Thursday, March 3, 2022

Goodreads Data Loss

Nelson Minar (tweet):

Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data.

[…]

Don’t trust any cloud service with the only copy of your data. Most companies are not quite so reckless but consider what you’d miss if an uncaring company lost your data.

[…]

The specific bug is related to my removing Twitter API access to Goodreads last week (they stopped supporting Twitter login months before). Somehow that triggered their system to delete everything.

Nick Heer:

These are big companies with big budgets and lots of customers, but they still act like they are just figuring this stuff out.

3 Comments RSS · Twitter

I may be not understanding this totally, and it certainly is terrible to lose one’s texts—if one is very attached to them but has them on one place only …

… but I’d think the problem here is using ONE service for registering at ANOTHER service.

Like, login here using Facebook, log in there using your Google account, etc.

This way of being lazy has always struck me as dangerous because it depends on TWO services instead of just one, PLUS it relies on them being “forever friends”.

Also, with proper password management it simply is not necessary.

@Thomas It sounds like they used to support logging in via Twitter but that this bug was related to Twitter API access; maybe it would tweet about which books you had read?

Thomas Rohde

OIC … then I misunderstood indeed … sry

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