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Google disabled my husband's account

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Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#381

Post by jeroenhd »

gowld wrote: post #349
ProAm wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be illegal if there is no way to contest/appeal.

It's the reverse. It's often illegal to divulge the content of a violation.

Illegal? Unlikely. A bad business move? Definitively.

As far as I know, the reason no company divulges information like this is to stop the endless protests and appeals from people. Dealing with people who believe they've done nothing wrong even though they have is tiresome and expensive and the more information you give them, the more ammunition they have to protest.

The result is innocent people like (presumably) OP's husband getting shafted by a short email without any details, but it's finanicially unattractive to change the system so without court or legislative action I doubt Google will improve their services any time soon.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#382

Post by rtx »

partiallypro wrote: post #278
kodah wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a startup where we used Google Cloud. Even as a paying customer, when I'd try to talk to their "support" all they would do is try to upsell their consulting partners to answer a question about their own services.

That's wild, we're a fairly small Azure customer (compared to others) and I get calls and emails every month from a rep asking us what they can do, if anything. I think Microsoft is maybe a bit smarter at this by connecting sales to CSMs, because they can up sell and get you to support if you need it. While with Google it's a big shell game.

Same experience, we spend less than 10k on Azure. The customer service people have been phenomenal. Though they need to move to some modern ticketing system.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#383

Post by mceachen »

AlfeG wrote: post #94
ezconnect wrote: post #57

I use OneDrive, iCloud, a couple HD for backup of my stuff. I also have duplicate of my OneDrive and iCloud stuff on another storage in case both company does something unexpected.

Do You know, is there a self hosted solution for automatic photos upload to own server?

Resilio Sync and SyncThing are what I recommend to my beta users to backup phones and laptops to their home NAS/server.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#384

Post by putlake »

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…

> 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.

This. And it happens in all businesses Google is part of. As a website owner who monetized with AdSense for a decade, this year their algorithms suddenly decided that 33% of the ad revenue was from "invalid clicks". The month before this happened, I was experimenting with a different ad provider. My suspicion is when I returned to AdSense the month-over-month increase in revenue tripped up the algo. Talking to Google reps was of no use because they have no control over the algo. I lost ~$12K in revenue over 2.5 months and eventually just stopped using Adsense.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#385

Post by cnst »

chrisshroba wrote: post #369
cnst wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To level the playing field. The idea of Small Claims Court is to have a cheap way to resolve monetary disputes, without having to rely on complex procedures and expensive lawyers. So, since you as an individual wouldn't have a lawyer when you sue someone for $300, it wouldn't quite be fair if the company was afforded one.

Keep in mind that anything you take to a Small Claims Court you can also take to to a Superior Court, where only lawyers are allowed, unless you're an individual, and are representing yourself.

Not every state bans lawyers from SCC. But in California, you'd only face a lawyer in SCC if you sue them for not returning your money, or they sue you for not paying them their fees.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#387

Post by pantalaimon »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #290
ochoseis wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a Google employee, I don't expect to have any special privileged access to Google customer support and I think if we did have it, wouldn't you think that would be unjust? Disclaimer: not saying anything about the qualities of said services.

Does Google have customer support at all?

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#388

Post by andmarios »

gowld wrote: post #352
andmarios wrote: post #41

I 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?

Currently the companies never explain their decisions, so we cannot know if there was a gag order.

A public authority is required to reply to requests unless there is explicitly a gag order. Of course the reply may be _the account is disabled as part of ongoing criminal investigation_ but again, once everything's done they will be required to disclose information.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#389

Post by mceachen »

AnssiH wrote: post #179
theandrewbailey wrote: post #79

If anyone has a Google account, you need to Takeout regularly. https://takeout.google.com

If only it worked... https://i.imgur.com/FKFa2l7.png I probably could try to bisect if there is a specific type of data that prevents Takeout on my account, but I haven't bothered as I think I have all the important data otherwise backed up.

Several Takeouts may work: a gmail-only archive, a photos-from-only-last-year archive, ...

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#390

Post by jeremyjh »

mszcz wrote: post #248
arthurcolle wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would lose my mind if this happened to me. Can't imagine how frustrating this would end up being.

That's why you should have email on your own domain. If they lock you out you can quickly-ish migrate to a different provider without losing your email address. Not a solution but definitely softens the blow. Google allows this for GSuite at $5/mo I think.

That is my arrangement and I've had it in place so long I don't even have to pay the $5, I have a free private GSuite on my own domain (yes they offered this to everyone 10+ years ago). What I realized today though while reading this story, is that my DNS account is backed by this same GMail account. What if I'm attacked and someone locks out my DNS account at the same time they take the sort of criminal actions in my account that that would get Google to shut it down? I could lose my domain and all my email forever. I think I'm moving to Fastmail.
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