Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

There is certainly something broken with google's multiple sign-ons. Here is what happened yesterday:

- My wife was logged into her Gmail account.

- I then logged into my wife's Picassa web account to share pictures with someone. I needed some information (an email address) from my own gmail. So for so good.

- So I logged my wife out of her gmail while keeping her signed in to Picassa web.

- Then I logged into my Gmail and got the info I needed.

_ I came back to my wife's picassa web acciount and when I tried to share an album with someone by entering the email address, whoops I get a 403 FOrbidden error. WTF!!

After a few mins of thinking, I thought why not log me out of Gmail and login back as my wife suspecting that google might be confused b/w 2 logins ? Bingo!! It worked. WTF google. Seriously!!

This isn't that surprising. I've always assumed that logging out of any Google service will log me out of any other Google services I'm logged into (with that account).

I do think they could make it more obvious what is going on behind the scenes, so that in your case, Picasa would have noticed the account was no longer logged in before it let you share the album.

> This isn't that surprising. I've always assumed that logging out of any Google service will log me out of any other Google services I'm logged into (with that account).

Why on earth would a normal person assume that?

If I have two tabs open to my bank, and hit "logout" in one, I'd assume my session was dead for both tabs.

Right, but if I'm logged onto my checking account and my auto loan, I don't expect logging out of one to log me out of the other just because both are owned by the same company.

In a banking context, I'd expect the bank to do the most conservative thing possible.

Because if you sign into one, you expect to be signed into the others. If you're signed into all of them, you don't want to have to go to every Google service and log out of them.

At the least, don't give me crap 403 Forbidden. just tell me to login again which even though annoying, will at least let me get the shit done that i intended to do.

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