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Comment by aposm | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those situations that make it incredibly clear that even Google, with all its resources, never considers the use case or life experience of anyone besides a wealthy Bay Area tech worker when designing their products. I can't help but wonder how this blind spot got so big - and why they still don't address things like this even with all the user testing & A/B trials they do for ruthless optimization. Is it just because usability has no correlation with profit, and so the feedback loop is broken?

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This blind spot got so big because the vast majority of wealthy Bay Area tech workers have never been poor or homeless. It is difficult for those that have never lived in poverty to understand the struggles that it brings. Just look at his thread, see how many people fail to comprehend that if someone is using the library computers they aren't going to be able to afford a $25 key-chain verifier.

Yes. The overwhelming majority of people that I worked with in SV had never been poor, never been homeless, never worked a fast food or customer facing retail job, and never lacked support from family or some kind of extended network.

They were accustomed to lightning fast internet on Macbooks and constant technological churn. Unfortunately for these exceptional people, poverty is logic resistant and nearly impossible to understand second-hand.

There's a strong right-wing libertarian element among tech workers, particularly the near-retirement-age ones and the ones fresh out of school. Their logic is that poor people are poor because they didn't stay in school or were lazy or stupid, and thus aren't deserving of services and support.

The tech scene's obsession with meritocracy is an extension of this.

> It is difficult for those that have never lived in poverty to understand the struggles that it brings.

I think this is giving too big of a pass to wealthy people. If wealthy people put in the effort, it isn't hard to understand the struggles that living in poverty bring. I think a better way of putting it is "It is very easy for those that have never lived in poverty to not consider the struggles that it brings". There is no difficulty in understanding, it is just easier to not every try to understand, so many wealthy people don't. It is a choice, though.

So how does your company handle these cases while defending against social engineering attacks to steal all private data?

The security wisdom I've always seen was to use 2FA and prevent other attempts at authentication, but if Google is evil for doing this security... what's the answer?

I get the impression Apple stores handle this reasonably well (though you lose data after a last-ditch password reset if and only if that data is unavailable to law enforcement warrants).

Anyway, I think the the common case is that most data is recoverable with an ID or whatever they require. FWIW, searching HN for: “locked out of icloud” doesn’t produce much.

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