Librarian's Letter to Google Security
The author is 100% not wrong, but the problem is that, unfortunately, it is entirely possible that Google cannot have an authentication system that is correct for use by the elderly in a shared-machine environment <i>while being</i> correct for everyone else at the same time.<p>There are options to fix this, but they&#x27;re social, not technical. To get there, let&#x27;s start with the technical side of why the author&#x27;s proposed fix won&#x27;t work.<p>Google has no idea who anyone is. The only way they can know is the authentication process. And that process is under perpetual, high-investment attack by basically everyone because Google is a valuable target. Everyone from script kiddies to state actors have tried every method to not only compromise individual accounts but to build frameworks for systemic compromise, because when you focus on a single target you can invest the resources to, for example, set up a server that mimics the Google login page or a phone bot that sounds like it&#x27;s making calls from Google Security. Our author bemoans the lack of a back-channel to recover one&#x27;s account, but that back-channel is (a) perpetually overloaded with requests to access accounts (b) one of the major vectors for attempting to steal an account, because the back-channel is just one more interface on the systematically-attacked system.<p>(Source: I know someone who used to be in the loop on the back-channel. Scammers would call crying about kidnapped children who were going to die in a couple of hours unless they could get into a GMail account to get an address in a ransom note. Google had to train their phone crew to understand that probability was heavily skewed in the direction that if they capitulated, they were, within a statistically-negligible margin of error, <i>never</i> saving a kid and they were <i>always</i> letting an abusive significant other into their former partner&#x27;s account so they could ransack it for passwords and vulnerable 1FA access codes and fuck up someone&#x27;s life. Truly sick, heartbreaking stuff).<p>So that&#x27;s the system under attack. How to address the problem that the elderly and impoverished can&#x27;t afford to keep up with Google&#x27;s security measures?<p>There are a couple of options here. In the short run, the cheapest is &quot;Don&#x27;t use Google.&quot; Use an email provider under less persistent threat, and one small enough to offer high-touch technical support. This is one of those situations where free may be the enemy of &quot;cheap but affordable,&quot; and to bridge the gap someone could even start fundraising to pay for accounts on a service like that. There may even be meat on the bones of someone being a non-profit high-touch email provider of that sort, who can secure a person&#x27;s account by having them log in from a specific, privileged machine within sight of an operator who knows them personally. Go back to the old days of how the DARPANET was actually secured by &quot;every node is locked behind a door.&quot;<p>Another option is that a service libraries could provide (at possibly great expense to themselves, but options on the table) would be to serve as a credentials broker for their users. Have the library keep track of the 2FA side of things. Risky and adds expense to the library, but for this userbase that local service is the missing piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, this <i>isn&#x27;t</i> something Google is set up to provide; they&#x27;re too centralized, they aren&#x27;t actually <i>in</i> the communities where the need lies.