[brokencode]

1. Many uses are not computer experts and don’t realize they’re at risk. They won’t adopt extra security measures unless they need to.

2. No company wants to announce that a bunch of accounts were hacked. The excuse that “our users don’t care” would be widely criticized.

3. Well yes, of course companies want to reduce customer support costs, but guess who else benefits from not needing customer support? The customers. It’s better to avoid a problem in the first place than to have great mechanisms for resolving it.

[swiley]

The problem is that you have to have an account on google to participate in a number of communities. Because of this they have social scaling problems that might be fundamentally unsolvable and in their attempt to find a solution they've done things like this.