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Google banned me from Google Voice

dannyguo.com

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Re: Google banned me from Google Voice

#31

Post by fermigier »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #9

Not to address the author of the article specifically, but only all readers generally.... I would suggest that the moment you chose to have a critical dependency on someone else's services, it becomes incumbent on you to have a disaster recovery plan should that service suddenly become unavailable to you. How formal or intense such a plan is may depend on if you're an individual or a small/mid-sized business that's t…

"it becomes incumbent on you to have a disaster recovery plan should that service suddenly become unavailable to you." -> It's already hard when you are a seasoned IT professional. I don't know a single person in my family who has the faintest idea where to start, even if I've lectured them several times on this topic.

Re: Google banned me from Google Voice

#33

Post by peterfisher »

My strategy for this class of issue is paying Google. I pay for Google Apps (now rebranded to workspace). I have so much of my life tied up into the Google Ecosystem I see no problem paying per month for their services. This also provides me a number to call when shit doesn't work.

Re: Google banned me from Google Voice

#34

Post by tantalor »

bravura wrote: post #20

IANAL, but my understanding is that EU Digital Services Act (DSA) protects EU consumers against this lack of transparency for moderation/bans. https://freedomhouse.org/article/eu-digital-services-act-win... "Providers of hosting services, including online platforms, now have an express legal obligation to provide clear and specific statements of reasons for their content moderation decisions. The DSA also empowers us…

This has nothing to do with content moderation.

Re: Google banned me from Google Voice

#36

Post by transcriptase »

I’m getting sick of the “take no responsibility for human or computer mistakes by creating automated processes where fixing the mistake manually can’t be done or hurts a KPI”.

FedEx lost my package. Apparently there’s no process to flag it missing without being able to physically scan the missing item (???). It’s permanently marked as “out for delivery”, so all of their systems tell you everything is fine and actively work against you ever reaching a human.

Meanwhile the sender has an automated system that checks the FedEx tracking number, sees “out for delivery”, and does the same thing. Even when I do reach humans at both FedEx and the sender it’s obvious they can’t do anything except sympathize with the situation.

I feel like I’m part of some sort of psychological experiment at this point.

Re: Google banned me from Google Voice

#37

Post by nfriedly »

Damn, that one hits close to home.

I have a custom domain for my email + a docker instance running Thunderbird, configured to keep an up-to-date local copy of my gmail. So if I lost access to gmail, it'd be a pain in the rear, but I wouldn't really loose that much.

But I hadn't thought much about my google voice account. That's the phone number I usually give out, although some friends and family do have my verizon number.

I suppose I need to figure out how to make regular backups of my google voice messages also.

Re: Google banned me from Google Voice

#38

Post by lotsofpulp »

jtbayly wrote: post #25
lotsofpulp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s ludicrous that Google can simply kill your phone number and nobody bats an eye. It is Google’s phone number. What is ludicrous is not having a federal US identity verification API such that phone numbers are not the end all be all. Or that if the US government wants to use phone numbers for identity verification, they enact legislation to provide legal protections from losing it. But I think leaders like the e…

It’s actually not Google’s phone number, as evidenced by the fact that he could have gone to the FCC and gotten it back if Google refused to release it to him. Edited to add: Also, it’s not true that phone numbers are only so important because of identity verification. That is one reason, but solving that doesn’t let my children’s school call me if Google shuts my number down, just to give one example. Edited to add…

Sorry, I should not have assumed that Google voice numbers provided for free are portable. Or at least not immediately released back to the pool of available numbers.

It is a free service, so I expected to not have any right to it.

I also feel like my only use for phone numbers for many years has been identity verification. If I lost access to it, I could be reached via multiple other communications avenues, but I can only get 2FA SMS sent to my phone number for many services, including government websites.

Re: Google banned me from Google Voice

#40

Post by superkuh »

larme wrote: post #18

Try jmp.chat, you can use an XMPP client to receive phone calls and sms. I use the following services: - phone number: jmp.chat and a textnow number as backup - email: fastmail - search: kagi - map: apple map

I tried kagi for a while. Did you ever notice that kagi image search is just a wrapper around google image search? The results are exactly the same, just in a slightly randomized order.
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