311–320 of 720 posts
Does anyone have a verifiable example of being banned, unlike this anonymous one?
I've seen many stories but wonder if these are more of thought experiments than examples of real world occurrences.
> The music he purchased through Google Music has also disappeared. "The app took it upon itself to delete all the downloaded music I had on my phone." If they are selling access to stuff via the account, surely revoking access without reason will have legal consequences. Couldn't it be viewed as consumer discrimination?
You didn't buy the music. You bought a license to use it and they revoked the license. At least that's how I've been made to understand how "buying" digital content works.
(They can turn around and say you violated copyright or something more specific, but they are not).
A good start would be to require by law from Google and similar other companies to actually give a reason for an account suspension, having to potentially put a real human on the line ought to bring them pause and ensure there are less frivolous suspensions. That said, the real answer is, of course, to migrate to a domain name you do own and a provider that's not known for suspending accounts willy-nilly, I'd stop ju…
I use their OAuth whenever I can, all my accounts on the internet use the gmail address, most of my life is in gmail.
Losing emails is not a bug deal, I can back them up, but losing Oauth accounts and ability to reset passwords for accounts I don't have a password saved in my manager is a bigger concern.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
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I'm trying to not make this sound harsh; but you really don't need a government regulator to tell you that centralising all your data with Google, who are providing largely free services, is risky. It is like building a house on the edge of a cliff then falling off the cliff one day. It was always a real possibility. Being locked out of your stuff is quite a likely end of the story with Google.
Google is huge and they run a vast portion of the internet now. If they were to suddenly decide that all FastMail accounts should go to spam tomorrow, any users of FastMail would be SoL—they would be unable to communicate with a huge majority of the internet. They could decide to randomly throw every 5th email that is not a gmail into spam and blame it on other providers having low reliability. Make it random enough…
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Under GDPR right to access your own data (in Europe), you could sue over Google's refusal to honour your data rights. Your request to use data rights can be made through any means, including social media message funnily enough! You can privately litigate breaches of GDPR, and I imagine the court would be keen to award you costs when the judge discovers the kafka-esque situation going down. Oh, and ensuring you receiv…
I was thinking the exact same thing, but Google isn't stupid either. So far all of these lockouts have happening to US folks, but this one is from UK. I'm not sure if Google made a misstep in this case or they found a loophole and no longer care about GDPR.
That said, I'll be careful to have backups of all my stuff outside google services.
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This is why i have setup one of my linux servers to automatically download all photos and videos from my shared google photo albums each night. This allows me and my wife to easily share photos of our daughter with each other, as well as have a backup of everything we have locally on my NAS. Next step is to sync this of to several other storage places in case of cryptolocker or the NAS dies.
I didn't realize this would be possible. Would you happen to have a guide somewhere?
This article finally prompted me to do what I should've done a long time ago, which is to create a Fastmail account and begin importing my Gmail into it. I've seen this story far too many times, and no longer will I say "yeah but it'll never happen to me". Setting up the import was insanely easy, and my Fastmail account is now configured to enable me to send using my Gmail address from directly within Fastmail. Plus…
Get your own domain "lastname.com" or "somethig.com", get it from someone who will give you 1GB catch-all mailbox.
My setup is:
Windows, MS Outlook. The emails go to the 1GB mailbox, I can access them over my phone. Once I fire up Outlook, they are siphoned down and live on my Outlook forever. My emails are around 5-6GB of .pst file(s). I backup my whole disk in two manners: selected files and folders of my C and D drives on Carbonite, and one massive (80GB) Acronis .tib file (clone of my C: - SDD) again on Carbonite. My Carbonite "footprint" is well over 1.5TB.
So my backup is 3-2-1.
3 places: local disk, external drive, Carbonite (not affiliated)(I just love their unlimited storage and ability to encrypt pre-transmit)
2 different physical locations: home/on the move & Carbonite cloud
1 online: Carbonite (nice and encrypted).
I keep some gmail accounts handy, a couple of hotmail accounts, but EVERYTHING forwards to my mail mailbox. These accounts are used for things I don't want to have a real name-surname (like a silly game or other 'stuffs'). I won't cry if I lose them.
I have been operating like this for 20 years. I do have the cost of the domain name and mailbox service, but the cost is nothing to the pain one gets of losing access to ALL the stuff from the "free service".
I do NOT use any of the Google/MS-Hotmail ecosystem, no "online drives". This setup works for me. Perhaps it may work for you/your lifestyle, perhaps not. Just putting it out there to show that one can have a perfect IT lifestyle without using any of the "free" stuff.
Edit: I am not affiliated to any of the companies mentioned above (MS, Carbonite, Google). I just made the decision 20 years ago to stay away from them (incl. Dropbox, Microsoft free or paid storage), and keep everything offline/on me, and of course accepting the risks that come with it (house burning down, burning a CD/DVD as backup method back-in-the-day), etc.
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You need a government regulator to stop large companies from buying up lots of small companies and adding them to this risk pool. I bought 3 Nest thermostats long before Google bought them. I wouldn’t have done so after the buyout. If google bricks my thermostats because my kid does something dumb on YouTube (through the linked tv accounts) that will suck. I suppose regulators could also prevent companies from bundli…
> The phone company can’t just randomly cut off service and ghost me. Regulators are the reason for that, as I’m sure they’d love to if they could. If you're paying your bill, why would they care? Regulation is part of the answer, but it's also part of the problem. If a YouTube comment wasn't at risk of "being mean" or breaking arbitrary rules (pushed by regulators, Google isn't doing it on their own), you couldn't b…
Personal experience, once I created an Adword ad using one of the image that Google Ad creator had suggested. It was nothing, just a woman in bikini. It was approved and then rejected with warning that I violated their guidelines. I wanted protest but thought probably not worth it. This could have perma banned me from Google, I stopped using AdWords.