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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

#401

Post by sbarre »

itsoktocry wrote: post #372
sbarre wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I was specifically addressing the other rather broad statement that I actually quoted.

To address your point too though, there are definitely customers that the phone company is required to serve that they would rather not serve, because the costs are higher than the revenue.

Remote rural customers, customers who need accessibility-related support, certain outdated services that people are grandfathered into and don't want to cancel, etc...

And again that's where regulation protects the customer from the corporation that doesn't care about the customer's needs, unless they align with their own needs or are forced to via regulation.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#402

Post by gcc42 »

TheChaplain wrote: post #3

Tip: Get your own domain from a non-google registrar, then connect to Gmail if you prefer. If you ever are locked out, you can just move the address to another email-provider. Another trick is to use always have forwarding enabled in Gmail, to Outlook.com or another provider. All email will be forwarded despite your account being locked, so you will not miss out on important info. And use Google Takeout for backing u…

> Get your own domain from a non-google registrar

The funny (er, scary) thing is I was actually thinking of switching to Google registrar for my domain after namecheap messed up their CNAME records and dropped a few days of emails (I already use GSuite). Google reliability, the promise of fair pricing and a free WHOIS protection was very attractive to me.

After this, fuck that.

Google has so many services that you could lead a reasonably diverse online life without going to another provider, without the accountability that typically comes with that sort of power. They really need to be checked.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#403

Post by snazz »

silicon2401 wrote: post #396
snazz wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also schedule Google Takeout, which gives you a nice .zip or .tgz with mbox files, in addition to all of your other Google information. I have it set to deliver one of these backups every two months automatically.

does this include absolutely everything from your Google account, like all emails with attachments, google photos with album data, youtube videos from your channel, etc? If not, does someone know of a guide out there on how to export all of one's data from Google?

Yes. I can verify that it contains email attachments, Google Photos files (along with metadata in JSON format), and YouTube videos. There is quite a bit of other information included as well, some of which I didn't even know I had created.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#404

Post by harha »

lr4444lr wrote: post #299
harha wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I don't think other providers like Microsoft are much better, but also note that the service is equally bad if you pay for ads or cloud. I'm generally against too much regulation, but given how important e-mails are (access to all sorts of accounts, important messages from clients, tax, etc.), this is a case where a certain service level needs to be mandatory, e.g., unlocking within few hours.

The bigger problem here even if you want to maintain your anti regulation stance is that a Google lockout prevents the user from acquiring the data that is rightfully theirs. If a lockout included something like a 90 or 120 day sunset period where you had read only export, even a harsh termination could at least be defensible.

That you should be able to obtain through GDPR in Europe at least, though it might be an issue to prove ownership if you didn’t provide your real name.

What doesn’t work that easily is resetting passwords without account access, especially since more services are switching to magic links instead of passwords (and the issues of managing multiple accounts in a standard browser password manager with things like slack having different sub domains and accounts for different projects)

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#405

Post by indigochill »

lordnacho wrote: post #384
_jjca wrote: post #60

This is genuinely scary. Photos, Yale locks, Fi, WiFi and Nest thermostat can all be poof gone because I made a silly YouTube comment? How is this not regulated? Google photos also 'helpfully' offers to delete your uploaded photos with 'some guarantee'!!! If this isn't an indication of a giant shitty monopoly that doesn't care about its customers at all, I don't what is. They have some AI ML fucking crap but can't fi…

This raises a question. If you're well marinated in Google services, like me, what do you do? Is there a comprehensive, simple, and easy way to port everything? Perhaps there's some authoritative site about what exactly you need to do?

I'm not sure there's an easy way to port everything (few services integrate across so many fields as seamlessly as Google does), but this Reddit post has a huge thread of alternatives to common Google services: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/g1yu01/google_alt...

For me, I've switched to DDG full-time for search and I'm veeery gradually swapping over to Protonmail for email (using Thunderbird as the client to ease the transition). Once email's over, I'll be able to rest a lot easier.

However, if you're a heavy Docs user, NextCloud is a Google-like suite with a few hosting options (self-hosted, third-party host, or enterprise).

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#406

Post by slightwinder »

cm2187 wrote: post #243
_jjca wrote: post #60

This is genuinely scary. Photos, Yale locks, Fi, WiFi and Nest thermostat can all be poof gone because I made a silly YouTube comment? How is this not regulated? Google photos also 'helpfully' offers to delete your uploaded photos with 'some guarantee'!!! If this isn't an indication of a giant shitty monopoly that doesn't care about its customers at all, I don't what is. They have some AI ML fucking crap but can't fi…

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.

> How many people pay for google services?

Everyone pays with their data and the ads they and others are seeing. Just because you pay no cash, does not mean ther is no payment at all.

Addtionally, it's used to be quite hard to even pay in cash for googles services. Though, this changde in the last years, as there is now youtube premium and google one. But still not possible for all their services.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#407

Post by Mikho »

juskrey wrote: post #380
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?

Because MS Office is a different business than giving away free accounts to collect user data. It provides cloud services for money. I guess MS has much better redundancy mechanisms and pretty much committed to not lose your data.

Well, shit happens sometimes even with people having the best intentions to do the right thing. Though I didn't hear about a single case of MS losing people's data. But I'm sure MS would handle such situations differently than blaming it on a user and just terminating accounts.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#408

Post by everdrive »

Justsignedup wrote: post #369

Unfortunately I've tried to find replacements for Google services. It's not easy or cheap. Sure I can pay and have my own replacements but most cannot afford this. Google is a landmine. You don't know what will get you locked out. The worst is when your card payment fails and they lock you. Now you can't pay and nobody can help you till you pay.

Gmail isn't actually cheap either, the costs are just offset to different places.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#409

Post by feduphn »

indigochill wrote: post #395
_jjca wrote: post #60

This is genuinely scary. Photos, Yale locks, Fi, WiFi and Nest thermostat can all be poof gone because I made a silly YouTube comment? How is this not regulated? Google photos also 'helpfully' offers to delete your uploaded photos with 'some guarantee'!!! If this isn't an indication of a giant shitty monopoly that doesn't care about its customers at all, I don't what is. They have some AI ML fucking crap but can't fi…

> How is this not regulated? It doesn't need to be (and shouldn't be). Just use an email provider that respects you as a customer and don't put all your eggs into one corporate basket (especially not one that treats you as nothing more than data cattle). Horror stories like this one will, over time, educate people that this behavior pattern is dangerous. IMO self-hosting is the ideal because that aligns responsibilit…

This victim-blaming needs to stop before the tech industry backlash hits. This is exactly why we need regulation. I swear, if "just go somewhere else" were good advice (and it's not), we wouldn't be having this conversation. How many years has it been, though, that Google and other consumer-ignorant companies have been able to get away with this, helped along by people who tell victims to just "go somewhere else"?

Normal people will only put up with this for so long. Either regulate it intelligently now, or expect actually scary regulation a decade or two from now.

There's nothing wrong with a law that says: "You cannot close a customer's account with no remediation, no recourse, and no explanation." What is Silicon Valley so afraid of there? How is that unreasonable?

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#410

Post by kashura »

FirstLvR wrote: post #391
juskrey wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is OneDrive different in this sense?

Office 365 is overall better plus, never seen anyone complaining about getting their officce account deleted into void

That's a pretty broad statement. I suppose that depends on your use case?
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