"We have seen a few cases where users report that their accounts have been deleted, and in each case our investigations have revealed that the accounts were deleted by someone with that account's password. In these cases, we're unfortunately unable to restore accounts," a Google spokeswoman told ZDNet UK.Many users think that even if someone knows their Gmail password, that person shouldn't be able to delete the Gmail account. But that's absurd: if you log in to Gmail, you can select mails (in a batch of maximum 100) and delete them. That's almost the same thing as deleting the account.
Until the identification systems evolve from username/password to biometrics authentication there will always problems like these. Biometric solutions use unique biological or behavioral characteristics (like fingerprint matching) to verify identification. A growing number of notebook PCs and computer peripherals are coming to market with built-in fingerprint readers, including keyboards, mice, external hard drives, USB flash drives and readers built into PC card and USB plug-in devices. For example, Wireless Intellimouse Explorer from Microsoft has a fingerprint reader that allows you to log on to your PC and your favorite Web sites with your fingerprint.
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Gmail horror story: Gmail account deleted