So, I just had a terrible few hours. My son, who is 17, and I had the same model of phone (LG-v30) but he got a new iPhone for xmas and I wanted to repurpose his phone into a remote for our entertainment center.
He forgot his phone password, so I tell him to figure it out. He goes into his computer with his gmail account and goes to the website google.com/android and it gives him the option of erasing all the data so he does it.
The problem is, it doesn’t wipe his phone, it wipes mine.
Let me tell you, getting your phone wiped while it is literally sitting inches from my left hand with no verification or anything else from google, is a fucked up way that google is doing this.
When I finally got off the phone with ATT (Google has no phone numbers), and had my phone functional again (with no ability to restore any data - lost all my contacts, all my text messages) I asked how can I prevent this from happening and the ATT person said she doesn’t know.
How in the heck did my phone ever get associated with my son? Is it because he logged into it once a few years ago? I’m seriously trying to figure this out and no amount of google-fu is bringing up anything remotely close to what happened to me.
I would think that many families have the same model of phone and this has happened before, but no one is talking about it, at least with words that I’m searching for.
Wow that sucks. I think the most likely answer is that his acct was added as an official Google account onto your phone - maybe he switched accts to download some apps or something?
It sucks, but of course there isn’t any verification. The point is to wipe the phone if it’s been lost or stolen. Requiring or even allowing verification would be counterproductive.
You say in your post he logged into it a while back. That would have associated the phone with his Google account and made it one of the ones that could be found/wiped.
Your phone data (contacts and maybe messages at least, depending on how you message and which version of Android) should be backed up to your Google account, unless you opted out of that.
Sorry this makes no sense. Reset your phone. When you turn it on, Android will ask “do you want to restore from a backup”. You click yes. If that doesn’t work, it’s another layer of ‘your own fault’.
Not to sound to condescending, sorry. Tech is amazing these days. Buy a new phone, turn it on, and all your apps, data, messages, contacts, settings, save-games are there automatically with minimal hassle.
Perhaps your data was backed up under your sons Google account?
Maybe check to see if there are any backups available in his account management (website).
lol. I was mad, but not at him. Once he showed me how he wiped it and I look that he has his email, I just chalked it up to stupid google shit. Which I still do. No way his email should have been associated with my phone.
It’s not really stupid. If his email was added as an account on your phone, then that account can manage the device. What is not good is having contacts on the phone that are NOT associated with an online account.
As draxen suggested, go to https://contacts.google.com/ and login alternately with both your Google account, and his, and see if your missing contacts have been synced to either account. If so, you can get them back on to your phone without much difficulty.
It’s likely that they remove the ability to restore from backups specifically because it was wiped remotely as an anti-theft measure. Maybe you could talk them online into specifically bypassing or un-flagging it as ‘stolen’ and the backups will be available again?
Yeah, this is all on your son. On Android, you can and should have (but hindsight is 20/20) checked which accounts are signed into the phone inside Settings.
To repurpose a phone for use, you don’t use the portal remote wipe. You reset it to factory defaults on the phone itself. This is the easiest way and allows you to eyeball things one final time on the phone. It’s the most natural and straightforward thing to do and I don’t know why he opted for the remote wipe. That no verification remote wipe is working as intended for anti-theft purposes.
Android is generally really good at cloud-storage type stuff…if your contacts aren’t on your Google account, I’d bet money they’re on your son’s, as others have suggested. I don’t know how much you use the Google ecosystem, but it’s really encompassing, and I’ve gone though multiple phones and resets without ever losing anything. If his email was tied to your phone somehow, it seems very likely that his account has your contacts.
That’s probably why you can’t find anything regarding this on line. I don’t think it would occur to most people to wipe their phones remotely (unless it was stolen).
So now that my phone is wiped, and I’m starting out with what appear to be google contacts on my gmail account that are 4 years old, I went in and added a contact on my phone. Nothing was synched. Contacts aren’t getting propagated between my device and gmail.
My son isn’t home so won’t be able to look at his contacts until he gets home from school.
Re-reading it, it sounds like the screen unlock PIN was forgotten. So a phone wipe from the portal might have been the only way. Just no care was taken to ensure the right phone was wiped.
