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.

Account Recovery Options, And Prevention Of Blogger Account / Blog Hijacks

Ever since Blogger started using Google accounts to authenticate Blogger account access, blog owners have had trouble maintaining access to their accounts and their blogs.

Not all Blogger blog owners understand - and less accept - the measures that Blogger has taken, to prevent malicious activity, by unknown persons who would use Internet obscurity to hijack their accounts, and their blogs.

Every day, we see numerous complaints in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?, about inability to recover account access. And, we see occasional (not occasional enough) reports about blogs now owned by people who are not personally known by the rightful blog owner.

Blogger is continually improving their account recovery, authentication, and account hijack prevention policies. Unfortunately, as they improve in one area, they make things more difficult in another.

Until late 2010, Blogger / Google offered several options, for recovering account / blog access.

• An automated wizard, where you could provide the URL of your blog, and have account recovery instructions sent to the email address registered with the Blogger account(s) that administered the blog, accompanied by the welcomed advice

  We've sent password reset instructions to your email account xxxxxxx@yyyyy.zzz.

• An option, should the latter email account be unusable (the owner graduated from school, changed ISPs, changed jobs), to walk into many regional Google offices, present proof of identity, and regain access to some Blogger accounts.
• In some limited cases, to transmit a facsimile of specific proof of identity documents to a Google office, have identity verified remotely, and regain access to some Blogger accounts.

In early 2011, we noted a significant number of cases where people were reporting logging in to Blogger, and finding various personal blogs missing from the dashboard blog lists. Checking the blogs themselves, they were found to be still online - but now owned by other persons. In an alarming number of cases, the persons then owning the mysterious blogs appeared to be part of a malicious and well planned attack, against Blogger accounts and blogs.

In mid 2011, Blogger changed the automated account recovery wizard, to not display the email address being used for the password recovery. Now, we see less detail.

We've sent login instructions to your GMail account.

or even

We've sent login instructions to your account at y****.com.

To recover account access, the blog owner is now required to remember the email address - or minimally, to have access to all owned email accounts, and check each account, one by one, until login instructions are found.

To reduce the need for local and remote identity verification, Google enhanced the account recovery wizard, where the blog owner can provide an email address (whether or not usable for incoming email), provide secondary details to prove identity, and regain access. They also added Two Step Verification, which lets you use a pre registered cell or home phone, as an additional / alternate identity token - both to prevent hijackings, and to recover account access.

Unfortunately, people who idly forget the password and the email address, or who forget (or never provide) secondary personal details when setting up their Google account, will always be a challenge. Another challenge is provided by people who value anonymity, and setup multiple email accounts to obscure their real life identity from their Blogger blog ownership.

In specific cases, Blogger is known to provide mysterious "hints" to people who have gratuitously used multiple email accounts - and who cannot now remember all accounts used.

Your email address is a***0@yahoo.com.

However, the limited effectiveness of hints should always be noted. The Blogger Help Forum: [FAQ] Regarding account-related issues won't be going away, for lack of traffic, any time soon.

>> Top

Blog Owners Report Disabled Blogger Accounts

This week, we're seeing a few reports, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, of disabled Blogger and GMail accounts, again with ominous warnings of "suspicious activity" or "unusual activity" on your account.

Besides a disabled Blogger account, loss of AdSense, Blogger, Picasa, and other services is reported. This is similar to an earlier experience from May 2011.

In many cases, people with disabled accounts should be automatically redirected to Google Accounts Help: Account has been disabled.

Start with the generic "disabled account" instructions.

You can start there, where you are advised, generically, why accounts are being disabled.

If your account was not righteously disabled, you'll find the appropriate instruction in the last paragraph.

Please start by reviewing the relevant Terms of Service. Then, if you think your account should not have been disabled, please contact us.

Clicking on "contact us", you see Google Accounts Help: My account is disabled. Here, you are advised

Please summarize what happened when your account became disabled so we can investigate. We'll follow up with you only if we require more information or we have additional information to share.

Make sure that you can be contacted - anonymity is not possible, now.

Be sure to provide an active email address, for contact. When you fill out the form, this is not the time for insisting on anonymity. Selecting "No", for

Do you currently have access to the email address that you use to sign in to your account?

you are asked for

An email address we can use to contact you

If you truly want your account reactivated, provide an email account which you use, or check, frequently.

You'll have to wait, patiently, for account and blog review.

Having filled out the form, and hit "Submit", you wait, as patiently as possible. The number of similar reports, combined with the time of year (such as the first week following end of year holidays, when many people receive new computers), may cause the queue, from this form, to be processed relatively slowly.

Note that fuzzy spam classification may result in various Google accounts and assets being taken off-line and even deleted - and the accounts and assets may not all be restored immediately - or even simultaneously.

Specifically, we have noted latency on restoration of Blogger blogs, after the owning Blogger accounts are brought back on-line. If your Blogger account is a victim of "suspicious / unusual activity", allow for your blogs to be off-line 24 to 48 hours after the account has been restored. Blogger Engineers are aware that this is a problem.

---

Blog Owners Report Disabled Blogger / GMail / Google Accounts - January 2012

Disabled Blogger / GMail / Google Accounts, When Reenabled, Leave Deleted Blogs

We've been advising people about the complications involved in recovering disabled GMail / Google accounts, for a few months. Recently, we've been seeing a new complication, in this scenario.

I tried logging in to GMail, and it says that my account has been disabled. So I tried verifying by sending codes to my mobile phone - I managed to log in, and it now redirects into my dashboard. Unfortunately, it now tells me

The blog has been removed.

So, I have my Blogger / GMail account back - but no blog!

Apparently, there is a delay, between reinstatement of the Blogger / GMail account, and recovery of any owned blog(s), deleted when the account is disabled.

Shortly after seeing one's disabled GMail / Google account re enabled, the blog owner will login to Blogger, and see the next disappointment - all owned blogs will probably show as removed (when they are listed, at all). Members of team blogs, even the people whose GMail / Google accounts are not disabled - may see the blog(s) in question disappear from their dashboards, also.

There is good news here. Blogger Support is now aware of this problem, and is hoping to resolve it shortly.

>> Top