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Google disabled my husband's account

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Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#291

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…

> They shipped me a scratched up refurbished phone.

This was me and my Nexus 5, like you I baby my phones and exercise care. An update bricked it, they sent me a scratched refurb with shaky buttons and a creaking case as a replacement. :-/

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#292
post #91

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 full solution is to NEVER rely on Google

You should have just put a full stop after that.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#293

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…

> The OP did not provide this, only the generic google service notification on his mobile Are you sure? The image in the tweet linked seems to me like the login screen you get on desktop, not a mobile notification.

That's my bad. Because the gmail link later in the thread is very likely to be mobile, I assumed as the first screenshot was so centered that it was also mobile. But it could be on desktop, so I edited my response

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#294

I understand this is frustrating, but reading through this person's thread, it reads as an absolute temper tantrum. A few choice quotes: > Our lives are in a bind because of this BULLSHIT > I am out of office reconsidering whether I should work at a company that continuously escalates its attacks towards my family. > [looking for]... A company that provides a steady salary and respects me, my nationality, culture, et…

The problem is, public temper tantrums have become an effective way of receiving support from tech giants. So you can hardly blame him.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#296

Sue in small claims court. Costs about $50 to file, plus $100 or so for a process server. Check Google's terms of service.[1] They're not too bad. There's no forced arbitration. You can go to Small Claims Court in Santa Clara County, CA. Google lists the reasons they can terminate an account. It's not a "sole discretion" thing; they have specific reasons listed. So Google will have to show in court that you violated…

Small claims only provides monetary relief, you can't get equitable relief. How exactly are you going to calculate your monetary damages? And quite frankly, why would Google reinstate your account over losing a maximum of potentially $7,500?

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#297
post #168

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 don't think the internet was ever going to become regulated. What did occur post-2007 was that what made the internet work as a disparate ecosystem of loosely connected destinations (news groups, message boards, blogs, misc websites) that all played their own very important role, controlled and owned by their own communities became one platform under Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc... and was controlled and owned by…

I definitely think that what you're saying is true, and is part of the explanation. But another part is that the Wild West internet also had its own major issues -- roving bandits, to carry the analogy -- and these big companies did solve real problems that were only growing with time.

Gmail's spam filtering. Recaptcha's bot rejection. Facebook's identity verification. Paypal's secure credit card processing. Google de-ranking link farms. Youtube's hosting costs. All of these very effectively solved real problems with the old web, and those problems were growing as bad actors became more sophisticated.

I like the old web too, but I do appreciate that an attempt to return to it would still require very effective tools to solve at least some of these problems, and they'd require constant improvement to keep the roving bandits at bay.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#298
Do Google employees realize how disgustingly evil their customer service is? Forget their free services for a second: you can even be spending big bucks with them every month and be randomly blocked by algorithm with no human recourse. I understand that Google can’t feasibly provide free tech support for the entire Internet as they’d probably have to have a million employees just answering phones and emails all day long. What they need to do is find some number (whether it’s $5, $25, $50, or more I have no idea) where they can charge for real customer service. Businesses get shut down and people lose their jobs because of some ad issue they can never find a way to get a solvable problem resolved. It’s sick that Google has gotten away with this for so long.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#299

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…

> "Google decided to arbitrarily ban a specific account among billions in order to target one of their employees." Nobody is claiming that. Malice is not the issue here; the issue is the effect of having an account banned without recourse or transparency.

The OP is claiming that. It is the purpose of their most recent tweets.

What I'm saying is there shouldn't be outrage until we figure out that the OP isn't lying, which there seems like there is reasonable doubt for. Because for very evil circumstances I wouldn't expect there to be transparency either for legal reasons.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#300
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess Google's ToS is between the employee's husband and Google and not the employee, the employee's husband, and Google. So there is no authorization for some random employee to "check up" on their partner, even though it sounds like escalating internally should help. (It should at least trigger, "we'd better look into this very carefully", though. If it didn't, that sounds like a problem. If it did, and the resul…

This is different though, his husband can't get the records himself.
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