241–250 of 514 posts
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Google's fetish for not providing human support is so counter-productive it makes me think there must be a single powerful individual executive maintaining the policy. It's too stupid to have widespread support among Googlers.
You cannot feasibly provide any level of acceptable human support and remain “free” with a huge user base. Meanwhile, being “free” is crucial if your actual paying customer is the advertisers. If you stop being free, you (gasp) normalize paid service. Suddenly you are conflicted and fighting two fronts, you compete with other paid services, your users can actually demand things and vote with their money, etc.
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I highly doubt getting locked out of your google drive still allows you to download backups from google backup services...
Which is why I download the Takeout backup monthly.
How many times does that have to happen before people realize there is no cloud, only other people's computers. The data that is stored there is no longer yours, just as thanks to Apple and Co. your hardware no longer really belongs to you, but you only enjoy a temporary right of use. It will be interesting to see when hardly anything remains of an entire generation because everything comes from the cloud: Photos, vi…
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Google's fetish for not providing human support is so counter-productive it makes me think there must be a single powerful individual executive maintaining the policy. It's too stupid to have widespread support among Googlers.
You cannot feasibly provide any level of acceptable human support and remain “free” with a huge user base. Meanwhile, being “free” is crucial if your actual paying customer is the advertisers. If you stop being free, you (gasp) normalize paid service. Suddenly you are conflicted and fighting two fronts, you compete with other paid services, your users can actually demand things and vote with their money, etc.
The problem is that because so many people misuse that option they deny the economies of scale that would support flourishing paid email providers. And a lot of people think they are OK with the no support plan but they really aren't, and this turns out to be the case when a bot shuts them down. Unfortunately the paid privacy focus email providers suck right now, both at spam filtering (looking at you, protonmail) and the overall UX. Gmail is just much better.
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I have no activity on YouTube, Blogger, or any other Google service since they tied up all the accounts, just to minimize the chance of getting my Gmail chopped off. (Note to self: stop giving feedback on Maps routing. You never know.)
I'm sure you already know, but setting up your own myname@mydomain.tld and then setting that up in Gmail[1][2] means that in a catastrophic scenario (your Gmail is closed) you don't lose your email address. In addition to that, you should frequently take a backup of your Gmail emails[3], then in case your account is locked you can use the exported mbox[4] archive, and import it in Thunderbird, this works reasonably[5…
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Counter productive? To what? Their market cap continues to climb. No one gives a shit about their customer support, or lack there of.
Oh they love their customers and are quite solicitous as to their needs. People using search, gmail, drive etc aren’t the customers.
I will upvote and comment to hopefully gain visibility at the minimum. Google really has an unfortunate customer support set up, in that there isn't one. Your best bet when Google does something bad to their customers like this (And regardless if its a bad AI or bad bot, its still Google doing it), is to post it on twitter or hackernews and hope it gets the visibility for a Google employee to fix it, or contact someo…
Like Facebook and content moderation, it's a problem entirely of their own making. Zero sympathy, caveat emptor.
Google Takeout is good insurance. I backup my full google dataset every 6 months or so. When Google AI blocks an account, why don't they offer a window of using Google Takeout to get a .zip of all their stuff?
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> What we really should be asking is why is google examining user data at all. Without reading into the details, I don't think that google arbitrarily examines all user files on Google Drive (and please correct me if I am wrong, but that's what I remember since the last time this discussion was had). Google only examines files that were shared with other users or were made accessible to others through a shareable lin…
I hope I'm not the only one who got a little squeamish at this...I understand the logic, "don't let people transfer/share things that are illegal". But it doesn't sit right that 1) A gigantic private company operating across most of the world/laws/jurisdictions/precedents etc...is in charge of determining (with little to no human oversight) what can and can't be shared between individuals. Who might even be in compet…