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Account Security Is Not A Game - It Is Real Life

Google has been playing games with their online products, so much, that some people seem to ignore the seriousness of the issues.

We see the occasional naivete, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue.
I feel like Google has gone over some sort of security event horizon -- trying so hard to evade hackers that too many authentic account holders are getting locked out, irreparably.
This would be blog owner (or possibly, blog thief) feels that she should not be responsible for remembering the necessary details, to login to her Blogger account. Alternately, she should cruise through account recovery, with no challenges.

The account recovery process is a part of account and blog security.

Loose account recovery standards lead to stolen blogs.

Account recovery, if not limited, leads to later requests to restore blog ownership.

We have already cautioned everybody, repeatedly, that thanks to allowed (and encouraged) anonymous blog ownership, it's not possible to easily identify the righteous blog owners, and consistently recover "stolen" blogs. The need to answer secondary authentication challenges will likely remain a part of Blogger account recovery, as one way to reduce blog theft.

People who publish regularly object to account recovery limitations less.

Most of the people objecting to account recovery limitations are owners of dormant blogs, and those that need repeated password reset.

People who actively publish their blogs are more likely to reliably maintain one or more backup authentication tokens - and to remember their account name and password. These people understand the need to keep their blogs under their control.

People who publish regularly get better support.

Blogger is going to support active blog publishers more.

  • Active blog publishers produce more legitimate blog content, and generate more traffic.
  • Active blog publishers are more likely to maintain and remember authentication details.
  • Active blog publishers need less attention, for account resets, blog recoveries, and other security issues.

It's simple business sense. People who actively publish their blogs generate more beneficial traffic, need less assistance, and cause less security headaches.

Blogger customers who actively publish their blogs want their blogs to remain their blogs. Those people will get the necessary support from Blogger and Google, because they encourage the support.

Comments

Noni said…
Yeah, I could never understand this. We see the same thing in the Adsense forum.

How can you NOT keep track of your account logins? After running into an issue (on blogger no less) some years back, I started keeping logins and updates on recipe cards. I have a small alphabetical folder to store them in. If the computer goes down, or can't be accessed I still have paper to recover them.

This actually was done for my family ... after having seen others in the AdSense forum whose family member had passed away and they couldn't shut down accounts without knowing the info, I decided my family needed access to that if something happened to me.

I don't trust my computer to store everything any longer and as I get older, well, my brain doesn't want to store it all either.

Learning that I needed to be more careful came from experience though. That's why I now have a folder full of recipe cards with site URL, login information, and instructions for my daughters (cause my husband would never be able to figure that out).
Nitecruzr said…
Thanks, Gracey,

The obtuseness occasionally perplexes me too. But Blogger has been encouraging obtuseness, for many years.

And every day we hear it "I am not a techie, so please speak to me as if I were 6 years old!".

LOL, some parents setup Blogger accounts for their 6 year old kids - and rarely glance at them, as they develop their blogs. And their only concern is "Is there a way that I can see what they post, before it gets posted?".

And your daughters probably have their own blogs, some you may not know about.

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