I'd be willing to pay a small monthly fee for using Gmail, and get proper support.
Google disabled my husband's account
361–370 of 499 posts
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What seems novel here is that the author _actually works_ at Google and still can’t help despite being an insider. Although, not sure if that says more about Google or more about the banned account.
If Google insiders had special access, wouldn't that be similar to exactly how the recent Twitter vulnerability was exploited?
Although, in this case, I guess the guy was just looking for any qualitative explanation for how to fix the situation, not specifically asking for exceptions to policies to be made.
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#363Earlier 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 believe this is an overly rosy-glasses view of the current heavily centralized internet.
Gmail spam filtering? Isn't particularly good. I run my own email infrastructure and I get way less spam through it than on my gmail address. And I don't do anything particularly special other than configure postfix correctly.
Recaptcha? Was there ever a more hated piece of user abusive technology? Plenty of rage against it here in many discussions. I won't do business anymore with any site that won't let me buy without identifying 27 traffic lights in slow motion (looking at you adorama). We're all better off if this dies.
Facebook verification? Don't know what value this brings to anyone other than FB.
Youtube? Granted.. Hopefully with bandwidth costs reducing over time, decentralization becomes more viable.
Paypal? Always pay with credit card directly. The regulatory consumer protection for that was well in place before internet commerce even took off.
The original potential of the internet was in its fully decentralized functionality. Usenet being a great example (owned by nobody, hosted peer to peer) which should be studied a bit more now that we have generations of developers coming up never having known it. Of course, it was (mostly) overrun by spam. But unlike email where spam is pretty much defeated, there was never a meaningful effort in addressing spam on Usenet (forums and mailing lists took over instead). Applying the same techniques to NNTP could well be equally successful.
If there is any desire to avoid the internet becoming fully a new cable-tv controlled by just a few major player we need to pursue research into decentralized services as a priority.
(If nothing else, consider at least running your own email infrastructure if you're technically capable. Keep the foot in the door so it doesn't close permanently.)
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Gmail's spam filtering. Recaptcha's bot rejection. > Facebook's identity verification. The ability to choose an identity online not connected to your legal or in-person name, to make it more difficult to find and stalk you in person, is a feature, not a bug.
I don't disagree, but a lot of websites these days choose to offload their login systems to Google and Facebook to certify that a unique human is on the other end. It solves real problems for them like password management, bot detection, astroturfing, sockpuppetry, stolen accounts, and so on.
For these purposes, an actual Real Verified Name is overkill, and a unique identity number would be enough. But Facebook offers that service for Free(TM) so there's not much incentive to the site operator to aim for something more minimal. And with GPT-3 and other systems inching closer to passing the Turing test, this only makes alternatives more challenging for them.
Those are problems in the Wild West that would need solutions if we were to reclaim the net from Facebook and Google.
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you pay them or any of their subsidiaries for anything? I have cell service on Google Fi. Long, painful (still-ongoing) story short, they shipped me a Pixel 4a that had no cell service. I went back and forth with support for ten days. Then they shipped me a replacement phone. I confirmed my current address. They sent me a shipping notification for my current address. FedEx ended up delivering the package, no signa…
> Do you pay them or any of their subsidiaries for anything? Yes, one of the places that I back up photos is google photos and I pay them $ for that. I'm assuming you think that is an important thing to condition on? I am not planning on refuting any charges that google gives me any time soon and would try and back up all of my data before doing that.
Then you are realistically fine
Even in a case similar to mine, visiting takeout.google.com before doing anything with billing is always a great idea :)
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#366This 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.
I run my own mail servers on my own domains. I use my own private "cloud" server for storing photos, documents, file sync, contacts, emails, events and everything else. I have minimized my contact with anything Google as much as I can. I have a couple of different Google accounts because I _need_ to have those accounts for work, or a developer account, but I have reduced any connection with Google to just background noise at this point.
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#367My approach with Google and these other big companies is to use their free services but treat them as disposable. For example: I use Google Photos all the time, but my photos are also synced to OneDrive which, in turn, is synced to my computer giving me offline copies as well as another cloud-based backup. I use Gmail (and old Google Apps accounts) for email, but I have MS Outlook continually running on my desktop PC syncing all email accounts to offline PST files.
The key takeaway is to not to get reliant on any service (free or paid) without having a backup plan if it went away.
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#368It'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…
>They somehow managed to skirt on that
Not "somehow". Our national leaders in the US since Google was created have been fabulously pro-business, to the extent that they have never updated our laws governing privacy for the computer age (IE, limiting what businesses can do with data) and they've gutted consumer protections along the way.
Since the US government is so thoroughly corrupted by money, once a corporation is large enough they can effectively write their own laws. Google and others have done this, so there's no law stating that they must give consumers rights in a dispute, must provide their data, or even must be fair.
Government + money = corruption.
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC, attorney fees are not typically allowable in small claims in California - wouldn't be surprised if there are exceptions.
In California, you're not allowed to bring an attorney to a SCC -- only to Superior Court -- so, obviously, there's no attorney fees when attorneys are not allowed. Some other states do allow attorneys in SCC, however.
Why would attorneys be disallowed?
Re: Google disabled my husband's account
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been wanting to migrate off Gmail since Snowden, but never looked closer. I need to get on that.
I looked into this a bit a year or two ago, and wasn't happy with the alternatives. The main issue for me is that I never delete anything , and so I have nearly 500GB of email, dating back over 20 years (sadly I've lost earlier email due to the cost of even local storage back in those days). I don't want to deal with the data in any way, sorting through it, splitting it up, etc. I just want to dump it all into an ema…
Fastmail, maybe? Their premium tier offers a 100GB mailbox, looks like, and a retention archive on top of that.