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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

#691

Post by beowulfey »

slightwinder wrote: post #672
beowulfey wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we do not pay the USPS or FedEx or UPS, etc. to agree to send mail to our address. I was making a comparison between mail and email services. Hopefully this clarifies what I meant.

Still makes no sense. We do not pay mail-providers for the address alone, but mainly for running the servers which deliver and store the mails. Which is the same for which USPS/Fedex/UPS/etc. are paid for. You want a mail-address? Grab your own domain (thus pay "tax"), put a server there (build a "house") and you are there. Getting an address, be it physical or digital never comes for free, and there is not human rig…

Alright, then I take back what I said in my parent comment about how "we don't pay for a home address". I'll concede that we do pay for a home address.

However, that doesn't change the fact that the economic model has changed when it comes to email. We no longer pay with money, but we pay in other ways when we use Google. So it's actually worse than with mail, because there used to be a clear exchange of goods but it is now obfuscated. And thus, there is nothing mandating good service, which is why people can be randomly banned from using it.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#692

Post by [deleted] »

kashura wrote: post #425
Mikho wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Value = proper Office suite online and offline with proper document formatting and files + more storage. Altogether cheaper than G Suite. Also it's really great value to have Office installed locally as a proper software. Not a crappy dumbed down browser web-site.

I pay for Gsuite which is $6/mo and extra 100gb of storage, for $8 total. The part that drives me nuts about 0365 is that they don't allow custom email domains below Business 0365 which is $12 a month.

[deleted]

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#693

Post by driverdan »

stareatgoats wrote: post #478
driverdan wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies that provide public utility type services The only "public utility type services" Google provides is phone service through Fi. Nothing else counts as a utility. Even then I'm not sure if being an MVNO counts.

> The only "public utility type services" Google provides is phone service I guess my implicit suggestion that email services be regarded as a type of public utility was a bit convoluted. But gmail is surely a close enough parallel to postal services of old (traditionally a public utility) to be regarded as such. Legislation has simply not caught up with technological developments.

It's not. Email is decentralized, anyone can run a server, and there are no email monopolies.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#694

Post by tehwebguy »

tifadg1 wrote: post #422
londons_explore wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work on adsense. There is no facility for an "earnings cap". Your revenue is the literal sum of earnings from every click on your property. While ads are showing and being clicked on, you will always be earning more. If I were to guess, you failed to implement ads.txt and/or your content didn't meet the standards required by some big advertisers, so auction pressure was very low for your site.

So you're saying he was smart enough to grow this revenue to 2000/month, but, in the meantime forgetting something that basic - and the system caught up with him? If so where was the system before?

No, he was smart enough to do whatever he did but lucky enough to get that payout. Over time, someone will always optimize for SEO, AdSense & shareability better.

Perhaps their entire strategy was accidentally optimizing for a keyword that was highly valuable for a short while, who knows?

For a short while YouTubers would mention getting a mortgage in the middle of their video just to improve the rate by tricking the algorithm into showing expensive mortgage related ads.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#695

Post by efreak »

mosselman wrote: post #103
koonsolo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me explain what happens when my house burns down, taking along all my hardware: - I buy another laptop and install Linux. - I connect my Google, Dropbox (which contains google backups) and Github, and they contain all data I own. - I buy a new smartphone and connect it to Google Simple as that. And my house doesn't need to burn down for this, when I buy a new laptop or smartphone I do the same. Plus, all my email…

Have you actually tried connecting a new phone to your google account without access to any old "burned down" device? You might want to try this before you feel secure enough. My mother's phone got stolen and I had a lot of trouble trying to get into here Google account for her. I was lucky enough to have logged into it once in Safari of all things on my personal laptop. Google seemed to have placed a cookie to 'reme…

> Have you actually tried connecting a new phone to your google account without access to any old "burned down" device?

Yes

> My mother's phone got stolen and I had a lot of trouble trying to get into here Google account for her

The first time, my phone bricked itself (you get what you pay for. Don't buy $30 smartphones). I have 2fa. I use both Authy (syncing) and WinAuth (local, with encrypted backups) to manage my secrets. Entering the code is enough to sign in.

The second time, I was moving from an old phone to a new phone; I turned off the old phone to remove the SD card before turning on the new one, and it worked fine without turning on the old one until after signing into accounts, when I needed to transfer data for some FOSS apps (termux, Fdroid, etc).

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#696

Post by efreak »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #92
koonsolo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me explain what happens when my house burns down, taking along all my hardware: - I buy another laptop and install Linux. - I connect my Google, Dropbox (which contains google backups) and Github, and they contain all data I own. - I buy a new smartphone and connect it to Google Simple as that. And my house doesn't need to burn down for this, when I buy a new laptop or smartphone I do the same. Plus, all my email…

what happens tho to all your google authenticator linked stuff?

Use Authy if you're into online synced services, use WinAuth otherwise (local, encrypted. No longer in development, but still works, and depends on windows for encryption; supports encrypted backups)

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#697

Post by dan15 »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #655
tracker1 wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook's moderation rules have determined that Keto and Low Carb aren't scientifically supported, so now tend to suppress resources that proliferate those views. I emphatically don't agree with this, but this seems to be the line of reasoning with a lot of things. The reality that much of science is never truly "settled" doesn't really matter. On the one hand, I feel there are a lot of leeches to society that hop o…

What also probably happened is that Facebook changed their algorithm to reduce organic growth to push businesses like this to spend more on ad money. They've been doing this for a few years now, and have been aggressively doing the same on Instagram. Love or hate TikTok, the reason it's become so big is that their algorithm actually promotes organic growth instead of hindering it.

AFAIK the FB algorithm also prefers posts from friends over posts from business pages, since that's the content that people prefer seeing.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#698

Post by Anarch157a »

jetrink wrote: post #379
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…

> I recently deleted my last Gmail account (that I had since 2001). Wow, was GMail already being used internally in 2001?

Sorry. 2004/5. My memory was a little fuzzy.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#699

Post by Anarch157a »

xdavidliu wrote: post #439
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…

you had a gmail account since 2001?

Sorry, fuzzy memory. I got my account maybe a couple of months after Gmail was released, so more likelly late 2004.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#700

Post by aperrien »

thu2111 wrote: post #678
aperrien wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what you do is set up some sort of monetary charge, to verify that the person you are dealing with is real. Someone willing to pay for support is highly likely to be an actual customer, not a fraudster; and you can even have their local bank or notary to verify their identity, if you are worried about identity theft. This is a problem that is largely solved at government scale, which is what Google is now, and t…

The vast majority of Google accounts have no real identity associated with them. Also, this doesn't help if an account was NOT a false positive. You're assuming this guy is truly innocent of all problems, but from past experience, unfortunately I can say that sometimes when obviously non-spammy accounts go poof overnight and nobody is willing to explain why, it's because it's related to a criminal investigation.

I'm confused. The goal of my proposal was that someone who was wrongly flagged (a false positive) could identify themselves as such by being willing to put up a (cash) bounty, or identify themselves with a financial/government institution that is set to handle such things at scale. Someone who is committing fraud, or trying to steal anonymously, or is involved in other criminal activities, is extremely unlikely to do such things. Legitimate people, however would have a route out of this kafkaesque maze. That system could even be automated, and it would work better than what's going on now. At a certain point, some problems just cannot be solved with just code.
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