A few months ago I created a new Facebook account for my daughter. Just for fun, she’s little and I thought it was cute that she could have their own posts and a few pictures. Anyway, in order to do it so, I created a gmail account for her too.
As expected, after a while I must have misplaced the login information so I had no clue what the username or password was. I could guess because of her name and lastname, but honestly I did not remember her username.
Anyway, I followed all the steps for the recovery and at one step they asked me to enter the username, so I tried different combinations. One of them fit, so I thought it was the correct one and even when I was not sure I proceeded with the password recovery process.
They said I had no alternative email nor phone associated to this account, which also seemed a little strange but what the heck, I must have forgotten that. I kept going and they asked the “security question” which was what my favorite dish was. I answered incorrectly as expected and since my memory is so poor, I thought “I must have put this other dish, because the one I originally chose used foreign characters”, so I entered this classic dish I thought it was, and voila! I was in.
The resetted my password and I following the classic procedure I could access my account.
Right after I was in, I was asked to enter an alternative email and phone number. So I did.
Then I checked the inbox because I wanted to delete old emails and to my surprise….this wasn’t my account!
I quickly deleted all the info I had previously entered and tried to contact this poor guy whose account I had accidentally hacked but as he had no extra info, I could not do it.
Probably if he tries to access his account, he will be able to do it by resetting his password just as I did, but I could have deleted everything, I could have changed it all and then he would have never, ever get it back.
I know, you must be thinking, it is his fault because he did not entered extra validation information. It is true. I am not saying Google is wrong I just wanted to share my experience in order to show how easily someone could steal your account if you do take all precautions.
This whole situation made me think how vulnerable people are if they are not well advised on how to use technology correctly. People are all pushed to use technology, pushed to get into this new world and unless they are well informed about the implications of this new era, they are left to their own devices.
Software development and productivity 