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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

#531

Post by NeoFeznet »

bigwavedave wrote: post #342
fullstop wrote: post #308

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…

The only issue I've ever encountered with Protonmail was Digital Ocean. For some reason receiving a password reset email through Protonmail took forever. I thought I'd entered my email incorrectly, but nope. Eventually came through, but from what I could find, it was a known problem.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#532

Post by rtx »

hedora wrote: post #491
a3n wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing worse than hanging your identity on @gmail.com is @comcast and the like. If you can, your own domain backed by a fastmail or a proton is the sweet spot of easy and flexible, or at least an @fastmail, @proton or similar. With payment comes the possibility of human support, which I have received easily from fastmail.

I have my email going to my own domain, but can’t figure out how to ground it out in anything other than someone else’s tld. So, now I’m in a situation where, if my gmail account gets banned, and the DNS provider decides to reset my password, then I’m permanently locked out of everything. I could point my DNS provider at my “real” email address, but that’s even worse, since needing to update the MX record could lock…

Use someone with backup codes.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#533

Post by NeoFeznet »

syshum wrote: post #529
caseysoftware wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is this not regulated? Cue the "businesses can choose who they do business with!" and "if you don't like it, build your own!" people. We signed up for many of those things individually and they've connected them more and more. Now we have a single point of failure that can take down everything across all your sytems. And it's not just those. Don't forget about Google Voice, Android, and every service where you…

Business should be allowed to choose who they do business with, they already choose to do business with these people. The problem here is they want to unilaterally have the power to termination the business relationship This is a problem with one sided none negotiable terms of service being considered valid contracts under the law They should not be. We need to change data ownership laws, and force companies to do ve…

Exactly. This isn't so much an issue of "Companies have the right to do what they want (within reason)". It's a typical issue of monopolies and dealing with a large, faceless corporation. Anyone who's ever dealt with any corporation of any significant size can tell you similar stories to this.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#534

Post by _imba_ »

thu2111 wrote: post #459
ckocagil wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this isn't evidence of a monopoly, I don't know what is.

Well, maybe monopoly in east Africa, but that's hardly surprising given the difficulty of doing business there.

I don't think this is quite fair. I'm from South Africa, hardly a backwater. It's a problem anywhere where people mostly search to buy on Google. In the western world it is anywhere Amazon has local 3rd party sellers and relevant adopted user behaviour. Many places don't have that to the point where it's a real alternative to Google for search-to-buy(I don't know the real term to describe this behaviour) ads.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#535

Post by megous »

bigwavedave wrote: post #358
megous wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would backfire spectacularly, and would probably kill gmail.

> That would backfire spectacularly, and would probably kill gmail. How would that kill gmail? It's not like they're going to lose any real part of their user base. Short of a press release from google confirming the behavior, the average user is not going to go through the hassle of finding a replacement provider and then changing every email address associated with every service they use (if it's even possible for…

A ton of online services, customer support services, government services, airlines, etc. etc. use e-mail but don't use gmail to send it.

They can't afford to let 20% of that go to spam without a backlash. And if they kept doing it despite the backlash, who knows what would have happened to gmail.

Lose a few thousand dollars or an entire vacation by google regularly blackholing messages from important and expensive services like airlines, when they send you email telling you your flight departure was changed, and you'll be looking for a better email service in no time.

Now imagine this happens to 1/5 of the customers of said airline, just because of google's 1/5 non-google mail go to spam policy. It would be a scandal.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#536

Post by harha »

Daniel_sk wrote: post #274
harha wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had trouble with e-mails from my own domain frequently landing in spam folders. I do agree on the control though.

I don't have these issues with Fastmail + custom domain, but you need to make sure that DKIM and SPF is set up correctly. Fastmail helps you to check and fix this.

My issues were with Zoho, with DKIM and SPF set up correctly. Would be interesting to see if the domain (or top-level-domain) or the e-mail provider is at fault. It's difficult to test given the number of signals that are involved in flagging a message.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#537

Post by einpoklum »

When you can't just "go across the street" from Google that means this is now essentially public infrastructure under private control.

Analogy: Railway ticket vending machine won't charge your card with a ride, gives a generic message saying you're banned due to violations of the ridership agreement.

So, you can maybe take a bus that arrives once a day and takes thrice as much time due to detours, and that's if you're lucky. But if the railway operator is just a private business, then you're basically out of luck.

accept sell you a ticket, say you banned for some obscure reason,

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#538

Post by C1sc0cat »

piyh wrote: post #514
Covzire wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how vulnerable Google's practices are to corruption. Say you've got your new business on the up swing and one of your competitors has a friend at Google who they offer a bribe to shut down your entire business, at least for a few weeks under dubious or non existent reasons. Seems like an extremely easy way to make copious amounts of shady cash if you've got that magic ban button at Google.

I'd imagine the average googler isn't going to be easily bribed compared to the alternative of finding some darknet service to figure out how to trigger an automatic ban by uploading malware to the site.

It would be lower wage support staff probably in in the USA not highly paid SV engineers.

Its the same in the UK where I used to work (British Telecom) criminals used to approach call centre workers to get info.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#539

Post by megous »

wolco2 wrote: post #424
megous wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would backfire spectacularly, and would probably kill gmail.

It's happening now with smaller providers or by hosting your own server. Try to send an email to gmail from your server. It hasn't kill gmail. How could it unless other providers refused to route gmail emails the way google refuses to route your personal server's email.

I do, it works most of the time.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#540

Post by NeoFeznet »

feduphn wrote: post #409
indigochill wrote: post #395

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…

For real. If we don't do this ourselves, then the hammer is gonna come down much harsher and with much more reckless abandon in the future. It'll look closer to SOPA than anything reasonable. I don't want 80 year-old dinosaurs in Congress making these decisions 10-15 years from now because we couldn't get our shit together.
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