Google disabled my husband's account • Hacker News Board

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#171

Post by Eyas » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

goldcd wrote: post #107

Eyas wrote: post #2

This story is just absolutely ridiculous: The poster _works at Google_ and even tried to escalate internally for days, to no avail.

I would have thought ensuring that workers at google, getting absolutely no special access to specific other accounts, is pretty much the most sacrosanct rule. i.e. Google's unlikely to hand over the dossier they've assembled on 'what your husband has been up to that we considered bad enough to shut down their account' Most definitely not saying this isn't a false positive - but the handling process for it it must as…

Sure, to me the ridiculous part is:

- it's weird to be mistreated by your employer's own product (just the irony bend to it)

- if you want to appeal after a dead end, your choice is to make a huge public PR nightmare, or try to make an internal post/plea that gains traction. you'd be doing your own employer a service if you could have this issue resolved without a PR nightmare

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#172

Post by m00x » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

tehwebguy wrote: post #149

vessenes wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Filing an SAR usually comes (99.99%) along with suspending the account. Suspension of account usually comes before filing the SAR as to stop any further illegal actions.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#173

Post by dleslie » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

blunte wrote: post #143

dleslie wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Er, not really?

I use Outlook to access it on my work PC, the Android app on my phone, and the web interface elsewhere. Seems quite usable and painless, to me; even search.

But then, I fastidiously organize my email and so I don't need to rely on "smart" , privacy violating, deeply intrusive search.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#174

Post by lotsofpulp » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

317070 wrote: post #161

lotsofpulp wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Because support sucks universally and everywhere. There is no way to know if you will get support, even if you pay. Support is one giant lemon market. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

I get support from apple when I walk into their store, or I open up a chat window on their website. I received it in April when my phone died and they helped me try to revive it.

I get support from Fastmail, and Migadu and Target and banks and plenty of other companies. I also provide support for my businesses.

Support usually sucks with monopolies, such as ISPs who know you have no alternative. But even then, I’ve always been able to get someone on the line to fix my issue.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#175

Post by payamb » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #128

itg wrote: post #12

Right now I have everything tied up to my Google account (primary email, drive, photos). Has anyone moved away and if so, to what?

I use a more privacy-focused email provider, their lowest tier costs 1 Euro/month and is enough for me, which means I still have near free email with calendar sync. I don't upload any photos or other files anymore, though. The problem is that you can never fully trust those cloud providers to keep the data safe, so you need other backups anyways. I was thinking about using a more trustworthy service for off-site back…

What they are called?

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#176

Post by Daniel_sk » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #87

ffpip wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't use Gmail to signup for stuff. If you lose the account, you lose all the forgot password links, the email 2FA codes, and the communication with support.

And use what instead? You're just re-stating the problem, not offering anything in the way of a solution.

Pay few $ a year for your own domain and then you can switch email providers. I love Fastmail.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#177

Post by manigandham » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #58

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…

If Google won't do it, why hasn't a 3rd party stepped up to provide the service? I'd gladly pay a trustworthy company a few dollars a month to automatically backup my gmail, google photos, and google docs. I don't want to do it locally, since that puts me on the hook for assuring physical safety and backups of my backups. I suppose I could roll my own solution, but frankly I get tired of maintaining my one-off projec…

This is a project I started working on but never finished. The problem is that people didn't care enough to pay for backups because they (are conditioned to) believe that Google is already safe and won't go away. The cloud is this magical thing that saves everything and unfortunately they don't realize otherwise until it stops working.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#178

Post by sangnoir » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

breakingcups wrote: post #83

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…

I'll play the devils advocate: moderating any platform is a challenging endeavor, mostly because of malicious users. Having all the rules broken down in detail allows bad actors to either get close to the line but not cross it, or abuse the system while technically not breaking any rules. As such, having very broad rules (read TOS) helps. Additionally, not having to explain exactly what was violated means that people can't probe the system to figure out the rules in detail as well as the limits of acceptable behavior.

The problem with such opaque systems is that it can go terribly wrong, but the answer is to not centralize anything important; always keep a backup. After all, the cloud is someone else's computer.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#179

Post by AnssiH » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #79

If anyone has a Google account, you need to Takeout regularly. https://takeout.google.com

If only it worked... https://i.imgur.com/FKFa2l7.png

I probably could try to bisect if there is a specific type of data that prevents Takeout on my account, but I haven't bothered as I think I have all the important data otherwise backed up.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#180

Post by bee_rider » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

rurp wrote: post #91

ghastmaster wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a partial solution. The author noted that account logins tied to the google account would no longer be usable either. The sites can do nothing to help that situation, since most sites do not have a way to "transfer account". I could not imagine losing access on a potential grand scale like that.

True, the full solution is to NEVER rely on Google as a single point of failure for anything. Which means backing up all photos/documents elsewhere and never using your Google account to auth with another service. I've always avoided tying my Google account to non-google services for just this reason and haven't ever had it be a problem.

At this point we've all got these 10 year old gmail accounts that we've used as the recovery email on 1,000 websites, and while... I guess it isn't really a big deal to lose a reddit or ycombinator account, it'd be nice if there was some other option to use as the recovery email for online banking that had the stability of google.

I'd happily pay for some sort of assurance -- "if you violate our TOS, we'll just put your email in receive-only mode" or something like that.