Google could put a toggle in Google Account settings titled something like "Allow anyone who knows my password to log in to my Google account (less secure)." It could sit above a description of the risks involved. It would need to be disabled by default, and it wouldn't help users who don't know about it. It certainly would not fix homelessness in society. But it would do a lot of good for a lot of people!

Would this option lead to some increased number of hacked accounts? Probably, but these would be accounts that explicitly opted in to that risk! I think it's excessively paternalistic to not provide the option. Every life situation is unique, and people know their own lives better than Google does.

This point is worth reiterating. Homelessness can be solved by providing housing. Yes, homelessness is a complex multi-faceted problem, but the first order solution to the problem is to provide housing.

Homelessness is a problem with huge externalities to society. Put another way, homelessness is an enormously expensive solution to the problem of providing space for humans to live.

Mark spent considerable time earning the trust of LA's skid row population – a large roadside tent community – and has a series of 1:1 interviews with a slice of the population, exploring their histories, challenges, preferences, and culture.

Mark doesn't believe that many (most?) of the skid row population would benefit from being provided with housing, and that issues of trauma, mental health, and childhood family environment are what he believes would have the highest leverage on the problem.

This is of course just one perspective on the problem, but Mark's perspective taught me quite a bit.

It could be opt-out.

> It's similar to the 'think of the kids + terrorism' attacks on encryption.

No, it's not. Nobody choosing whether _they_ enable 2FA affects your decision to use it or not. It's more like forcing drugs down somebody's throat because you believe it benefits them and everybody else is doing it anyway.

> Why is it such a hassle to keep the same number after a theft? We could investigate there too.

Sim-jacking. Somebody could claim to have lost it and just take your number. This has happened before. The problem of authentication is fundamental in security and Google are just passing the buck onto phone service providers.

> Heck, if we want to focus on Gmail, why not focus on why it's the default choice for the homeless to begin with, as opposed to removing features.

Because it's free and the emails don't bounce. Most big tech has 2FA now.

We have to break out of the stereotype that homelessness is a city problem. It isn't. Far from it.

Homelessness is more obvious in cities because there are fewer places for homeless people to be. But there are plenty of homeless people camped out in rural and suburban towns, if you know what to look for.

I recently lived in a snooty city suburb where most of the homes cost from $600,000 to $10 million, and guess what — the drainage tunnels beneath the Home Depot, the maintenance underpasses in the parks, the undeveloped wooded lots were all full of homeless people.

Promulgating the notion that homelessness is a city problem is what allows suburban and rural politicians to cut funding for homeless services because "it doesn't affect my constituents."

google isn't requiring specific 2FA data, like address, because they are stalwart guardians of data. They are harvesting data because that is their business.

The homeless don't have enough data to be of value to an entity like goolge

E-mail needs to be a regulated utility, given that getting locked out of one’s email happens all the time with catastrophic consequences.

That's not the problem, that's a vague wave at a generic class of innuendo that could be used just as easily to rationalize not allowing your child to eat ice cream or Japanese internment. You have to make the case why Google changing their 2FA system is so much more important than the homeless having phone service, you can't just say "sometimes, empathy can be bad."

I'm not getting that from the rest of the comment, which seems like a gish gallop around a bunch of other things that we're also not going to do for the homeless, and about which you or somebody else can say "it's only human to be worried about other people going through these issues, but empathy can be bad. The answer isn't that HUD should change the second line of the third section of Form B, it's that we should fix the homeless problem completely."

edit: We can't use as an excuse for not making small changes that we should be making larger changes. The excuses that one makes to avoid making small changes will apply more so to larger changes.

You're putting the cart before the horse. The far simpler solution is for the government to provide the homeless with email. Now the auth can work however you want.

Also, homelessness isn’t the problem we think it is. It’s millions of problems. Any solution will never help more than a subset of the homeless population. We need to iterate on small solutions to make progress.

May I introduce you to the concept of scissors?