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How likely is losing a Google account?

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Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#151

Post by c22 »

efsavage wrote: post #111
the_snooze wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Any company with a business model that takes your money and gives you service is inherently more secure than one that sells your eyeballs to advertisers in exchange for giving you free stuff. If anything, companies try to double-dip and serve multiple masters. See: the security and privacy mess in smart TVs. Last I checked, LG wasn't giving their TVs away.

> If anything, companies try to double-dip and serve multiple masters. See: the security and privacy mess in smart TVs. Last I checked, LG wasn't giving their TVs away. This is true, and you transition from customer to eyeballs once you take delivery of the product, but it is also tempered by the fact that they would like to sell you your next TV as well.

Google has the same incentive to consider users. If your eyeballs go away they have no recourse for tomorrow. This is no doubt why they give their services away. If they thought they could achieve similar market share while also charging you they certainly would. (And they do whenever they see the chance.)

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#152

Post by rektide »

fencepost wrote: post #138
crazygringo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd never heard of that, but it doesn't appear anyone was banned for viewing a stream. Rather, accounts were banned because he asked people to vote via comments using just single emojis, and the repetitive emoji comments were classified as spamming, so accounts were blocked for spamming. Once Google recognized the error of over-aggressive spam classification, it reinstated all the accounts. [1] [1] https://www.engadg…

Absolutely correct. What would have happened to those banned accounts had it been a livestreamer with a small number of subscribers and a smaller number of viewers? Would any real human have ever looked at it - and would they have cared or been empowered to do anything? Obviously proving a negative is a problem, but would anyone be surprised if small bans like that had actually happened and never got fixed? I'd be su…

Yes, well, Google & all sites also has a right to defend the network against attackers, which these people constitute. They actively degraded the site's quality & looked like & were an attack. Ultimately I think it's the right of these sites to handle matters as they may, and to a large degree caveat emptor us users.

But I also very much want there to be forgiveness somewhere in these systems. The historical, classic, "It was just a joke" doesn't cut it, but I also am not heartless, don't think the punishment here ought to be forever. I want there to be reconciliation, reform, appeals available. I personally am a huge fan of better digital justice efforts. But these efforts need to start & take off as ground roots, voluntary systems, to avoid premature & hardening regulation. I think we need some banner sites to bother trying to do better, which so far no one at all has. Trying to force change at the top seems foolish when we have tried so little, when we still know nothing.

I'd love to see some newspapers build "Digital Juries"[1] for abuse/moderation, or see some transparency floated. Just having more open processes would also be very helpful, versus how close to the chest these things are played today.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.06393

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#153

Post by ryandrake »

dspillett wrote: post #45
NelsonMinar wrote: post #24

Chargebacks can get your Google account locked. If you have a dispute with Google and protect yourself by reversing a credit card charge, Google might lock you entirely out of your account. The Google Pixel subreddit has a bunch of people's stories about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/search/?q=chargeback Not sure if this counts as "policy reason" for the article's purposes; he sort of dismisses payment d…

> My takeaway was that if I was ever in a dispute over a couple of hundred bucks for Google, I would not risk a chargeback for fear of retaliation. My takeaway from that is to never spend more than a few quid (i.e. money I'd care about losing) on anything linked that directly to Google.

To me, a chargeback is a 'burn the bridges' moment. If a company has wronged me to the point I'm prepared to do a chargeback, then I obviously don't want anything to do with that company anymore, and I welcome them to close my account since I will never do business with them again. Why would you want to continue doing business with a company that has frustrated you to the point of doing a chargeback?

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#154

Post by donmcronald »

blfr wrote: post #40

Google is too good not to roll the dice. I use Gmail in my own domain with a different registrar. Push comes to shove, I'll move, restore backups, and carry on. But damn are non-Google ecosystems bad. At work we use m365 and everything is atrocious compared to Google. Loggin in is a mess, email search is dreadful, OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe, integration with Android is weak, Ou…

> At work we use m365 and everything is atrocious compared to Google.

In my experience the admin side is the opposite. I only have a legacy Google Apps account to judge, so maybe the paid stuff is better, but MS365 has some pretty good tools when it comes to email.

However, both of them have absolutely brain dead policies sometimes. Ex: Google bounces mail sent to accounts locked for suspicious login attempts and MS forces you to give admin privileges to normal users that have to deal with messages that are incorrectly flagged as high confidence phishing.

MS is a double edged sword though. You get access to a lot of tooling on the admin side, but they very obviously don't care about small business users. The Business Basic accounts are more like paid beta testers than anything. You can see it if you look at the release lifecycle for a lot of the products. Ex: Business Basic accounts get app updates before Enterprise accounts.

I currently use MS for everything, but the bloat is starting to get to me. They can't stop adding features and everything there is starting to feel unpolished. They can't even keep their own docs / support up to date and sometimes support will send you links to stale information.

The support is 100% useless from both Google and MS, so I almost never use them and prefer MS because I get more tools to solve my own problems. The "confidently wrong" part of ChatGPT feels like a Microsoft product. Lol. They could literally replace their support with that "AI" and I bet people wouldn't notice the difference. That's not because ChatGPT is good. It's because MS support is so bad.

"My name is ChatGPT. I understand your problem and I'm going to help you fix it." >>> Proceeds to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding and doesn't fix the problem.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#155

Post by cycomanic »

remus wrote: post #121
GeekyBear wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can reach a human" is a huge security vuln Google's algorithms make entirely too many errors. "I can't get my account back unless a viral account of my problem makes the front page of HN" is an unacceptable risk.

I'm not sure how you can make that judgement without extra context (that is almost certainly tightly held within google). For example, what actually is the error rate? How does that compare to improper access that is successfully prevented? Obviously any real person losing access to their account is a rubbish experience for that person, but an error rate of 0% is not possible with any system (including those with ple…

I highly doubt that Google even tracks the error rate. I mean that you somehow need to make a viral post on HN to get your account back is evidence of that, they don't even know they made a mistake. Also based on the number of posts that we see here it's a nonneglible error rate. How many users does HN have a couple of 10thousand. So 32 posts makes it maybe 1 in a 1000, even if it is a 1 in 10000 or even 1 in 100000 error rate that's a pretty high probability to loose your online identity.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#156

Post by jp191919 »

balboah wrote: post #99
guptaneil wrote: post #13

It's true that every service has to deal with the same policy and lockout problems, but that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the risk is the same. I pay for FastMail because 1. if something goes wrong, I can reach a human without needing to write a viral blog post first. Other services pay for a customer service department. 2. I trust FastMail more to not shut down their product because they got bored. Sure Gmail…

Used fastmail (and proton) for a year or two. Had to go back to google because there’s just too much spam otherwise

I haven't have any problems with spam on PM, but I also don't give out my email addresses willy-nilly. I have junk emails for that.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#157

Post by rektide »

edent wrote: post #64
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but there is not process or person that has ever existed that has been infallible, therefore you are arguing that Google scale does not work?

That's correct. Google boasts that it doesn't do customer service because it can't scale to meet the demands of their user base. That can only work if their systems and processes never cause a user to have to go further than an FAQ page or community support. Given that Google are fallible, you end up in a situation where users' have a poor experience and cannot contact someone to resolve it.

Technosocietal Mechanization is a term I might float here.

I'm in a weird spot. I find myself surprised at how actively I defend these company's right to speech. Section 230 still seems like the bedrock that made it possible to have everyday people put words online to me, and I can't imagine renegotiating a way to preserve that while heaping liability onto those who offer online services.

Yet these completely mechanized processes, with no appeal, no humans, no way to get back into graces if something ever does goes awry, is curdling. I cant imagine mandating change, I can't imagine what we could demand that would be reasonable, but I also think this represents one of the worst possible sides of technology & the world; is most quintessentially de-humanizing.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#158

Post by creata »

ryandrake wrote: post #153
dspillett wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My takeaway was that if I was ever in a dispute over a couple of hundred bucks for Google, I would not risk a chargeback for fear of retaliation. My takeaway from that is to never spend more than a few quid (i.e. money I'd care about losing) on anything linked that directly to Google.

To me, a chargeback is a 'burn the bridges' moment. If a company has wronged me to the point I'm prepared to do a chargeback, then I obviously don't want anything to do with that company anymore, and I welcome them to close my account since I will never do business with them again. Why would you want to continue doing business with a company that has frustrated you to the point of doing a chargeback?

Because you have to. For example, no matter how badly Microsoft wrongs them, people in many industries need to use Windows, or Office, or LinkedIn.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#159

Post by PascLeRasc »

guptaneil wrote: post #13

It's true that every service has to deal with the same policy and lockout problems, but that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the risk is the same. I pay for FastMail because 1. if something goes wrong, I can reach a human without needing to write a viral blog post first. Other services pay for a customer service department. 2. I trust FastMail more to not shut down their product because they got bored. Sure Gmail…

I can't find any information on what happens if you stop paying for a Fastmail account. 1Password for example freezes your account in read-only mode. It's documented that Fastmail will re-use addresses for free trials and when a user requests to cancel [1]. It isn't clear what would happen if for some reason your card expired, they stopped accepting it [2], or your bank messed up and blocked the transaction [3].

To me, this introduces a new way to lose your account that isn't there with a free email service like Gmail.

[1] https://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?p=622760

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29988359

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/d1okxu/cha...

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#160

Post by nitwit005 »

crazygringo wrote: post #131
fencepost wrote: post #81

This doesn't mention what I think is the most egregious example of Google account risk - viewers of Markiplier's YouTube live stream getting mass banned. That included access to Gmail accounts from some reporting at the time ( https://gamerant.com/markiplier-stream-ban-lock-users-out-of... ). Combine that with automoderation and you have a recipe for people with no recourse getting hammered. At least when Nick (Train…

I'd never heard of that, but it doesn't appear anyone was banned for viewing a stream. Rather, accounts were banned because he asked people to vote via comments using just single emojis, and the repetitive emoji comments were classified as spamming, so accounts were blocked for spamming. Once Google recognized the error of over-aggressive spam classification, it reinstated all the accounts. [1] [1] https://www.engadg…

> Once Google recognized the error of over-aggressive spam classification, it reinstated all the accounts.

You mean, Google's support services entirely failed, but a huge amount of social media attention eventually got them to fix things.

It notes human moderators denied appeals in the article you linked.

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