Google disabled my husband's account • Hacker News Board

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#151

Post by ffpip » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

bigbubba wrote: post #37

ffpip wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7 billion people use Google. If you look at the likeliness of it happening to one guy out of 7 billion, it would be very, very small. But the problem is, once it is banned, you will probably lose a lot of important stuff permanently.

Worse: This sort of thing has happened to a lot more than just one guy. One in seven billion is way too optimistic.

You may have misunderstood. I didn't mean to say the likeliness of it happening to X6S1x6Okd1st is one in seven billion.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#152

Post by Someone1234 » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

fh973 wrote: post #33

They're begging for the European legislation to require mobility of email addresses as we have for mobile phone numbers.

How would that work on a technical level?

Phone numbers are just sequential numbers, that are assigned to carriers, when consumers transfer numbers the carriers just re-assign ownership via an assignment swap.

An email address by contrast is an undefined/minimally defined identifier in front of an @ and the message is just thrown to the domain to do something with.

Which is to say, mobility is impossible, because there's no cross-vendor standard for the identifier part and even if there was, both parts make up an email address which would send it to the wrong vendor anyway.

It is like having a phone number that ended with a network specific postfix and using it to route at the network level. It would make phone numbers non-transferable too.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#153

Post by blunte » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

eindiran wrote: post #132

blunte wrote: 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.

I’ve been using Protonmail for years, with many tens of thousands of emails, and this does not match my experience at all. It is far, far easier for me to find old emails sent to my Protonmail account than to my old Gmail account, which seems to randomly decide that some emails shouldn’t be searchable. With a paid account it is trivial to export your emails as well: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/expor…

Interesting, because I had exactly the opposite experience. My 70,000+ gmail account from 2004 is still easier to find things in than my 10k email account on PM was before I gave up.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#154

Post by kelnos » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #71

martinko wrote: post #15

This is one of the reasons why I've finally began migrating to a custom domain + proton mail. Can't imagine the time it would take me to get back all the accounts registered to my email, not to mention those to which access would be lost forever.

I've been wanting to migrate off Gmail since Snowden, but never looked closer. I need to get on that.

I looked into this a bit a year or two ago, and wasn't happy with the alternatives. The main issue for me is that I never delete anything, and so I have nearly 500GB of email, dating back over 20 years (sadly I've lost earlier email due to the cost of even local storage back in those days). I don't want to deal with the data in any way, sorting through it, splitting it up, etc. I just want to dump it all into an email account and have it forever. Many of the alternatives that offer good privacy top out at 20GB or so for their most expensive plan (or less).

Tutanota was the one service I found that let you add (IIRC) arbitrary amounts of storage to your plan, but I found their web interface to be kinda clunky, and let the account expire. I keep wanting to look into this again, but never get around to it.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#155

Post by blahyawnblah » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

blunte wrote: post #103

blahyawnblah wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use nextcloud with s3 as the backend for file sharing and storage. Backblaze backs up the folder that contains nextcloud. I self host email using the standard dovecot/postfix

When this topic comes up periodically, some people comment about the difficulty of having their outgoing mail often blacklisted or automatically marked as spam when being sent to major email hosts (such as Google, MS, etc.) Have you found this to be a problem?

Only without outlook. I am currently working to fix the issue. They have a process, and it's definitely a process.

Barring that. I still have my gmail account.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#156

Post by dleslie » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

jpxw wrote: post #60

andmarios wrote: post #41

I am not fond of suggestions to break up big companies, but I do believe that FAANG should be treated as utility companies and not be allowed to deny service to anyone; any termination decision should be left to an independent 3rd party, ideally a public authority, so the big company will not be liable for any account misconduct.

Hello from the UK, where we lock people up for jokes! Public authorities are just as corruptible.

For jokes and for carrying deadly assault spoons. AFAICT, it looks to be sporting aftermarket tacticool rust. ;)

https://www.foxnews.com/world/british-police-station-mocked-...

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#157

Post by toss1 » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #52

This is a fine example of why one should NEVER use a free closed (source or company) service for critical life or business functions. They can and sometimes will shut you off with no reason given, no access to your data, and no recourse (& NO, appealing when no charges are specified, and no info or reasoning for their decision other than "yup we confirmed you violated our TOS", is not recourse, even in a Kafka world)…

Interesting, multiple downvotes in minutes, yet zero discussion or attempt to make the counter case.

Seems plenty of people around here think it is a good idea to leave critical functions to a company where you are the product.

Edit: minutes later some upvotes too, so controversial, it seems. If there's a counter-case (other than convenience and "low" risk, I'd like to see it

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#158

Post by blunte » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

cft wrote: post #134

blunte wrote: 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.

I use my own domain and gmail for phone access, but I download all my emails to Outlook via imap. I have about 20GB of emails in outlook (my entire life's emails basically) which are instantly searchable.

Indeed if you are willing to have all your emails downloaded to local disk, but that's really inconvenient if you want to live with disposable hardware and cloud-based storage.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#159

Post by m00x » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

Before laying down judgement on Google, this is standard procedure for any kind of legal matter / fraud.

I work at a bank and it's absolutely critical that we do not let anyone know of our reasons for banning/suspending accounts while there's fraud investigations on the account.

Investigations take a long time since we need to determine if the fraud/criminal actions were 100% done by the user of the account, or if the account was compromised and was used as a proxy. 90% of the times we find it's a third party takeover and the user is cleared. There's a good chance his husband's account was taken over and someone was using his Drive to host pirated movies.

Think about the other side when thinking about a situation like this. I'm sure Google is taking this very seriously.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#160

Post by manigandham » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

actuator wrote: post #14

I have been thinking about this for a while. Considering I prefer to keep the important data/emails on Gmail or Google drive for security and I really consider it important. Would it help if Google had a paid tier? Say, if you can get into an annual plan, similar to what's there for hardware devices like Apple Care+. Just that, in this there is someone to help you through issues. We used to pay 10% of our AWS bill fo…

Google One is $20/year for the base 100GB plan. I pay primarily so that there's a direct line to support in case something happens.

Otherwise I recommend using your own cloud storage buckets and/or a local NAS to store your data. It's easy enough to backup and sync across all of them now with various tools and services.