For a while, our Comcast billing account accessed some other person’s account. Comcast didn’t take it seriously, and just told us to create a new account and not use the old one. (!!!)

We had full access. I could have signed this person up for the most expensive package, or even canceled their service.

Let's be realistic here. Everyone knows it's not possible to cancel Comcast service.

I managed to cancel my dad's after he died. They STILL tried to upsell me! One of my favorite phrases ever uttered: "He's dead, you asshole, he doesn't need more channels!" And that actually did it. Felt sorry for the salesperson, who didn't have much of a choice in the matter...

Surely by making it difficult to cancel they’re really just making it easier for people to get discounts. If I were a Comcast customer I’d be calling up to cancel every few months.

He's dead, he doesn't need discounts.

Obviously. Which is why I used a plural—I was referring to Comcast’s overall customer base.

Nice one. However, I cancelled in person a couple years ago (because I had equipment to return).

The first thing I said at the counter was "I know it's really hard to cancel Comcast, and I'm not going to accept anything but a cancel."

The girl at the counter smiled and said "We know ..." and immediately cancelled my account.

"Ah yes, cancelling requires a call because of security. A feature for the user!"

To be fair, internets would have been equally outraged if there wasn't such requirement, because sure as hell somebody would have found an exploit and cancelled a bunch of account, just for funzies

That sounds like white hat hacking from all I've heard of Comcast...

Maybe that's how we drive their customer count and revenue down and put them out of business.

I signed up for a disposable Gmail account using my real name at one point, and accepted the randomly suggested address it offered. Gmail loaded with someone else's obviously in use mailbox

IIRC I logged out again and back in, same thing, my credentials worked. Went back to it a few days later and the password no longer worked

Hash collisions most likely.

Have heard this so many times about Gmail...

How have they not resolved this?

I think it's like EC2 instance IDs. When they first came up with it, they never thought there would be literally billions of unique email addresses/EC2 instances eventually.