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Google disabled my husband's account

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Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#311

Post by numpad0 »

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…

That’s just unfair business practice that works against ill educated. Way to keep it to nice people, but nice in the context ultimately means established.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#312

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

sangnoir wrote: post #231
swiley wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps - but it has always been prudent to keep redundant copies of anything important since before computing platforms existed. Frequently backup your data and test the backups.

The bigger problem here is not really about the content, but the means. If all e-mail communication goes through Gmail (and maybe a bit via Outlook and some remnants of Yahoo), at some point you may lose your ability to communicate with the rest of the population unless you subscribe to one of these services. This is already happening to some degree but is definitely getting worse.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#313

Post by tpxl »

smallnamespace wrote: post #265
nullc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 1…

It is trivial to put every criminal to prison: put everyone in prison.

It is trivial to ban every spammer: ban everyone.

If you ban most spam while significantly harming some of your users, you've done your job poorly.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#314

Post by Daniel_sk »

_wldu wrote: post #233
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…

Is it that easy to have someone locked out of Google? Just by reporting them for fake abuse? I'm sort of shocked if that is indeed true. It ought to be hard to do that. Otherwise, people who disagree with others may use that to get even or settle an online quarrel, etc.

I had a small website few years ago and I placed Google Ads on it. After few weeks my Google Ads account got banned forever (no appeal available) for fraudulent clicks. There is no way to reverse this ban. I am 100% sure I didn't click on my own ads. I guess someone could easily do some suspicious activity on your ads (or just extract your Ads ID from Android APK) and then get your account banned. Fortunately, they only blocked me from Google Ads for life, but not from the rest of the account. Also - never ever open a Google Play developer account with your personal Google email. Create a new one for this.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#315

Post by barnabask »

smallnamespace wrote: post #265
nullc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 1…

Your comment calls to mind the paperclip maximizer thought experiment: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#316

Post by fauigerzigerk »

bartvk wrote: post #238
toomuchtodo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You should be backing up your Google digital artifacts to local storage or an object store you have access to and can control access to (for example, my partner knows how to get to our Backblaze B2 storage buckets and request a USB drive of all the data if needed, which contains a lifetime of documents, emails, voicemails, iCloud photo backups, etc). If you insist on using Google, keep backups elsewhere. You cann…

What is weird to me, is that you can't really back up Google Docs, Sheets, etc. because as far as I know, the document format is closed. I understand you can use Google Takeout, but documents export to Word, drawings to JPG, etc. You cannot continue with the original elsewhere.

That's right. What you can do is use Microsoft Office formats, but Google makes that rather difficult. You have to download as Excel/Word then upload the file and delete the original Google Docs document. You can then edit the Office document in Google Docs/Sheets (with some limitations on collaboration I think).

I found it easier to move everything to Office 365. Google Takeout can export all data directly to OneDrive without having to download anything.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#317

Post by neltnerb »

kodah wrote: post #207
neltnerb wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used the internet without facebook before it existed. I had a Facebook account for over a decade. I haven't had a Facebook account in two years. To the extent that what you are saying is true, it is only true because these companies have walled themselves off. You used to be able to chat with Facebook users over XMPP even.

Yeah, I agree. If I remember XMPP was dropped while using that old adage of "scale", which maybe was real, but in the end the net effect is the same. Advanced users know a broader breadth of the internet while most internet users only know the depth of Facebook and other various platforms.

I guess once they got big enough there was no longer a point in interoperability, it seems like a pretty big phase transition got hit about a decade ago where suddenly each walled garden got big and valuable enough that isolation was a better strategy for them.

It just sucks for the internet. I don't think, if those companies ceased to exist, that they would automatically get recreated because of some inevitable niche or market law. I think that they got where they are because of a fluke of the times they were created in -- people could not grasp how they make money.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#318

Post by holoduke »

jeremyjh wrote: post #96
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…

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.

Bullshit. Maybe 99.999 are successfully identified, but one is mistakenly banned/suspended for no reason and it often has significant impact on his/her business. Google automation is a broken system. A system made by people who never have to deal with the actual users.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#319

Post by Gibbon1 »

logicalmonster wrote: post #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 l…

When I've talked to google employees what I get is they think customers that have issues are trying to scam something. And that allowing a human to try and sort the problem would just enable that.

The amount of money you need to pay google a year to change that attitude runs in the six digits.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#320

Post by skratlo »

jbay808 wrote: post #297
kodah wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I don't think you're right.

> Facebook's identity verification

in real life, do you need to know the real name of the cashier and see their contract so you can trust them with your payment? You don't, you use common sense.

> Google de-ranking link farms

hey, haha, and what do we get instead? Monopoly on ad-driven search engine, great, I'd rather have link farms since I can easily filter those out with little brain-power. I can't do that with paid-for-propaganda

Now imagine we'd leave the way it was, people would learn how to deal with it, the same way you learned you can't leave unlocked bicycle in a city. It's a price to pay for anonymity, and we should all have right to be anonymous on internet.

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