111–120 of 499 posts
This story is just absolutely ridiculous: The poster _works at Google_ and even tried to escalate internally for days, to no avail.
Well IMO it kinda makes sense that internally of all places you might actually make it hard to address it along that specific path to avoid any kinda of local shenanigans.
Getting information on this stuff is difficult, given the blank check the NSA has had from 1959 onwards: https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/516064-stat...
Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Address is misinterpreted by many and totally forgotten by others. Please listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyBNmecVtdU
This is one of the reasons why I've finally began migrating to a custom domain + proton mail. Can't imagine the time it would take me to get back all the accounts registered to my email, not to mention those to which access would be lost forever.
Unfortunately Protonmail is not good for long term mail storage. Their web mail app has hardly improved in years, and it is abysmal in terms of search and handling thousands of emails. If you depend on PM, you may find some years later that your emails are trapped and incredibly difficult to access except painfully individually, with much manual effort.
It's fairly easy to extract your data.
It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal, but you don't know what you're being accused of doing. This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone…
For instance, it is a prison-time offence for an individual employee of a financial institution to tell a customer they filed a SAR on them.
The way you get kafka is BSA compliance officers have personal liability for this reporting, so they prefer not to have customers that trigger reporting, but they cant tell a customer why they are dumping them, so the word comes from ‘on high’ or an algorithm and thats it. Nobody internally can help because for their own good they do not know the reasons for account termination.
This may be that or it may not, but probably its not that google is being dicks to its own employees. It is an outcome of a pernicious set of government and institutional dynamics.
Somehow related - long, long time ago in one of Google services I've used an account bound to my 'external' email that I've been using actively back then. Just few days ago I had a need to login to this service. I know my login (and I still have access to those e-mail), I know my password, but since I haven't used that account for a few years Google wants to send me a verification code on some phone number. Even that the last 2 digits displayed by Google on the verification screen match my phone number apparently I've made a mistake back then and provided a wrong phone number. There is a zero possibility to contact a human person at Google support and their docs in general provide a gentle 'fuck off'. I understand (somewhat...) the scale they operate at, security concerns and hey, I'm not a customer really here. Still it is rather infuriating that I cannot do anything. Fortunately the account and that service is not that important... :/
I've started to untangle myself from Google services some time ago and this incident will only accelerate this. Unfortunately - in general - our dependency on digital services will only increase anyway. With so many services providing some kind of 'free' tiers and all the effort needed to backup your stuff spread across so many accounts it will only get worse.
I've been slowly trying to decouple myself from google in the last few years (/decades) ... but I have stuff that goes back at least 2 decades that I have been lazy / hesitant, e.g. contacts on the phone (since I doubt I would have the necessary patience to import / export / sync contacts manually anymore). But ... seeing this kind of thing, I need to reconsider and at least keep a monthly backup or something ... as…
My Dad has all his photos on a PC and HD backup. If something happens to him I know I can recover it all, I'm glad he doesn't rely on Google Photos, dropbox or similar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reporting chain wasn't helping him. This is obviously his last resort. I pay for Google services and stuff like this is motivating me to look into migrating away (the only thing I _actually_ care about is mail).
So he's going to piss away a $300k+ job over this. And then what? The account will still be locked out.
Personally ethics play a big role in my happiness, but I acknowledge and appreciate that being able to chose is a rare privilege.
EDIT: Grammar