How to kill your Google account: Access it via Tor

Except that that is incorrect information.

I can answer a number of points directly: I have my account password. I can (and have) accessed it from a non-Tor IP, the same that I've been using recently, and from within the same IP range that I've been using for quite some time (though now long I don't know -- the space is dynamic and subject to change).

I can and did answer last login dates, questions about email contacts, and general questions about email filters (none of which would be likely if I didn't have local copies of email -- in other words, they're tough questions to answer if you don't have access to at least some of your account.

And there are numerous other questions that I wasn't asked that I could answer. Including as I've noted, my PGP key to which I can sign or respond to challenges. Multiple other accounts that I've referred to frequently in my G+ postings (including this one, also reddit, Ello, and Diaspora, among others). Which, though Google isn't (or shouldn't be) in a position to check, all use different (and difficult) passwords.

So: no, I can't answer all the security questions. Then again, I'd challenge you to go through account recovery procedures for your own online account(s), and to see how far or successful you are with these.

Some time ago close friends lost access to their email account they'd had for years with a very large Internet services provider. It turns out that the password they'd been using was a poor choice -- I'll just say short, based on a limited characterset, and based on personal demographic information that could be pretty easily guessed at, or simply brute-forced.

Oh, and they'd been a paying customer for years before the system switched over to free, which meant that there were both credit card numbers and I suspect street addresses on file. But the CCs had long since expired and been retired.

After a few months, it became apparent that there was simply no way to recover the address.

Which means that any accounts that _weren't_ notified were still sending to it (think financial services, etc., as well as friends and other services tied to it). And that the account could be used to send spam.

I've got a few friends whose Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and other accounts appear to have been similarly compromised.

As I state below, the question "who are you" is a really difficult one to answer. Google's Eric Schmidt stated early on that G+ was designed to be "an identity service". In the sense of "we're going to use this to identify exactly who you are in meatspace and stick with you no matter what" I've got no interest in that.

But in the sense of "we want to be able to consistently and correctly provide access to the self-described entity who should and has been using a particular account", well, yeah, you could say I'm down with that.

And on that count, at least for the moment, the company is failing spectacularly.