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Google disabled my husband's account

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Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So he's going to piss away a $300k+ job over this. And then what? The account will still be locked out.

People who can get $300k+ jobs at Google are exactly the people who can afford to piss away those jobs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#143
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately Protonmail is not good for long term mail storage. Their web mail app has hardly improved in years, and it is abysmal in terms of search and handling thousands of emails. If you depend on PM, you may find some years later that your emails are trapped and incredibly difficult to access except painfully individually, with much manual effort.

The bridge is open source and works on Linux, there are AUR packages for Arch. It's fairly easy to extract your data.

Yes, you can extract to local files, but if you just want to keep your data on PM and try to access it, it's a very unpleasant experience.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#144

It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal, but you don't know what you're being accused of doing. This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone…

> The only reason these tech companies managed to get so big is because they'll cheat at anything that requires human scale. Support, moderation, taking responsibility for the content they host. They somehow managed to skirt on that just as the web was transitioning from a wild west to a somewhat ingrained, regulated place and the world is worse off for it.

People willingly chose the free option and chose to not pay companies that would have offered support.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#145

It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal, but you don't know what you're being accused of doing. This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone…

Its only 9 times out of 10 when the story is escalated to the front page of Hacker News. For all we know, 99,999 times out of 100,000 its a case of fraud or law enforcement action that is completely correct and valid, and you do not give those actors information on how you detected them.

It absolutely is, which is why what they're doing looks fine on internal metrics.

Imagine I make a laser bug zapper and install them at every fast food joint in the US. 9999 out of 10000 times it zaps an insect. 1 out of 10000 times the laser fires it blinds a child.

I could wax all I want want about the 99.99% accuracy, the _relative_ accuracy won't mean a thing to the million people blinded by it.

When there is a mix of spambot garbage and human beings that being harmed the right metric isn't the ratio. Blinding a million children wouldn't go from unacceptable to acceptable just because the level of insects swarming around a restaurant increased by a factor of 10. The harm stands alone, and there is a level of harm which could not be justified by any amount of boring spambot influx.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#146

It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal, but you don't know what you're being accused of doing. This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone…

It took 6 months for Facebook to get to an appeal of mine to unban a page. I was happy it was unbanned, but the ticket said "1-2 business weeks" in the turn around...I was never contacted for an entire 6 months. If that had been a crucial page for me that brought in revenue for me, I'd have been completely screwed. Google is also hard to get a hold of for anything unless you're a partner.

I worked at a startup where we used Google Cloud. Even as a paying customer, when I'd try to talk to their "support" all they would do is try to upsell their consulting partners to answer a question about their own services.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#147
post #112

Does Google also disable access to Google Takeout when they disable accounts? If so (and I assume they do), IMO that's really the worst of it. It's bad enough that they arbitrarily and capriciously disable accounts, but then to also deny you the ability to take out your personal data... that's reprehensible.

Everything is locked away. Happened to a movie director. Lost all of his YouTube, blogger, business email, everything. Never recovered any of it. It was why I switched away from them and will never trust them with anything important / irreplaceable.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#148
There is a simple three-step process to resolving these recurring problems: (1) Surface the complaint on the front page of Hacker News; (2) Stimulate at least 100 comments on the submission; (3) Wait for someone at Google to sheepishly revert the change, possibly without comment.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#149

It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal, but you don't know what you're being accused of doing. This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone…

One thing that is tough about these stories is that there a class of US enforcement responses for which it is illegal to disclose why you responded. For instance, it is a prison-time offence for an individual employee of a financial institution to tell a customer they filed a SAR on them. The way you get kafka is BSA compliance officers have personal liability for this reporting, so they prefer not to have customers…

Filing a required financial report is not similar to terminating someone's access to their account

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#150
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the hope is that you'll have better customer support options if you're actually paying them money, rather than the block hole that is the support for their free tier of products.

To be honest, I don't understand this. Why should someone paying for a product get better support than someone who doesn't? I understand companies which sell plans so that some users can have priority support, but quality should not change according to how much money you give. It's absurd. Everyone should be in the same boat.

Yeah, but welcome the real world where this is pretty much rampant.

Want support for working with AWS? The more you pay the better it gets.

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