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Google disabled my husband's account

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Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#431

Post by cft »

blunte wrote: post #158
cft wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use my own domain and gmail for phone access, but I download all my emails to Outlook via imap. I have about 20GB of emails in outlook (my entire life's emails basically) which are instantly searchable.

Indeed if you are willing to have all your emails downloaded to local disk, but that's really inconvenient if you want to live with disposable hardware and cloud-based storage.

when i upgrade my laptop i just transfer the 20GB file via external hard drive (where I keep a backup anyway).

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#432

Post by im3w1l »

LurkersWillLurk wrote: post #373
octoberfranklin wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is not true in all states that corporations must be represented by an attorney in small claims court. In California, corporations must be represented by a non-attorney employee for small claims actions.

Doesn't that just mean they will get some self-taught lawyer-in-all-but-name?

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#433

Post by ars »

bhaile wrote: post #343
Animats wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone who sued Google in small claims court over an account cancellation and won.[1] [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_1...

The followup is equally interesting. Google filed an appeal and won. [1] [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...

According to the author of the article (i.e. the person who sued Google), they correctly won. He did in fact violate the Ad Sense rules.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#434

Post by genocidicbunny »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #394
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.

Stupid question: how does that work for the company?

They send a representative, probably someone from their legal department if they have one. The important thing is that both you and the company are arguing on much more level footing. You don't need to be thoroughly versed in court procedure, and the whole process is generally a little more lax than in superior court.

With that said, the company can still pump tons of money into things behind the scenes, but because the stakes are so low, and not necessarily precedent-forming, they're not likely to actually invest that much money into fighting you. And even if they do and you lose, since you brought the lawsuit and there are no attorney fees, the most you'd end up spending is the court fees (potentially the company's court fees, but those are minimal too.)

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#435

Post by Animats »

ars wrote: post #433
bhaile wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The followup is equally interesting. Google filed an appeal and won. [1] [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...

According to the author of the article (i.e. the person who sued Google), they correctly won. He did in fact violate the Ad Sense rules.

AdSense issues are harder to win. Google has more discretion there. But their terms for ordinary accounts don't seem to allow arbitrary cancellation. That would attract unwanted attention from consumer protection agencies.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#436

Post by washadjeffmad »

justinlloyd wrote: post #222

I had a Google Pixel phone. Less than a year old old. Treated with kid gloves. Always kept in a case. Pristine condition. An approved Google software update bricked it. This was, by all accounts, a known issue. The phone was under warranty. I sent it back. They shipped me a scratched up refurbished phone. It ran fine for a week then bricked itself due to the same software update. I sent that back. They sent me anothe…

This is event for event what happened to me with a Pixel 3 XL, except I chickened out and ate the charge. I filed an FTC complaint and emailed my AG, though.

Could you share your process and arguments? I'd really like to pursue it while I still can.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#437

Post by spydum »

jeremyjh wrote: post #390
mszcz wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

i actually think it's useful to create a flow graph of all your most critical accounts, and how you might recover them if lost. If you find many of them flow back to an account you cant control and may be shut down for arbitrary reasons, may want to reconsider your recovery/hierarchy.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#438

Post by skybrian »

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…

I don't think it was a rule before, and I don't think it should be a rule now. This is missing an important opportunity to debug the process, since you have a separate way of finding out what's going on.

If you're not going to use that data when you get an opportunity like this to fix something, what's dogfooding and "trusted testers" all about?

It's sticking in your head in the sand out of a misguided attempt at being unbiased, instead of fixing things.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#439

Post by usr1106 »

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.

From hearsay Azure has better customer support because they know that in cloud and server environments they are a relative newcomer, traditionally many data center people would run away when they hear Microsoft.

Google has the ego of a market leader. They don't care for their customers, that's nothing new.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#440

Post by tikiman163 »

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'm confused, are they over policing to the detriment of users, or they don't police because they're not responsible for what users post? You can't have it both ways or switch positions just because you ended your paragraph.

Did you ever consider that all of this shit is free and you're just an entitled idiot spouting contradicting rhetorics backed by cherry picked examples/data and strawman arguments?

You can't sue the news stand that sold you a news paper that turned out to contain liablous statements about you because they didn't write. You also can't expect a company providing free services to hire enough support staff to cater to the individual problems of 2 billion people. And finally, the fact that you like the average consumer only used one or two major online communities is why you don't have alternatives when it comes to accessing original content. In short, people have behaved like people and your oxymoronic tiraid is neither insightful or helpful.

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