Ask HN: Why is there no way to log out of a Google account? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is there no way to log out of a Google account?

23 pointsent10115 comments

There seems to be no way to log out of a Google account on the web. The only option to log out of all your Google accounts! This doesn't make sense.

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This is the #1 reason I use Firefox Container Tabs.

I can have a container for my work, personal, project, etc. where Google is logged in, and not commingle any of them, and all of the tabs are a different color, clearly distinguishable from one another. I have containers for separate Microsoft accounts as well. My "normal" tab is not logged in to any Google or Microsoft accounts, because why would I want them tracking me all over the web? Seriously, container tabs is one of the primary reasons I stick with Firefox, and it's FANTASTIC if you have multiple identities you need to manage.

Chrome pops up and asks you if you want to launch a new chrome instance with that Google profile.

Wow, this is an eye-opener. Thank you so much!

If you ever have a reason to do this, it's a sign that you should not never have logged in to them in the same session in the first place. Use browser profiles (chromium/firefox) or multi-account containers (firefox) to keep them separate, lest Google effectively starts treating them as one.

You know all those "my employer G account was closed and now I permanently lost access to my personal one as well"/"an old employee got their yt video flagged and now our Play Store account is inaccessible" etc stories? I'm quite sure this is the mechanism behind those links.

I don't agree with this. I have many accounts for different domains and use cases. Some of them are used less frequently so I'd like to remove them from the long list of user accounts and log in whenever I need to (once every few weeks).

Right, but don't come crying on HN when you are locked out of all of them because a single one of them got flagged for some arbitrary reason...

You can agree or not, but Google effectively starts treating them as a intrinsically linked accounts once you sign them into the same session (as you are now noticing).

The solution is to keep them in separate sessions, using either profiles, multi-account-containers, or whatever else you prefer.

Alternatively, if you have a handful which are more of occasional transient sessions, you could start the habit of using those from private(firefox)/incognito(chromium) windows, though that sounds like it could be more hassle if you have many of them.

"but don't come crying on HN when you are locked out of all of them because" I don't think the user is at fault here, Google needs to improve its auth/session management.

Google doesn't "need" to change anything. They have a particular model and you can choose to either:

* adopt/accept it

* use available tools (which have been proposed here) to do things differently in a way you prefer

* look for alternatives

There are times when feedback can help things improve but in this scenario you're asking for a fundamental shift that is just not aligned with their model. Along the lines of "I don't want to see ads on top of Google Search results but I also don't want to use adblocker technology; Google needs to improve the way they present search results".

I hope you realize you are being unnecessarily hostile with your answers. OP and the commentor you are replying to are asking legitimate questions, and giving solid criticism for a popular service most of us has no choice but to use. Being all like "Fuck you, don't use it then" adds nothing to the conversation.

I get what you mean with my second one - but the first one was meant at honest advise and a rule of thumb. Text can make words appear harsher than they're meant at times.

And well, OP posted it as an "Ask HN" but their followup replies make it quite clear that they're not about genuinely understanding or finding a way to make it work but about venting, which is not what "Ask HN" is for.

> Being all like "Fuck you, don't use it then" adds nothing to the conversation.

This is really not what I'm saying. Note there are three points up there, not two.

> keep them separate, lest Google effectively starts treating them as one

Does anyone know how often and how long you need to be logged into multiple accounts before Google treats them as one? Maybe it's a single occurrence? One slip-up and you're screwed?

I had the same issue so I decided to create a bunch of website accounts(stackoverflow for example) just for my company profile's google account. Once I leave the company everything will be wiped by IT which is fine.

You can log out of all, then only sign in to the account you want (and optionally remove the "unwanted" account(s) from the sign in list).

Better to log out of all and log back in than to have a random one logged in that you don’t know about.

A cookie is basically just an item in a dictionary. Each item has a key and a value. For authentication, the key could be something like 'username' and the value would be the username. Each time you make a request to a website, your browser will include the cookies in the request, and the host server will check the cookies. So authentication can be done automatically like that.

To set a cookie, you just have to add it to the response the server sends back after requests. The browser will then add the cookie upon receiving the response.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17769011/how-does-cookie...

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