I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

> Yes it is possible but you are describing outliers. Which first world country doesn't have age restrictions on alcohol or tobacco?

In many parts of the US the restrictions are not actually enforced, or you can prove your age using non-government-issued identification.

I also dispute your assertion that people who don't drink or smoke are outliers. The majority of people don't smoke and a large minority don't drink. In some major cultures and religions drinking is outright prohibited.

> Envelopes and small packages (which fit) are left in mail box. In order to get everything else you have to go to your post office. Courier services deliver package to you personally and they don't leave it at your doorstep so anyone can steal it.

In the US they leave it at your doorstep so anyone can steal it, because in practice hardly anybody actually steals it. Who is going to risk federal prison or getting shot by the homeowner over a mystery box which is probably just a $25 bulk pack of shampoo?

> I don't really know how it is done today but in theory you could prove it by taking DNA/fingerprints at birth and registering accordingly.

This doesn't work for anyone who is already an adult, and isn't already being done for newborns so won't work for them either, which means you've got more than a hundred years before something like that could be used without having living people it doesn't work for. It also fails permanently for anyone born and raised in another country.

On top of that, it still isn't solving the unsolved problem, which is identity theft. You can't use DNA or fingerprints over the internet (they're trivially forged if you control the reader), so they're just going to issue you a card or a PIN or some other thing you can use and then someone can steal/hack/forge it and impersonate you. Being able to prove your DNA doesn't disprove that you're the person who used your card+PIN to buy $50,000 in already-provided goods and services, or pay for an email account used to send spam etc.

> We are talking about reality not a situation where government regulations doesn't exist so there is no way of having a bank account if you don't have some sort of ID.

We don't have mandatory national ID cards either. If the proposal is to make a policy change to improve things, let it be the one that doesn't double down on a bad idea.

Also, around a quarter of Americans and half of people in India don't actually have a bank account, largely because they don't have any money to put in it and can't afford the fees that come with not having a minimum balance. So they get paid in cash, or something they immediately convert to cash, and pay for everything with that.

> This is just plain wrong, they care about the identity in case you stop paying so they can go after you.

That is why they require collateral. If you take out a mortgage they put a lien on the house. If you don't pay, they take the house. If you're on a beach in Argentina with a million dollars in cash in a briefcase, what does the bank care as long as the house sells for more than they're owed?

> P.S. You also need ID to own property, companies etc.

There are millions of people who don't own real property or companies, or even cars.

And even then, it doesn't require a national ID -- they all exist without it. They even predate modern identification. Because all of those things are local. If you want to transfer property, you go to a notary. The notary will want to know who you are, but that doesn't mean national ID. They could just take a picture of you and keep it for their records, or accept a non-government ID or an oath from a person known in the community that you are who you say you are.

Centralized identification is at the same time unnecessary and actively harmful.

To provide a citation for their two decades of Adsense fraud, last year they settled a case they fought for four years after someone sued them for banning their account and stealing their revenue, alleging that they deliberately froze publisher accounts at the end of the month to maximize the amount of revenue to be stolen.

After a ban the allegedly fraudulent portion of the revenue is refunded to the advertisers, non-fraudulent revenue within the same time frame is ... they settled for $11m on the grounds that it would be too expensive to show how they didn't design a system intended to steal from their publishers.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/

>If their system decides it doesn't like you, then you're out of luck. You'll never get them to fix it.

Exactly right. The only way to get them to even look at it is to have a friend who works at Google or have tons of Twitter followers and pressure them by tweeting the story.

Is anyone using GCE? This is making me pretty worried. I'm operating a jupyter notebook service where every user gets their own volume. If my account was suspended and we no longer have access to user data that would be terrible. We can try backing data out to AWS but the egress fees would add up

US citizen here. I was in Mozambique, England, Romania and Denmark with my Fi phone in 2017. Despite being listed as a country Fi covered, I could never get service in Mozambique (Beria), despite spending a few hours with several courteous Google Fi customer support people. My experience in the European countries was satisfactory. I don't recall any issues and it was nice to have my US phone number just work in those places.

An earlier trip in 2016 to Tajikistan in central Asia with my Fi phone required purchasing a local SIM card.

I've since given up on Google Fi and switched my number back to Verizon and have been happily using a $200 Moto G5 Plus purchased through Amazon.