231–240 of 1001 posts
Having core parts of your personal computing or business computing rely on Google or AWS infrastructure is a systematic risk. Unless you are are racking up a $50k bill every month, you are simply too small that anyone there would care.
This is inaccurate. A $50K a month AdWords spend does not get meaningful support.
A $5k a month cloud bill definitely gets this.
As a small business we use Google Suite. We would need a single solution which provides all these: - Email (unlimited domains, unlimited addresses) - Drive (Docs, sheets, forms) - Photos (this is where we also store out private photos 2Tb+; also, auto-sync is a lifesaver) - Calendar Any alternative which is as affordable as Google? How about Zoho?
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> anyone doing business with you If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or something like that? Disclaimer: Work at Google (far from this space); opinions are my own.
It's SUPPOSED TO BE pay-to-play. Google is a business. That's how businesses work. That's the entire point.
In fact, you can pay for your Google account with Google One, and I do, but it may or may not stop The Machine from accidentally banning my account.
As usual, some Googler browsing HN will reactivate his account, everyone will forget and Google won't change a thing to his unbanning process.
People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of: * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.) * Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-s…
This is simply wrong since the account is always "banned" and not "deleted". So the data is still there, not providing it is going against GDPR. Evidence for this is all the accounts that were unbanned and still had their data. Make the account read-only for all I care but don't think for a second that this data has to be deleted immediately (It definitely does not, there are reasons and reasonable ways for data to be retained for some time)
> * Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
> * Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
So simultaneusly you can look at the image to ban the account but can't look at it to unban it? I get that the first one is done by algorithms and the second one presumably is not but calling this a privacy issue is laughable since you don't have to look at the content in the first place.
All of your points don't adress the issue of "The user does not even know why he was banned" at all. Luckily there are EU laws in the pipeline for that.
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Maybe the solution is to not have single platforms that are this big.
Then move off. It's not the only solution. There are alternatives to all these: Search, Email, Game streaming, Online doc editing, Etc
The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.
Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.
It also helps that we're one of the largest telcos.
Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.
As usual, some Googler browsing HN will reactivate his account, everyone will forget and Google won't change a thing to his unbanning process.
People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of: * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.) * Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-s…
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Is there a good reason to keep using gmail? I've only got good things to say about Fastmail - which is paid, reliable, faster than gmail and private. And they're reinvesting some of their revenue into making better standards for email. I haven't needed to contact support, but I think they have a manned tech support email address too.
There is no other service with feature parity on the UI alone out there. I've searched one for ages and would switch the whole org over in a New York minute if there was an (ideally open-source) "copy" of the Gmail UI available as front-end for one of the other mail servers. Features we can't do without nowadays are tagging; advanced filter and forwarding rules; split inbox with tabs for ads, newsletters, social medi…
We only hear the celebs that got their accounts suspended. Imagine how many others are stuck and have nowhere to talk to.
I'd easily pay for a personal gmail account which has all the privacy protections on and also 24/7 access to customer support via chat and phone. Sadly most of that is only provided for business accounts.
Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent? I read that Google automates the flagging and disabling of accounts but given how many people have their livelihood linked to these accounts, Google must have done something. It makes me scared how deep I have dived into the Google ecosystem. Time and time again I think about transitioning to someplace else but don’t know how to. It seems too daunt…
> Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent? File for a C&D and then, if that does not help, a court-issued injunction order ("Abmahnung" followed by "Antrag auf Erlass einer einstweiligen Verfügung"), if you're German. This works somewhat reasonable for Twitter, Facebook and Google.