371–380 of 501 posts
One possible preventive measure could be to have separate developer accounts for each product and keep everything air-gapped between those accounts. I was banned from AdSense for a never disclosed reason. I guess I still am - never tried again, in part because the alternative I used after that paid better.
What alternative did you end up using?
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After reading so many posts like this, I decided to bite the bullet and start moving off-Google. Funny thing is, ProtonMail and Obsidian are much better than Gmail and Keep anyway. I'm still forced to use Google stuff here and there but I'm no longer dependant on them, and coincidentally I've been sleeping much better recently.
In my case, I moved to Fastmail... and yeah, the hilarious thing is people remember moving from AOL to Gmail over a decade ago, and think Gmail is still so much better than everything else. Gmail is worst-in-class at this point. It's slow, it's bloated, it's bad at spam filtering compared to the alternatives. They've been riding on people remembering email before Gmail, but not really actually stayed competitive with…
The difference is night and day. I can look in the spam folder for my work email now and there are hundreds of spam messages there for the last 30 days, and absolutely zero false positives. I have seen a handful of spam messages come through, but it's in the single digits over the last two years.
Good luck fighting this as a small company.
Is anything stopping app developers from forming a (non-workers) union to collectively bargain and advocate for its members? This seems like something where if every app developer paid dues to a central body, with the insurance that each dispute had the resources and leverage of that body, then maybe they would take more care in the first place.
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I don't understand why the fear of being sued is not preventing Google (and other big players) from misusing their position like this. Is it impossible to sue Google?
> Is it impossible to sue Google? Theoretically no but practically yes. Even if they know they are in the wrong and would loose a court case, they still "win" by just dragging it out and making you go broke on legal fees.
I will say this once again: App Stores are too important in the current world to be left to the mercy of some big Internet company. I agree they should get a cut due to them being both the creators and maintainers of their platforms, but their ability to regulate what's in them should be left to a third party or government agency, just like trade is not left to its own devices and has regulators. Apple and Google are…
I don't think regulation is the answer. The US government should just create app.gov with a 1% fee or something and out compete them.
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After reading so many posts like this, I decided to bite the bullet and start moving off-Google. Funny thing is, ProtonMail and Obsidian are much better than Gmail and Keep anyway. I'm still forced to use Google stuff here and there but I'm no longer dependant on them, and coincidentally I've been sleeping much better recently.
the editor for Google Docs is the one really good thing I can't get elsewhere, but I don't do that much important stuff in it - just like planning vacations, etc. Once I'm done editing something, if I want to back it up I can just export it elsewhere
The up-front cost and setup time is a stiff investment, but I’m much easier in mind now.
The other side of the coin is my wife’s gmail, which is going to be deleted come May. So... we gotta figure that out.
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After reading so many posts like this, I decided to bite the bullet and start moving off-Google. Funny thing is, ProtonMail and Obsidian are much better than Gmail and Keep anyway. I'm still forced to use Google stuff here and there but I'm no longer dependant on them, and coincidentally I've been sleeping much better recently.
So how do you know those services don't pull the same stunt? I use various google services, and do a monthly backup of everything. I guess that's a sane thing to do with any service, even self hosted ones.
Protip: you can easily sync obsidian by sharing the top-level vault directory with syncthing. Its entirely transparent, you just start obsidian and open the vault, and changes you make on one system automatically appear on others.
As for protonmail, its better than google -- but you're right in the data ownership. In the case of protonmail, they have a much better track record than Google, but if you are really paranoid choose a service that supports SMTP/SNMP. You can then just have a mail client store the mail as an archive or connect it to any other mail system.
I have mentioned my preferences before, but I'll refrain from turning this comment into an unpaid ad. Drew Devault's recommendations are pretty good though: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/19/Mail-service-provider-rec...
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After reading so many posts like this, I decided to bite the bullet and start moving off-Google. Funny thing is, ProtonMail and Obsidian are much better than Gmail and Keep anyway. I'm still forced to use Google stuff here and there but I'm no longer dependant on them, and coincidentally I've been sleeping much better recently.
So how do you know those services don't pull the same stunt? I use various google services, and do a monthly backup of everything. I guess that's a sane thing to do with any service, even self hosted ones.
Your backup note is on point; I highly recommend everyone to do a Google Takeout every few months (or at least years!!). If you've never done one, like most Google users, you're playing with fire.