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Google users locked out after 15 years' use

businessinsider.com

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Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#371

Post by [deleted] »

beowulfey wrote: post #336
cm2187 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a “customer”. How many people pay for google services? I know it’s kind of jerky but I still agree that if you aren’t paying for the service, you have no leg to complain about it.

We do not pay for a home address, and yet people can still reach us there. Email is just as important as physical mail -- the problem is that the economic model changed. This means there is no incentive to maintain service, even though (in my mind) in the modern era an email address is possibly more important to a person for day-to-day communication.

[deleted]

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#372

Post by itsoktocry »

sbarre wrote: post #333
itsoktocry wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Corporations don't gain by cancelling their customers. Sure they do. If a certain customer's behaviour is alienating or obstructing other customers, then that customer gets cancelled, because they are having a negative impact (on the business - not the users!) that is larger than the benefit they provide. That's a net positive result. Ignoring your whole concept of "mean", it is 100% up to the company to decide wha…

>If a certain customer's behaviour is alienating or obstructing other customers

This is not a random cancellation.

There is zero incentive for your phone company to cancel an account in good standing otherwise.

The OP said "they'd love to [cancel my account] if they could". Why would a phone company "love" to cancel accounts?

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#374

Post by itsoktocry »

lol636363 wrote: post #319
itsoktocry wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There are a lot of stories of people paying for Google Services getting locked out too. 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 st…

>It was nothing, just a woman in bikini.

Do you think Google really cares about this, or do they get pressure from "outside" forces to impose such rules?

I seriously doubt Google cares one wink about people posting bikini photos. These rules exist because activists put pressure on the company to enforce such rules, for better or worse.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#375

Post by bigwavedave »

Fnoord wrote: post #350
bigwavedave wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love protonmail! I made the switch a couple years back and haven't looked back, with one exception- my city's utilities company blacklists protonmail, so in the handful of times I've emailed them (specifically there were three times they've shut off my water because someone with a very similar looking address didn't pay their bill) with proof of something-or-other, it supposedly doesn't make it to their communal or…

> with one exception- my city's utilities company blacklists protonmail Why do they do this? Did you contact them about it? I would say it seems, at face value, that your city's utilities company did not serve you while Protonmail did.

> that your city's utilities company did not serve you while Protonmail did.

That's fair- that's a better way of saying it. Every time I've had to email them (which admittedly has only been a handful of times) with proof of something, I always end up calling them up and they'll say "but protonmail isn't on the blacklist that IT posted, so you're lying or you sent it to the wrong place," then I'll send screenshots from a different email provider proving that I sent the protonmail email(s) to the right place, then they'll say "oh, I promise to talk to IT to get this straightened out."

It's pretty obnoxious.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#376

Post by bleepblorp »

ubermonkey wrote: post #349

I've been yelling about this for years. In every single case, if you are not paying for a service, be aware you'll eventually get screwed. In every single case, if you put too many eggs in one basket -- one computer, one hard drive, one vendor -- you'll eventually get screwed. Google has made it very very very easy to get deeply enmeshed with their ecosystem of "free" offerings, and those offerings can become very ve…

Again, there's no evidence that paying for service results in better customer service. There are many, many stories of Google arbitrarily killing paid and/or B2B accounts, including Gsuite, Adsense, Play Store consumer (paid apps), Play Store publisher accounts, and so on. If you use Google accounts at all, you're putting yourself at undue risk of getting screwed and paying for the privilege.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#377

Post by VLM »

411111111111111 wrote: post #179
roenxi wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree actually. The issue seems to me that it's a global ban. If Google only locked you out of the functionality you seem to have violated somehow, it would still be a viable strategy to use their services. Imagine losing the ability to comment or upload videos on YouTube because you wrote something offensive or published a video with copyrighted materials. Potentially bad for YouTube creators, but definitely no…

> The issue seems to me that it's a global ban.

Global bans "seem" to be new. I've read many stories of shell scripts randomly permanently banning android developers for life from their platform, but those stories always involved being banned from the play console and so forth, not being banned from search / maps / gmail / youtube / etc.

It seems to be news that if you tell people in public youtube comments that you vote for Trump, or whatever it is they're enforcing today, google will fight back by disabling your thermostat or whatever.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#378

Post by varispeed »

_imba_ wrote: post #359

Not completely related to personal accounts being banned, but something that happened to me recently: I started a side business with some friends during lockdown. We created an online store selling some hard-to-get long tail items, and almost instantly got some traction and growth thanks to Google Shopping. A month ago we received one of these generic automated mails that our account is banned and we were misrepresen…

I had a great blog that started getting me over $2000 per month from Google Ads (several million views), then suddenly after 3 months it dropped to $300 with the same amount of views and never gone up. No matter how much promo I did I would never get past $300. It seems like Google somehow put restriction on my account without any explanation. Eventually my blog died (also because Facebook capped organic reach of my posts after I stopped buying ads. I had tens of thousands of followers but content they shared would never reach their friends after I was no longer a paying customer. Pretty shady stuff). I decided to not contact neither Google nor Facebook about this, because I was worried they will ban me and I needed access to GMail and Facebook (to talk with family). I really hope these companies get properly investigated, because they have unregulated power of altering the markets to their favour. This power should only be reserved to governments and if Google or Facebook are so big, they need to be divided and their business space heavily regulated.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#379

Post by jetrink »

Anarch157a wrote: post #334

Everyone saying "I would lose all my e-mail" apparently doesn't know about fetchmail, getmail or even Thunderbird. Just download your mail using IMAP or POP3 and archive it locally. I recently deleted my last Gmail account (that I had since 2001). Before doing it, I tried Google's Checkout to get the data, but it was adking me for "verification" (i.e. more info about me) to finish the download. I just fired up Thunde…

> I recently deleted my last Gmail account (that I had since 2001).

Wow, was GMail already being used internally in 2001?

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#380

Post by juskrey »

Mikho wrote: post #362

Happened to me too after 10 years of Gmail use. Exactly the same story. No explanation. As I remember at that time I checked Google servers data as to uptime—the data was public, not sure about now—and it appeared that there was a serious problem with servers right before I was blocked. It looked like Google just completely lost data in some server cluster. Anyway, there was no way to get any response from Google or…

How is OneDrive different in this sense?
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