I was planning to move away from Gmail, once I ran through 15GB of free quota. After reading this, I am thinking that I need to move to Fastmail sooner. I did not realized that my logins throughout the Internet depend on Google. I can not have anything critical in my life to depend on Google. I guess it’s just risk management.
Google disabled my husband's account
351–360 of 499 posts
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#352I am not fond of suggestions to break up big companies, but I do believe that FAANG should be treated as utility companies and not be allowed to deny service to anyone; any termination decision should be left to an independent 3rd party, ideally a public authority, so the big company will not be liable for any account misconduct.
OK. And when the public authority is the one that issues the gag order to the company, which is what usually happening in these stonewall cases, then what?
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#353It'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…
Really? The world is worse off because of the Internet?
The Internet has been the single best thing that has happened to the world ever. Information is effectively free now. It's given limitless opportunity to billions of people everywhere in the world, regardless of class or wealth or social status. Largely, the Internet itself is not discriminatory.
Sure, it has its downsides, like misinformation, and 1 in 10m people getting locked out of their accounts.
I lost my Google account, which was tied to my phone number (Google Voice), a few years ago. It sucked. But, honestly, it wasn't even as bad as losing my license.
I'll take free information for that.
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#354Earlier 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…
Usually cost/benefit arguments do consider the benefits. If I kill millions of mosquitos and reduce malaria fatalties by 100 per million population while blinding 1 per million, then unless there is a better way to kill the bugs we should consider this approach.
I don't really see how this line of argument really translates to this issue with Google. First of all I should have acknowledged that imprisoning data is almost assuredly unacceptable and that unless Google is acting directly in response to a law enforcement action they should give you a way to download your data when they tell you that they have chosen not to continue the business relationship they have with you.
But there will be cases where they cannot do that, and in some cases it will be a mistake but the reason they cannot solve this problem cheaply is because usually it is not a mistake and so litigating 99,999 cases to find the one worthy of saving is a hard case to make, why should Google pay for that?
I should have mentioned up-front that this article scared the hell out of me and I'm probably moving to Fastmail. I've had my own domain for going on two decades and am still grandfathered into the free gsuite for it but I'd much rather pay someone who will support me than use a free service that could cost me access to data that I might want again in the future. I also realized I could be vulnerable to a trap where my DNS account is disabled at the same time my email is, meaning I couldn't even move the DNS without first recovering access to my mailbox.
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#355Do 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…
Your problem isn't Google customer service. Your problem is that your business is, if the case is such, wholly dependent on Google and you can't switch to a different vendor.
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#356Earlier 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…
> 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.
You can't be self reliant. No one will deal with you of your only contact information is GPS coordinates
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#357It'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…
Really? The world is worse off because of the Internet? The Internet has been the single best thing that has happened to the world ever. Information is effectively free now. It's given limitless opportunity to billions of people everywhere in the world, regardless of class or wealth or social status. Largely, the Internet itself is not discriminatory. Sure, it has its downsides, like misinformation, and 1 in 10m peop…
He is referring to the tech companies, you are referring to "the internet"
Are you certain you two are speaking about the same concept?
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can you give some examples of this type of job done flawlessly? i.e. where all bad actors are stopped and no good actors are hurt in the process
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#359Do 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.
I can understand being wary of social engineering and scams, and at Google’s scale it’s almost impossible to imagine how many problems they have to deal with every day, but I think that’s an excuse to duck out of solving the problem because it’s not sexy enough for a Google employee to get a promotion for solving. Google wants to provide
Here’s the reality. Cable companies have methods of verifying their customers identity when they deal with support requests for private services. Banks have a very good verification process. Phone providers use tools like pin codes and other methodology (see https://www.removemyphone.com/learn/prevent-your-phone-numbe... for instance) to solve this problem. Domain name services (even Godaddy and the like) have figured out how to largely solve this verification problem despite their numerous other shady business practices.
Are you telling me that Google with their many geniuses can’t find a technical approach to dealing with this? We have multi-factor authentication and other tools. People are willing to pay money for human support.
I can’t believe that Google can’t figure out some means of providing this. Their refusal to me is one of the most evil business practices on the Internet while they pretend that they’re the paragon of virtue. It’s really sick to me and hopefully this case is a wake up call to at least one Google employee how backward and customer unfriendly their overall practices are.
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Correct. In order to get injunctive relief of having account access restored, you'd have to sue Google in a Superior Court. The difference between Small Claims and Superior is that in the former you're generally not allowed to bring an attorney, whereas in the latter you may actually be required to bring one. Does anyone know whether account suspension without a reason is actually something that a pro-se litigant has…
> in the former you're generally not allowed to bring an attorney
That only applies to individuals.
Corporations are not only allowed, but in fact required to be represented by an attorney in court. Even small claims. Corporations do not have pro se representation rights, and only an attorney can represent another person.