Down grading security for the benefit of a tiny minority with an especially ridiculous use case is not the greater good. If the homeless people think they are at risk of losing their phone then they should pick another free email vendor.
1. Vulnerable populations need more assistance accessing essential services required to participate in society
2. Service providers need to maintain a reasonable level of security for their customers
Can both be true. Saying that maximum (or minimum) levels of security are required at all time completely misses the point of security--which is to mitigate risk. How much risk is appropriate varies a lot by context.
Beyond the context of risk, there is reasonable debate to be had on how to best provide access to essential services to vulnerable populations. It's pretty important to have an email nowadays and if you're not tech savvy or an individual/community has little to no money to spend it's not unreasonable to have the reality of the matter be that there may simply not be many good alternatives (or awareness of alternatives) to GMail.
I'm not sure what a correct answer here looks like, but I don't think ignoring the need is an approach that gets us to a better society or enables vulnerable populations to better care for themselves.
What is the debate? The government can collect taxes and provide services, like they do for multitude of other needs.
> I'm not sure what a correct answer here looks like, but I don't think ignoring the need is an approach that gets us to a better society or enables vulnerable populations to better care for themselves.
The correct answer is not depending on the largesse of businesses. It is using government resources to provide methods for identity verification, communications, and various other bare minimum needs for living.
The debate parent mentioned is what to do with the money, not where to get money. You can see that there are lots of possible options, right? But you say use taxes like it’s ‘duh, easy’ or something. Now we’re in the realm of the debates actually happening every day in the US, whether to provide social services at all, before we even discuss how much money they need, what to do with it, and where to get it. A huge portion of people this country seem to believe that they don’t benefit from taxes and would prefer safety nets for other people not come out of their pockets.
> The correct answer is […] using government resources to provide methods for identity verification, communications, and various other bare minimum needs for living.
This also sounds like you think it’s easy, without considering the implications. (If govt resources is the solution, why do we still have a problem?) We don’t have municipal or federal Gmail or Facebook, and there are reasons to believe programs like that would take a long time and cost a lot of money. The ‘bare minimum needs’ have changed dramatically in 20 years, and will probably keep changing just as fast for a while, with the homeless population growing in the mean time because the tax-funded social safety net we have isn’t doing the job.
To be fair I don't see how any government system can do better regarding identity on the internet. Login.gov is one of the best services I've used for access to usajobs/SSA/etc but it follows some of the same security best practices people are complaining about here with no real way to re-gain access to your login.gov account should you lose your 2fa methods (afaik).
