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Google users locked out after 15 years' use

businessinsider.com

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Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#501

My gut feeling is that I feel Microsoft is more trustworthy than Google at this point. Is it just me? Also isn't it funny how we are willing to pay $100+ a month for an iPhone or premium Android with service, yet many balk at the idea of $5/month for a more trustworthy email option? (not saying MSFT is it necessary; there's multiple paid alternatives to Gmail)

Its just you. Also there is no such thing as paying for a more trustworthy email option. If people send mass emails or spam that violates the ToS you'll get blocked no matter who your provider is.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#502
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lots of people don't have a FB acct or don't use it anymore. It's largely died off unless you are old.

That's not really relevant to the argument, but just s/facebook/new_hip_site if it helps..

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is this not regulated? It doesn't need to be (and shouldn't be). Just use an email provider that respects you as a customer and don't put all your eggs into one corporate basket (especially not one that treats you as nothing more than data cattle). Horror stories like this one will, over time, educate people that this behavior pattern is dangerous. IMO self-hosting is the ideal because that aligns responsibilit…

This victim-blaming needs to stop before the tech industry backlash hits. This is exactly why we need regulation. I swear, if "just go somewhere else" were good advice (and it's not), we wouldn't be having this conversation. How many years has it been, though, that Google and other consumer-ignorant companies have been able to get away with this, helped along by people who tell victims to just "go somewhere else"? No…

> Normal people will only put up with this for so long.

Agreed. Then they will learn that Google is not to be trusted with email and move to a provider that is (sort of like how kids migrated away from Facebook when their parents showed up, even though Facebook remains a dominant brand). Disruption occurs when an incumbent is bad at something which the disruptor beats them at. In this case, there is an opportunity for an email provider to disrupt Google by providing actual customer service. Protonmail is already making waves in this space (in addition to the encryption).

The reason I'm anti-regulation is that every law is a headache waiting to happen (and one more barrier to entry) where to me -the- beauty of the internet is that there's almost no barrier to entry once you have an internet-capable device. The more we regulate the internet, the more difficult doing something as simple as running a personal discussion forum becomes. Regulation is, at its best, a necessary evil, to be avoided until no other solution has proven viable. And there are plenty of other solutions for this particular problem.

And to clarify, I'm anti-Silicon Valley (IMO venture capital's expectation of high returns is the direct cause of many of the "evils of tech"). But I do tend to agree with the anti-regulation stance. IMO the problems people want to solve with regulation (even including GDPR) are better solved by better tech and organizations that align their incentives with those of their users.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#504
I'd like to know how often other email services like iCloud and Yahoo Mail close accounts, since I have accounts on those as well. In the meantime I'm slowly moving off of Gmail, even though I give them money each year for additional storage.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Have you switched on your someuser@pm.me account? That at least doesn't have protonmail in the name.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#506
I have the best of two worlds - I think. My own domain (since 2000), and hosted on GSuite (the last 8-10 years). So I get the benefit of a robust email service but without the risk that I will get locked out. I access it using a desktop IMAP client and keep a copy of everything locally. And the icing is that I was an early user of GSuite when they used to offer free accounts. They no longer do that, but haven't (yet) killed off the ones that were created earlier, like mine. The primary data that's on Google without a copy are the photos backed up from my Android phone. Need to figure out a better solution there.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#507

A few comments in this thread rub me the wrong way. E.g.: > It should be illegal. > How is this not regulated? No one forces you to use these services. They're voluntary. Imagine you're looking for storage for some stuff. One company advertises a storage service, which is free, but there's a clause in the contract that says, "We can take your stuff at any time, for any reason, no backsies." Would you trust your stuff…

> No one forces you to use these services. They're voluntary

The problem is that they are a lot less voluntary then you think in certain segments.

* Running ads against a blog without using Google Adsense puts you at a disadvantage.

* Running an online store without Google Shopping puts you at a big disadvantage.

* Bootstrapping an online video show without YouTube is effectively impossible.

So if you are, say, an independent videographer, YouTube is not voluntary. The alternative is to not be an independent videographer, or to kludge together 5 other services that will get you 10% of the viewership and 10% of the revenue.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#508
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting point here actually - number porting was viewed to be core to a telecoms service operator. They have to provide it free of charge as a cost of doing business. Perhaps we need similar for email forwarding - it's clear that the major email platforms (Google, Microsoft) can already handle mail that is simply deferred to another mail server (see partial cloud email transitions). Perhaps we need the same fo…

It's easy to forward from gmail to any address if you want that.

Be sure to disable gmail’s spam detector if you do this. I’ve seen > 30% false positives in a setup like that.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#509
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

How much are accounts currently worth on the market? It seems that making the recovery procedure more expensive than the worth of the account should resolve that issue. At the same time legitimate users are probably willing to invest some money in order to recover their account.

For example offer a $20 option to send a registered letter to an address provided by the user. Then Google can check if: 1) The name on the credit card matches the name on the account, 2) a given address hasn't been used too often, 3) the identity check done by the postal service (checking if the recipient actually has a given name) succeeded.

This won't be a perfect solution and there are definitely edge cases for which it won't work (in countries without registered mail, if someone doesn't have a credit card, etc.). But it should be able to cover the majority of cases where legitimate accounts have been locked.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#510
Good lord, it's stories like this that make me absolutely afraid to take their cloud offerings seriously. Yes I know it's a separate business arm, but it's the same people calling the shots and trying to stick an algorithm in where Customer Service should be.

AWS / DigitalOcean / Linode all the way.

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