This problem, and the not-my-problem responses, really highlight the self centered mindset we have encouraged. What if that homeless person was your substance-abusing sibling? A friend from school with mental health issues? We need to collectively take more responsibility for those in the worst situations.
If you've every tried to teach an old person how to use 2FA you know it's an uphill battle. Using a fingerprint reader isn't even doable for some. And we're all going to be old one day.
Practically, we need ideas like to 2FA to gain tractionas widely as possible, while realising that isn't everywhere. And some people will never use 2FA, need higher thresholds for triggering lockouts, and need alternative methods for re-establishing identity to their ID provider (google in this case). For some people that might be their local librarians or community shelter, legal aid groups, and banks.
This is missing the forest for the trees. Of course we'd be more emotionally involved if it was someone we knew, that's not hypocritical. Most people aren't against fixing societal problems, either. As it stands, homelessness is definitely something that affects a ton of people so it definitely is our problem as long as we are city dwellers.
The problem here is that misapplied empathy can lead to terrible decisions. Having Google change their 2FA system for this group would be one such decision. It's similar to the 'think of the kids + terrorism' attacks on encryption. It's socially difficult to argue against these ideas because you are then labeled as a terrible and non-empathetic person, but the solutions themselves make one other thing worse without really being helpful other than for garnering retweets and likes.
In this case, we actually aren't being ambitious enough. Why are we having a system where we give out phones every 12 weeks to each homeless person? We'd probably save money for the program by developing some sort of dedicated device designed to be harder to steal or lose. Maybe a high-autonomy low-powered KaiOS smartphone that can be attached as a strap? It's not like the current devices are working.
Why is it such a hassle to keep the same number after a theft? We could investigate there too. Improving this would be better than decreasing the effectiveness of gmail's measures.
Heck, if we want to focus on Gmail, why not focus on why it's the default choice for the homeless to begin with, as opposed to removing features.
We could try to solve the problem structurally but we prefer the caseworker approach, because it's more easily packaged 'empathy' than actually fixing the homelessness issue. It's like people who travel to developing countries to 'help', when the locals need investments and training facilities, not extra warm bodies. Actually giving homes to the homeless would probably be cheaper than whatever we are doing now, even taking into account the mental illness and drug-abuse problems that factor into this.
Look, I'd love to fix homelessness in America! Really, I would! But Google's policies are causing people to get locked out of their accounts now, today.
Google could put a toggle in Google Account settings titled something like "Allow anyone who knows my password to log in to my Google account (less secure)." It could sit above a description of the risks involved. It would need to be disabled by default, and it wouldn't help users who don't know about it. It certainly would not fix homelessness in society. But it would do a lot of good for a lot of people!
Would this option lead to some increased number of hacked accounts? Probably, but these would be accounts that explicitly opted in to that risk! I think it's excessively paternalistic to not provide the option. Every life situation is unique, and people know their own lives better than Google does.
This is a result of taking a product made by someone else for a certain purpose and then using it for one it isn't intended. Its not Google's fault gmail is a bad fit here. They didn't design it with this use case in mind.
The solution is to use one that is. Why are case workers directing the homeless to setup gmail accounts? Because they haven't been provided with a better solution by the system they work within.
So its the government's problem to fix. They are the ones handing out phones and setting the expectation to communicate through email. So they can either design an email service themselves that fits their needs. Or they can work with an industry partner, such as google or someone else to provide the service.
Normal gmail is a one size fits all commodity solution. It works well enough for most people, most of the time. Specialized problems call for specialized solutions. Complaining that google didn't think of you is misplaced.
Should users with poor vision also have to use a special blind-person email provider? Because, I'd expect supporting screen readers to take significantly more effort than adding the setting I outlined.
Also, if I was homeless, I wouldn't want my email address to indicate I was homeless.
I broadly agree that it isn't Google's job to cater to everyone, but in this instance, the ask seems overwhelmingly reasonable—and less than what we expect in other circumstances.
What is the ask that is overwhelmingly reasonable? As has been pointed out to me and others, Google already offers a way to turn off 2FA - https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1064203 Naively this seems like it should solve the 2FA problem for the unhoused community members in question.
Even when 2FA is disabled, Google will insist on additional verification (phone, recovery email, etc) if it thinks something about your browser or IP address is unusual, even if you know your password. If you don't have a verification method (or cannot access it), Google will literally just lock you out. I have personally experienced this.
OK. That raises all sorts of follow-up questions, as turning off security measures can be expected to have consequences.
What should Google do in the scenario that this purposely-low-security-for-the-unhoused account is breached? What about abuse? Are we OK with Google just shutting off accounts in that scenario? Are we prepared to accept that the members of our community experiencing being unhoused will find themselves constantly creating new accounts as their old ones are shut off or rendered unusual from the consequences of purposely-low-security-for-the-vulnerable?
Remember, things like gmail accounts are under constant attack. Security measures, the very ones we're talking about disabling, help keep those attacks at bay. Each of those things that triggers verification actually lines up with real attack patterns.
So while this may be a small-ish thing to ask for, I'm a little concerned about the consequences. We're literally asking to offer the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society shittier security and ignoring the effects of this.
> Are we OK with Google just shutting off accounts in that scenario? Are we prepared to accept that the members of our community experiencing being unhoused will find themselves constantly creating new accounts as their old ones are shut off or rendered unusual from the consequences of purposely-low-security-for-the-vulnerable?
I am, yes, if the alternative is that they loose access to their account every few months!
Also, at least this way people have the ability to keep their accounts truly safe if they choose a strong, unique password. If Google just locks them out no matter what, there's no recourse.
> I am, yes, if the alternative is that they loose access to their account every few months!
Good to hear, though I confess to a bit of confusion. The issue I pointed to is that they're going to lose access to their accounts frequently as their accounts get breached, abused, and shut off. As opposed to losing access because they lost their phone number.
> Also, at least this way people have the ability to keep their accounts truly safe if they choose a strong, unique password. If Google just locks them out no matter what, there's no recourse.
As described in the Twitter thread, we're talking about people who already struggle to remember their passwords. I doubt this will improve if we require basically regular people to have strong passwords, but perhaps you have reason to think differently.
Basically I think you're trading one cause of lockout without recourse for another cause of lockout without recourse with this proposal. This does not strike me as progress. For my own part, I think Google is the wrong place to be trying to address this issue - perhaps porting phone numbers within the Lifeline phone program would be better.
I don't think people's accounts are getting hacked anywhere near three times per year. And while remembering passwords is a problem, surely it's easier than remembering a password and keeping track of a second factor device?
You're right, people's accounts aren't getting hacked that often. This is because of a wide array of security measures - the ones you're suggesting be disabled. The frequency of breaches goes up significantly without those in place, especially when coupled with the kind of weak password likely to be chosen by struggling, marginalized, vulnerable people whose priority is not keeping bots at bay.
In short - yes, but the consequences defeat the point.
Gmail is a perfect fit in theory. Google provides a product, workspace, where you can hand out gmail addresses and reset them at need. Given that the cost of providing such accounts is actually less because the support burden falls on the city it might be possible to convince Google to provide them at less than the standard cost.
If Google is going to position itself as the face of the internet, then it has to live up to that responsibility; it can’t go, hm yes, use our browser and our email service and our phones, but only if you fit into this category of prescribed users.
Of course they can. It's the only thing they've ever done. I honestly can't think of a company that thinks less of its users than Google does - that's because in their view, they have no users - they only have eyeballs, that are worth anywhere from fractional cents to hundreds of dollars every time they can grab them.
Using "support" and "Google" in the same sentence is laughable. They barely support the ad clients that pay their freight. Google's entire business model is built around NEVER providing support for the users of their technologies, and killing off any products that don't monetize.
> They didn't design it with this use case in mind.
Where on the gmail page does it say "not for homeless people, sorry"?
Adding (and forcing) 2FA was a recent decision from Google, which came a long time after Gmail the product was already introduced. There are millions of accounts which were created long before anyone had an idea what a smartphone was, let alone phone-based 2FA.
Not having 2FA is going to allow some portion of users to get hacked. When those users do get hacked they will need a way to regain control of the account. Methods of regaining access to an account are notorious for bad actors social engineering their way to gaining control of accounts.
2FA relieves some of that, because even if you do get hacked you can provide a token from the authenticator that was attached to the account, proving that you do in fact own that account.
> I think it's excessively paternalistic to not provide that option.
I don't find it paternalistic. The goal is to cut down on support costs by reducing the number of users who get hacked and need assistance regaining access to their accounts, and to force users to have a method of demonstrating they own the account even if they can't log in. That it confers some additional security to users is nice, but not really the end goal.
> Not having 2FA is going to allow some portion of users to get hacked. When those users do get hacked they will need a way to regain control of the account.
I don't think they do! This would be part of the tradeoff.
Currently, people who cannot use or rely on 2FA are getting locked out of their accounts even if they weren't hacked and knew their password! Isn't that worse?
> Currently, people who cannot use or rely on 2FA are getting locked out of their accounts even if they weren't hacked and knew their password! Isn't that worse?
I don't think so. You seem to presume the end state of both is that the user is locked out, which is only half true.
With a lost 2FA device, the user and everyone else is locked out of the account.
With a compromised account, the user may be locked out but the hacker is not. The hacker is free to impersonate the user to social services, hospitals, potential employers, etc. If there's no mechanism for the user to regain control of the account, the hacker will have that access until the user can contact all of those people and give them a new email address. That could take a while, especially if we're considering that the user has a high chance of not having a phone at the moment.
> Currently, people who cannot use or rely on 2FA are getting locked out of their accounts even if they weren't hacked and knew their password! Isn't that worse?
Not if it's happening to fewer people than the alternative.
> I don't find it paternalistic. The goal is to cut down on support costs by reducing the number of users who get hacked and need assistance regaining access to their accounts, and to force users to have a method of demonstrating they own the account even if they can't log in. That it confers some additional security to users is nice, but not really the end goal.
So we should be mindful of Google's profit margins, instead of homeless people's access to vital services?
If the service is truly vital it should be provided by the government, not Google. The government would also be free to set security policies and provide support at the level and cost demanded by the public. It is not and should not be the role of a private enterprise to act as a backstop for the fabric of society when it is not in their interests or their customers' overall interests.
The vital services are provided by the government, but require an email address. Some people have trusted Google to be their email provider, and Google is failing some of those people by denying them access unnecessarily.
I'm saying that if the public/government doesn't feel like Google's security policies are compatible with the homeless, the simplest solution is to set up a government-run email host.
But we should also expect Google to give a small crap about the troubles it's putting some of its users through, especially when this is so important to some of its most vulnerable users, and adding an option to disable 2FA is such a small feature for a Mega corporation.
umm you DO know that Gmail isn't only free email, right? Like, just use another one which doesn't force 2FA. Why is this become an issue? I don't get it
Why is it fine? Why should we not ask and expect that one of the largest corporations on the planet make a tiny effort to improve the lives of some of its users at very little cost to them?
Sure, homeless people and those who help them should pick an alternate free email service. And the government should either set up its own email or stop requiring email contact for this sort of thing. But for people who are already Google users, Google should also try to make their lives significantly easier with a tiny bit of effort (allow someone to explicitly disable 2FA for gmail - with all the warnings and cautions that they can).
• The people who want security get to keep all the security they get today.
• The people who don't think about security and leave default settings intact keep all the security they get today.
• The people who explicitly ask for less security get less security.
• Some of the homeless will get increased access to vital services.
It's a win-win—unless you believe, for some reason, that people should have security forced on them even if they explicitly ask to not have it. I fundamentally don't understand this mindset. People should have the right to do dangerous things if they are warned of the risks involved.
>The people who explicitly ask for less security get less security.
The problem with that is less security is almost always more usable than more security, which leads to the greater amount of people being in that state, which is not just a danger to the user making the choice, it is a danger to others.
Unless the requirement is extremely onerous, very few people will go into settings to check if it can be circumvented. For homeless people, it seems that it is indeed extremely onerous, so they or those who help them will have a reason to do this, but few others.
Not sure why this is being downvited. You could argue that forcing security upon users is why everyone knows about password-based logon today. Same could be said about the initiative for HTTPS everywhere.
We should probably not force private companies to spend (or lose, no difference) money to solve societal problems that they are in no way responsible for.
That's like forcing pepboys to change the tires of senior citizens for free because social security isn't paying enough.
Maybe we should put our efforts towards fixing problems instead of asking private companies to put a bandaid on it at their expense.
This seems like something the homeless services are best positioned to fix by providing email hosting to their clients. They know their clients are actual humans, not hackers, so can provide the continuity that the giant providers can't.
That's almost exactly what Google has done. Here's how you turn off 2FA on your account:
1. Go to myaccount.google.com
2. Press "Security"
3. Press "2 step verification"
4. Enter your password
5. Press "Turn off"
6. Confirm the dialog that says "Turning off 2-Step Verification will remove the extra security on your account, and you’ll only use your password to sign in."
Those steps don’t actually turn off 2FA for Google accounts.
If you login from a new computer or unrecognized IP, Google forces you to use the YouTube app on your phone to enter a “code” to login. It sometimes doesn’t even let you get a text code.
God forbid I lose my phone or delete the YouTube app and login from a new IP. I don’t know how I would even get into my account.
I don’t know how this isn’t a wider spread issue affecting more people but I guess Google developers live in a perfect world where the YouTube app auth can never fail and you never lose your phone.
Have you actually tried disabling 2FA? Because I just did. I followed the steps above then signed in to Google from a clean browser profile with password only. No problem. Then I connected to a VPN in a different country and signed in from another clean profile. Again, no problem.
If you have 2FA enabled, then yes, of course it will ask you for the second factor if you're doing something unusual.
But with 2FA disabled, logging in with just a password works fine.
I have no idea what part of Google's fingerprinting panopticon decided it was okay to let you in from a clean profile, but I can promise you that in the past, I have been locked out. Yes, 2FA was turned off. And there are lots of other reports of this happening around the web, and even here on HN, so I'm not unique.
My problem isn’t that gmail is too secure, it’s that the 2FA setting doesn’t actually turn off what it’s supposed to turn off. Not sure if this is a bug or intended behavior.
Just use another email provider. There are many other free ones and reasonably priced paid services. The paid services tend to better listen to their users since they’re the real customers
That's Weird, I've never had to do that. I can just login to Google with my username/password. If it doesn't recognize the device it just pushes a notification of the sign in to my phone
It's just a notification, it can be ignored (for me). I don't usually even notice its there until hours later. You don't have to acknowledge it in any way.
It also has nothing to do with the YouTube app, and there is no code I have to enter anywhere.
I've never had any form of 2FA on my Google account.
I recall that the problem was broader than 2FA. They also re-verify accounts that have been idle, or that are being accessed from a new location. Or issues if you've forgotten the password and don't have a phone.
This is exactly it. And if you don't have a verification method on file, Google will just lock the account if it thinks something about your browser or IP address is unusual. Even if you know your password.
Speaking as a long-time Gmail user who doesn't have a mobile, this is kind of terrifying. Sounds like I need to look into moving to Fastmail or somesuch pronto.
While your proposal is perfectly reasonable, I couldn't help but notice that your opening was an example of the "'think of the kids + terrorism'" mentioned by GP.
> Look, I'd love to stop CP distribution in America! Really, I would! But Google's encryption policies are preventing law enforcement from intercepting pedophile communications now, today.
It's the same "think of [vulnerable group]" type of statement.
The purpose of that sentence was to bring us back to the issue at hand. GP was essentially saying (as I interpreted it) that we should focus on the root causes of homelessness instead of worrying about day-to-day concerns like how the homeless access email. I think we should do both, especially when the latter would be relatively simple.
But also, yes, there are in fact many times when it's important to consider the needs of different groups of people! That isn't to say that the ends always justify the means—it depends on what the means are—but reasonable accommodations should be made where possible.
> Google could put a toggle in Google Account settings titled something like "Allow anyone who knows my password to log in to my Google account (less secure)."
Google allows someone of your choosing, who must also have a GMail account, to takeover one's account after x months of inactivity. It's not great but it's better than nothing and it has the benefit of being an option that exists today.
I can understand your statement, but by doing that you will find that A LOT of people will check the insecure options because “that a not going to happen to me”.
Remember you have the “rescue keys” from google to avoid these kind of problems.
The bigger problem is how you teach those people how to use the services in their situation.
While I don't think that's a bad idea in some situations, it means trusting the case worker with access to the entire account (as they could use the recovery email to reset the password). It's also an extra burden to put on the case worker, and the individual who has to coordinate with the case worker.
Additionally, this only exists in some magical, fantastical world where the unhoused only have one case worker. In reality the unhoused bounce between a patchwork of government and non-profit services, and because of the soul-crushing workload and emotional labor of those jobs the individuals in each role are also subject to frequent turnover. So the only way this would work is an account that's shared between everyone who might work with that unhoused client at each organization (there are often multiple handling different aspects such as housing, mental health, money for groceries, etc.), and as clients move geographically or do other things that make them eligible or ineligible for each organization's services, that recovery account would also need to change or transition to some new org. Even a single recovery email address is just a totally unworkable solution for the reality they face.
> Actually giving homes to the homeless would probably be cheaper than whatever we are doing now, even taking into account the mental illness and drug-abuse problems that factor into this.
This point is worth reiterating. Homelessness can be solved by providing housing. Yes, homelessness is a complex multi-faceted problem, but the first order solution to the problem is to provide housing.
Homelessness is a problem with huge externalities to society. Put another way, homelessness is an enormously expensive solution to the problem of providing space for humans to live.
Some homeless people don't want to deal with the maintenance of a home.
Some homeless people aren't capable of the maintenance of a home due to mental or physical issues.
Some homeless people refuse to accept help for mental issues for fear of being trapped in a psych ward.
Simply put, you need to split homelessness into temporary and chronic populations. For the temporary group, homelessness is the problem. For the chronic group, it is a symptom. Treating the symptom will not have a long-term impact on much of the population.
Source: conversations with a social worker friend who spent years working with the homeless population in our metro area.
> Some homeless people don't want to deal with the maintenance of a home.
You've got a good point. These leaves are really starting to pile up, and the snow will be upon us soon. I think I'll just say fuck it and sleep under a bridge, and leave the grounds keeping to the parks department.
You did set up a straw man solely to get knocked down, right? In actuality, the idea of giving "housing to everyone" doesn't mean an idyllic single family stick-and-drywall dwelling with a yard, but rather something communal - like a less-populous more-dignified shelter with a modicum of persistent personal space. The maintenance would be institutional, and come out of the same operating budget as administration, utilities, etc.
I feel like most of the "some homeless just want to be homeless" argument revolves around baking in assumptions that public housing should come with a bunch of strings attached, to make the residents' lives "better". In your comment, this is the responsibility for maintenance or mental health treatment. Such conditions are what turns people off, not some intrinsic love for sleeping rough.
How many of those chronic homeless would have only been temporarily homeless if they had the security of housing early on before their situation went even further downhill?
Sometimes mental issues are purely genetic but often they can also arise from or be exacerbated by trauma. And homelessness sure is traumatic.
Most homeless people do not have a severe mental illness (around 70%) [1]. For most homeless people, it's primarily an issue of housing affordability. The solution is to reduce the cost of housing.
For the people who need more support -- due to mental illness or otherwise -- the affordable, effective solution is permanent supportive housing [2].
Wait, what? That's precisely opposite of what your source [1] says:
“70% were receiving mental health treatment or had in the past.”
"An April 2016 survey of New York City’s homeless population reported that unsheltered homeless individuals were most likely to be severely mentally ill single males."
Something like 1 in 5 of the homeless in San Francisco have a traumatic brain injury.
None of these people are going to be fixed with mere "housing".
Even worse, putting these people who desperately need medical treatment in "mere housing" is very likely to cause the "mere housing" program to fail when it could have succeeded. The homeless who need "mere housing" don't want to be near the homeless who need "significant medical treatment" any more than anybody else does.
Homelessness has an "Amdahl's Law" nature to it. You have to separate out the different types of homelessness and apply the correct solution. And you will only gain the improvement for the group you "solved".
Consequently, you can solve 20% of the homeless problem and people will still say you "failed" because 80% of the homeless are still in their vision.
Unfortunately it's more complicated than this. There have been nonprofit organizations and government initiatives to give homeless people space in unoccupied hotels for example.
What ends up happening is they generally just destroy the living space in a variety of ways.
It's because the majority of homelessness is an issue of mental health. In the USA, there are pretty much zero mental health resources for people in poverty.
> What ends up happening is they generally just destroy the living space in a variety of ways.
Citation very much needed here. This certainly does happen. But, I don’t believe this the general (i.e. typical) outcome. From what I understand talking to acquaintances who work in this area, wrecking the place is not the typical outcome. And property damage is generally cheaper to address than the constant provision of emergency services.
I agree that mental health (and substance use) are major factors in homelessness, but those issues are more or less impossible to address when people are living on the street with no permanent address and no place to keep e.g. a cell phone without it being stolen.
At least a data point here - my city of Austin is buying a hotel to convert into housing for the homeless.
This has gone badly. The property sees intense vandalism and destruction, the neighbors are afraid for their safety, and the whole thing is an amazingly expensive boondoggle.
Seems like a bad situation. But follow the timetable:
1) Austin buys the property
2) Begins renovations on vacant premises
3) Vandalism takes place
---------------
4) The conversion is complete
5) Property officially offered to homeless residents
Steps 4 and 5 haven't happened yet. So homeless people who "generally just destroy the living space" isn't a good fit for what's going on. This is simply a situation of an unsecured construction site that has attracted squatters and vandals.
Oh they sell it as soon as they can (copper is easy to recycle and carries direct value) and then use the money for whatever.
The risk of course is that you are ripping potentially live circuits out of a building. It usually requires you to already be impaired and desperate to do it. It's that fun combo of illegal and dangerous.
But it also wasn't homeless people being legally housed there. If your point is "people who live there take better care of the space", then that's what Austin is trying to do. Convert squatters stealing copper to the kind of people who live there.
> It's because the majority of homelessness is an issue of mental health.
This isn't true or at least it doesn't start that way. What people don't understand is that there isn't a single homeless population. You have people who are temporarily homeless and people who are chronically homeless. The temporarily homeless are people who lost jobs, fell on hard times, etc etc. The simplest solution for them is yes to give them housing. The chronically homeless is where things get more complicated and those are the people who typically need mental health and abuse services. The simplest and most efficient thing we can do is help the temporarily homeless and prevent them from becoming chronically homeless.
We're pretty good at getting the temporarily homeless into housing. Obviously any improvements are good, but fundamentally the issue is with the chronically homeless who often have other factors going on.
This is the industry term for people between housing (they can't make rent, they got kicked out, etc). It differentiates from the chronically homeless who can not be rehoused simply by giving them a place to live.
yes there are different castes of homeless, some do quite well, and are not problematic. others are of disorganized psyche, and cause much of thier own problems, resulting in no one wanting them around.
The problem is multifaceted. And homeless people are not a monolith. There are large cohorts for whom simply receiving a home would make life significantly easier.
What sometimes ends up happening. It’s true that we have huge gaps for mental health and substance abuse but there are examples (famously, Salt Lake City) of such programs working. The mixed history says we need to take the problem seriously, not give up.
What you describe is not "giving the homeless a home" its giving them a temporary, poor substitute for a home that they have no personal interest in"
Also your sweeping statement about the destruction of their living space smells to high heaven prejudiced thinking based on myth or hearsay rather than actual data.
> Homelessness can be solved by providing housing.
They used to be called asylums, and the problem is what to do if the homeless person refuses to go. I wonder why you don't hear about homelessness in totalitarian states...
Homelessness in the US is a complex problem. I found the Soft White Underbelly interview series by Mark Laita insightful when learning more about it: https://www.softwhiteunderbelly.com
Mark spent considerable time earning the trust of LA's skid row population – a large roadside tent community – and has a series of 1:1 interviews with a slice of the population, exploring their histories, challenges, preferences, and culture.
Mark doesn't believe that many (most?) of the skid row population would benefit from being provided with housing, and that issues of trauma, mental health, and childhood family environment are what he believes would have the highest leverage on the problem.
This is of course just one perspective on the problem, but Mark's perspective taught me quite a bit.
I have a feeling that the issue isn't homelessness really, but the kinds of people that end up homeless cause problems anyway. Someone won't stop being violent or committing crime because they got moved from a tent to a studio.
I don't think the temporally homeless, like someone down on their luck. makes up the issues people have with homeless. You see some crazy person, then you see that person is homeless, your answer to that is "oh give them a studio apartment!" and not lets help them with their issue. Police should be policing violent people, for some reason instead of that we want to build homes in the middle of nowhere and drop them off their. They're still going to cause issues.
I think people would be a lot more compassionate towards homeless people generally if the violent and destructive subset of homeless people were put in prison where they belong. With the awful ones out of the way, the peaceful sympathetic homeless people would become the public face of homelessness and the general public would be much more willing to to address their problems constructively (e.g. provide housing to them.)
But instead the justice system is set up to give effective impunity to the worst sort of homeless people; they're back on the street days after being arrested (if they are even arrested in the first place.) They cause incredible damage and commotion, so they hog all the public attention and give all homeless people a very bad name through association.
> Having Google change their 2FA system for this group would be one such decision.
It could be opt-out.
> It's similar to the 'think of the kids + terrorism' attacks on encryption.
No, it's not. Nobody choosing whether _they_ enable 2FA affects your decision to use it or not. It's more like forcing drugs down somebody's throat because you believe it benefits them and everybody else is doing it anyway.
> Why is it such a hassle to keep the same number after a theft? We could investigate there too.
Sim-jacking. Somebody could claim to have lost it and just take your number. This has happened before. The problem of authentication is fundamental in security and Google are just passing the buck onto phone service providers.
> Heck, if we want to focus on Gmail, why not focus on why it's the default choice for the homeless to begin with, as opposed to removing features.
Because it's free and the emails don't bounce. Most big tech has 2FA now.
homelessness is definitely something that affects a ton of people so it definitely is our problem as long as we are city dwellers.
We have to break out of the stereotype that homelessness is a city problem. It isn't. Far from it.
Homelessness is more obvious in cities because there are fewer places for homeless people to be. But there are plenty of homeless people camped out in rural and suburban towns, if you know what to look for.
I recently lived in a snooty city suburb where most of the homes cost from $600,000 to $10 million, and guess what — the drainage tunnels beneath the Home Depot, the maintenance underpasses in the parks, the undeveloped wooded lots were all full of homeless people.
Promulgating the notion that homelessness is a city problem is what allows suburban and rural politicians to cut funding for homeless services because "it doesn't affect my constituents."
What I mean is that it's almost impossible not to be affected if you are a city-dweller, it's a lot harder to ignore. Most will ignore it, but still acknowledge it as a problem for them. Even in a cynical and dehumanizing way.
I would argue yours is a poor point of comparison and you have missed the forest.
google isn't requiring specific 2FA data, like address, because they are stalwart guardians of data. They are harvesting data because that is their business.
The homeless don't have enough data to be of value to an entity like goolge
If Google were to shrivel up and dissolve, I would not mind at all. But what's currently happening is that a metric ton of people are using their free email service and won't stop doing so any time soon, and so they had an incentive to hand-hold and force along 2FA that coincides with some form of public utility: fewer security breaks and financial ruin for massive globs of vulnerable, tech-illiterate people.
I like your comment because it gradually stumbles upon the actual solution. We aren't being ambitious enough, but developing a device designed to be harder to steal or lose is timidly incremental. By the last paragraph, we're talking about ending homelessness entirely. That is an ambitious — but achievable! — goal, and one that actually addresses the root of the problem.
If you mean a stumble in the sense that I'm not truly aware of the implications of what I'm proposing, that's not really the case. I personally believe we could be yet more ambitious than what I am describing here, but I realize that most people aren't going to be on board. So the next best thing is to propose a different framework of looking at the problem and a different methodology for looking for solutions. A dedicated device would be incremental, yes, but what matters is that if we unlock the capacity to think towards this sort of innovation the big changes will follow naturally.
Just to clarify, I meant “stumble” as in it seemed to be somewhat stream of consciousness; just happening to end up at “give everyone a home” rather than planning a route there from the opening sentence.
Don't single out email. The problem is much larger than that. Any big megacorp nowadays figured out that the best way to do whatever they are doing is to provide the service to the median consumer, and just cut the rest out as perfectly as they can. It started with the idiotic get a number to wait in line at the branch offices, IVR audio labyrinths on the phone, completely useless self-service portals, and now there are no branch offices anymore, and in many cases the "helpdesk" is just a dumb caricature of a robot in a fucking submenu of a tragedy of a hacked together mobile app.
Sure, it's great that gmail is cheap, after all "it's free". But Google (and MSFT, fuck outlook.com in particular for their completely anti-competitive spam "protection" that only accepts email from other big providers) cross-finances gmail from their ad business, completely distorting every kind of service and product markets.
---
For email in particular what's needed is a LetsEncrypt-like community-driven solution for reputation management and acceptance of emails from reputable sources by the big inbox providers.
The long version (if it’s patronising please skim forward, I’m writing as an explainer for anyone else that comes along):
E-mail was originally a means to communicate informally between two participants over the Internet.
In this early version of the system the message would leave your machine, go to your Mail server, then the recipients mail server, then their inbox. This would complete the transmission and a copy would exist at both ends.
Companies providing ostensibly free online e-mail inboxes have slick sign-up funnels that on the surface seem to be offering a very similar system as the one above, with very little in the way of regulation around either the sign-up funnel or the mailbox (and which do not explain the catastrophic life consequences that can occur as a result of losing access to your mailbox).
These new mailboxes work differently from those of the early Internet, though:
1) Your mail is sent to your mail server. A copy may or may not be retained locally.
2) Your mail server transmits the message to the recipients mail server as before.
3) The recipient receives a notification of the e-mail and may or may not retain a copy locally.
This infrastructure is ubiquitous and now not quite 30 years after the early Internet we have an issue where you’ll be required to have an e-mail address for almost all public services and common accounts that have little to no online component. Your entire life, more or less, may pass through that inbox.
If one day you lose access to the account (in that you insert your password and the provider says no), you will lose access to your entire e-mail history.
You may attempt to reset some passwords for essential services, but you can’t, because they’re sending e-mails to verify your identity - which you’ll never be able to receive.
You move on, create a new account, and attempt to start over. However, e-mails - potentially important e-mails containing personal information - continue to be delivered to a mailbox that you can’t access ever again. Maybe you miss some important alerts.
Perhaps it was a gmail account that had your entire photo and video history in google photos. That’s now gone too. With your passwords, if you’re using chrome passwords.
You rebuild, and a couple of years pass, and perhaps someone else gets access to your account (either through a hack, or a rogue employee with access rights, or someone who guessed a badly thought out password).
You never find out that the account was accessed, so have no-one to complain to, and maybe you end up with savings or 401K/pensions getting emptied. Which in a lot of cases wouldn’t be discovered until they’re due to be collected.
Some of the above might sound far-fetched, but you’d be surprised how much having access to an email inbox is accepted proof-of-identity in 2022.
My mailing address and phone could also be key factors in my life related to identification but there is little regulation there.
"If one day you lose access to the account (in that you insert your password and the provider says no), you will lose access to your entire e-mail history"
This comes down to personal responsibility assuming you lost the password or even if it's the companies fault you should prepare for thus.
Really Original e-mail, the mail server was your computer (mainframe) where your account was. It's Greg@ because that's Greg's username when he logs in. Greg doesn't need outlook because his mail is just a folder of text files. There's a mail agent but it's running on Greg's computer.
> The problem here is that misapplied empathy can lead to terrible decisions.
That's not the problem, that's a vague wave at a generic class of innuendo that could be used just as easily to rationalize not allowing your child to eat ice cream or Japanese internment. You have to make the case why Google changing their 2FA system is so much more important than the homeless having phone service, you can't just say "sometimes, empathy can be bad."
I'm not getting that from the rest of the comment, which seems like a gish gallop around a bunch of other things that we're also not going to do for the homeless, and about which you or somebody else can say "it's only human to be worried about other people going through these issues, but empathy can be bad. The answer isn't that HUD should change the second line of the third section of Form B, it's that we should fix the homeless problem completely."
edit: We can't use as an excuse for not making small changes that we should be making larger changes. The excuses that one makes to avoid making small changes will apply more so to larger changes.
I can make a very specific case for it. Out of 1.5+ billion users, millions of which are barely tech-literate and vulnerable, with gmail a constant target for malicious entities. That means intuitively at least hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people getting cleaned out of their life savings. Changing things for billions in exchange for a marginal benefit to thousands is bizarre.
It's not a 'gish gallop' but a framework for looking at the issue. I'm not saying that empathy is sometimes bad, I'm saying that it can't be the starting point for our reasoning. It can be the impetus that makes us act, but the actual solution should come first. Sure, maybe none of the things I'm proposing will be implemented. Maybe they're all godawful ideas, but I can't fix the problem in the five minutes it took to write the post or even five decades of intense research on my own. But it's clear that keeping to that pseudo-empathy performative martyrdom mindset is an active roadblock against the more ambitious solutions. And it leads to truly awful ideas such as getting rid of encryption, rights, and so on.
So you don't want Google to do anything or what is the purpose of all this verbiage? Which moreover, unjustly dismisses whole issue as "marginal benefit to thousands". Being able to keep/recover email address is so much more than a marginal benefit, and there are many more than thousands of homeless in the US alone.
Maybe Google can do something. Just it probably shouldn't be something that alters security measures for billions.
I'm not dismissing the whole issue, just that it was presented in a way that's not actually conducive to helping the homeless.
If you remove forced 2FA, you would be dismissing the hundreds of thousands (at minimum) of tech illiterate people out of the 1.5 billion users who would get cleaned out in the coming weeks. Why do their lives not factor into your calculus? Are they not vulnerable too? All of this for a measure that could be resolved in so many other ways.
This is the problem I'm trying to illustrate. This sort of moral appeal helps no one, and in fact endangers other populations. If the goal truly were to help people, no one would EVER suggest an alteration that would expose billions for the benefit of thousands.
You really expect people caring for homeless to come with some ready made technically feasible solution? Of course they will do moral appeals and suggest potentially dangerous solutions first. That happens all the time! Getting a response "that aint gonna work get away" isn't appropriate here. Dialogue is, and for that we must listen a bit.
>In this case, we actually aren't being ambitious enough. Why are we having a system where we give out phones every 12 weeks to each homeless person? We'd probably save money for the program by developing some sort of dedicated device designed to be harder to steal or lose. Maybe a high-autonomy low-powered KaiOS smartphone that can be attached as a strap? It's not like the current devices are working.
You're putting the cart before the horse. The far simpler solution is for the government to provide the homeless with email. Now the auth can work however you want.
I agree that it would be a good start. What I'm saying is that the system of having to replace phones every 12 weeks is dysfunctional on its own and probably should be looked at.
Yup. Why break 2FA when we could have the Obamaphone program work with the case workers so that they don’t loose track of people in the first place?
Also, homelessness isn’t the problem we think it is. It’s millions of problems. Any solution will never help more than a subset of the homeless population. We need to iterate on small solutions to make progress.
Utter nonsense. Mandated treatment for drug addiction and severe mental illness would tackle half the problem.
Then provide contingent housing based on staying sober, sticking to your treatment plan, and getting a job. You can graduate when you’re able to pay your own way.
For non-addict/mentally ill homeless, it’s housing contingent on employment, graduate when you can pay your own way.
Is that really your only takeaway here? Feels like a parody of HN comments. It could be any other equivalent, I don't know. Even if it's KaiOS the homeless probably have other things on their mind than the CCP or whatever.
Let's say I care. Let's say I care a lot. I care so much that I'm willing to make it my personal problem to address the very real, very pressing needs of a critically vulnerable and marginalized part of my community from inside Google.
What am I going to do? Is anyone going to be happier if I stand up and proclaim loudly how much I care? Probably not.
Could I say "Gee, what if we just let everyone put themselves in the group of people who don't do 2FA"? Yes, if I wanted to be responsible for a lot of people not securing their accounts. Could I outsource identity verification to a wide assortment of groups (libraries, non-profits, etc.)? Absolutely, so long as I'm alright with this being used to gain improper access to a LOT of accounts outside the target segment. Could I offer more password chances and friendlier lockout times? Sure, so long as I'm OK with the negative consequences of this for a lot of people.
OK. Let's end the game now. We don't really have any major steps towards real solutions here. Empathy is very useful for showing where a problem is. Demanding what amounts to lowering the global bar for account security is perhaps not the ideal approach here.
Sometimes problems are just hard. Taking ownership and feeling empathy and sincerely wanting to solve the problem does not render them easy.
If you dont know how to control what happens in the park you build, then the park will be shutdown.
In the case of Google its not hard to speed up the process of shutdown. I just encourage them to keep working on more and more mindless ivory tower trash like Pixel phones, watches etc and inject more Ads into everything. They dont have the imagination for anything else but want a pat on the head for whatever they build. Give it to them.
It seems to me that Google is in full control of what they've built here. They've chosen not to put in the effort to find a way to meet the needs of this portion of their user community.
On the one hand, this can be quite reasonably derided as a lack of imagination. Surely there must be a way to do it!
On the other hand, well, we as a society accept that businesses are generally allowed to decide they just don't want to be in a market segment or produce some features. Bridgestone is not compelled by law to have a store in every neighborhood. Montblanc is not forced to produce disposable ballpoint pens.
Perhaps we should treat this as Google admitting the limits of what they're willing and able to build. There is no shame in knowing your limits.
It seems likely that enabling insecure account usage would be a net negative to huge swaths of their user base.
Gmail is functionally the root of trust / skeleton key to millions of people's online lives. The only real competitor is Facebook and, for some, Apple. I think Gmail is far better (more secure, more privacy respecting, less capricious) than Facebook.
With the admission by Chad that that homeless he advocates for can't retain mobile numbers, or ID cards, or 2fa keys, I have no idea how he thinks any secure access could possibly work.
I have the nagging sense that what we're seeing amounts to throwing one's hands in the air and exclaiming "There must be a way!"
As others have pointed out, turning off 2FA is available. Apparently that doesn't work either because the people in question forget their passwords. So I guess we should add passwords and biometrics (not available on all hardware) to the list of things that aren't going to work.
Like you, I'm left wondering what there is to anchor any level of security.
You're reducing the concept to an absurdly simplistic level in order to create simple vulnerabilities.
As I wrote, THIS WOULD NOT BE THE DEFAULT. It is quite possible to pre nominate the specific groups that can allow unlocking of an individual account. And that's all it is, account unlock when they use a new device, or putting the account into PW only mode for a period.
If the PW is forgotten you require a higher level of identity verification, like a bank/USPS/DMV process.
Facebook already has this enabled, you can have a friend/family member (or two of them!) validate your account.
If you're determined not to find solutions then you won't progress.
Gmail already has a system for using one account to unlock another, so no changes required there. A bank, USPS, or DMV generally requires ID or other identifying documents. The people we're trying to help often struggle to retain physical possessions like ID.
It's not that I'm determined to not find solutions. It's that I am determined to find solutions that don't create a degraded security state ready-made to abuse people's email accounts. Sometimes finding a good solution requires looking somewhere other than under the streetlight.
Like others, I'm led to the conclusion that perhaps Google isn't the party best positioned to solve this particular pain point for our most vulnerable and marginalized community members. Maybe we should be paying more attention to why Lifeline numbers aren't portable.
It's routine in disaster relief situations that people lose all their documents but then governments step in and allow identity verification via vouching: this other person Alice says you're Bob. Then Bob gets his photo on a temporary ID document and gets a DR payment.
Social workers, shelters, libraries etc are well placed to support that. They know these people because they see them every day.
If you choose to enrol in the "community assisted recovery" process then you could enrol a new device into your email with their help. Put a big red banner at the top of the email client saying "Community recovery via Topeka Library, Kansas".
Lifeline numbers aren't portable because people have no way to prove their ownership of the previous number, because they have no ID.
This feels ever-increasingly like asking Google to cover the role of a government agency. Universal service is something we expect of government agencies. It's rarely something we expect of private enterprise.
The whole "community recovery" concept sets my teeth on edge. It's a whole alternative authentication avenue ripe for exploitation. Anything that positive and innocuous sounding is going to be the target of many an abuse campaign - think Cambridge Analytica and all the people who handed over their info to innocuous-looking things. Telling people all their info has been stolen isn't all that helpful for protecting them and knowing the specific library or shelter that authorized it will do very little to help.
Plus it turns the people designated as recovery agents into high-value targets.
Again, I'm not trying to avoid finding a solution. I'm trying to avoid finding a "solution" that puts a large number of people at risk unnecessarily.
You could easily limit this program to people using Lifeline phones, or enrolled with a geolocated homeless support organisation. The vouching agents can't be high value targets if they're protecting the identity of impoverished people.
While I agree that empathy is the motivation and starting point, I do want to note that a lot of people in this discussion do seem to sincerely believe that this problem would be easy for Google to solve if they just cared enough. The framing of "Google's product designers should talk to my unhoused friends" in the tweet linked seems invested in this idea.
What if the most empathetic answer here is "This isn't really the right service for you"?
My dad helps people navigate the system to find housing.
Recent story was a 65yo + veteran living in a shelter. They hadn’t started collecting social security due to some debts and was worried it would ALL be garnished.
After explaining that veterans get expedited in line for housing and that they would still get almost all of their SS, they have applied for it and should be housed soon.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that 2FA causes problems after hearing many stories similar to this one.
> They hadn’t started collecting social security due to some debts and was worried it would ALL be garnished.
Is this common? I knew a guy who had the same mindset. I ended up paying him in cash for some work, he was convinced that if he made any money in a traditional role it would be instantly garnished.
It is unfortunately common. We're not perfectly rational robots, and so for a decent subset of the population, they go off what has happened to them.
And being paid $1k and assuming they'd have $1k and then discovering they only had $500 because of garnishment tells them "don't accept checks, cash is the only safe method".
And then it's not a step much further to be "it's not worth setting up social security because it'll all be taken".
People forget that there is a population group where fines are MORE HARMFUL than jail time. At least with jail, you can serve your time and be done.
You do realize jail isn't some magical unifying force of social justice right?
A while back a guy destroyed a vehicle of mine and drove off. Per criminal law in my jurisdiction, he should have served at least 45 days for that offense. But it isn't like that would ever give me my property back. It's also unlikely to deter that particular crime in the population.
Real, actual people exist who turn down raises because they're convinced it'd cause them to lose money, because they don't understand how marginal tax rates work. I don't mean low-income earners who may in fact lose out or not gain from a raise due to benefits cliffs, I mean people earning low-six-figures who think if their pay goes any higher "my tax rate will go up and I'll lose money" and are weirdly resistant to being convinced otherwise.
In many cases I think it has more to do with having to jump through a bunch of hoops with no assurance of what the outcome will be.
Another person needed an ID. In order to apply for the ID they needed a birth certificate. In order to apply for it they had to fill out the application, mail it with money, and then have a permanent place to have the birth certificate mailed an unknown amount of time later. At which point they then needed to apply for the ID and go through that process.
It's no different than people not investing in their 401k and getting the free match because they're worried about paying "penalties" when they take it back out. My employer has a 50% match and early withdrawal penalty is only 10% and yet, people still refuse to do it.
> They hadn’t started collecting social security due to some debts and was worried it would ALL be garnished.
Your contractor’s actions makes a some twisted sense to me as he’s still receiving ‘undisclosed’ cash. The homeless veteran doesn’t make any sense to me as he was not receiving the social security funds at all.
If I told you that you had a bunch of forms to fill out, and after doing all the work you'd get no money (and it would all go to your hated ex-wife or something), you might not bother doing it.
First, anyone skipping out on their responsibilities shouldn’t be getting a sympathetic reaction (and, yeah, I know they always have stories about how it’s justified in their case - my dad spent a lot of time hanging out with other deadbeats but every time details came out, surprise, surprise, they were leaving out a lot).
Paying people under the table has a lot of potential liability for you and it almost always catches up with them. Especially now it’s just not viable to live off the grid (e.g. hoping you don’t get sick isn’t effective) and all this does is ensure that the amount they owe the IRS is unaffordable when the bill finally arrives, usually when their earning potential has gone down.
"Not-my-problem" is a bad response, but the actual response is that without 2FA even more people lose access to their accounts. Anything that makes it harder for adversaries to take over an account almost necessarily adds friction for the users themselves. This isn't a "fuck the people who don't have regular access to a phone, they don't matter" situation. It is a "there is an aggravating balancing act in this situation and no solution will avoid harming everybody."
> but the actual response is that without 2FA even more people lose access to their accounts
This is not black and white. It is possible to encourage 2FA but allow to opt out. The same for phone numbers.
And that's why companies enforce 2FA: they want your juicy phone-number or other data. And yeah, maybe they also want to reduce support costs and avoid bad publicity. Still, it's not in your interest, it's in theirs.
If they at least would allow for a sufficient number of options. Like paper-tan (even self printed), yubikey or similar, second email address, an authenticator, ... but even big companies often only require a phone number.
EDIT: Yes, Google offers more than a phone number when creating a gmail account. I didn't say they don't. However: they don't make it easy and I would even go as far as saying that they are evil here. If you don't believe me, try to create a gmail account right now and don't google/search how to do it without phone number.
> Still, it's not in your interest, it's in theirs.
Which is okay, because it is a business.
If society wants homeless people to have reliable access to email without having SMS 2FA or whatever requirements a business requires, then society should elect a government to provide it as a utility.
There is no reason to expect or want businesses to pick up the slack for the government not providing adequate safety nets. Let businesses be businesses, and let governments handle redistributing wealth.
I think this is a better answer than it first appears.
Initiatives at for profit corporations will always exist within some business constraints, shareholder obligations, and so forth.
It would be very reasonable for governments to provide tax-supported digital services. I could easily imagine that spending a few dollars per year to provide the homeless with basic digital services would pay off simply in easing administrative overhead.
But we don't do it, because, in America, our sense of what government can or should provide is atrophied, and we, mistakenly, look to private actors to provide basic public services.
>But we don't do it, because, in America, our sense of what government can or should provide is atrophied, and we, mistakenly, look to private actors to provide basic public services.
I don't think this matches reality. The US government is doing more today than any time point in the past. Spending and taxation as a percent of dgp is at an all time high.
There's also a sense that nobody should have to do anything themselves. There's nothing stopping anyone from talking to a homeless person and helping them set up an email account without 2fa.
That's fair that I shouldn't make such an unqualified statement.
While public spending as a % of GDP has indeed increased, that's primarily driven by two things: increased defence (and related) spending, and increased spending on health costs.
At the same time, we continue to believe in privatizing basic government services: outsourcing social assistance to charities (including religious charities), outsourcing military and intelligence functions to mercenaries, or, on point for this thread, outsourcing ID verification to VC-funded private startups.
Looking at your numbers or just social spending, it is increased 50% since 1990 as a portion of GDP. Real GDP adjusted for inflation itself has increased more than 3x since 1990. This means that us social spending in terms of inflation adjusted purchases has gone up more than 450% from 1990 levels.
This excludes military spending and is adjusted for the purchasing power of those dollars.
I don't know about you, but I don't feel like we are getting 450% more value out of the government services. The numbers are pretty clear that the government is collecting more and more inflation adjusted dollars from people's income than ever before.
I Suspect we would probably agree that the government is not being a responsible steward of this money that it is collecting.
My primary point was that I don't think that the belief that a decrease in government spending and Revenue is reflected in the numbers. Further, I think it is important to push back on the idea that the systemic issues we see can simply be solved by throwing more money into an increasingly inefficient system.
Sure. My point was indeed to suggest we rethink what government can do.
Can governments (not necessarily the federal government) run a public service internet system? Sure, and probably more easily than we can, as another poster suggested, regulate tech companies into providing the right tradeoffs for housed and unhoused users.
I've been on municipal Broadband and it was fine. I ended up moving to a private provider because it was better and cheaper.
When it comes to the right trade-off for the housed and the unhoused in terms of email service, I'm skeptical that the solution is regulatory. It seems like there is a large number of email providers that already offer what the homeless need. The problem is simply setting them up with the correct provider and user settings.
This seems like a job for people that work with the homeless.
Sure. I was also saying the solution is not regulatory.
But, look at that: the federal government already provides the homeless with cell phones. Yet instead of arguing that the government should also provide free email—which of course costs far less than cell service—the poster argues that existing commercial services should better serve the homeless.
Which, of course, would be nice! But my point was that this kind of argument seems to reflect a mistaken perception of free online services as some sort of social service, with commensurate obligations.
I find your worldview overly constrains the range of possibilities and eliminates reasonable ones, like expecting companies to not disproportionately harm those in our society who are least able to recover from or avoid the harm
Businesses are not harming anyone by not providing charity.
I struggle to see a reasonable possibility to the government either directly or legislating others to provide identification and communications services. One of the greatest utilities in the US is USPS, a monumental accomplishment to be able to provide communications to all people in the US.
Tacking on email (and identity verification services - which USPS already does via passports) should be a no brainer.
> And that's why companies enforce 2FA: they want your juicy phone-number or other data.
It is possible. And, as far as understand it, the teams at Google in charge of this have evaluated this option and found that it leads to more lost accounts.
The people responsible for user authentication at Google are in a completely different part of the company as advertising and, in my experience, are especially stubborn about their focus on security. "This is about phone numbers" doesn't make sense to me given my personal experience.
> If they at least would allow for a sufficient number of options. Like paper-tan (even self printed), yubikey or similar, second email address, an authenticator, ... but even big companies often only require a phone number.
We are talking about Google specifically here, which offers all of these options.
For our product, 2FA is pretty important as a security feature (domain registrar). That said, if you don't want to use it, that's on you as the user. We help out in a different way for those users - we make it impossible to disable account sign in email notifications if you don't use 2FA and those email notifications include a "nuke all active sessions and lock my account" button that can (and has) saved users if their account is compromised due to things like leaks of credentials that they've reused on multiple sites.
2FA is a major hassle for support when users get locked out because they smash their phone or change phone numbers or somehow lose access to the 2FA method. But, the benefits of 2FA largely outweigh those downsides for the majority of users. Offering the choice though, is something we think is important.
> For our product, 2FA is pretty important as a security feature (domain registrar). That said, if you don't want to use it, that's on you as the user.
That's all I'm asking for as a user - thank you for being on the good side. Optimally you allow for multiple MFA options, so that I can e.g. use an authenticator app and a yubikey, as well as a recovery code in my bank.
> It is possible to encourage 2FA but allow to opt out.
You might be surprised to learn that this is how it works for Google accounts: it is default-on but you can turn it off.
> If they at least would allow for a sufficient number of options. Like paper-tan (even self printed), yubikey or similar, second email address, an authenticator, ... but even big companies often only require a phone number.
You might be even more surprised to discover that all of these options are supported for Google accounts.
I definitely vividly remember needing it a few years ago, but right now I can try to sign up and it says "Mobile Number (optional)" (Maybe that's based on some security heuristics).
Yeah and it also only works on your phone (or if you know how to make Google think you are on your phone) and in certain countries. All to my knowledge and based on my tests.
I just did it from Firefox on Linux in a private tab near Washington, D.C.. Fake name, no phone, no backup email. I was able to log out, sign back in, and send an email without any trouble.
No doubt they're letting me through because some security heuristic says I'm a real human, and I'm sure they'd eventually make me provide a number if I continued using the account (this happened to me with my university G Suite account a couple years ago and I needed to contact my IT department to manually disable the phone challenge), but so far I can't see any evidence that they're doing anything unreasonable.
Perhaps they're requiring you to use a number because you've tested it a lot.
I thought the same but I just tried on firefox desktop (Windows) and spun up a new google account with email, password, fake first+last name and fake bday. Really, I was expecting to be stopped at "Phone Number required" but it is indeed optional.
Google only allows non-U2F 2FA methods (like TOTP) to be enabled AFTER enabling a hardware U2F device. And signing up without a working mobile number is impossible. Anyone who says that's not true hasn't actually tried in the last several years.
Nope, while I also did have TOTP before U2F (because it wasn't even a thing then), the rules changed to where if you don't have a phone number on your account, then you're required to enroll a U2F device before you can turn on TOTP.
Can't turn it off for Google Ads account any more. Won't let you in. This is a real pain for shared google account in a small team like ours. Sick of Google removing user choice.
We all knew password, no problems at all. Now it mandates 2FA. And because they mandate it for Google Ads, now it's on for everything like Google Drive etc.
Gmail offers all of these (except for the second email address): paper backup codes, hardware authenticators, non-Google/gmail authenticator apps. The problem is that homeless people can/do routinely lose the “thing you have” part of 2fa.
> If they at least would allow for a sufficient number of options. Like paper-tan (even self printed), yubikey or similar, second email address, an authenticator, ... but even big companies often only require a phone number.
Oddly, I suspect if Google provided no free accounts at all--if you had to give a credit card and pay $5 to sign up--nobody would be complaining about this.
Which leads me back to the point made elsewhere in this thread: we have too high an expectation for what private companies can or should do, because they have taken the place in our minds if government.
And our expectations for what government can or should do are too limited, because we've convinced ourselves government is ineffective and unaccountable.
I can assure you that this suspection is wrong, at least about me.
I've personally bought/subscribed to various companies both personally and professionally. Just recently (a couple of weeks ago) I evaluated a couple of mailproviders. I discarded all of those that enforced 2FA with a phone-number.
For instance mailgun. At least the support helped me:
> Hello XXX,
>
> Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
>
> At this time, I have successfully activated your account so that it is now fully operational and you are all set! You may need to log out, then back in, to reflect this change. Also, your users can indeed utilize Google Auth without using a phone number.
>
> Please reach back out if any other questions arise.
>
> Regards,
> XXX | Mailgun by Sinch
Others weren't as flexible. E.g. Sendgrind:
> Hello,
>
> Thanks for reaching out to Twilio SendGrid Support and for your interest in our products. My name is XXX and I’ll be more than happy to assist you in this matter.
>
> I am sorry for the inconvenience caused by the 2 Factor Authentication process, but this is mandatory for all accounts, as a security feature.
> The only options available are to setup 2FA through Authy: to receive an SMS code or use the Authy app, which you can download here.
>
> I apologise for the inconvenience caused by the fact that we do not have any other options available at the time.
>
> Please do let me know if you have any additional questions in regards to this matter and I will be more than happy to further assist.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> XXX | Technical Support Engineer Twilio-Sendgrid
Forcing me to use your own homegrown authenticator or a phone number? No thank you.
In the end I decided for a provider that offers 2FA but offers multiple options and doesn't enforce it.
> Oddly, I suspect if Google provided no free accounts at all--if you had to give a credit card and pay $5 to sign up--nobody would be complaining about this.
That is like saying 'if the DMV didn't offer IDs to people, no one would complain about not being able to get an ID'.
The fact of the matter is that email is 'de facto' online ID, and gmail has positioned itself into this role. They are now a societal need, not a luxury. They need to be regulated.
Email may be a societal need, but Gmail === Email. They're one email provider in a sea of providers. There are dozens to hundreds of free email provider choices out there.
One doesn't need Gmail to have a functioning email address.
I wonder how many people suffer identity theft versus how many have a working recovery email but are denied to use it because some algo finds it suspicious that you moved country or logged in from a linux machine?
The key takeaway is not about how we should promote 2FA or how we should promote long ass passwords, the main issue at hand is google's neglectful lack of customer support.
I was once caught in this non-sense many moons ago. But I learned my lesson, I absolutely do not rely on any google products for anything that has any potential to impact me personally (with the unfortunate exception of the Android OS on my phone).
Google as a brand is absolutely dead in the water for anyone that has woken up from the 'Don't be evil' kool-aid of the early days.
> the main issue at hand is google's neglectful lack of customer support
Imagine Google had a full service customer support system for account recovery that everybody could access rapidly. How would a homeless person use it? They lose all their possessions regularly so they don't have a reliable form of identification. They'd need to enroll their drivers license (which they probably don't have) in the system and then still have that license when they need to recover their account. Or they could be vouched for by a pre-enrolled trusted party account that does have strong authentication systems. But... homeless people are often transient and don't have access to regular support networks like a family member or social worker who could be enrolled as a backup account. In fact, you can already enroll as backup account if you want to.
> Google as a brand is absolutely dead in the water for anyone that has woken up from the 'Don't be evil' kool-aid of the early days.
Google has a pretty bad reputation at this point on tech blogs and forums. But, believe it or not, it actually shows up near the very top of trusted brands when 3rd party analysts do surveys on the wider population. Maybe this data is wrong, I don't know. But it is interesting.
> the main issue at hand is google's neglectful lack of customer support.
Customer support is the main entrypoint into 99% of sim swapping attacks and would be similarly for any targeted account takeovers. What sort of information do you possibly think would be enough to prove someone actually owns a Google account over the phone?
I've heard of some system for reviewing identification like drivers licenses in extreme cases, but homeless people are largely not going to have access to this either.
that is a phenomenal question that deserves to be answered by the highly paid engineers at Google
they're smart, I'm sure they can find a way, even if it contains such horrible, detestable ideas like "more support staff" and "more training for support staff"
Companies with highly trained support staff regularly fall for these attacks.
The answer has been figured out by the highly trained engineers. It's "don't provide account recovery options that bypass 2fa". Yeah that sucks for a segment if people, but it sucks less than regularly getting your account stolen due to a social engineering attack. There really, truly, doesn't exist a panacea. You don't have and can't create an oracle that knows when an account recovery attempt is legitimate or not.
That's also a bad response. The tech industry literally exists to invent things. That's its entire purpose. Why should we satisfied with a status quo that neglects the most vulnerable among us? What is the point of technology if not to solve these problems?
The claim in the link is that homeless people lose every single one of their possessions after a period of time. They also have minimal access to support structures that could be used as a recovery system. We've had decades of work on authentication and pretty much every solution either involves using a password manager to create unique passwords or having possession of a physical thing.
The best I can think of is trusted backup accounts, which already exist. A homeless person with regular attachment to a family member or a social worker could set up that person's account as a backup. But this already exists and is likely to fail for a large number of homeless people, who tend to struggle at maintaining long term relationships with family members or social workers who'd be able to help them.
I don't have one. I'm not a security expert or researcher or anything like that. But the tech industry has invented thousands of things that to most people would have been inconceivable beforehand. That doesn't mean there's a way to improve on the tradeoffs we have now — but the fact that no one's invented it yet doesn't mean it can't exist.
The tech industry self-styles as the smartest people in the world, who try to solve the hardest problems. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't throw our hands up when we can't immediately come up with a solution to something we only learned about five minutes ago.
> The tech industry self-styles as the smartest people in the world, who try to solve the hardest problems.
I think this is a good point, but the catch is that there's an implicit footnote that needs to be attached to "the hardest problems*": "*Which generate sufficient monetary returns". This particular problem isn't one that has much revenue potential.
This isn't something we learned about five minutes ago. It's been known that people lose their phones for a very long time. The tradeoffs were considered when designing the system.
Treating the tech industry as a magical black box that can "solve anything" is disingenous and dangerous. This is the exact same attitude that leads to things such as legislation that says "find a way for any communication to be decrypted upon subpoena. You're tech people, figure it out"
The solution is very simple. Don't force 2FA. I'm sure most homeless people would rather risk the unlikely case of their accounts being hacked if they didn't choose a strong enough password to memorize than risk getting locked out of their accounts permanently.
You can encourage 2FA but forcibly enabling it for everyone does more harm than good, especially to homeless people but also non-tech-savvy parents and such (though the latter would be more likely to have a working recovery method).
And then in alternative-universe HN people are complaining about the rate of account takeovers via credential stuffing and calling Google irresponsible for making it easy to disable a powerful security measure.
> You can encourage 2FA but forcibly enabling it for everyone does more harm than good
I'd wager that pretty much the only people on the planet who can definitively say this are the people who handle account takeovers and lockouts of large email services. My understanding is that the folks at Google responsible for this have concluded that making it behave the way it currently does is the setup that causes the fewest people to lose access to their accounts.
Password managers are absolutely not required. While they're a good idea for most of us who don't have to worry about having somewhere to sleep, homeless people can still most likely memorize a password and remember it after a few tries. They can't do that if 2FA is forced on them.
Everybody sucks at memorizing unique passwords. I'd be stunned if homeless people are consistently not reusing passwords. Credential stuffing is the #1 form of account takeover and 2FA is the solution.
The 3-2-1 backup strategy requires an offsite backup. It's unclear what advantage was forseen by the homeless when the decision was made to forgo this guidance.
Yep, reducing standards for everyone in an attempt to help a small minority is also a growing trend in the west. Schools dumbing down so everyone gets A’s type of top level decision making.
Sometimes you have to make hard choices where some people get burned because the alternatives are worse. That doesn’t mean you don’t care.
Right now, technology has reached a point where it's expected to be ubiquitous, however is not as accessible as other ubiquitous and necessary services. This has been brought up before, buy can someone in their 70s keep up with the changing UIs and websites and security requirements these days? This is all fine for something like Netflix or Spotify. But for government services, access to jobs, and fundamental communications this poses a problem.
I'm in my early 40s, computer programmer, and I've temporarily lost access to my WhatsApp account because I don't have a recent enough mobile phone, and the phone that I do have doesn't have a relatively recent OS installed.
It's a 4-year old (I think I've got it for 4 years) iPhone SE, on which I never updated the OS because I hadn't feel the need to do it. When I started getting pop-ups that "hey, our app will stop functioning on your phone unless you upgrade the OS" was already too late for that, I was afraid that upgrading the phone to the latest OS will cripple it permanently in terms of performance (the battery is already on its way out by this point).
So, assuming I get to 70, in no way I'll be up to date by then in terms of having the latest OS installed and all that crazy stuff, who has the time and the nerves for that? (especially the nerves).
I also don’t have a WiFi password at home, if it matters. Of course, I don’t have Internet banking nor do I do much (if at all) money-related things with my phone, something tells me that makes me more secure than people who trust Apple and Google with their money (at least the local banks have to answer to the authorities).
What’s your employment specialty that makes you trust Apple and Google?
Having a Wifi password is honestly pretty important unless you're remote enough that there's just no chance someone can access your network. Remember, unencrypted WiFi doesn't just mean that someone can access your network, but also that they can collect your traffic.
It's not though. No one writes perfect software on first release. Even perfect software adapts to the changing realities of our world. Staying up to date is not optional.
We're crippling along depending on family, libraries, charities, and other NGO support services.
The DMV works with people like this all the time; perhaps something could be done there where you have a government issued email address that you can't lose or be locked out of (worst case you take your ID to the DMV and the nice clerk helps you reset your password/sign in).
Google is already providing a free service to homeless people. It's not empathy to tell someone else to solve a problem that you care about. That's virtue signaling. If he cares, he should take matters into his own hands.
Is it too much to ask a single person to build a free email service for all homeless people? Perhaps, but the good news is that he doesn't have to. Google already allows you to disable 2FA [1]. He could have started a campaign to disable 2FA on homeless people's phones, but instead he uses this as an opportunity to shame Google to boost his own Twitter follower count.
I think that empathy is highly overrated. I doubt anyone notorious for flashing their big Johnson is particularly empathetic, yet LBJ expanded social services more than any other President. The problem isn't that people have too little empathy these days. It's that people are too easily impressed by broadcasting their intentions rather than actually trying to solve a problem.
looks like loder is talking about problems their own friends face, and the post is not directed at anyone in particular. venting is not virtue signaling
Loder has 130k Twitter followers without any claim to fame besides Twitter, so he knows exactly what he's doing. If he had vented about his friends cutting themselves with a knife that's too sharp, he would have been ridiculed, but in this case he can hide behind the Google hate bandwagon.
But many people consider LBJ to have been an empathetic president? I don't see how it's supposed to be self-evident that, because Johnson liked bragging about his johnson, that his focus on the Great Society must have been driven by hard-headed pragmatism. U.S. presidents have a wide array of problems to solve. LBJ didn't have to pick causes that are commonly associated with empathy for the downtrodden.
He didn't just brag about his dick. He went out of the way to show it off to his colleagues. I mean it's possible that his fetish outweighed his empathy, but it's more likely that he simply didn't care about making people feel uncomfortable.
He did progressive things, but to me it sounds like he was influenced by philosophical ideals rather than empathy. They based Frank Underwood from House of Cards on an exaggerated version of LBJ.
I have a sibling who's "no fixed abode". Teaching him how to use 2fa isn't the problem. It's that all property is transient, so the 2nd-factor can't be tied to property. It doesn't matter if that's his phone or his socks. "Something you know and something you have" does not account for those who have nothing.
If we all spent our collective efforts to make sure everything in this world is accessible to every single human being, we would have zero progress as a society. We are not even guaranteed the right to live in this world and yet you are advocating for the right to email service? It is shocking that someone could even have a thought process like this and receive so many upvotes.
Counterpoint, I taught several older relatives in my family how to use 1Password.
UX for good security can exist, but it does need a little bit of education.
We will all be old one day but I have trouble believing we will just forget how to use computers. On the other hand, we do need to carefully consider the role google plays in our lives… especially for us Europeans, who are just at the mercy of a US company’s whims.
What if that homeless person was your substance-abusing sibling? A friend from school with mental health issues?
I think we also have to realize that not everyone who is homeless has problems that can explain it away.
It's easy to look at someone who is homeless and tell yourself, "Oh, he's a dope addict. He did this to himself." It's only very rarely true, and you're only making excuses for not helping another human being.
Just last year there were newspaper articles about how a shocking number of perfectly normal public school teachers in California live out of their cars, just because they cannot afford a place to live on what they're paid.
Most people, especially in the SV bubble, would be shocked to learn how many of the baristas, maids, security guards, convenience store clerks, and other people they encounter every single day are homeless, living in their cars, or sleeping on other people's couches through no fault of their own.
> The "quiet homeless" who can hold down a job are also likely to be able to keep track of a phone or other two factor device.
While I agree that there's a lot of generalization here, a lot of the point of supporting the homeless in the first place is that big tech should support everyone, even if they are indeed someone who "can't keep the same cell phone number for more than 4 months at a time" (via the source twitter thread) as if they're a government that must cater to its citizens.
Just trying to motivate some empathy, "there but for the grace of God go I." You are correct than many homeless people are not carless, or they suffer from housing uncertainty (couch surfing, itinerant sleepers rolling through difficult family situations and severe housing shortages). Probably they can manage 2FA though.
> Practically, we need ideas like to 2FA to gain tractionas widely as possible, while realising that isn't everywhere.
thats just one opinion on security. you see this world where google is an identity provider, and you prove your identity to it via a librarian or bank. i dont. an internet service should absolutely never require any form of government id nor separate network like cell.
you just backed off and said that the thing i responded to is an auxiliary point then your last sentence just retakes the position you backed off from by reclaiming that the auxillery point is true
shut the fuck up. of course someone named octect is the most braindamaged fuck on earth.
As someone else pointed out, there is an unavoidable tradeoff that had to be made here between account security, accessibility, and privacy. Reasonable people can absolutely come to different conclusions, but I think it is arrogant to believe that a different decision from the one you would have made could only result from incompetence or ignorance.
> we need ideas like to 2FA to gain traction as widely as possible
No, 2FA needs to die in a fire. Easily circumvented in most social attacks that actually matter, false sense of security, massive timewaster/usability-hell/pain in the butt, acts as a novel social/corporate/accessibility barrier to technology for a large number of previously unaffected groups, and poses a threat to software freedoms.
There are many ways to strengthen security and this has got to be the shittiest one.
Get rid of software that doesn't have to be an online service, for one. This cuts 90% of incidents.
Then, all the "common sense" stuff: encourage use of password managers to discourage password re-use, having actual humans providing actual customer support when suspicious activity is flagged, companies educating about safe practices like banks do now (e.g. always call back to a trusted number), spam prevention at the ISP level, SSO authentication, VPN ...
At the very least there must be better ways to do two-factor authentication than what is the standard default.
And to top it all off, on many services, if you cant get all that to work, all you need is your "memorable word". *facepalm*
A hardware token can be lost as well, and "in app" push notification (or whatever the app does) you stil need the telephone or at least the SIM/same telephone number, don't you?
No the device auth prompts are completely independent of mobile number, you don't even need a Sim card.
Giving homeless people a secure and convenient place to stash documents would be a great outcome. Birth certificate, military discharge papers, licences, 2FA codes. Many homeless people live in cars and have all this stashed somewhere in the car, but then the car gets stolen/towed (e.g. because they haven't paid car registration) and then they're sleeping rough, without docs.
>No the device auth prompts are completely independent of mobile number, you don't even need a Sim card.
Sorry, I don't understand, I believed that the independence from the SIM for an app was for an app already installed and authenticated on the specific device.
If you lose the smartphone (with the app), and the SIM, how can you install the app and be authenticated on another device?
I mean short of a SMS or a code via e-mail (both not receivable/accessible).
>Giving homeless people a secure and convenient place to stash documents would be a great outcome. Birth certificate, military discharge papers, licences, 2FA codes. Many homeless people live in cars and have all this stashed somewhere in the car, but then the car gets stolen/towed (e.g. because they haven't paid car registration) and then they're sleeping rough, without docs.
If you lose your device it's a problem, but at least you don't need a local cell phone plan. (I'm almost locked out of my Canadian bank because it won't accept international phone numbers for 2FA.)
If you know this will be a problem you can enrol with TOTP, using an app but also writing down the initialisation code or printing out the QR code.
This is almost the same as having 2FA recovery codes written down somewhere.
A secure version of luggage deposit, but just for small things. We used to have safe deposit boxes at banks, though it doesn't need to be that secure. The key limitation is that the client can't travel far, and they have to be able to open it based on a matching photo, not an identity card.
Yep, but the issue (in the specific case of the homeless) is that the devices (and the - let's call it "optional" - SIM/local cell phone number) are lost/stolen, the written down emergency/recovery codes may work IF the other idea (luggage deposit) is implemented, let's call it EPBD (Essential Personal Belongings Deposit).
No, people like you really highlight the “If they don’t help everyone then they are being immoral” mentality. Which is wrong.
Down grading security for the benefit of a tiny minority with an especially ridiculous use case is not the greater good. If the homeless people think they are at risk of losing their phone then they should pick another free email vendor.
1. Vulnerable populations need more assistance accessing essential services required to participate in society
2. Service providers need to maintain a reasonable level of security for their customers
Can both be true. Saying that maximum (or minimum) levels of security are required at all time completely misses the point of security--which is to mitigate risk. How much risk is appropriate varies a lot by context.
Beyond the context of risk, there is reasonable debate to be had on how to best provide access to essential services to vulnerable populations. It's pretty important to have an email nowadays and if you're not tech savvy or an individual/community has little to no money to spend it's not unreasonable to have the reality of the matter be that there may simply not be many good alternatives (or awareness of alternatives) to GMail.
I'm not sure what a correct answer here looks like, but I don't think ignoring the need is an approach that gets us to a better society or enables vulnerable populations to better care for themselves.
> there is reasonable debate to be had on how to best provide access to essential services to vulnerable populations.
What is the debate? The government can collect taxes and provide services, like they do for multitude of other needs.
> I'm not sure what a correct answer here looks like, but I don't think ignoring the need is an approach that gets us to a better society or enables vulnerable populations to better care for themselves.
The correct answer is not depending on the largesse of businesses. It is using government resources to provide methods for identity verification, communications, and various other bare minimum needs for living.
The debate parent mentioned is what to do with the money, not where to get money. You can see that there are lots of possible options, right? But you say use taxes like it’s ‘duh, easy’ or something. Now we’re in the realm of the debates actually happening every day in the US, whether to provide social services at all, before we even discuss how much money they need, what to do with it, and where to get it. A huge portion of people this country seem to believe that they don’t benefit from taxes and would prefer safety nets for other people not come out of their pockets.
> The correct answer is […] using government resources to provide methods for identity verification, communications, and various other bare minimum needs for living.
This also sounds like you think it’s easy, without considering the implications. (If govt resources is the solution, why do we still have a problem?) We don’t have municipal or federal Gmail or Facebook, and there are reasons to believe programs like that would take a long time and cost a lot of money. The ‘bare minimum needs’ have changed dramatically in 20 years, and will probably keep changing just as fast for a while, with the homeless population growing in the mean time because the tax-funded social safety net we have isn’t doing the job.
> A huge portion of people this country seem to believe that they don’t benefit from taxes and would prefer safety nets for other people not come out of their pockets.
Exactly, and they love it when people waste time and energy blaming businesses for not providing charity. This whole tweet storm should not be directed at Google, but directed at the US federal government.
> This also sounds like you think it’s easy, without considering the implications. (If govt resources is the solution, why do we still have a problem?)
Because it is purely political. Stalling progress on providing essentials for life helps keep people from getting help, and hence keeps taxes lower. If the US government can do identity verification for passports at USPS offices, it can do the same for other purposes.
>We don’t have municipal or federal Gmail or Facebook, and there are reasons to believe programs like that would take a long time and cost a lot of money.
If the world’s leading country cannot setup email infrastructure, then we have huge problems. Presumably, it already does for the how many million federal employees?
> The correct answer is not depending on the largesse of businesses. It is using government resources to provide methods for identity verification, communications, and various other bare minimum needs for living.
To be fair I don't see how any government system can do better regarding identity on the internet. Login.gov is one of the best services I've used for access to usajobs/SSA/etc but it follows some of the same security best practices people are complaining about here with no real way to re-gain access to your login.gov account should you lose your 2fa methods (afaik).
The US government uses the USPS to do identify verification for passports. If it can handle identity verification for passports, why would it not be able to handle identity verification for other purposes, such as replacing or reauthorizing one’s MFA device?
Hell, it should be trivial to offer federal government provided emails with ID verification with customer service in the event of loss of device/loss of ID/death/etc.
Passports require the most paperwork out of anything - your in particular, a birth certificate, a second form of ID including a driver's license, a photo, and $130+$35. The USPS isn't just looking at a face and issuing a passport.
0The issue here is that homeless don't hold onto anything physical for 4 months; identity verification breaks down in-person immediately as shelters/libraries can't be expected to run a facial recognition operation, and specific shelter employees/volunteers aren't guaranteed to be there anytime a homeless person might walk in and need those backup codes, but it breaks down even further online since 2fa is inherently 'what you know' + ('what you have'/'who you are').
> Passports require the most paperwork out of anything - your in particular, a birth certificate, a second form of ID including a driver's license, a photo, and $130+$35. The USPS isn't just looking at a face and issuing a passport.
The point is the hardest part of the problem is already solved - which is the physical infrastructure and labor. As for not holding onto physical items, USPS also has little boxes that people can keep their belongings in.
The USPS and banks would be ideal identity validators. Having run a few mail servers I don't think the Govt is best placed to do that, but they could outsource it to google, with a few tweaks to allow identity attestation.
Many other countries have a central government portal with secure messaging, with federated identify. Heavily reliant on 2FA of course.
If you've every tried to teach an old person how to use 2FA you know it's an uphill battle. Using a fingerprint reader isn't even doable for some. And we're all going to be old one day.
Practically, we need ideas like to 2FA to gain tractionas widely as possible, while realising that isn't everywhere. And some people will never use 2FA, need higher thresholds for triggering lockouts, and need alternative methods for re-establishing identity to their ID provider (google in this case). For some people that might be their local librarians or community shelter, legal aid groups, and banks.