant they took their laptop to public Wi-Fi...

      1 reply →

jesseendahl  1 month ago

>He didn’t remember his password, and we were unable to reset it because you need the passkey! No other options to authenticate for a reset were available.

Google treats both a password and a passkey as a primary factor, and if you forget either of them you have to go through their account recovery flow: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7682439?hl=en

AFAIK there's nothing different about the recovery scenario for a Google account in that state regardless of whether it has a password in use as its primary cred, a passkey in use as primary credential, or both.

  • brandon272  1 month ago

    Thanks. Upon further investigation we could have hit “Try another way” on the account recovery process UI a few times to get to a workable account recovery method.

    Would be nice if Google would lay your recovery options out for you (which I am used to it doing in regard to 2FA if you are doing a regular log in) instead of having to hammer the “Try another way” link repeatedly as it cycles through options.

lokar  1 month ago

I set my father (late 70s) up with a physical passkey (yubikey), and a backup key. He uses it for the important accounts (google, apple, bank, etc).

It’s been fine.

  • jesseendahl  1 month ago

    Yubikeys generally have much worse recovery scenarios than passkeys do, for consumers. In enterprise if you lose your yubikey, an IT admin can help you get back into your account. If you lose a security key as a consumer, you're generally in a much tougher account recovery situation.