41–50 of 177 posts
Isn't a reasonable solution to pay google for gsuite? It's $50* per year or something? Then the "there's nobody to phone and no appeal and data could just be _gone_" concern goes out the window. *edit: $6 per month so $72 per year
I love that other companies have sustainable alternatives to Google services. But these articles looks more like hype train and doesn’t really add any new value for me. You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day. Probably I’m getting old but I remember times when Google doesn’t exists. We had software for files, messages, ca…
It's probably not normal. I've heard of Google, but not Fastmail, Matomo, Nextcloud, Collabra, Plex, Jellyfin, F-Droid, Aurora, Lineage, PinePhone, Simple Mobile Tools, Hover, Matrix, PocketCasts, AntennaPod, or "Ting".
Wouldn't it be best for google to allow you to download a takeout of all your files in the case that your account is suspended?
They do, and the service is called, drum roll, Google Takeout. https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
I configured NeoMutt to grab the e-mais (the only thing I had on it) and that's it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know, but it seems from the author's post that they were just locked out completely with no option to use google takeout to retrieve their photos etc.
The assumption is that takeout would not work anymore once you are suspended. So unless you are proactive and takeout your data every day, you will probably lose some data
I haven't had a suspended account yet but if google really doesn't let you copy your data under any circumstance, they will have even more fun with the data protection agencies.
Isn't a reasonable solution to pay google for gsuite? It's $50* per year or something? Then the "there's nobody to phone and no appeal and data could just be _gone_" concern goes out the window. *edit: $6 per month so $72 per year
What stops Google from suspending a paid account, assuming they issue a pro-rated refund for anything paid in advance?
Has anyone else had experience with getting their Google account suspended? I literally use it for everything in my life, and without it I would probably lose access to a lot. I would change away from Google in a heartbeat but it just seems like too much effort if I can avoid getting my account suspended in the first place. If anyone has gotten their account suspended, what was it for and how can I avoid it?
Fortunately Google is (or more accurately, was) simply a convenience for me.
I have not yet fully deactivated the several Gmail accounts I have still standing, though those are largely inactive, and most are strictly associated with specific nyms I'd created (one notably after a primary nym account was suspended).
The best way to avoid having your Google account be suspended is to not have one.
But moving to self-hosting, or increasingly, entirely offline, has been a goal and project of the past few years.
I touch a few Google services directly:
- Google Scholar: still amongst the best academic search engines I'm aware of.
- Google Ngram Viewer and Google Trends: quite useful for tracking concepts over time.
- Google Maps: There are times OpenStreetMap's search simply falls down even when specifying lat/lon coordinates directly, Because Reasons. Google Maps is my fallback, but I still rely on it far more than I'd care to.
- Gmail: Secondary for several accounts.
- YouTube: still the largest online video hosting service, though alternative interfaces (https://invidio.us/) and alternate hosts (both centralised and federated or self-hosted) are increasingly viable. YouTube's UI tweaks and aggressive pre-roll ads over the past several months have been aggressively user-unfriendly.
- Google Web Search. A very distant second to DuckDuckGo, but still necessary for 1) date-bounded search, 2) getting overall counts of results (occasionally useful), and 3) rare edge-cases where DDG doesn't turn up expected/desired results (GWS is ~50% successful here).
I don't know if it's because I rely so heavily on DDG that I'm influencing its results, but I find that both searches and content that I've posted tends to turn up high-ranked on it. I'm not as aware of this with Google.
Has anyone else had experience with getting their Google account suspended? I literally use it for everything in my life, and without it I would probably lose access to a lot. I would change away from Google in a heartbeat but it just seems like too much effort if I can avoid getting my account suspended in the first place. If anyone has gotten their account suspended, what was it for and how can I avoid it?
Google doesn't do customer support, which is fine for maps or search where I can just hop and nothing matters, but I'm starting to think it's too big of a risk for my primary email/calendar/contacts.
Today's Google would have suspended all associated accounts.
Right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never understood using a gmail.com account for anything important. It’s always been inexpensive enough to buy a domain and have an email address associated with it. I also don’t understand startup founders who tie personal emails into a business email account. Keep a separate email.
For one, a personal domain is less secure than a gmail.com domain. There have been quite a few targeted hacks, like Mat Honan or any number of crypto-holders, where a personal domain was socially engineered to be transferred to a new registrar (or password reset on existing registrar) where the attacker controls the MX records, thus your email, thus your password resets. It’s much harder to transfer gmail.com, office…
Isn't a reasonable solution to pay google for gsuite? It's $50* per year or something? Then the "there's nobody to phone and no appeal and data could just be _gone_" concern goes out the window. *edit: $6 per month so $72 per year