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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

#471

Post by mschuster91 »

anthony_r wrote: post #301
_qulr wrote: 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…

You're not seeing the other side of the coin - the huge amount of spam and abuse that such systems correctly identify and remove. If every abuser requests those explanations (which they will) there will be far more spam going around the Internet. Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health. (I am offering no solutions…

> Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health.

Hire them directly instead of via labor farms, pay them an actual living wage, give them full health benefits, and hire enough of them to prevent overload.

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

#472

Post by exikyut »

londons_explore wrote: post #183
arnaudsm wrote: post #4

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…

3 completely different points:

1. Ignore the downvotes. The reality (poor customer service perception) is what it is. Objectively looking at the problem and what can be done about it, without cynically assuming it's impossible, is the most practical focus going forward. Thanks very much for this insight, it was really interesting to read.

2. I've noticed various glitches and bugs over the years with various services - two I can remember right now are a) misspelling a search then clicking "did you mean" won't update the titlebar (been watching this one since ~2012), and b) accidentally sending an in-progress draft from one device will cause followup edits made on another device to sent to /dev/null. Well... I look at the kind of time-wasting junk input that makes it into Issue Tracker, I look at random app feedback, etc, and I know my feedback is never going to be seen. I can understand why things need to impact 10K people to be noticed. I thought I'd ask you: what's a good recommendation here?

3. Extremely specific question that I happen to be worrying about at the moment :) - I wasn't sure which Google account I wanted to use to play with GCP some months ago so I ended up enabling billing on more than one account using the same card. I have an idea I'd like to play which would call for a new account (since it would be tied to a YouTube channel) and would require me to use the same card yet again. All of this would be staying within the free tier, but I still wonder if I shouldn't run data takeouts first...? (I can't deny that the current state of Google services feels a bit like Russian roulette with extra servings of superstition - what doesn't kill your account, makes it stronger, or something??)

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

#473

Post by stonesweep »

gnud wrote: post #445
theshrike79 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start the process of getting out right now. Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product. I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995. [1] http://www.iki.fi/

I've had an email on a personal domain for years. But I still use my old gmail for one thing: Point of contact for the my domain registrar. Do you have any suggestions for how I can solve this?

Two domains registered at two different places, then cross-connect them at the registrars. To keep it fully distributed, you'll want to host one domain at one provider and the other one at a second one. (I do this - it's ~$10 USD/mo for both providers email hosting and ~$10/year to register each email domain, usually big discounts if you purchase for many years at once)

A second hosted email domain has an additional benefit - it allows you to also control your recovery (secondary) email, such as you'd add to your banking/financial website, etc. and not have any of your email options where they can be taken away like this post. It's trivial to have one of the email hosted providers do an IMAP pull from your GMail account, so you can still keep it around just manage it as an external account (such as for your Android login needs).

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

#474

Post by MisterTea »

_qulr wrote: post #407
MisterTea wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Want to be treated like a person? You have to pay for that. Andrew Spinks, the author of the linked tweet, was a business partner of Google's. That didn't save him.

Partner is not a customer. They don't care about any human on their platform because their platform is not designed to care about humans, only exploit them.

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

#475

Post by mrmattyboy »

The link is actually a reply to his first message... The start of his thread is: https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661841220730882

The message reads:

My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay . I had just bought LOTR 4K and can't finish it. My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.

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

#477

Post by blunte »

Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue.

But Google (and Facebook, and probably some other companies) don't have reasonable processes for disputing or resolving these situations.

Some have said that we should consider Google's challenge: lots of users/activities that need to be monitored and policed. The assumption is that Google could not afford to do this "reasonably" with humans instead of automated systems because the volume is high.

But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit.

In the unlikely event that involving more humans would be too expensive, then Google should raise their prices (or stop giving so much away for free).

To summarize, there is no excuse for Google to operate this way. They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.

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

#478

Post by 42droids »

toyg wrote: post #418
42droids wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, Office 365 sounds good, but we are a Linux & Mac only business. Can't imagine using MS products... Or will that not matter at all? :)

MS software for the mac is pretty decent - Excel alone is likely worth it to any org. Linux users can access the web versions, which are now pretty powerful. And if you are a Slack user you can move to Teams (which is now fairly good) and drop that subscription. I hate to say this, but MS really have their act together on "office in the web age".

Thank you for this. I will signup and check their offerings. If we can use the tools in the browser on linux, that is fine.

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

#479

Post by AnHonestComment »

prepend wrote: post #438
_qulr wrote: 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…

You know it’s funny that lots of the basic functions of business with consumers (eg, ability to return items) were set and codified in the US as the Uniform Commercial Code [0] that was established in 1952. Before then it was wild and variable. What’s really interesting is that it seems like of hacker-like in how it was implemented. It was published as a guide and then states passed laws to implement. Reminds me of a…

The original reason for free speech was to allow people of different creeds to work together against government.

The Bill of Rights is establishing as a baseline the policies that were found to reduce tribal conflicts in the European empires — having a strong central identity as a state (eg “American Destiny”), but allowing individual tribes under the state a great deal of freedom in religious practices. As a secondary purpose, it tamped down the worst state abuses.

The anti-religious messaging, the anti-conservative messaging, etc undermine this and are bringing back sectarian strife inside the state.

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