Once upon a time a Googler would respond, now nothing. Says everything.
Google users locked out after 15 years' use
671–680 of 720 posts
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We do not pay for a home address What? You don't pay paxes in your country? No rent to the owner of your house or paid for owning the house yourself? What country is that?
I mean we do not pay the USPS or FedEx or UPS, etc. to agree to send mail to our address. I was making a comparison between mail and email services. Hopefully this clarifies what I meant.
Still makes no sense. We do not pay mail-providers for the address alone, but mainly for running the servers which deliver and store the mails. Which is the same for which USPS/Fedex/UPS/etc. are paid for.
You want a mail-address? Grab your own domain (thus pay "tax"), put a server there (build a "house") and you are there. Getting an address, be it physical or digital never comes for free, and there is not human right for having one.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#673Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without going to the step of moving photos, mail, contacts, etc. off of Google services. Are there automated tools available to periodically export that data?
You can use the "download your data" feature of Google to download a copy. However you have to manually trigger the export. Also no incremental download so it can be a lot of data being transferred. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en Edit: Looks like Google Takeout lets you schedule the download (ie once every month)
Unfortunately, you still need to manually download the data each time. There's no way to automate this. There's also no way I know of to directly upload a takeout zip to another service and continue. There's also a (generally long enough, except when you forget) time limit on downloads, as well as a download limit (have a crappy internet connection, and lost access to a file? Start a new takeout, wait for it to be available, and try again)
If takeouts could be configured to download automatically through Google drive, that would be amazing.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use the "download your data" feature of Google to download a copy. However you have to manually trigger the export. Also no incremental download so it can be a lot of data being transferred. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en Edit: Looks like Google Takeout lets you schedule the download (ie once every month)
Unfortunately, you still need to manually download the data each time. There's no way to automate this. There's also no way I know of to directly upload a takeout zip to another service and continue. There's also a (generally long enough, except when you forget) time limit on downloads, as well as a download limit (have a crappy internet connection, and lost access to a file? Start a new takeout, wait for it to be av…
> If takeouts could be configured to download automatically through Google drive, that would be amazing.
They can. And Dropbox, and various other cloud providers.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to implement something like this and you wouldn't be able to find out, as a service sitting between the network and ad servers, it could even be embedded in an innocent looking load balancer. Why would you think something like that wouldn't exist?
Why would Google, internally, implement a feature as if they were maliciously attacking their own systems?
They could use that to suppress funding to websites that are not in line with Google world views and boost funding to websites aligning with their views. They could also use this to help website competitors who pay for ad words. My traffic also got down once I stopped paying for ad words, but the increase of traffic I was getting from ads, was nowhere near the size of the drop after I stopped using it. Then they capped the ad sense.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work at Google on stuff related to account bans. Global bans are not new. They were standard a decade ago. The reason is due to the structure of the various spam/abuse industries that plague any service that allows user generated content. What happens is this: 1. Accounts get harder to create as signup security improves 2. Black/grey-market account sellers come in and start creating accounts that get bought…
There are a couple of things that I don't get. Why are accounts suspected of TOS violations not simply put into read-only mode instead of shutting out users completely? If the identity/authorisation of the user is not in doubt it makes zero sense to not let people download their data before closing the account. This simple change would fix all the consumer related horror stories with zero cost to Google. In fact it w…
A lot of abuse is things like posted comments. The locks are retroactive and "account disabled" is a signal to each service to hide content generated by that user.
Read only mode would make sense for content that's truly private, or which can be made private. Nothing stops them allowing Google Takeout for disabled accounts, heck maybe they do these days.
Paid support:
1. the optics of false positives being held to ransom to get their account back is terrible. Giving the money back isn't always easy (credit cards support this sometimes but many users don't have them). And this is made worse by:
2. many accounts aren't easily verifiable. People imagine that every Google/FB user puts their entire life on these accounts. A very small number do. For those, expensive ad-hoc processes could maybe increase the account verification rate by a little bit. But most accounts that get disabled are accounts with fake names, that use exclusively one service, etc. It's extraordinarily difficult to come up with reliable ways to verify the identity of the holder of accounts that required no identity to sign up.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#677Everyone 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…
> ...backed up at home and on a Nextcloud instance I keep on a Linode VPS. > Web is not the only way to read e-mails, friends. Use a proper client and back it up. I think your advice is good for you and, perhaps, for some of us who are willing to do the work. But the vast majority of people aren't going to be able to casually fire up, for example, a Nextcloud instance and linode VPS. Not even close. The long-term man…
> I'm now trying to properly tag and curate these media files and host it in some way that I can use it remotely. It's not a trivial job.
Foobar2000 with discogs addon will help you with organization; musicbrainz picard will hello you with actually identifying your files if necessary. Airsonic is quite nice for actual hosting, and allows you to create multiple accounts with limited access and time-limited shares for playlists/albums/etc. I personally use fb2k with a dozen or so addons to organize my media library and playlists (the auto-playlists feature is nice). I use airsonic for hosting; on computers I use the web interface (or fb2k) for playback; on mobile I use dsub for playback. Bubbleupnp server is also installed locally so I can share/cast to receivers that don't support subsonic protocol, though I have yet to use this since I started using airsonic.
Airsonic is a fork(?) of subsonic, and has several forks available with different feature-sets and focuses (one for japanese media, one for audiobooks, etc). The one I use is airsonic-advanced, linked below. It integrates with last.fm and listenbrainz for scrobbling, and (I think) with last.fm for artist info and similar artists (I'd like to see similar artists replaced by gnod, personally).
- https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#678Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work at Google on stuff related to account bans. Global bans are not new. They were standard a decade ago. The reason is due to the structure of the various spam/abuse industries that plague any service that allows user generated content. What happens is this: 1. Accounts get harder to create as signup security improves 2. Black/grey-market account sellers come in and start creating accounts that get bought…
Then what you do is set up some sort of monetary charge, to verify that the person you are dealing with is real. Someone willing to pay for support is highly likely to be an actual customer, not a fraudster; and you can even have their local bank or notary to verify their identity, if you are worried about identity theft. This is a problem that is largely solved at government scale, which is what Google is now, and t…
The vast majority of Google accounts have no real identity associated with them. Also, this doesn't help if an account was NOT a false positive. You're assuming this guy is truly innocent of all problems, but from past experience, unfortunately I can say that sometimes when obviously non-spammy accounts go poof overnight and nobody is willing to explain why, it's because it's related to a criminal investigation.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most WINZ/StudyLink and IRD interactions are online now, and I got my passport 100% online using RealMe. I can't remember the last time I posted anything to government in NZ.
I've had a ton of paperwork done in recent years (voting, child passport, visas). Most of the conveniences stops when you don't have NZ's drivers licence... p.s. IRD has it's own login system.
Check the IRD login page - there's a RealMe button ;)
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#680Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work at Google on stuff related to account bans. Global bans are not new. They were standard a decade ago. The reason is due to the structure of the various spam/abuse industries that plague any service that allows user generated content. What happens is this: 1. Accounts get harder to create as signup security improves 2. Black/grey-market account sellers come in and start creating accounts that get bought…
> Back then and still now, I think Google need to make it easier to handle this situation. Strong end-user support in these situations is hard because genuine fraudsters will happily file support tickets and socially engineer support to get their accounts back - I even witnessed auto-generated pleas to support once. How much are accounts currently worth on the market? It seems that making the recovery procedure more…
Most users don't have a credit card - they're not all in the USA. A big chunk don't even have bank accounts at all.
However that's basically what phone verification does. In case of suspicion someone has to provide their mobile phone number. It's texted with a code and a counter increased. The same number can't be used over and over. Unlike credit cards, the assumption of universal mobile phone access (amongst people who have internet access) is very strong. It works very well. In this case, the account was shut down without this being possible, which is only used normally for very clear cut cases. Don't assume the full story is public.