Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you work for Lyft or something?
No, but she used to work for Google and Facebook.
It’s complicated.
I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
151–160 of 464 posts
Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
#152Maybe someone on HN will know the answer to this: is it easy to enable/disable service with Google Fi? My use case is to use Fi while traveling internationally for a few months out of the year while switching back to my existing plan in the US. I only want to pay for Fi in the months when I'm out of the country.
You can pause Fi service for a few months at a time. However, Google will catch on to your proposed usage pattern and will eventually boot you from the platform. Majority usage outside the USA violate ToS. There are plenty of stories on r/projectfi about this. I've also had a personal friend that was booted after he subscribed to Fi, then moved out of the USA month later for a temporary work assignment, and was boote…
> Majority usage outside the USA violate ToS.
I'm not seeing this listed here: https://fi.google.com/about/tos/. What are the guidelines behind this?
Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
#153The lede here is somewhat burried: "From what I’ve since learned, if a card in your Google Pay is stolen, or someone uses your Payments account fraudulently, or anything happens that leads to a security flag being raised, it can lead to your Google Payments account being frozen. ... If you can’t use Google Payments, you can’t pay for Google Fi This, fundamentally, is why I can’t suggest anyone use Project Fi anymore.…
> The only suggestion of a solution we’ve been given is that he abandon both his email address and phone number of the past twenty years and start fresh."
I believe that being able to port your number is a legal requirement. It's unlikely a poorly designed billing system is a permanent exception to this.
Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
#154I abandoned Fi after a trip to western Europe, where I was billed for 6 GB of usage in a single day on one of my data-only SIM cards, despite that the device the SIM was installed in (a 4G hotspot) registered only 200MB of usage that day. Support was completely unhelpful, and after escalation reported back that the Fi team has zero visibility into chargebacks from their carrier partners and ergo could not diagnose th…
I just went to western Europe (Germany specifically), and spend 15 Euros for phone service there. It's simple: I just bought a SIM card at a shop (O2) and put it in my Verizon phone. I got a prepaid card that had unlimited text/calls (within Germany only), and 3GB of data, which was far more than enough for my 2 weeks there. Cellular service is much cheaper in Europe than in the US, so you might as well take advantag…
i to the same whenever i travel abroad -- be it USA (i use t-mobile) or europe (went twice, used o2 twice). it's a lot less complicated.
Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
#155Stories like this make me incredibly wary about the future of my Google account. I've been using it for almost twelve years. It has a copy of every photo/video I've taken for almost eight years. It's what I use to download apps, listen to music, and pay for things, and get around. I'd be absolutely devastated if I suddenly lost it. I've been planning for a while now a sort of contingency plan where I regularly backup…
Do you want to keep your photos and videos forever? You have to take your data in your own hands. At the very minimum keep an offline backup of things you care about.
Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
#156Phew look at the comments on this one google.
Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
#157Stories like this make me incredibly wary about the future of my Google account. I've been using it for almost twelve years. It has a copy of every photo/video I've taken for almost eight years. It's what I use to download apps, listen to music, and pay for things, and get around. I'd be absolutely devastated if I suddenly lost it. I've been planning for a while now a sort of contingency plan where I regularly backup…
The easiest way to mirror gmail, i have heard & am using is, to set a filter in gmail, forward every mail received to Hotmail. So, any point, Hotmail inbox is a pretty segregated but exact copy of Gmail
so you give two privacy ignoring companies all of your email (as well as portions of your email correspondents) instead of one? is control and some measure of privacy not worth the $50 or whatever to set up a paid account somewhere like https://www.protonmail.com/ ?
Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
#158> Google Fi won’t restore service or allow your number to be ported out until the bill is paid, so around and around we go. I'm surprised this is legal. Number portability isn't something phone companies offer out of the kindness of their heart; it's required by law. Does the law really allow them to hold the number hostage as part of a payment dispute? EDIT: Nope, this is illegal: > Once you request service from a n…
This Reddit thread concluded that because a T-mobile account was suspended for non-payment and the number is unportable while suspended that the customer was out of luck.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/4wotw8/tmobile_won...
I don't see how that matters legally. The FCC requirement doesn't make portability conditional on some account status defined by the carrier. But IANAL.
Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
#159Stories like this make me incredibly wary about the future of my Google account. I've been using it for almost twelve years. It has a copy of every photo/video I've taken for almost eight years. It's what I use to download apps, listen to music, and pay for things, and get around. I'd be absolutely devastated if I suddenly lost it. I've been planning for a while now a sort of contingency plan where I regularly backup…
I agree -- this single point of failure is incredibly scary. There must be a legal mechanism established to ensure consumers are protected. This is an inevitable technological cycle within markets:
1) a technology arises
2) usage spreads across consumers
3) consumers become deeply reliant on it
4) megacorps coalesce dominating market power over it
5) consumers demand protections from the government
We have to get to step 5.
Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi
#160Stories like this make me incredibly wary about the future of my Google account. I've been using it for almost twelve years. It has a copy of every photo/video I've taken for almost eight years. It's what I use to download apps, listen to music, and pay for things, and get around. I'd be absolutely devastated if I suddenly lost it. I've been planning for a while now a sort of contingency plan where I regularly backup…
Its not particularly hard to back up your google data. The hard part is switching emails when the old one gets suddenly taken from you.
Get your own domain and start using it for email. Auto-forward your existing emails to your new email provider. Over time your use of your primary email will asymptotically reach zero. After a few years you will realize that if the original email disappeared overnight, nothing of value would be lost. You have to start the switch TODAY.