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I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

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Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#441

Post by smsm42 »

MyNameIsFred wrote: post #333
gameswithgo wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's an unsolvable fraud/scammer problem. credit card companies and traditional banks and credit unions handle it fine. >Too many people, scams and fraud become big problems. if the solution to fraud is un-fixable account freezes, you have not actually solved anything. It is fraud itself.

They most certainly do not "handle it just fine". They are highly scammable, they know it, and it's "solved" my moving as much of the burden and repercussions onto the consumer as possible. I've had my identity stolen, and both my wife and I have been mistaken for somebody else. There ARE way to move past this condition (inline with Google Pay, apparently), but it's just done via trust. Or apathy. Or acceptable risk.…

> it's "solved" my moving as much of the burden and repercussions onto the consumer as possible.

I've had fraudulent charges on my credit card several times, and I've had checks stolen, and in no case I had any repercussions and financial burden shifted on me. I didn't pay a cent, and both credit companies and banks never tried to claim I am responsible for it - they rolled back the charges and reissued account numbers and that was it for me. Maybe I'm just exceptionally lucky, but my impression from other people that this is what happens in most cases like mine. Of course, whole full-blown identity theft is a different matter, probably harder to handle.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#442

Post by yaleman »

gregd wrote: post #412
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't previously know what Larry Page's view on customer support circa 2000 was: But while it's easy to scoff at Page's quirks—his odd obsessions, his unrealistic expectations, his impatience for a future dangling out of immediate reach—sometimes his seemingly crazy ideas wind up creating breakthrough innovations, and skeptical Googlers wind up admitting Page was right, after all. That was the reaction in 2003 whe…

Yeah but it doesn't work. It's one thing to be able to "answer questions". It's an entirely other thing to have access rights to actually solve a problem and the authority to do so.

Worse still, the forums are full of spammers, phishing and malware links.

I've posted in the past and had nothing but fake call centres and phishing links posted, which eventually get removed, but I did click on some of them (in sandboxed malware-analysis browsers) and it took a lot of searching and knowledge to realise that the numbers were fake - and I work in IT secops.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#443

Post by yaleman »

brewdad wrote: post #217
magduf wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My son will be traveling to Europe this summer for a school trip. He'll be spending time in 6 or 7 different countries (UK, France, Germany, Switzerland and a couple more I can't remember right now) Is there a better option than Fi for this type of trip?

I've been to Europe a few times lately and I'm a massive fan of Vodafone's coverage and offerings. The only issue I had was the lack of tethering on a prepaid SIM, but the free wifi everywhere I went was normally good enough to use for anything I needed.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#444

Post by tomjen3 »

akimball wrote: post #432
kalleboo wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden has a personal identity number system, with an address/phone database that business can subscribe to. When you're shopping online, you can enter your ID number and it auto-populates your address. When you move, banks and others will automatically pull your new address from the database. The banks then created a digital ID system (BankID) on top of this which is now used by everyone for real ID verification. Yo…

How well served are the unenumerated?

Dane here, we have mostly the same system.

There are only really two groups that have issues: the very young (who are not used to checking up) and the very old (who are not used to computers).

Nobody is unenumerated, everybody has our version of a social security number, you are mostly required by law to have a bank account (and banks are required to give you one, except in specific individual cases such as you acting in an inappropriate manor)

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#445

Post by tomjen3 »

tooop wrote: post #376
dragonwriter wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t function as a citizen of a country without identity documents. Sure you can. Identity documents exist more to prevent (the “wrong") people from functioning as citizens than to enable people to do so.

If you look young, how can you even buy alcohol or cigarettes (in my countries case even energy drinks) or get in a club? In my country each citizen must have an identity document - either a passport or ID card (drivers license doesn't count). I can't see it any other way as you need to ID yourself in stores (in the mentioned case if you look young and want to buy alcohol/cigarettes/energy drink), post office when re…

The checking for a picture id is mostly an issue in the US, because they are insanely horrified by thought that people drink in the US in the exact way they do in most of the western hemisphere.

Anyway never had an issue with getting a package with my drivers license, and I didn't recall having issues before I got that. My passport is expired, because travel is inconvinient and mostly made obsolete with the internet.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#446

Post by alanfranzoni »

dpark wrote: post #318
jjeaff wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend anyone who likes Gmail to use your own domain name@example.com and just forward all messages to your Gmail address. Only give out your own example.com email and set it as the reply to. Even the cheap budget registrars offer email forwarding for free and I have never had any trouble. This gives you the benefits of free Gmail without handing your entire life over to them. At least with a tld there is some d…

You’ll find that if you do this, you start getting emails directly to your gmail anyway. I never give out my gmail address, but I use gmail and they happily report my gmail address when they send email as my “real” account. (Both email addresses are included in emails I send.) And upstream they are happy to respond to that gmail account when people hit the reply button. So I have tons of people who would essentially…

This happens because you use Google's own SMTP. If you configure an external SMTP (e.g. Amazon SES) then the gmail webapp won't tell your gmail address to third parties.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#447

Post by 013a »

buro9 wrote: post #415
013a wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I can suggest; if you're deep into google products, you should be paying the $5/month for a G-Suite account with your own domain. You get access to better business-class support. Fi is now also supported on G-Suite accounts. It's a no-brainer. It sucks that their personal account support is so bad, but there is a solution.

I've had such bad experiences on G Suite I've just gone back to the consumer Google One world of regular Gmail: https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d292906... I would not recommend G Suite to anyone who is a consumer or household any longer.

That article, despite being only a month old, is out of date or just wrong.

Yes, none of the "Family" products are available for G-Suite. That being said, all of the functionality beyond saving money is there with G-Suite. The saving money part is important, don't get me wrong. But sharing photos, seeing your "family's" (aka, your G-Suite organization's) stuff, etc, that's all there. Its just packaged differently, and in a way that's more expensive and substantially more powerful.

YouTube Music is definitely available on G-Suite. So is Google Fi; I'm on a Fi device on my G-Suite account right now (they enabled this early 2018 IIRC). Google Spaces is a discontinued product that isn't available for anyone.

The Google Home and Assistant is the only area today within G-Suite I've seen really weird behavior because I use a G-Suite account. Things like accessing your calendar just don't work right, and often result in errors. That's a very valid issue.

There are sacrifices to both approaches. I will gladly pay the extra money to, in turn, get access to a higher tier of account level support, unlimited storage, and the custom domain name. There are also a few products that are only available to G-Suite customers. CloudSearch is a single omnibar search service that does deep, filterable search on every resource in your G-Suite across all of their services (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, etc). Vault is also cool; I have rules set up which retain emails indefinitely, so even if I delete them from GMail they're still exportable from Vault. The Google Titan Key was also a hardware product that was only available for G-Suite customers for a while.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#448

Post by radicaldreamer »

sithadmin wrote: post #352
radicaldreamer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because people will figure out that they don’t need voice services st all...

That's not a problem if you follow the Fi billing model: a base payment for voice and SMS/MMS service is always required to keep the account active. Data is billed separately.

The thing is that I’m sure there are plenty of families on Fi who don’t have phone numbers for anyone but the primary account holder and rely on voip.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#449

Post by fastball »

rrdharan wrote: post #236
fastball wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, crypto is a payment system that won't kick you off for fraud.

The DAO hack remediation has determined that was a lie.

That was a reversal of fraud, nobody was banned from the Ethereum network (because nobody can be banned from the network).

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#450

Post by overtmind »

Anyone notice a theme here?

Every failure of google has something to do with the fact that they're automating so far that it ends up being downright harmful. Youtube, Google Pay, Google Cloud, etc

I've even heard of similar stories about using Google Cloud, where the system can flag your account and basically your entire business is deleted due to an automated process!

https://medium.com/@serverpunch/why-you-should-not-use-googl...

Though they seem to have reigned that in a bit here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/18/google_cloud_platfo...

I get the feeling in the short term they'll double-down on automation/AI until it's good enough nobody notices.

I wonder if they have a pulse on how their businesses are suffering because of that perception, though. When your company has a stigma of it being nearly impossible to reach a human being to get things done - is it really a surprise that my colleagues and I won't recommend google cloud as a service provider?

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