Account Recovery, Evaluated As Return On Investment

Too many Blogger blog owners, seeking recovery of a long dormant account, overlook the realities of the Blogger business relationship.

I started the blog 10 years ago, I have forgotten the password, the email address is long gone - and I need the blog deleted now.

When told that deletion is not possible, if you cannot provide proof of ownership, they next ask for personal assistance.

But isn't there a person to whom I can explain my problem? Surely we can reach some understanding!

The reality is that Blogger wants to help their customers - when helping their customers provides them some business benefit.

Any business, that hopes to remain a business for any amount of time, has to understand the realities of Return On Investment, combined with Risk Management.

One basic calculation of ROI is

(Sum of benefits) / (Sum of costs)

Both benefits and costs can be tangible (income, expense, etc) and non tangible (inconvenience to customers, increased / decreased reputation, etc). Projects which provide more ROI can be scheduled, with more urgency - and projects which provide less ROI, with less urgency.

In problem management, problems which affect many people, when solved, produce some benefit. Problems which affect few people, when solved, produce little benefit.

A project which involves account recovery requires individual assistance, and benefits only the claimant - thus provides very little benefit.

It will require considerable research, to verify the identity of the person who setup an account or blog, and to verify the identity of the person asking for assistance - thus much cost. Additional cost would be the risk of encouraging more Blogger blog owners to overlook the necessities of blog ownership - and to not bother with remembering account name and password - thus ensuring more of the same, later. And there's the risk of enabling a deceptive blog hijacking.

ROI for most account recovery projects is very low.

A project which requires blog deletion (when ownership cannot be proven by the
claimant) provides even less benefit than simple account recovery - as the only result is the removal of one dormant Blogger account / blog. And it involves the same cost - both the same amount of research - to verify identities - and the same risk of encouraging more, similar thoughtlessness. And again, there's the risk of enabling a deceptive blog hijacking.

ROI for blog deletions is even lower than for simple account recoveries.

Both account recovery and blog deletion, when accepted as activity in the Blogger Support action queues, will, out of necessity, not receive high priority.

The memory of impatience, from previous claimants, will motivate many Blogger experts and Blogger Support staff to simply quote the Google Help advice.

At Google, we take your privacy and security very seriously. Therefore, we're committed to returning accounts only when we're sure we're giving them back to the accounts' owners. Because Google doesn't ask for much personal information when you sign up for an account, we don't have many ways to verify that you own an account.

Some advice given will be somewhat perfunctory.

Please, read the FAQ, and objectively consider the bigger picture.

This attitude, too, is an expectation of low ROI - special service demanded by people who never did anything with their blogs - and now, plan to simply move their blogging activity to WordPress.