I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi • Hacker News Board

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#331

Post by ghazak » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 2:01 AM UTC

istjohn wrote: post #327

ghazak wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not really intelligence, so much as selection pressure in the direction of high margin. Evolution isn’t “intelligence” either, but still leads to interesting or highly honed solutions to problems.

It's certainly not selection pressure. Google's systems did not evolve because similar companies out-competed and reproduced more effeciently than dissimilar companies. The metaphor doesn't work at all.

Yeah, I actually pretty much agree, I was more responding to the point that nobody made a decision for it to be this way, and that is intelligence. I actually think that it was something that was intentially planned for purely margin reasons.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#332

Post by etimberg » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 2:01 AM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #228

8ytecoder wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time a comment like this comes up I say the same thing: Your email address is very very valuable and everything in the digital world is tied to it one way or the other. Own the domain so you can port it to another provider. Keep a copy of your emails somewhere - a mail app on your laptop? If you use drive, sync it fully to a laptop. It's not just Google, any service - paid or free, can and will shutdown your ac…

I bought my domain through domains.google.com though, lol Though, my nameservers are on bluehost. My biggest issue is figuring out other aspects of google-tied-ness. For example, everyone has my @gmail email right now. Websites, newsletters, contacts, everybody. Untying that will take a while. Also, I use Inbox for organizing my mail, and I like that a lot. I need to figure out a way to get similar functionality whil…

I just started the process of moving from gmail to an email on a custom domain through https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html. The setup process was pretty painfree and they provide very detailed setup instructions.

I haven't set my gmail to forward to the new email yet. I've spent the last month or so unsubscribing from a lot of email newsletters. Once I get the mail volume down even further, I'll setup gmail to autoforward and then give out my new email to those who need it.

I haven't yet found a Google Calendar substitute but that's lower priority right now.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#333

Post by MyNameIsFred » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 2:08 AM UTC

gameswithgo wrote: post #284

ploxiln wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also a problem with Square, and Stripe, and Paypal ... it's an unsolvable fraud/scammer problem. Basically, if there was customer support that could fix the problem, then skilled scammers can get money and control out of them. They can do it a lot better than you can get your stuff re-enabled, they know just when to say what to whom. Verizon just accepts the inefficiency, and also over-charges random customer…

>it's an unsolvable fraud/scammer problem. credit card companies and traditional banks and credit unions handle it fine. >Too many people, scams and fraud become big problems. if the solution to fraud is un-fixable account freezes, you have not actually solved anything. It is fraud itself.

They most certainly do not "handle it just fine". They are highly scammable, they know it, and it's "solved" my moving as much of the burden and repercussions onto the consumer as possible.

I've had my identity stolen, and both my wife and I have been mistaken for somebody else. There ARE way to move past this condition (inline with Google Pay, apparently), but it's just done via trust. Or apathy. Or acceptable risk. Or some combination thereof. It never truly goes away.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#334

Post by killjoywashere » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 2:12 AM UTC

Ah, I live on a small island in the Pacific and just got back from Thailand. Having Google Fi has been an absolute game changer.

Would having a back-up payment method set have solved something like this?

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#335

Post by jrobn » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

velosol wrote: post #322

dpark wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll find that if you do this, you start getting emails directly to your gmail anyway. I never give out my gmail address, but I use gmail and they happily report my gmail address when they send email as my “real” account. (Both email addresses are included in emails I send.) And upstream they are happy to respond to that gmail account when people hit the reply button. So I have tons of people who would essentially…

It's because of Google's use of 'From' and 'Sender' headers in gmail. If you setup an SMTP server to send your emails from for your @example.com address then Google won't mess around and the emails appear to actually come from the email address you want out there, not your @gmail.com.

Or just pay Fastmail $30 a year for such an important 21st century utility such that e-mail is.

I don't use gmail for anything else except throwaway accounts. Who wants to run an SMTP server.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#336

Post by taneq » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 2:31 AM UTC

fernly wrote: post #321

saurik wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PayPal has sales representatives and technical support people and you can actually deal with them, so I am not sure the premise is right... ...but the core problem is this argument is in reverse anyway: if I get banned from Bank of America somehow I don't lose access to the concept of a card that lets me pay for my Verizon account, and in the worst case scenario I can send them a check. I have had serious issues with…

Are you sure about PayPal? Because I believe I have read quite a few pathetic stories -- similar in tone to the posted article about Google Fi -- about PayPal accounts being frozen with no recourse, for example[1]. And PayPal settled a class-action lawsuit on just this topic[2]. [1] http://www.paypalwarning.com/paypal-frozen-account/ [2] https://www.doctorofcredit.com/paypal-class-action-lawsuit-f...

I thought PayPal's issues were on the receiver side rather than the payer side? Making payments seems OK, it's just if you use PayPal to receive payments, they can arbitrarily freeze your funds for 6 months whenever they feel like it.

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#337

Post by bubblethink » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 2:31 AM UTC

Isn't a more fundamental reason to not use fi is that it's not a real phone network ? Nobody other than google can operate a client as intended on the fi network. The network switching stuff isn't a standard or open source AFAIK. It's not a part of AOSP. Only google's licensed devices get that logic as a part of google play services. All other devices will operate in degraded mode where you are basically using a single carrier just like other carriers. So why bother ?

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#338

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 2:33 AM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #275

rroblak wrote: post #100

Google is, fundamentally, an engineering company. Despite their size and breadth, they still don't understand customer support. Their approach is to use software to solve problems, and they insist on doing so even when it's clear that software isn't up to the task. Unfortunately, customer support is a hard problem. Despite all of the advances in NLP, I still abhor automated customer support systems when I have a comp…

> Despite their size and breadth, they still don't understand customer support. Cue Larry Page's view on customer support circa 2000, and it still makes sense. Leaders fundamentally don't change views like that, and it impacts the organization - look at Zuckerberg's formative views on privacy.

I didn't previously know what Larry Page's view on customer support circa 2000 was:

But while it's easy to scoff at Page's quirks—his odd obsessions, his unrealistic expectations, his impatience for a future dangling out of immediate reach—sometimes his seemingly crazy ideas wind up creating breakthrough innovations, and skeptical Googlers wind up admitting Page was right, after all. That was the reaction in 2003 when Denise Griffin, the person in charge of Google's small customer-support team, asked Page for a larger staff. Instead, he told her that the whole idea of customer support was ridiculous. Rather than assuming the unscalable task of answering users one by one, Page said, Google should enable users to answer one another's questions. The idea ran so counter to accepted practice that Griffin felt like she was about to lose her mind. But Google implemented Page's suggestion, creating a system called Google Forums, which let users share knowledge and answer one another's customer-support questions. It worked, and thereafter Griffin cited it as evidence of Page's instinctive brilliance.

https://www.wired.com/2011/03/mf-larrypage/

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#339

Post by ndnxhs » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 2:33 AM UTC

2Ccltvcm wrote: post #160

ndnxhs wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not particularly hard to back up your google data. The hard part is switching emails when the old one gets suddenly taken from you.

Get your own domain and start using it for email. Auto-forward your existing emails to your new email provider. Over time your use of your primary email will asymptotically reach zero. After a few years you will realize that if the original email disappeared overnight, nothing of value would be lost. You have to start the switch TODAY.

Yeah thats what I have done and its not too bad. The one question I have is what email to I put for my domain stuff. If my domain name provider suspends my domain for some reason how do I contact them if my email has also gone down?

Re: I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi

#340

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sat, Jan 12, 2019, 2:39 AM UTC

fastball wrote: post #214

aaomidi wrote: post #45

Companies like google shouldn't be allowed to just ban someone's account and leave it at that. We actually need to regulate how OUR data is handled and managed by companies. Google thinks just because they provide an email service, they own all the emails in their service. This should not be the case and with all our reliance on cloud services, we need to be assured that our accounts are safe and we won't be denied a…

Email is a federated system. If you don't like how Google handles it, run your own mail server.

That's kind of a ridiculous statement these days. It's a bit like saying "Worried about e coli contamination in your food? Run your own farm."

These days, running a mail server is a complicated business, and the very fact that you ARE running your own server makes it much, much more likely that all the other mail servers consider you a spam relay unless you are very, very careful about how you have configured things.