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Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

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Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#391
post #285

It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies. At the very least, companies must be legally required to present you in writing with the so-called violation of terms they're accusing you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone # or other immediate contact so that you can dispute the accusations. It's insane that these basic legal rights don…

> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies I get where you're going, but I think far more costly to them and advantageous for us is to simply show them that they are unnecessary. If we can drop them so easily, they can't pull stuff like this anymore. It is possible to drop Google and Facebook. They do this stuff because people _need_ the…

> drop them en mass

The libertarian in me wants to believe that reputation is enough to make business act in the interests of the consumers and that personal responsibility would prevent customers from acting in their best interests: but we all know this is not true.

And, I know enough to know that any public policy that essentially says “Everything will be fine if everyone just does [X]” is bad policy, regardless of what ‘X’ is.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#392
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter seems to be the worst platform ever created to get customer support. If any entity requires a huge amount of Twitter followers to get support, count me out.

I think twitter is last time I checked (looking at guidelines maybe 3/4 years ago) pretty amazing for customer support, even if you drop the fact that well-followed people might get better support. The expected reply time for twitter support queries is on the order of minutes. Compare that to phone or email customer support on many platforms.

That's no longer the case. In my experience, most companies have stopped responding to complaints on Twitter. They have a set playbook now which asks you to DM them and then sends you a holding message.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done exactly this with Fastmail and my own domain, and the experience was wonderful, as in "why didn't I do this years ago".

Fastmail is Australia based, wouldn't that pose a risk with regards to backdoors?

I am assuming that the entire email system is a Times Square billboard in terms of privacy. This move gives me flexibility.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#394
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically they do offer customer service if you pay them with their Google One product. I have phone numbers and human access very quickly, because I pay for it. Although obviously if they banned me, I wouldn't have access to my direct support line anymore.

> Although obviously if they banned me, I wouldn't have access to my direct support line anymore. Which they will do literally on a whim. Who are you going to call then?

Ghost busters

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#395

Gives me a chuckle for every high profile case such as this. Just get a domain & link it with a Zoho Mail account or any other paid one, for everything else use self-hosted storage

How you going to use that to host on Stadia?

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#396

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.

GCP is the only Google service where I regularly, easily, got humans to take up my problem.

Once including waking up people in Mountain View on weekend.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#397
post #285

It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies. At the very least, companies must be legally required to present you in writing with the so-called violation of terms they're accusing you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone # or other immediate contact so that you can dispute the accusations. It's insane that these basic legal rights don…

> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.

Google is a private company who offers free internet services in exchange for your privacy being violated. They have no customer service because you are not a customer as customers pay. You have no rights on their platform because again, you are not a paying customer. And you agreed to their terms of service when you signed up. They don't owe you anything at that pont.

So stop expecting "paying customer" treatment from a shady adware dealer who gives you "free" "integrated platform" stuff to get you hooked. That's an old drug dealer tactic anyway.

Want to be treated like a person? You have to pay for that. Otherwise stop whining about the tyranny of "free" platforms such as google, twitter, facebook, etc.

The only thing the government should do is fund PSA's to warn people of the rights and privacy hazards of free internet platforms.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#398
Always remember: if you aren't paying a company to use their services, you aren't a customer- you're the product.

Google does not care about non-paying customers individually. They have literally billions of them. They're easily replaceable and provide roughly the same amount of value each- not much, but worth lots in aggregate. If Google were to have a human review all the complaints from the non-paying customers, then they would become a small cost each rather than a small profit each.

Google's only option is to start assessing which people are dangerous to offend and then provide just those people additional customer support. I'm sure there won't be any social consequences of that though.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account. There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn't there for the former, but there's plenty of it for the latter.

I can sign up to AWS and get world class service on day one with just a credit card. That’s the bar.

And that absolutely works on GCP too. In similar way, even.

You just add "support contract" on that credit card (without it, AWS is just as likely to ignore you too)

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#400
post #285

It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies. At the very least, companies must be legally required to present you in writing with the so-called violation of terms they're accusing you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone # or other immediate contact so that you can dispute the accusations. It's insane that these basic legal rights don…

> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies. Google is a private company who offers free internet services in exchange for your privacy being violated. They have no customer service because you are not a customer as customers pay. You have no rights on their platform because again, you are not a paying customer. And you agreed to their te…

> The only thing the government should do is fund PSA's ...

Should governments allow caller ID spoofing, spam bordering on harassment, or lazy oligopolies to be negligent?

Governments should do whatever we agree they should. Both governments and companies serve the humans.

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