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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

#661

Post by rurp »

kube-system wrote: post #567
mitchdoogle wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should people have to pay money for a product to expect fair treatment? Is an exchange of services without money not subject to rules and regulations? Google chooses not to charge people because they've found it more beneficial to offer many of them for free. It's a model many tech companies have followed to great success. That doesn't mean they should have free reign to do whatever they please.

> Is an exchange of services without money not subject to rules and regulations? A contract without consideration is not a valid contract. There are a few laws in some places that require companies to provide service outside of a contractual service agreement, but those are typically limited to public utilities, emergency services, etc.

GP said without money, not without consideration. Google derives a great deal of value by having your attention and data in its various products. The fact that users exchange attention and data rather than dollars doesn't give Google the right to stomp all over them.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#662

Post by grishka »

Tor3 wrote: post #26
grishka wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mail is one of the things I'm most worried about. Use an IMAP client. It would keep all your mail on your device, so at least you don't have to rely on having uninterrupted access to your account for your old conversations. Actually, I'm surprised just how many people use email through web interfaces for some reason.

Search and find old emails.. that's where gmail works. I guess that's why I keep using it. For work I use Thunderbird (the best of the bad alternatives), and search is horrible and extremely slow (and usually never find what I want to find). If I had something which was as easy as gmail for handling tens of thousands of emails I would switch.

Apple's Mail.app I'm using does a good enough job of searching emails.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#663

Post by hedora »

vkou wrote: post #642
hedora wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past, the advertiser would likely to tell that to the people selling ad space. Then, they’d suffer political blowback for being anti-LGBT. It sounds like Google is laundering third party behavior that is further dividing our society. Perhaps advertisers should be forced (by the government, on all algorithmic platforms) to publish their targeting criteria.

> In the past, the advertiser would likely to tell that to the people selling ad space. Prior to ad networks that automatically match advertisers to display space, yes. The thing is, though, prior to ad networks, there were a lot fewer advertisers who were interested in spending time and money on doing this song and dance with a slew of tiny web properties. Most of them wouldn't even bother. You can have no ad networ…

Before ad networks, we had a longer tail of low prominence newspapers and magazines than we do now.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#664

Post by brokenmachine »

nucleardog wrote: post #649
varispeed wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to implement something like this and you wouldn't be able to find out, as a service sitting between the network and ad servers, it could even be embedded in an innocent looking load balancer. Why would you think something like that wouldn't exist?

Why would Google, internally, implement a feature as if they were maliciously attacking their own systems?

So they can not pay the content providers and pocket the advertising money?

Not saying that's what happened but there's definitely motive.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#665

Post by leptons »

leptons wrote: post #580
prepend wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a government regulator to stop large companies from buying up lots of small companies and adding them to this risk pool. I bought 3 Nest thermostats long before Google bought them. I wouldn’t have done so after the buyout. If google bricks my thermostats because my kid does something dumb on YouTube (through the linked tv accounts) that will suck. I suppose regulators could also prevent companies from bundli…

> 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. >You need a government regulator to stop large companies from buying up lots of small companies and adding them to this risk pool. These two statements are not even close to arguing the same thing. The previous commenter is saying that it's common sense that "c…

[flagged]

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#666

Post by vkou »

hedora wrote: post #663
vkou wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the past, the advertiser would likely to tell that to the people selling ad space. Prior to ad networks that automatically match advertisers to display space, yes. The thing is, though, prior to ad networks, there were a lot fewer advertisers who were interested in spending time and money on doing this song and dance with a slew of tiny web properties. Most of them wouldn't even bother. You can have no ad networ…

Before ad networks, we had a longer tail of low prominence newspapers and magazines than we do now.

1. Low prominence newspapers made most of their money from classifieds. Craigslist ate that business.

2. A low prominence local newspaper has local businesses advertising in it. Your local auto mechanic on Walker Street will buy an ad in a local paper, but they aren't going to spend a penny to advertise directly on your website, even if it has the same readership #s as the paper. Because 99.9% of your website's visitors aren't within driving distance of their location.

The ad network [1] solves problem #2, by making it possible for geographically-constrained businesses to buy ad inventory on websites that only get a handful of clicks from their geographical area.

Yes, ad networks introduce plenty of problems, as people in this thread point out. [2]

No, nobody will advertise on your 1,000-50,000 reader/day website without going through an ad network. Small advertisers aren't going to pay anything for an untargeted impression, and large brand advertisers aren't going to waste their time [3] on so few impressions.

[1] I am speaking about the industry as a whole.

[2] I could mention a few other problems that people in this thread haven't pointed out, too, but that's neither here nor there.

[3] Not to mention that without going through an ad network, and by directly dealing with the website operators, making reports of your ad spend + ROI becomes a colossal pain in the ass. People who work for large advertisers are just trying to do their job, and their job consists of making their boss happy. Something that does not make their boss happy is being unable to quickly say how much money they spent, and what they got for that spend.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#667

Post by brokenmachine »

nucleardog wrote: post #654
lordnacho wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This raises a question. If you're well marinated in Google services, like me, what do you do? Is there a comprehensive, simple, and easy way to port everything? Perhaps there's some authoritative site about what exactly you need to do?

My two cents would be don't worry about a comprehensive degoogling plan. Just chip away at stuff until you feel like the risk level is acceptable to you. For me, that started with email. Email is a root for a lot of your digital identity. I can't guarantee access to @gmail addresses going forward, but I can at least _start_ fixing that problem. I picked up a new domain, hosted the email with someone else, and set all…

I really wanted NextCloud to work but the Android docs app is absolutely hopeless.

It's like pulling teeth to work with that interface to edit documents. It's hard for me to believe that anyone actually uses it.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#668

Post by happymellon »

ckocagil wrote: post #448
_imba_ wrote: post #359

Not completely related to personal accounts being banned, but something that happened to me recently: I started a side business with some friends during lockdown. We created an online store selling some hard-to-get long tail items, and almost instantly got some traction and growth thanks to Google Shopping. A month ago we received one of these generic automated mails that our account is banned and we were misrepresen…

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

The evidence of a monopoly is zero support for these services.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#669

Post by jmnicolas »

UncleSlacky wrote: post #420
jmnicolas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the process of Degoogling my life so I have installed GrapheneOS on my phone and use FDroid as an app store. It works but I have the impression of living in the dark ages: - I had to ask my contacts to install Signal on their phones, some just didn't follow up (we were having long conversations on WhatsApp the week before), some don't even see my messages. I receive much less messages than before, I'm left out…

You don't have to stick with the AOSP keyboard, there are several alternatives in F-Droid. I'm currently using the Hacker's Keyboard: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.pocketworkstation.pckeyb... I wouldn't recommend doing banking on a phone anyway, although GrapheneOS should be fairly secure (and I'd use a browser, not an app).

Thanks for the keyboard suggestion, I'm testing it right now.

As for security I'm not sure my desktop is more secure than my phone! Anyway I'm more concerned by privacy than security.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#670

Post by _imba_ »

Yhippa wrote: post #611
_imba_ wrote: post #359

Not completely related to personal accounts being banned, but something that happened to me recently: I started a side business with some friends during lockdown. We created an online store selling some hard-to-get long tail items, and almost instantly got some traction and growth thanks to Google Shopping. A month ago we received one of these generic automated mails that our account is banned and we were misrepresen…

> selling some hard-to-get long tail items Was there anything potentially illegal or sketchy about this?

No nothing dodgy at all. Whatever we did wrong it isn't obvious.
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