Google disabled my husband's account • Hacker News Board

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#411

Post by syshum » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

bleepblorp wrote: post #288

bilalq wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's honestly unacceptable. Google deserves whatever anti-trust action comes their way. It's absolutely insane that they can lock you out of your phone, email, youtube, password manager, business, and everything you've ever used sign in with google for on the whims of some buggy algorithm.

Stuff like this isn't the result of some faceless software algorithm that's only harming people because of 'bugs.' Consumer abuse isn't an emergent property of algorithms. They're designed, by people, to abuse consumers.

I agree with everything except for the fact you are treating gmail, YT and other google services users as "consumers"

remember if you do not pay for a service you are the product, and 90% of google services and algorithm's are deigned to control their product (aka the users)

This is the root of the problem; to google and their devs you the user are not a person, are not a human, you are just raw ore for them to mine, refine, pack and resell to their consumer the advertisers

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#412

Post by arexxbifs » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

"Hey, I'm going to leave the control of all my personal files to a faceless third party who can arbitrarily lock me out of access without due process."

No. Don't use the cloud for that.

"But maybe we can fix the cloud by adding more cloud to the cloud, so that we can back up the cloud to the cloud?"

No. Stop using the cloud.

"But I have (hundreds of gigs of photos|twenty years of emails) there! I was going to pour a glass of nice Chablis and gingerly sift through them all on a Tuesday evening!"

No. Stop using the cloud.

"But I'm working on the next Great American Novel and I couldn't possibly be tasked with syncing a backup of it to a USB stick!"

No. Stop using the cloud, damnit! How hard is it to understand?

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#413

Post by RonanTheGrey » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

traveler01 wrote: post #36

izacus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have been thinking about this for a while. Considering I prefer to keep the important data/emails on Gmail or Google drive for security and I really consider it important. Would it help if Google had a paid tier? It wouldn't, because Google is averse to any kind of customer support even for paying services. Even the "support" people that get attached to highly paid YouTube, GSuite, and other accounts get regularl…

To be fair I had a lot of trust in Google. Now, seeing these cases I'm thinking about starting moving my important stuff to other services...

Start sooner rather than later. It's extremely hard to get off of them once you're tied to their services.

I'm basically down to email and some old Google Drives I need to clean out. Found a project in this thread that should help me with the Drives, just working on email now..

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#414

Post by RonanTheGrey » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

xtracto wrote: post #405

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 OneDri…

> What you can do is use Microsoft Office formats, but Google makes that rather difficult. This right here is amazing and describes very well the moment in time we are living in. When using a Microsoft file format is [righly] considered the "open", "friendlier" option it really means the alternative [Google] is terrible. Microsoft used to be the Evil Borg that had everything proprietary.

Several years ago Microsoft (rightly) saw the writing on the wall that the way they were going to compete was to be the open solution to everyone else's walled garden. It has been a strategy that has worked out fantastically well for them and honestly MS is one of the very few tech companies I still have any respect for.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#415

Post by dilyevsky » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 10:54 PM UTC

goldcd wrote: post #107

Eyas wrote: post #2

This story is just absolutely ridiculous: The poster _works at Google_ and even tried to escalate internally for days, to no avail.

I would have thought ensuring that workers at google, getting absolutely no special access to specific other accounts, is pretty much the most sacrosanct rule. i.e. Google's unlikely to hand over the dossier they've assembled on 'what your husband has been up to that we considered bad enough to shut down their account' Most definitely not saying this isn't a false positive - but the handling process for it it must as…

When i worked there i got my blocked payment acc unblocked with an apology pretty easily. I cant recommend using google payments (or anything other than gmail) anymore though

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#416

Post by eli » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

akiselev wrote: post #301

eli wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they could fire you?

IANAL but that sounds like something that'd end up in big boy court for wrongful termination with a lawyer on deferment.

In most places in America you can be fired for no reason at all.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#417

Post by TedShiller » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 11:00 PM UTC

Gmail is great as long as this doesn't happen to you.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#418

Post by TedShiller » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 11:03 PM UTC

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.

Yes. But make sure you don't use Google Domains to host your domain. Otherwise your domain will be locked too.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#419

Post by tpxl » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 11:04 PM UTC

pb7 wrote: post #358

tpxl wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, but I can think of a few examples where most of the fraud is stopped while not significantly harming users.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#420

Post by daotoad » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

Daniel_sk wrote: post #247

mdavidn wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a password manager like 1Password instead. Don't tie your accounts together.

Yes. I don't see ANY advantage of SSO if you are using a password manager like 1Password which autofill strong passwords and even 2FA if you want. Why would I want to use Google Sign In in this case? It's a single point of failure and you are making it easy to link all your services to a single identity.

I personally like being able to establish one identity across multiple services.