Google reverses its ‘digital death sentence’ for Pixel phone resellers
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It's like if Alphabet bought a company running tollways, and they banned you from using their streets.
They probably assumed it was a bunch of fake account and deleted them all in one big swoop, but once they realized a few of them were real, they restored them...
Just the media blowing things out of proportion, and for some reason everyone's defending these people who were doing something clearly very shady and wrong.
I do agree though that the thought of losing access to all your data is scary, and people should definitely do takeout and be more conscious about it, but in this case specifically, it was hardly Google's fault.
Google is at the end of the day a service, and if you go on their lawn and start shitting all over it, what do you expect will happen?
Or, rather, Google is a utility. At least Gmail is by now.
That has very interesting implications.
...However, to me it feels like its not so much that google killed off access to email as if it was a separate product...Rather, the physical device that google sells (and its associated platform a la Play store) are dependent on an identity mechanism...And the identity mechanism was what google was trying to shut down...It so happens of course that the identity mechanism that google chose to use (and has chosen to use for their android-based phones) is one's gmail address. THIS begs the question, if there was no such dependency (like one's gmail address), could google have exerted such power in shutting down these people's access? I'll admit I've traditionally been a fan of android phones...but this just struck me as way too much power, and scary.
Yeah, i might still need a semi-"throw away" google/gmail account to use my phone, etc. But as far as one of my "identity mechanisms", I'm starting to look at alternatives such as fastmail.com (which I just started a trial account with) for my main email. If anyone can suggest other alternatives - for quality (non-free) mail providers beyond just fastmail - I'm all ears.
If google wanted to they could provide oauth like identity only service.
All of those require an account. You're basically implying that they should have a separate account for every one of their services, which makes absolutely no sense...
Then, back when there are just two things, merging them into one was maybe not so good of a decision, but at this point, having a single account makes much more sense from a user experience point of view.
What do I honestly do in a situation like that? (After 2 years of failed recovery attempts, hunting down google employees on social media and their work or personal emails)
I got one single Google employee to respond to a help thread I posted on the Gmail help forums. He responded with a question that was already answered in the original post. And it took me 6 months to get there.
Alphabet REALLY needs to work on their customer service, especially for paying customers.
I don't trust having email on a domain I don't control (you can't move a gmail account to another provider like you can a phone number). Yet if you want to take advantage of all the features of google home/music/youtube you have to use a normal gmail account.
For example, calendar data of Gsuite customers is sensitive enough the assistant AI can't access it, so if you ask the Google assistant "what's my next appointment", it can't answer.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5dif8j/psa_google_...
What they really need is a customer service team that finds these people that are having genuine issues that can be resolved. They'd need the means to reach out and communicate without that person being able to subsequently share contact information with the world.
That said, I don't know what I'd do as a Google employee looking at this guy's situation. If david.smith@gmail.com is dormant and my name and ID say David Smith why should that give me access to that mailbox? How do you verify the contents without violating someone's privacy? We're not asking some tiny ISP to take a quick peek, this is Google and they have a responsibility to all of their users to practice great care. So we can't assume they're telling the truth and neither can Google. This guy's situation sucks but the mistake of turning over the account to the wrong person is catastrophically worse than the bad experience of denying the rightful owner access. This exact situation is why they have recovery options.
I think it's likely they're telling the truth and I do feel bad for them and their situation. I've been there myself with a yahoo account years ago but at the end of the day the only way I could recover it was using something I no longer had. The things in that mailbox that I wanted access to were also things I would be furious at Yahoo for sharing with someone else no matter what their identification or birth certificate said.
Allow people to purchase a "certificate of service" at a nominal cost when the account is set up, and then charge them a fee when they need service for the product, verifying the request against the original certificate. That should cover the tech support problem.
Sure, they could provide advice, but would you want some stranger who happens to work on Google Support India the ability to look into your account? To reset your password?
It's best they provide buttons for you to fix your own problems than choose privileged people who can invade your privacy to fix problems for you.
The issue, regardless of the financial model of the services, is that (a) these are now critical services for some people & (b) there is utterly no support path in the event something goes wrong.
Charge $100 or $200 or $2500 per suppprt case, refunding part of the difference if it turns out to be a Google system problem, and people would still be much happier.
The issue is that there's currently no amount of money you can throw at Google to fix things, and no one besides Google has access to implement a fix. And every system has glitches and corner cases when you're running at the scale Google is.
https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html
Lowest tier is $5/month. I know my old company used Google for email. Is there a guaranteed access to support. I saw access to "Forums". Anyone have experience with that.
But then Fastmail is $3/month and you get personal support it seems.
Google as the brilliant software developer whose only flaw is that they're completely unwilling to ever write a single-use function.
Lost access to my old Gmail account recoveries cause it had been over 4 years since the last login. My M$ account recovery is not possible despite opening about 10+ cases with their engineers who fail to respond 100% of the time. And when they did it was automated. So without either recovery available ill just go to type in all the info I have about my old Gmail. Automated response forms with more automated rejections. I've tried it easily 300+ times at this point. Doesn't work.
If it was so important data isnt the onus on you to keep it locally backedup or at least login once a few months?
Ohh come on now. Are they supposed to keep things around indefinitely? Most providers will wipe accounts after just a few months of inactivity.
I don't care about other providers I want my old gmail back.
(It's going to be a big pain...)
I bought my own domain back in 2002 or so, and note it's important that you own it*, and then set up email with a quality shared hosting service company. At some point I noticed this well recommended Fastmail company, which was lots cheaper than the shared hosting, the other features of which I no longer needed. Which has now been providing my email service for years, and I note they also do contacts and calendaring. And have really good customer service. And are reliable, including not having GMail's sometimes too aggressive spam filtering. Etc.
Although if I remember correctly they were pants at accepting notifications from Fanfiction.net, which is not something I really worked at fixing since it prompts me to regularly check my backup Hotmail (Live, whatever) account. Which emphasizes one thing, if you do this, make very sure to maintain another email account in case you have any problems with your personal domain.
You also ought to get treated more seriously by various important others if you have your own domain instead of a generic GMail or other big free email provider account.
When I moved to FastMail, I set up that email address to go to FastMail instead. Most of my inbound mail instantly came with it. It's been a couple weeks, I still get stuff on my Gmail. So I check it once or twice a day still at the moment, and when I get something from some website, I go log into that account, and change my email address.
Once I get down to a minimal amount I'll forward and tag.
By starting with an "@gmail.com" address you willingly give that up, but that's not the system's fault.
I setup the forward from <name>@gmail.com to <name>@<mydomain>. I then flagged things that are coming from gmail and slowly updated addresses on those websites to point at <name>@<mydomain>. You don't have to be in a hurry to get it done you just have to be working towards the end goal.
On top of everything mentioned by hga, as the name implies, the web UI is fast, and their calendar is good.
Another nice thing with owning the domain is that you can set up a catch-all, then use unique addresses to sign up for stuff. I sign up with <service>@mydomain.com now, so when <service> sells my address, I know who to blame.
I still receive stuff on my old gmail, so I do POP retrieval from Fastmail.
with gmvault now floating at the top of the page i can imagine the gmail adminstrators on the phone to the account managers every few minutes relaying just how many hundreds of terabytes a second in backup bandwidth closing the accounts is now costing them.
And gmail has 1 Billion monthly active users, so that is quite likely a conservative guestimate.
I don't think its implausible that shutting down these guys accounts will cost google a 7 or 8 figure sum in (non budgeted) backbone bandwidth charges alone.
And you don't pay per megabyte at the peered networks scale, or even 95% percentile.
Just a significant number deciding it is time to back up their content.
And at the backbone level it is all charged by the Mbps for example http://www.level3.com/en/legal/ip-traffic-exchange-policy/ http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/transit-works-costs-i... So a jump in a significant portion of the user base from a few MB per user per day to several GB will be several thousand times more expensive for that day.
Putting traffic into a tier 1 network costs, taking it pays.
A massive surge from Googles hardware onto the tier 1 networks will be very, very expensive.
Last time it came up was as the BitTorrent protocol started blowing up ISPs that couldn't pay the bills.
I'm considering suing Apple under the same laws for blocking messages sent from iPhones to my phone number (you can never truly deregister from iMessage. Apple still silently destroys group messages sent to you).
We need to get more serious about the idea that you can't legally withhold correspondence meant for someone else. These tech companies think they're immune from telecom laws but I am not sure the courts would agree.
here's the lawsuit, I can't find a definitive source on any memo so maybe that was just unfounded rumors
This is like saying "I was in an IRC channel with friends but I left for Slack and now I don't get their messages"
Stop whinging.
As proof I would welcome Google employees to study the past mail of other family member mail headers including mine to give them absolute proof of whose account it is.
There is no way to ask them to do this.
Learn a valuable lesson and move on. I lost some important data to a free service many years ago and now I don't rely on anything that I can't pay for with a credit card. I figure if something goes horribly wrong maybe the credit card company could work the fraud angle for me. Probably not but it makes me feel a little better.
Isn't that how The Phone Company used to work?
Looks to me that Google has too many monopolies under the same administration.
Of course, that name-calling person was a Scot, but Google is everywhere and everything…
If it's their road, what's the problem? It's not like the government is banning you from the roads.
(Joking, in case it isn't obvious.)
Yeah, sorry, Google. I once trusted you, but now I am migrating away from everything Google (except search).
Also, DuckDuckGo?
You can always use !g interobang if you want to search google
Plus you still have to type "bookmark" <wait> "search"
Often it is good, sometimes better than Google but in some settings I too use !g frequently. I still try to use it without !g first to give some search traffic to ddg.
I hope they can use the data to improve future searches.
#1 rule when you get as large as Google is not to burn your users trust. This was about a big of a screw-up as you could do there. You should keep your different services separate and isolated and only ban in the areas of business where it impacts things negatively.
It's as if some person kicked out of a store for shoplifting swore they'd never shop there ever again. Good!
For this story in particular did anyone come forward to say that they had been banned that didn't participate in the scalping scam?
There's a culture of impunity out there on the internet were people think they can cheat the system and nothing will ever come it (think manufactured spending for example). Well, sometimes something does come of it. Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time.
If there is email abuse, then you ban from gmail, youtube abuse, from youtube, etc.
In the case of AdSense that may be true but there's no evidence here that anyone was falsely accused.
People scalped. People got busted. That's it. The only "problem" is that some of the scalpers were stupid enough to use their real accounts.
Google should put in place a better solution to deal with frauds. They have the resources, not the will apparently.
Their customer service sucks big.
That said, if you as a company are going to completely destroy someone's online life over a single incident, then it's totally fair for others to be weary of using your services.
I think I will be concerned to enter that shop again.
It'd be like losing your voting rights due to getting a speeding ticket.
Google is technically right here but the reason you're seeing such a visceral reaction is that people care about their data a lot and having a relatively unrelated event wipe that out is a big overreach.
One time I had a question, I was able to use the web interface to request support, and a real human called me back in 10 minutes. It wasn't a very complex question, so I can't say if he was super knowledgeable, but he certainly seemed like he knew the platform, and was able to answer my question in just a few minutes.
Oh, and I know this is a throwaway account, but I'm not a shill for MS. This is just my personal experience with O365, and YMMV - it's worked well enough for me.
Heck, I could run my own mail server if I wanted (been there, don't want to go there again, but could if I really HAD to).
Of course, I only have one account (lastname@personaldomain.com) and therefore didn't have to deal with setting up multiple users, migrating data etc. I also set up 2FA for my account.
I did all this over one weekend (from looking at different providers, to signing up for O365, configuring etc), and haven't had to touch anything since. The only question I had was related to billing (I went from a month-to-month to a yearly account) and that was answered quickly by a real human being.
I ran a website that got our AdSense account shut down for what Google claimed was invalid clicks. I never clicked on our ads and we made little money from AdSense (we had other ad networks). Since my personal Gmail account was used as a backup email my personal account's AdSense account was also banned. They won't reinstate either account or give any more details.
I don't use any Google Cloud services because I'm afraid that all of my accounts would get shut down for any reason and I would lose all of that data.
That happened a number of years ago and I haven't had them kill any of my other accounts for any reason, but it remains a concern and I certainly don't trust them.
Just like hotels factor in the price and rate of stolen towels when pricing their rooms for everyone, Google, like any other business, makes money from some of te customers and loses money on others. We don't get to pick only the winning horses. Your grocery store doesn't ban you because you dropped a dozen eggs and then left with a 10¢ stick of gum - they price it in.
I strongly disagree with that notion. Even if you know in advance who will be profitable, you often gain more customers by servicing all customers (or at least the vast majority).
Two examples:
1. A lot of internet companies are built on servicing everyone, and extracting money from a tiny subset (github is one example).
2. If one in every thousand customers costs me more in support than they pay, that's one thing. But becoming known for good support will be more profitable than becoming known for kicking customers who ask too many questions.
The cost for support is low too, relatively speaking. Obviously not all businesses have enough margin to consider this, some support is more expensive than others etc.
The problem is when you accept customers and then don't provide proper service.
They could require $1k or $10k per month minimum volume. But they don't. They accept everyone and then stonewall at random, sometimes even when people are high-volume.
Then, there is a set of guidelines you have to comply, which is great, except it says this "Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site" and also says you can't copy content from other sites, they are basically describing Google search page.
who watches the watchmen?
They obviously provide a good service with Google search, that's out of discussion.
Google search quality has dropped drastically. Any attempt to look up a technical issue results in StackOverflow inconsistently in the top 5, with maybe 20 different shitty mirror sites.
Google has lost their magic. I'm actively migrating away from their services at this point.
Are you logged in? Maybe their learnt wrong things about you? (For me swiftkey has that problem, had to switch away from it as the more it learnt, the worse the suggestions would become)
Search is the one thing I still need from google. Technical things result in 50% stackoverflow and 50% blog posts or forum posts of people discussing the same problem. For things with multiple meanings google usually gets the right one. I'd love to use DDG, but whenever I try it, I end up having to use bangs to get what I want.
Yes, I agree it's a scary thought, I will automatically takeout my data and keep personal backups, but let's be honest here, those people in my opinion very well deserved what they got. You can't shit on someone's lawn and expect them to welcome you in their house.
Citation needed. In the past decade, tech companies have managed to perpetuate the toxic notion that they can attach strings to your physical purchases. Despite their aspirations, legally you are free to do as you like with a physical product once you legally purchase it.
> You can't shit on someone's lawn and expect them to welcome you in their house.
Pets do exactly this, so if any company treats people like property, they shouldn't be surprised by those people's behavior in response.
My cloud storage has always been Dropbox, it's always been great.
I backup my cloud storage (and disk storage) with Arq.
It's possible to get something similar using Google Apps and a custom domain. But they need to start offering paid support for the free services (@gmail.com) as well.
But I also feel like Google treats people's accounts without a lot of respect. They've successfully integrated into every part of people's lives, and people have a Google Account at the core of their digital identity.
It would be better if Google killed services offered one by one instead of killing the entire account. It would be inconvenient not being able to pay via Credit Card with my Google Account, but it is nothing compared to losing all of my email/purchases/cloud stored files/etc.
Google will realize this when a) people pay for them and/or b) people start leaving the platform.
There are options for paid, supported email, like Fastmail and others. They probably have .01% of the userbase Google does.
also, gmail. Google Apps has paid support that you can call and talk to to get problems resolved.
Gmail is just as valuable to Google as it is to any individual user. I'm not sure why people's gmail accounts would ever be banned. If people do something illegal, prosecute them. Even if they're found guilty, it's not like the court is going to delete their email address or take away where they live.
This feels like an episode of Black Mirror.
Probably much harder to litigate than criminal activity, so I can vaguely understand the use of banhammers, even if they were clearly unwarranted in this case.
I don't think there's a way to start paying for your normal Gmail account (and have ads go away, get phone support, probably some other bonuses?), but there really should be.
Currently when you get Google for Work (or however it is called now) you remain with two separate accounts. You can sync data if you work on it, but whatever you buy via one account stays with that one account.
Not necessarily. I tried to integrate Google's services with a custom domain once before and the previous owner of the domain had done the same thing and I could not figure out how to dissociate the two. There was no way for me to contact customer support about it, and I eventually gave up trying so that I wouldn't run into exactly this kind of fucked up crap from Google.
I am right now looking at two stories of people that has trouble with Google because of some security system or other has picked up "oddities" in the payment activity.
Google went bad a few years ago. Google had to pay $500,000,000 to DoJ to avoid criminal prosecution in the "sportsdrugs.com" case.
"Federal agents created www.SportsDrugs.net, designed to look “as if a Mexican drug lord had built a website to sell HGH and steroids,” Mr. Whitaker said in his account of the sting… At the agents’ direction, Mr. Whitaker said he signaled his illegal intent to Google ad executives, including Google’s top manager in Mexico. As a tape recorder ran, he walked Google executives through the illegal parts of the websites. He said he told ad executives that U.S. Customs had seized shipments, for example, and that one client wanted to be “the biggest steroid dealer in the United States.”"
"Mr. Page, now Google’s chief executive, knew about the illicit conduct, said Mr. Neronha, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island who led the multiagency federal task force that conducted the sting. “We simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on,” he said in an interview after the August settlement…".
Never forget this.
[1] http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_journal_takes_us_inside_th....
It's overwhelmingly likely that without the massive media backlash, Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise defenseless customers. I don't say this lightly and it pains me to say it but they need to be regulated.
It was at a time Balmer made Microsoft look bad.Now that he is out, Google looks as bad as Microsoft, even worse, at least when you have a issue with a Microsoft product there is the community and some kind of support.
How is it sociopathic and amoral to ban scalpers?
> Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise defenseless customers.
Defenseless doesn't mean innocent, and there's no evidence that these users were falsely accused or otherwise innocent of the violations they committed.
Buying something with the sole intention of reselling it for profit is the literal definition of scalper.
The words you're looking for are mastermind and pawns. The pawns took the fall (as they usually do), and the mastermind didn't get hit.
Concerts are always limited in supply, which is why scalping is prevalent there more than most other things. If tickets were infinite in supply nobody would care about concert scalpers, that wouldn't exist.
And the reason this matters to places selling things limited in supply is that scalpers hurt consumer satisfaction and generate negative impressions of the seller due to greedy opportunists that were otherwise outside of their control. Thus why they place limits on how many you can buy until supply is high enough (like in this case how Google had a limit of buying 5 devices - enough for most families, not enough for re-sellers)
If you truly feel that wiping those people's personal communications records and blocking their email is a reasoned response then I sincerely hope you are never in a position of power.
What guilt is being cast here exactly? The company used automated tools to disable accounts that were found to breach their ToS, likely the majority of which were bots.
I mean it's one thing to complain if these people were false positives, but they actually weren't.
What happened to these people sucks. I get that. But you make it sound as if someone at Google specifically targeted these people's accounts on purpose, when it's significantly more likely that they were just trying to disable bot accounts for scalpers and didn't realize some people were using their real accounts to help scalpers.
Do you think they are stupid enough to not realize how bad the backlash from this would be?
In the US, there's a concept called right of first sale that protects people's ability to resell what they buy to others. Sales contracts preventing resale have lost many times in courts. From my perspective Google trying to prevent "scalping", as you put it, is already overreach, regardless of what verbiage they might have shoved in their TOS or the massive legal resources they can deploy to get their way.
Furthermore deactivating someone's gmail without even letting them export their data is profoundly destructive on the victim's lives.
That has no bearing on the issue at hand. Just because entity A is guilty of X doesn't magically make entity B innocent of Y.
For your reference:
A = Google
X = Arbitrage
B = Users who bought and resold Pixels.
Y = X / 10^9
Humans reviewed the appeals, and then re-enabled the accounts.
First, by your own definition "scalping" is nothing more than choosing to sell property that you have legally acquired, and there is nothing wrong with that. Second, even granting that in this case reselling the phones violated Google's terms of service, the punishment is disproportionate to the violation. Speeding is illegal, but confiscating the cars of speeders and permanently revoking their licenses would be absurd.
They need to be broken apart. Don't know about regulation.
Glad to see google doing good by undoing their own evil.
When you can't get your account reactivated unless your plight ends up going out over Associated Press, the company deserves no kudos for finally fixing it.
For one, a lot of businesses are dependent on google services like email because there aren't many alternatives that can match google's price and sprawling integration.
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/10/security-fatig...
I used to be on Fastmail and started running into serious deliverability issues. I'd send emails that'd never be received and people would send me emails that'd never show in my inbox.
I spent a month trying to get their support to figure out what was wrong, but the response was just "there's nothing wrong" the entire time.
Used to love Fastmail, but can't recommend it to anyone that depends on their email.
It's discounted if you hold up your side of the deal and if you don't, then this is what's going to happen.
Scalpers are a cancer.
That's fine. Terminate contracts with these users then, or sue them for your losses. But throwing away their data is a step too far. It's like finding out that your bank doesn't want to do business with you any more but also that they aren't going to give you your money back.
Google could give these users a data dump, at least.
A Terms of Service violation is a civil matter. Even the courts don't punish contract violators; they only require damages to paid to make the damaged parties whole. Punishments are reserved for crimes, are supposed to be proportional, and you're entitled to justice judged by your peers.
A digital death sentence is the right term for this. In what way is this proportional?
How is Google justified in doing so much more for so much less?
Of course, I happen to love it because scalpers are a blight upon the nation. But that's just me.
You are fully with your right as a US citizen to resell something that you buy.
If you're not a lawyer, though, your opinion is as good as mine on law - which is to say, it's worth nothing.
This isn't just about reselling an individual phone. They knew full well what they were doing was shady.
You as an individual have a RIGHT to resell physical products that you buy.
It is called the first sale doctrine and it is enshrined in US law.
It doesn't matter what document or terms of service that google has you sign. You buy it you own it.
Source?
From a cursory search, I found absolutely no mention of such a law, and the strictest I found is that, in certain states, it's illegal to resell tickets at the venue site. Not only would it be pretty much impossible to enforce such a law, but it goes against other laws like the first sale doctrine mentioned above.
So Google sees a bunch of accounts trying to circumvent the individual order limit and bans them all, as is their right. Good riddance.
What should be concerning to most people is that almost everybody depends on so many of Google's (and other companies) services in the cloud and you can have your entire life removed with absolutely zero recourse unless you get media attention. Google doesn't even offer human customer support if your account gets banned and you want to throw $50 or $100 in their face to speak get somebody's undivided attention for just 5 minutes to resolve the issue.
That's the real issue.
Yeah Google, we understand you cant provide free customer service for the entire internet and deal with every crazy person's complaints. But charge a reasonable fee and give desperate people a realistic way to talk to somebody over life-changing problems. Even Google's paid services are often very flawed in this regard.
There are people whose companies and lives get totally destroyed when Google randomly bans them from one of their services and then there is literally no way to get in touch with anybody at Google unless you somehow manage to get media attention.
We're all smart and realistic here: we understand that Google can't offer free tech support for the entire world and deal with every crazy person out there. That's why charging a nominal fee is suggested. Should it be $1, $5, $25 or more? I don't know. But there has to be some way to reach out to a reasonable and smart human being at Google for critical issues.
The driving force for my mistrust of depending on one cloud provider for everything was getting burned by a hosted email service that I used for everything. Since I didn't control the domain I had no recourse. Taking the lesson learned, I moved to a privately owned domain for my critical stuff and now I can instantly point to another provider (or my own server) of choice.
- Fastmail for email
- Dropbox for data sync/storage
- Switch to iOS devices
My reasoning is that companies focused in one area (such as email or storage) and offering paid accounts will be much more responsive to any issues since it's their core business. And for iOS, it's because there's the option to go to any Apple store and get immediate support for anything. For example, if I'm suddenly locked out of all my Google Play purchases, I'm SOL. With Apple purchases, I can at least go to an Apple store and there's a chance of getting it resolved. That in-person human contact option is very very important and something Google doesn't offer at all.
Google (and any other product company) wants their products to be sold through authorized channels only so they can manage distribution, keep pricing consistent, and ensure that the devices are legitimate and have not been tampered with before sale.
Customers receiving phones with malware pre-installed is a real problem for companies like oneplus and xaiomi who don't clamp down on unauthorized resellers.
Copied from below:
FFS. If you're going to participate in an organized ring to deprive people of buying a scarce item so that you can flip it to your ring leader for a profit so that the ring leader can then mark it up and sell it for considerably more then you deserve what's coming to you.
This isn't just about reselling an individual phone. They knew full well what they were doing was shady.
Never mind that it's not their device anymore. Never mind that your problem is because the reseller pried it open and swapped out the battery. Never mind the malware the reseller loaded. Never mind the 30% price premium and "Advanced Warranty" you had to buy, because Google's site was out of stock. Never mind the battery-draining Candy Crunch [sic] game you installed because you mis-clicked.
These days, both Apple and Google are held responsible for anything that happens with their phones, no matter what else goes on in the ecosystem. No wonder they try to control the experience as much as possible.
Many who use AdSense get their accounts suspended and have almost no chance to figure out what happened and overrule the suspension. When their domain gets blacklisted due to a suspension, they can never use AdSense again.
As for me, though, I was terrified at the thought that my account could have been disabled, had I entered my actual birth date. Even back then, I had a fair amount of data stored on my Google account. The incident was enough to get me to start downloading data from Google Takeout once in a while.
It's been a while since my last backup, though. I hope this incident serves as a wake-up call to both me and everybody who "owns" a Google account. I also wish that Google would allow at least some disabled accounts to download their data from Takeout: that would make me feel just a little bit safer.
There's no point in trusting them after they did this once, even if they may have reversed it. The fact is they did it once.
I've been a Gmail user since 2004 and have since (like everyone else, more or less) tied my online life around it. I don't care that much for backups (honestly, I don't store that much super memorable data in the google cloud - I have a separate, offline backup system for that stuff.)
What I do care for is the availability of my personal gmail as a fallback authentication mechanism for these hundreds of online services I've signed up for during the past years. I would recommend anyone who uses Chrome and its password manager to use the recipe at https://github.com/megmage/chrome-export-passwords to get a list of sites and corresponding passwords. I just printed mine out (all eleven pages). Don't bother storing it on a local drive - it's just another fat target to be stolen.
Up next is going through all those services to see which is critical or non-critical, and how I can get into them if I no longer have access to my primary gmail address. Facebook is probably a big one for most people. (Annoyingly - I tried to add my mobile phone number to FB recently, but at a first attempt I couldn't get it to just be a rescue number, rather than a rescue + spam messages via sms number.)
Some services allow multiple email addresses - for that I guess something like Microsoft's free outlook.com service could be suitable.
I'm also considering removing my credit card details from my Google Account. Seems like you're much more likely to be a target of their automated policing if there's actual money involved. (If they don't want stuff like this to happen, maybe they should invest a little more in that dirty annoying customer management area.)
A single company can still wipe your online identity. Is there any solution for that? Maybe getting a domain directly from ICANN somehow?
Most of the changes started around 2011, when Larry Page took over as CEO. That's when Google switched from developing open standards to developing walled gardens, killed Google Labs, started disincentivizing 20% time, etc.
(Check out the 10 year stock history for Google, draw a line at April 2011, when Larry Page took over, and notice you have effectively marked the line between Google being a company worth praising, and a company with a meteoric stock price rise.)
Reality is, obviously, more complex. But the big corporation environment does incentive people to act that way.
Pretty much every company in the world makes choices, little by little. Some set of people pretty much always disagree with those choices. If you make enough choices in a enough of a period of time, over a wide enough area, congratulations, you've now annoyed a lot of people :)
(IE even if Google was to do literally everything that hacker news people want, in the optimal order and way, it would just be some other forum where people are complaining.).
As companies become larger in scope, the number of choices they make, and the likelihood those choices will upset distinct groups of people, grows.
Sadly, pretty much the only thing you can really change is how long the cycle really is.
IE even if you make PR-optimal (for lack of a better term, i mean the choices that upset the smallest set of people) choices, you'll probably just upset 3-5% of people instead of 10-15%. So you get 15 or 20 years instead of 5.
At some point, people become upset enough, go to the next thing, and the cycle repeats.
You can see this happen in pretty much any group of people, not just companies. Companies are just larger so the timescale is smaller.
All of this is also compounded by the fact that larger companies deal with positive and negative PR campaigns for and against them, which helps change opinion faster one way or the other.
People love to blame shareholders, governments, or whatever, but truthfully, that is just about them disagreeing with the decisions. Look at it from the other perspective - if you did the opposite thing, now those currently-happy people would just be the people who are annoyed. It doesn't change anything, just swaps the set of people. Maybe that set is smaller, but again, that just changes the timeframe.
It's pretty much impossible to be universally loved and large, for any serious length of time, unless you aren't doing anything (again, applies to more than just companies)
Google chose this route because it was the easiest route to take.
Google felt the "Power of the Dark Side".
While I don't disagree with the authors position here, if TC want to be seen as a source of quality journalism they really should ensure their "journalists" keep their personal opinions to themselves.
crowd-sourced inventory acquisition program using the consumer Google site. It instructed people to buy phones from the Project Fi site and list the dealer's NH address as their "home address" so phones would be shipped directly to the dealer. The buyers were then paid enough to make a profit on the transaction (probably helped by the fact that NH has no sales tax), and the New Hampshire dealer would later resell the phone at a markup
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/google-bans-users-inv...
Do mail through IMAP. All your devices can sync to a IMAP server. The IMAP server built into Android isn't bad at all. Use Thunderbird on desktops and laptops. Most ISPs offer free IMAP. Or you can get your own domain and use IMAP from a server on it. No ads, too.
That looks a lot like Google's own tax minimization/avoidance policy, except they do it on a worldwide basis.
I'm glad they reversed their decision, but damn, it's time to move off Gmail.