81–90 of 396 posts
It amazes me that HN, and Twitter, is the only customer service for a multi-billion dollars company like Google.
The customers are well taken care of. The users are not the customer, they are the product.
I know losing a YouTube channel is horrible, especially after you dedicated so much time, effort and money - and for some people it may be a source of income as well. It is totally unfair. But my nightmare in here is that you lose access to your whole Google account and that would devastate me. Not only email access (and thus, access to every service I use because I have my Google account linked to it), but also Goog…
I use Smugmug but if they go out of business today I couldn't care less, not only do I keep copies, I also keep the structure of the galleries and could recreate them elsewhere with little trouble.
It amazes me that HN, and Twitter, is the only customer service for a multi-billion dollars company like Google.
The customers are well taken care of. The users are not the customer, they are the product.
Could one lose access to manage domains registered with Google domains because of some other service like this?
When I try to visit Youtube now I get redirected to https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40039?p=youtube which says: --- Google reserves the right to: * Disable an account for investigation. * Suspend a Google Account user from accessing a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system, if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated. * Terminate an account at any time, for any reason…
I always thought we had protections that when someone runs a public service (eg. a restaurant or a supermarket), they can't just turn people away they want for "any reason". But I was never confident this is true (and sure, it depends on the local laws).
Eg. imagine there being the only supermarket in your area where the security person (or the branch manager, whoever) doesn't like you (it could be for a mundane reason, maybe you made the computer nerds club and they didn't :), and never lets you in. Obviously, supermarkets rarely exist right next to each other, so existence of one usually precludes another one existing nearby (sometimes even due to urban planning/zoning), but this would be equivalent to terminating someone's account "for any reason".
Would that be legal anywhere?
With public servants, it is usually clear: they've got to give you a reason for any action they are taking, a reason supported by law (except when endangered, but those are special, edge cases).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have the power TODAY to change that. Do it before you lose access. Start with a Google Takeout and get your email out into your own domain as a starting point. Search "self hosting" for more details, even if you have no interest in running your own servers it gives you lots of good ideas to regain more control over your own data.
My main fear about that is not doing it properly and my email stop working as expected. For the nature of my job (press) I send a lot of emails to people who don-t know me, asking for interviews, etc. If my email starts to fall into spam folder, my job would be impossible. Gmail gives me that and I don't have to worry about if this person received the email or not.
It's hard to know what's best in terms of risk management here. The likelihood that you will be hit is small but the consequences are potentially devastating.
Why are you using legacy centralized web 2.0 platforms ruled by fiat money? Put your video on IPFS, give it an ens.domain, mint an NFT for it. With an eth filecoin bridge it will fund its own censorship-resistance forever. That tech is great and has obsoleted web 2.0. Don't trust Google, self-govern!
I'm not sure why people are calling this satire. If you want to host a video, make it available through a URI, protect your ownership rights and then make sure it gets hosted for as long as possible, this is a way to do it.
It's terrifying that the punishments are so draconian (because one false move and you lose access to the entire Google account, and possibly become persona non-grata and lose the ability to create another one even in a company context), it's hard to understand what the rules are, the appeals process generally won't help, and even being a paying customer won't save you. It seems like best practice for any professional…
Talking from my company's perspective, this is very real. It gets worse when out of the blue a customer rep from them want to schedule an interrogation about why to do you use their cloud services, which is because the absolutely vital part ML bit of your business is there. We are currently decentralizing and moving to a local cloud provider with real people subject to local laws, better for the environment.
This is why I have like to have many google accounts. One for personal mail, one for my own youtube channel, another for my 2nd channel with random uploads, another for gmail for the first youtube account and another account for gmail for the other youtube account, plus 2 more gmail accounts for spam or when I need to signup with an email for another expendable service, I use one of these. I don't do anything on my p…
Personally I surely would not want to go that route, but maybe suing(or the threat of it) helps, if you know a trustworthy lawyer? I would imagine just a letter from a lawyer stating the facts of the incident would be enough to get real attention from google. I mean, you pay for a service - they just canceled without further explanation. Shouldn't there be some rights left for normal people? Otherwise yes, your story…
Why do you use YouTube? The html tag was invented 10+ years ago and works flawlessly with mp4.