The Problem
Yesterday, I tried to log into Google Calendar using Firefox on a Windows 10 desktop computer. Google gave me this message:
Verify it’s you. To help keep your account secure, Google needs to verify it’s you. Please sign in again to continue to Google Calendar.
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I clicked the Next button. The screen replied:
A suspicious app might have accessed your account Someone might have accessed your account through a suspicious app installed on this device. You’ve been signed out to protect your account. Before signing in again, remove all unsafe software from this device and change your password. Learn more. To continue on this device, you’ll need to verify it’s you.
I restarted Firefox in Safe Mode. To do that, I had the Menu Bar enabled (right-click on the top bar in Firefox to get that option). On the Menu, I went to Help > Restart with Add-Ons Disabled. I did that to see whether maybe the “app” was actually a Firefox add-on. But no, that didn’t help: even with add-ons disabled, I still wound up back at the same “Verify it’s you” message.
So, on the screen quoted above, I clicked the Continue button. It said this:
Account recovery Enter the last password you remember using with this Google Account
I entered my password. It said this:
Account recovery This helps show that this account really belongs to you Get a verification code
I entered my phone number. It sent me a verification code. I entered that. It replied:
Change password Create a strong password Create a new, strong password that you don’t use for other websites
Yesterday, when I got to that point, I did as it requested: I created a new, strong password. That worked: I was back in my account on Firefox. But now, first thing in the morning on a new day, we were back to square one. I wasn’t inclined to do that again, because it didn’t seem that doing so had solved the problem.
At that point, I clicked the Help button at the bottom of the screen. The Help Center said, “How can we help you?” I entered, “Verify it’s you.” That led to a help page that did not seem to explain why I was getting this again. The page also seemed to be oriented toward phone users, even though I hadn’t indicated that I was using a phone. There was a Sign In option at the top of the page, but of course I couldn’t sign in. There was no Contact Us link. I found that I was having the same problem when trying to access my Google account in Chrome and Opera, as well as Firefox, on the Windows 10 desktop.
While logged out on all other devices, I tried logging into Google using a nearly brand-new, plain vanilla installation of the Brave browser on a laptop running Ubuntu 20.04. It took me through the same verification steps. I changed the password yet another time, as requested. When that was done, Google required me to change the password again, as it had done in Windows. Google’s advice was to clear cache and cookies. I followed Brave’s advice on that. I set Brave to save no site data on exit. I restarted Brave. I was able to access my account. I went in to review my security settings. In the process, Google logged me out again, and required a new password again — and then AGAIN.
It appeared that I had better try to get in, using Brave, and download backups of my data on all Google-related websites, in case they prevented me from gaining access even through Brave on Linux.
The Worst-Case Solution
I ran a search to see if maybe there was a simple explanation or quick fix. Among the search results, I saw 1 2 Quora pages. Quora users pose questions and answers to various problems. Among the answers, on both pages, I saw statements advising users that, if they couldn’t get back in, they might have to abandon their accounts and start a new Google account.
That was upsetting. Since I was unable to log into Google Calendar, it appeared that this could mean I would lose everything there. I quickly verified that I was also unable to log into YouTube, so I would lose access to the videos that I had uploaded to YouTube over the years, including the ability to moderate viewer comments and post more videos. The same risk would presumably apply to Gmail and any other Google services I used.
It was not surprising that Google would put me in this position. Years earlier, I had been using Blogger for the predecessor to this tech-oriented blog. Then Google acquired Blogger and wrecked it. With many other bloggers, I migrated to httl.com.vn/en. The event forcing that decision: suddenly people who wanted to view my blog were getting an error message: “Blog has been removed.” It hadn’t actually: it is still there.
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That wasn’t the first time Google had ruined software that had previously been providing a useful service. As described in one of my posts, Google had acquired and wrecked DejaNews. That put me on notice that they could do it again. As noted in my transitional post, they had also brought many users to rely on other tools — notably, in my case, the Google Reader tool — and then dropped it. Even Google’s flagship search function was not immune: for reasons presumably related to maximizing profitability, they had significantly reduced both search quality and capability.
The classic saying is, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” The prudent decision, at this point, was obviously not to keep on assuming that Google would be a reliable partner in whatever I was trying to do on YouTube, Google Calendar, and so forth.
In short, the worst-case solution facing me, at this point, was that I might be best advised to go through the password-changing rigamarole again, get access to my Google-related accounts, and at least download backups of everything, proceeding perhaps to upload those backups elsewhere and stop relying on Google tools. In other words, find a video hosting site other than YouTube, an online calendar tool other than Google Calendar, and so forth. And make a practice of keeping frequent backups, in case this happened again.
An Interim Solution
I did set up an alternate online calendar with Zoho, one of those recommended as second-best by several sites. My attempts to use it suggested it was definitely inferior to Google. That’s not to deny it would be far better than nothing, which was what I would have if Google kept locking me out. In a pinch, a person needs to be able to get tech support. The jury was still out as to whether I would get that at Zoho. Among other things, their problem report webpage did not seem to be accepting my message.
Meanwhile, for the moment at least, it appeared that I was having some success, in Google, with the solution described above: log out everywhere else, log in using Brave on the Linux computer, and adjust its settings (basically, saving no data) as mentioned above. That, and making sure not to go into my Settings once I was logged in, did enable me to download a backup of my Google calendar on the Linux machine. Possibly I could also have tried similar steps on my phone.
But that solution was only temporary on the Linux machine. When I restarted Brave on that machine, once again I ran into the requirement of changing my password. I didn’t do that. Instead, I sent an irate Feedback suggestion to Google. This appeared to be as close as I could get to making actual contact with them.
At any rate, once I went through the password change on Brave several times — enough, that is, to learn that I dare not use that machine to visit my Security settings in Google — I found that I was once again able to log into Google on the Windows desktop. For the moment, I seemed to have gotten past this problem. It was impossible to tell whether Google would respond to my feedback and fix it.
Postscript
A few months later, I decided I’d had enough of Zoho’s calendar. The factors taking me back to Google Calendar were (a) Zoho’s wasn’t as good, (b) Zoho tech support was clueless, and (c) there were invitations to events that would apparently be entered automatically into my Google calendar, upon clicking a link, whereas that didn’t seem to work with Zoho.
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I found, in the process of making this transition from Google to Zoho and back, that the translation was not perfect. I wound up spending hours manually checking every item in my calendar, because the import and export processes did not reliably return things to Google in quite their original condition. I had hesitated to switch back to Microsoft Outlook, but maybe that would have been the better alternative.
Categories: Mail