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Google disabled my husband's account

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Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#261

Post by LanceH »

bleepblorp wrote: post #195
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…

The argument that customers chose to be ripped off by opting for 'free' is not supported by evidence that paid services are any more accountable. Anyone who's had to deal with Google support for paid business accounts will tell you that the situation is barely any different for paying customers. Things might be different for very large businesses who are spending millions per month, but that's hardly relevant to how…

Lots of people with free gmail accounts have their app store purchases locked up behind that very email, don't they? Or their phones.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#262

Post by _wldu »

bee_rider wrote: post #180
rurp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Buy a cheap domain from Gandi for 10 years. They provide free email and DNS. Use that email for anything you care about. Stop using your gmail account and forward your gmail to your domain's email account. Gradually, you'll switch your recovery emails to the domain that you own and control.

The other nice thing about this is you can be bob@domain.com rather than bob2746293@gmail.com and you can provide email accounts to your family and friends.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#263

Post by vxNsr »

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…

If you want to become a platform that everyone in the world uses and reap those billions in profits that come with that, maybe... just maybe you should be responsible for sane, humane moderation as well. Don't build something that's manageable and then complain when people ask you to manage it.

I've said this before here, I'm pretty libertarian, and very much in favor of small gov, but at this point its become clear that anyone who strives to become an internet platform where market dominance equals monopoly or duopoly, should be held to strict regulatory standards, re: free speech, appeals, etc. similar to what a gov entity is held to.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#264

Post by sjs382 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #90
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?

Fastmail. But the key thing is using my own domain name . You can actually use Gmail safely... as long as you are using your own domain name. If Google (or Fastmail) terminated my account, I could point my domain name to another mail service, and not lose access to any of my other services. But as long as you're using an @gmail.com address as your digital identity, your access to all of your online accounts is tied u…

> But the key thing is using my own domain name.

Then the trust is placed in your registrar. Maybe that's where the trust should be placed from your perspective, but do note that you're still choosing to trust another organization who's interests may not totally align with yours.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#265

Post by smallnamespace »

nullc wrote: post #145
jeremyjh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Something about this argument doesn't smell right.

I care about the crime rate, or car accident rate, or botched surgery rate, because it tells me the odds that something bad will happen to me.

Given a stable rate of bad things, population growth alone causes more bad things to happen.

If we took your argument about absolute harm seriously, then we should, say, encourage population reduction until there are only 10k human beings on the planet. That would surely minimize the number of bad things that continue happening to people.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#266

Post by prima-facie »

This is why having email service using your own domain is important. Should Gmail decide to suddenly terminate your account you can point the MX records to a new provider and be up and running in an hour or two. I would argue that any free email service is a liability. It's one of the things that's very important & worth paying for.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#267

Post by bleepblorp »

justinlloyd wrote: post #222

I had a Google Pixel phone. Less than a year old old. Treated with kid gloves. Always kept in a case. Pristine condition. An approved Google software update bricked it. This was, by all accounts, a known issue. The phone was under warranty. I sent it back. They shipped me a scratched up refurbished phone. It ran fine for a week then bricked itself due to the same software update. I sent that back. They sent me anothe…

Take Google back to court.

The judiciary will not be happy with Google seemingly taking a reprisal against you for wining against them in small claims court.

It might be worth speaking to a lawyer to see if you can seek punitive damages.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#268

Post by simtel20 »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #21
FullyFunctional wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reporting chain wasn't helping him. This is obviously his last resort. I pay for Google services and stuff like this is motivating me to look into migrating away (the only thing I _actually_ care about is mail).

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

What makes you think he'd get penalized by his work for this. What makes you think he'd want to stay if this was a threat to his job?

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#269

Post by gothroach »

beamatronic wrote: post #139
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail. But the key thing is using my own domain name . You can actually use Gmail safely... as long as you are using your own domain name. If Google (or Fastmail) terminated my account, I could point my domain name to another mail service, and not lose access to any of my other services. But as long as you're using an @gmail.com address as your digital identity, your access to all of your online accounts is tied u…

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

It's definitely not the cheapest option, but if you don't have a large storage requirement, 25 Mail St. is a good option. I host my own personal email, but have set a couple clients up with 25 Mail St. and it's been excellent. By far the best part is the support - all support is done by the engineers instead of customer support staff following a script. They're incredibly transparent about things like support statistics, and are understandably proud of their metrics. The main downside is the low amount of storage offered for the price.

It's run by the same company as Rimuhosting and Zonomi, if you're familiar with either.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#270

Post by theontheone »

The entire thread is full of people jumping on the hate train, did anyone even stop to consider that Google is right on this? https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695?hl=en There are two points here: first, they claim to provide a reason for closing your account when you log in to your google account (not google service). The OP provided what looks like google service notification on his mobile, but could be on desktop (thanks to reply for noticing this). Second, after escalating the issue internally, decided to email (internally) people saying this is an attack on his family. He is also publicly looking for a job. This seems like a severe overreaction for a google account ban... I think there is reasonable doubt here to suspect something is wrong here more than "Google decided to arbitrarily ban a specific account among billions in order to target one of their employees."
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