Installed Steam on a new computer. Signed in. It sent a passcode to my GMail. I signed into GMail. It wanted me to 2FA because I hadn't signed into Google on that device. It sent a notification to my phone, which I never received. I had it resend the notification twice, still nothing. Tried again with my phone's offline passcodes. Neither worked. Tried the QR code/Bluetooth connection, and that finally did it.
At least I got through in the end, but fuck, it's annoying.
Ya its a big problem IMHO. Last time my phone was fucked I could pay rent or anything because I couldn't log into my bank because I couldn't get the SMS. I use a password manager and have TOTP set up for important account but a lot of these big institutions only support SMS.
I heard about a guy who got his google account deleted because a computer wrongly though he had csam. (During covid his small child had a genital rash so he took a picture and emailed for a virtual medical visit as the clinic requested.) They deleted everything and "dont have backups" so even tho google admitted it was an error will not restore. So he couldn't log into anything, no email, cross site logins, his phone didn't work, even totp I think via authy. All just gone.
Its not the exact same situation but shows what a tangled web has been created and so precarious.
it's part of my job to think about this for companies, and you'd think that would make me feel confident in my ability to create a robust backup system with failsafes for all of these logins. instead i'm hyper-aware of how screwed I'd be with loss of access to any given point of failure and constantly anxious about it, bc it takes a literal team of people to set up and maintain that sort of thing
twice as bad if you're concerned about data privacy or opsec. like sometimes the options are "give my phone number to some company i inherently don't trust" or "accept the risk that it will be impossible to recover this account if I lose access to my email address"
the problem is, and it seems like a legitimate problem, is that in this context a backup is also a back door.
I don't know how it is possible to have any amount of security without the possibility of being totally locked out in some situations. how can you assure that you can reset a password but prevent anyone else?
It seems intractable. Password managers have been available for a long time and if people haven't started using them yet en masse I see no reason to expect they might any time soon.