Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google users locked out after 15 years' use

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 720 posts

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#461

Post by vorpalhex »

boringg wrote: post #445
varispeed wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a great blog that started getting me over $2000 per month from Google Ads (several million views), then suddenly after 3 months it dropped to $300 with the same amount of views and never gone up. No matter how much promo I did I would never get past $300. It seems like Google somehow put restriction on my account without any explanation. Eventually my blog died (also because Facebook capped organic reach of my…

I get the sense that this was related to the content of OP's blog. The fact that he was concerned that he would get blocked from gmail and facebook sounds like a level of paranoia, from my perspective, related to the content of the site that's why they didn't push farther. I do see how if you were naturally a paranoid individually you might be concerned about losing those connections, though seems high unlikely they…

That seems like a bad faith assumption without more evidence. If your gmail is your main way of interacting with the web then any user is going to be a bit paranoid about protecting it even when doing nothing bad or wrong.

Likewise just having content Google deems unacceptable doesn't mean you aren't owed an explanation of the policy. "Hey, sorry, we've decided that blogs on breast feeding violate our policies on content and we won't be allowing you to run ads" is certainly better than silence.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#462

Post by [deleted] »

Anarch157a wrote: post #334

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#463

Post by iow84wer »

FirstLvR wrote: post #391
juskrey wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is OneDrive different in this sense?

Office 365 is overall better plus, never seen anyone complaining about getting their officce account deleted into void

At least in Germany some sites/blogs reported in the last few month that many users lost their Microsoft accounts without reason, so i wouldn't be too sure about this.

One user is even suing Microsoft because of this: (article is in german) https://www.drwindows.de/news/konto-gesperrt-nutzer-reicht-k...

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#465

Post by pnutjam »

Mikho wrote: post #362

Happened to me too after 10 years of Gmail use. Exactly the same story. No explanation. As I remember at that time I checked Google servers data as to uptime—the data was public, not sure about now—and it appeared that there was a serious problem with servers right before I was blocked. It looked like Google just completely lost data in some server cluster. Anyway, there was no way to get any response from Google or…

I pull my phone photos via rsync and I backup my gmail and my wife's gphoto via an api key backup script.

This way i don't lose any data. I have a grandfathered custom domain, that my kids and other family members use; so it would suck. I could however move the domain anywhere. It would just be a bit more expensive.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#466

Post by thu2111 »

VLM wrote: post #377
411111111111111 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree actually. The issue seems to me that it's a global ban. If Google only locked you out of the functionality you seem to have violated somehow, it would still be a viable strategy to use their services. Imagine losing the ability to comment or upload videos on YouTube because you wrote something offensive or published a video with copyrighted materials. Potentially bad for YouTube creators, but definitely no…

> The issue seems to me that it's a global ban. Global bans "seem" to be new. I've read many stories of shell scripts randomly permanently banning android developers for life from their platform, but those stories always involved being banned from the play console and so forth, not being banned from search / maps / gmail / youtube / etc. It seems to be news that if you tell people in public youtube comments that you…

I used to work at Google on stuff related to account bans.

Global bans are not new. They were standard a decade ago. The reason is due to the structure of the various spam/abuse industries that plague any service that allows user generated content. What happens is this:

1. Accounts get harder to create as signup security improves

2. Black/grey-market account sellers come in and start creating accounts that get bought by spammers/fraudsters.

3. Spammer/fraudster abuses an account on service X, it gets locked for service X. They sell the accounts _back_ to the seller, who then resells the account once again with a note that it can't be used for YouTube or whatever.

4. Different spammer/fraudster buys the account, abuses it on a different service, goto step 3.

Their systems have some notion of why accounts were suspended or blocked, and the tech does support individual service level blocks. But they weren't used much back then because the pattern of a user being bad on one service and then being bad on every other service was too strong.

The problem of false positives was well known a long time ago, and the noise:FP rate is very good - if a script accidentally disabled good users with even quite low volume the people in question would be on Twitter or HN within hours making articles like this one, which did get noticed. So false account blocks were pretty rare.

Back then and still now, I think Google need to make it easier to handle this situation. Strong end-user support in these situations is hard because genuine fraudsters will happily file support tickets and socially engineer support to get their accounts back - I even witnessed auto-generated pleas to support once. They were quite convincing individually, only when you saw a few thousand of them with re-arranged sentences all begging for help with identical language was it clear they were spam. However they could still make it a lot easier, and in particular, could improve Google Takeout to be easier to use (e.g. automatically uploading the backups to various non-Google services).

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#467

Post by silicon2401 »

snazz wrote: post #403
silicon2401 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does this include absolutely everything from your Google account, like all emails with attachments, google photos with album data, youtube videos from your channel, etc? If not, does someone know of a guide out there on how to export all of one's data from Google?

Yes. I can verify that it contains email attachments, Google Photos files (along with metadata in JSON format), and YouTube videos. There is quite a bit of other information included as well, some of which I didn't even know I had created.

That's actually amazing. thanks for your response! I've been slowly working on detaching from google this year due to stories like this, but the thought of manually downloading all my data was rather overwhelming. Glad to know they at least offer this feature

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#469

Post by Kihashi »

hilbert42 wrote: post #73
tjoff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People constantly bash on thunderbird search, when it is actually the opposite. Gmail will often fail on exact-match searches. Unbelievable frustrating and next to useless. Thunderbird is a bit clunky but does what you ask of it and has much better+simpler filtering options. Which makes sense, gmail is in the cloud so it can't perform intensive search queries because that would cost way to much. Thunderbird has a ded…

I use Thunderbird but I only do so as it's the best of a bad lot (before that I used Eudora before Qualcomm dropped it - Eudora users know everything else is a letdown). Thunderbird has forks but they too need much work. The trouble with email started when free email was included in Windows thus taking the incentive away from development. Same goes for Thunderbird nowadays with free Gmail being available.

I was working in a College's IT Dept when they were migrating everyone from Eudora. Lots of the professors were of the "You can pry it from my cold, dead hands" opinion. They often had 10s of gigabytes of email dating back to the early 90s, some even earlier.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#470

Post by mbeex »

windexh8er wrote: post #388
lqet wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been managing my own mail server for 6 years now, and enabling and configuring all the mail security features (DKIM, SPF, etc), and keeping up with them, is indeed the most difficult part. I regularly check my mail server against tools like this: https://mxtoolbox.com/diagnostic.aspx . If you just do one thing wrong, you will end up on some black list from which it is very difficult to get off. So far, I did n…

This. So many people don't take the 10 minutes to configure DMARC, DKIM and SPF. I've been hosting my own domains since 1996 and I haven't ever had a problem with any of them sending mail to any of the big hosters. If your DMARC passes and you actually have a policy set to REJECT you're almost guaranteed to not have a problem as long as your domain isn't a few days old. The first thing I do for any new domain I plan…

> So many people don't take the 10 minutes to configure DMARC, DKIM and SPF.

Another commentator here mentioned this and the hint was worth gold. In the meantime, I changed/adjusted this in the interface of my website provider (I am also using his SMTP server) and solved an actual problem of this kind immediately (maybe also explaining the shortcomings in the past).

In general, I would admit that it is not a compelling excuse not to know something. The problem is, that I was not even aware of these keywords and after looking them up, I seemingly solved things quickly and - hopefully - permanently. People just don't constantly check all things. Especially with long term reliable services with rare, subtle and not obvious (in this case without any hint) errors.

Post reply on HN