361–370 of 720 posts
The second person lives in Britain. I wonder if he tried submitting a GDPR request, and if Google has any obligation to keep the data, or if they delete it immediately?
I wonder how Brexit fits into EU regulations.
Since then I use my own domain for email, could easily switch email provider while keeping the address in case there is a problem, and I'd still control access via the email to other services. Also I never rely on Google as to files, photos, or videos. I mean yeah I use Google, YouTube etc., but everything is first of all backed up on MS OneDrive. Even on my Android phone there is automatic upload of all new photos to OneDrive. Google Photos is more like for easy viewing, sharing and presentation. Not backup. Not to mention that MS Office + OneDrive storage subscription provides much more value that Google G Suite.
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I got gmail accounts for my kids after they were born. My youngest, 12, attempted to sign in from a Windows PC in our house and was told that they could not verify that it was her. Keep in mind, this is the same public IP address that we've had for ages. I am the recovery contact for the account since she is a minor, and have filled out the forms several times now, even giving the exact date and the "verification cod…
Did you sign up and enter a fake birthday? Google doesn't allow creation of real accounts for minors under 13 years old unless you use family link[0]. 0: https://families.google.com/familylink/
edit: Family Link is also for android devices and chromebooks. She doesn't have a phone / android device or a chomebook.
Everyone saying "I would lose all my e-mail" apparently doesn't know about fetchmail, getmail or even Thunderbird. Just download your mail using IMAP or POP3 and archive it locally. I recently deleted my last Gmail account (that I had since 2001). Before doing it, I tried Google's Checkout to get the data, but it was adking me for "verification" (i.e. more info about me) to finish the download. I just fired up Thunde…
> ...backed up at home and on a Nextcloud instance I keep on a Linode VPS.
> Web is not the only way to read e-mails, friends. Use a proper client and back it up.
But the vast majority of people aren't going to be able to casually fire up, for example, a Nextcloud instance and linode VPS. Not even close.
The long-term management of a DIY personal/household computing infrastructure for email, important files, and online services just isn't in the skill-set of most people who aren't computing professionals. It's not really even in the skill-set of most computing professionals.
I just used Google Checkout to get my music files after Google shutdown the play music service and transferred it to youtube music. I now have ~60GB of zips containing mp3's and meta-data in csv files (admittedly, it was all badly curated by me with garbage id3's and bad filenames). I'm now trying to properly tag and curate these media files and host it in some way that I can use it remotely. It's not a trivial job. Especially because I've decided I don't want surveillance capitalism coming between my music collection and me anymore (eg no spotify/pandora/apple-music for me). I'm sure it's trivial work for some of you but for me to manage a collection of music, it's a challenging project with lots of trial and error (tbh, I kind of enjoy it). Can everyone do this? Definitely not. It's a massive DIY undertaking.
If we're now talking about email and files which are more important that one's cool music collection, it's a whole other ball game. I don't think there's a good solution for those of us who don't want to roll-our-own infrastructure.
Tip: Get your own domain from a non-google registrar, then connect to Gmail if you prefer. If you ever are locked out, you can just move the address to another email-provider. Another trick is to use always have forwarding enabled in Gmail, to Outlook.com or another provider. All email will be forwarded despite your account being locked, so you will not miss out on important info. And use Google Takeout for backing u…
Who do you recommend instead of Google Domains?
E.g. website@yourdomain.com
It should be illegal. Companies that provide public utility type services should be obliged to follow certain laws, one of them being that they are not allowed to shut people out from their own data. They could provide the service as read-only on alleged breach of terms (allowing the user to migrate) for example. Shutting them out completely: just no.
If you live in the EU, Google are legally obligated to hand over your data under GDPR notice.
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I'm trying to not make this sound harsh; but you really don't need a government regulator to tell you that centralising all your data with Google, who are providing largely free services, is risky. It is like building a house on the edge of a cliff then falling off the cliff one day. It was always a real possibility. Being locked out of your stuff is quite a likely end of the story with Google.
Google is huge and they run a vast portion of the internet now. If they were to suddenly decide that all FastMail accounts should go to spam tomorrow, any users of FastMail would be SoL—they would be unable to communicate with a huge majority of the internet. They could decide to randomly throw every 5th email that is not a gmail into spam and blame it on other providers having low reliability. Make it random enough…
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Google is a private company. So they can choose there customers. If they don't want you, they are free to throw you out.
At some point companies are large enough that not having an account is an handicap. IIRC, the supreme court of Canada mentioned in a ruling that Facebook terms are unenforceable because they can't be negotiated and because not having an account in too consequential. In essence, it's not a agreement you freely enter in. It was about forced arbitration. My point is there are limits that what private companies can do. S…
The worst is when your card payment fails and they lock you. Now you can't pay and nobody can help you till you pay.
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I love protonmail! I made the switch a couple years back and haven't looked back, with one exception- my city's utilities company blacklists protonmail, so in the handful of times I've emailed them (specifically there were three times they've shut off my water because someone with a very similar looking address didn't pay their bill) with proof of something-or-other, it supposedly doesn't make it to their communal or…
There are a few things that protonmail is not good at, but I guess I've learned to live with them. 1. You can't search message content. gmail is very good at this, so I've had to become more organized to make sure that I can find a particular message in protonmail. 2. Notifications on mobile do not clear if I've read the message on another device. I have to open up the app and sync to stop them from popping up with o…