Google Docs Connector Broke Google Authentication

whitkri5
I had a student grant Zotero permissions to integrate with his Google Docs (he told me he did not try to make this happen, Zotero pushed out a request for him to allow it permission to integrate). When he allowed this, suddenly he was unable to authenticate into any Google product. For example, he showed me what was happening when he clicked "Sign in" on a shared Google document he was viewing, and nothing would happen. He also could not sign in to YouTube via his Google account.

To fix the problem his university IT department had to wipe all his browsers and reinstall them, and he lost all his cookies and saved passwords. I just wanted to report this to let the community know there could be serious problems with Google Docs connector. If it helps, he was on a Mac computer, but this seems to have impacted multiple browsers on his computer, including Safari and Chrome. He was unable to login to Google products until all of his browsers were completely re-installed.
  • adamsmith
    That sounds unfortunate, but almost certainly unrelated to Zotero (correlation not being causation etc.). There is no other report on this, and even if there were, if it were possible to break google authentication with a 3rd party app this easily, that would be a Google bug. Google account login is notorious for weird issues, especially with multiple google accounts involved. The fact that this occurred on multiple browsers further suggests another issue. Zotero's Safari connector doesn't have any functionality to authenticate with google.

    (Also, Zotero does not actually push this onto users unprompted, ever. The request is prompted by clicking on the Zotero toolbar in google docs.)
  • whitkri5
    This does make sense. I realized I left out the most important part of the issue, and what made us think Zotero was the problem. When he tried to log into YouTube and was unable to, the screen that came up looked like the typical Google authentication page, but what it said was some version of "Zotero needs permission to work with Google Docs. Do you agree to give it permission?" The student said that this message was appearing every time he tried to authenticate into a Google product. So it seems that Zotero in some way was not playing nicely with Google.

    Since his computer has now been wiped and fixed I'm unable to grab any screenshots or do any testing, but at least this bug is now on record, if other similar reports start coming in.

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