The few times I needed help with my project Fi connection it took about 3 minutes to reach a human. Even faster if I was willing to chat instead of call.
I completely disagree. Recently did a factory reset on my nexus only to find out that without the password for the last sync'd google account, a throwaway I don't remember, it's bricked. I can report it stolen on the device page, can easily prove to google it's my device, but I can't reset or sell or do anything with the phone. Google's response after spending days trying to fix, and talking to different support people who had wildly different answers, the only viable answer was to give me the number for Lg and wish me good luck. Never have I paid so much for a product which is broken by its own design while being entirely unsupported by the vendor. Never will I purchase a google product or service and I will tell everyone I know to do the same.
That's because, short of sending you a new device, there isn't any way to bypass the theft prevention. Do you have the same complaint about, as another user mentioned, not being able to recover your data when you forget the password to an encrypted drive?
Do you have the same complaint about, as another user mentioned, not being able to recover your data when you forget the password to an encrypted drive?
This is a pretty disingenuous analogy. GP did not ask about recovering data from the device. GP asked about starting over from scratch. Most people do have the expectation that an old encrypted drive can be reformatted and repurposed without knowing the key.
True, but in this case, you're "encrypting" (or really, securing) your device, and not your data. (I realize this will be misunderstood because "encrypting your device" normally means encrypting the data on your device).
The whole point of that is as an anti-theft measure (a stolen device [with a locked bootloader] cannot be factory reset without the original owner's permission). It would be kind of silly if you could bypass that by saying "no look, its mine I just forgot the password.".
Now admittedly, I'm unsure if you need to know the original password, or if you can change the password online and then reset it, but I think the second would work.
As an aside, this I think fits into a trope I see repeatedly (and pretty much only on HN). I'm not making any judgement about whether being privacy conscious is good or bad. But I find it amusing when people state something like "This product is awful because I <did something that is incredibly privacy conscious and actively inhibits the ability of the prodcut to track things about me that contribute to a positive UX> and then <some product was not useful, and my experience was notably less good than other people>."
>cannot be factory reset without the original owner's permission)
Presumably the permission should come _before_ the reset? After the reset, all the data is gone anyway, and asking the password at that point seems pointless since
> I <did something that is incredibly privacy conscious and actively inhibits the ability of the prodcut to track things about me that contribute to a positive UX>
I read it as - "I did a completely normal thing like performing a factory reset of a consumer device (something that people have been doing for over a decade)"
>Presumably the permission should come _before_ the reset? After the reset, all the data is gone anyway, and asking the password at that point seems pointless since
The point, in this case, is not to keep the data secure, but to disincentivise theft of the device. You cannot resell a phone that prevents someone from using the device.
>I read it as - "I did a completely normal thing like performing a factory reset of a consumer device (something that people have been doing for over a decade)"
To be clear, doing a factory reset wasn't the privacy-conscious thing. Using a throwaway google account to set up the device was. The flow in this case is that the phone will say something like "please enter the username and password of the old account on this device before logging in with a new user account." If they knew the password to their old account, there wouldn't be any issue.
I factory reset devices fairly often and so I run into this a lot, and its not an issue because I know the password to the google account that I use.
I fully accept the premise that a theft prevention system will limit the users ability to do certain tasks. My point was that this feature should also have blocked the factory reset from happening in the first place. That way, your data is still there, but access is conditional on you having the right keys, and there are no surprises.
>I fully accept the premise that a theft prevention system will limit the users ability to do certain tasks. My point was that this feature should also have blocked the factory reset from happening in the first place.
It doesn't sound like that would have made any difference here (ie. instead of "I have a phone I can't use" the complain would be "I can't remove this old google account from my phone")
And actually, as an anti-theft tool, you don't want that, since you want to be able to remotely factory reset your device in case it is stolen (ie. the find my phone features).
Someone at LG or Qualcomm can definitely fix this easily and it takes about 30 seconds to do so. All it takes is to do a "chip erase" which will clear the QSEE sector and allow a complete factory reset.
