Google disabled my husband's account • Hacker News Board

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#181

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

vidanay wrote: post #73

01100011 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because it costs more than a few dollars a month. The net cost to users for Google is zero (or a token amount) because Google makes their money from data mining and selling your meta data.

For a competing service maybe, but they're talking about backups. I find the bigger issue is that not enough people believe they need a backup for the "cloud".

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#182

Post by m00x » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #93

vidanay wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it costs more than a few dollars a month. The net cost to users for Google is zero (or a token amount) because Google makes their money from data mining and selling your meta data.

Amazon cloud storage is $1.99/mo for 100GB. That's exactly what I get from Google(I pay $1.99 for extra storage). Are you saying the software to perform the syncing costs more than a few dollars per month?

> Are you saying the software to perform the syncing costs more than a few dollars per month?

The operational costs could be more than that per user if you want regular updates. That's disregarding engineering time.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#183

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

kelnos wrote: 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.

I think whether or not takeout is disabled depends on what happened with the account. If the account has content with legal problems, it could be really really bad if someone used Takeout as a free image host with Dropbox/Onedrive integration

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#184

Post by manigandham » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

spidersouris wrote: post #122

kbenson wrote: 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.

The quality isn't changing (and it's not that great to begin with). The free users don't get any support at all.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#185

Post by ceejayoz » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

nomdep wrote: post #169

beamatronic wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any US-based company, which offers a paid email service, and great customer support?

Hey.com ?

I'll switch to them in a heartbeat once they have custom domains.

(Apparently that's coming this year! https://hey.com/custom-domains/)

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#186

Post by swiley » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #178

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…

Maybe it's better not have platforms that everyone on the planet have to use in order to access content/software.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#187

Post by windthrown » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

blunte wrote: post #72

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.

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.

Have you tried the beta web app [1] recently? I have seen steady, albeit slow, progress and welcomed improvements in recent months.

[1] https://beta.protonmail.com

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#188

Post by ghastmaster » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:46 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.

The service is a tool. I would not "never" use a battery powered drill upon it's first power loss. It has it's use case. It is important to understand the limitations of any tool. This author helps us all understand the limitations of google.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#189

Post by bilalq » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

It's so incredibly frustrating that no one at Google seems to care about this. They don't even acknowledge this as an issue to be addressed. It amazes me that their callousness still hasn't backfired further.

I was on the receiving end of a similar issue with Google Pay Support for Android and it took weeks for Google to unblock in-app-purchase transactions, even via internal escalations from friends who work there. I guess I should count my blessings that it got cleared up at all.

The casual cruelty and opacity is just ridiculous. Surreal and bizarre that this extends even to their own employees. I really do hope this finally serves as a wakeup call for Google, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#190

Post by qubex » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

monkpit wrote: post #106

actuator wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there was a TOS violation here but it would help if someone can explain what went wrong with some SLA unless there is a reason they can't reveal it.

Google provides a mechanism to appeal. It’s impossible to appeal if you don’t know what happened, or if you were hacked, or whatever.

I’m guessing here, but if one were to write that one is unaware of which transgression against the hallowed TOS one has committed it’s possible that a dialogue may ensue... though considering everything I’ve read so far in this thread and others like it, I seriously doubt that.