Android user locked out of Google after moving cities | Hacker News Reader

Android user locked out of Google after moving cities

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238 pointsJerry2124 comments

Its very disturbing for me as a google user and an android phone bearer seeing many of those posts coming up.

So in all fairness if I ever get my account locked for whatever reason, I need to make noise on reddit and yc news to get it resolved?

That really makes me feel uncertain about the google apps I use day to day.

They need to change something soon on their policies or they'll start losing customers.

P.S there was a post here the other day about someone that got his account closed due to a breach of service etc. I don't mind that obviously google can close your account if it feels you are violating their terms, what shouldn't be able to do is to lock access to your data or the option to extract your data off their servers.

The worse thing is, I don't think they care about losing users, they are like 90s Microsoft, there are no alternative for most of the services they give. They would care about losing customers, but Google customers are not its users, it's the guys who buy advertising space.

Even if that's true, they still care about losing users -- users are inventory!

Yes, but if your inventory is over a billion units worldwide, you don't even notice a few thousand a year disappearing from the shelves.

This is just "shrinkage." It's factored in.

A certain percentage of your inventory will be stolen off the shelves per year. Your rental property will stand empty a certain percentage of the year. A certain number of your cows and chickens will die, or fall ill and be "culled." A certain number of your engineers will move on. A certain number of your containers will fall overboard and spread yellow rubber duckies around the word's oceans.

For every 1 user they spend $25 on not losing they could get another 10 users in emerging regions that will make them lots of more money in a few years.

The tyranny of being a customer to a company that has 2-3 billion "customers".

So this is apparently offensive in HN-land. Since I have no idea why, how about if you also leave a comment with your next downvote, deal? I'm honestly really curious.

mostly google employees reading hn these days would be my guess.

anything that suggests google isnt and never was the "do no evil" company and is rather just another pyschopathic corporate machine will just attract the wrath of said psychopathic corporate machine.

This guy was actually a customer, he had made several purchases that were locked up in his account. With Google Play, every user is at least a potential paying customer, so there's really no excuse for this lack of customer service.

It is possible that the reason their customer service is so terrible sometimes is because the culture still doesn't necessarily think of users as customers. But they've got strong competition from Apple, at least, so I would expect this kind of situation to get better once they manage that mind shift.

> they'll start losing customers

my understanding is that at their core, they are an ad tech company. Their actual customers are on Madison avenue, and I imagine, get excellent support.

>what shouldn't be able to do is to lock access to your data or the option to extract your data off their servers.

FWIW, download all your Google stuff: https://www.google.com/settings/takeout

> So in all fairness if I ever get my account locked for whatever reason, I need to make noise on reddit and yc news to get it resolved?

That is beginning to be increasingly required for everything. We had an issue with our land line when it would rain. Called the phone company, was 'fixed' every time, until it rained again. This went on for 12 months or so. Suggested to my wife she complain on their Facebook page. They called us, there was a truck out the next day, found the issue and actually fixed it. Never would have happened without the public complaint.

The problem with this kind of thing is this...

If its going out when it rains, its likely wiring on your house, not plant. Its probably past the point of demarkation (where you become liable for the line) ... 99% of the time this is the case (ex phone field tech)

You just raised enough attention to make it worthwhile to soak up the cost of replacing YOUR line for you...

Congratulations, you may have joined the ranks of entitled people who use public pressure to whine their way into getting what they want...

I don't think this is really justified, given the story presented. If the problem with GP's line was on their own property and not the responsibility of the phone company, the phone company has some responsibility to say so and not do some quick non-permanent fix every time they call.

We can't all be ex phone field techs. When we call a company providing us a service for support with that service, we expect them to do what they can and inform us of what they can't and what we can do about it. That's not unreasonable or entitled.

If it is my responsibility to pay for something, then just say so. Happy to fix my own messes. But don't tell me it's fixed 12 times over the course of a year and then complain when I demand it be fixed for real.

Even though the people on the other end of that line aren't always technically savvy individuals or generally in a good mood, they are adults and should be told the truth so they have a fair shot at solving their problem and moving on with their lives.

> If its going out when it rains, its likely wiring on your house, not plant

Ya, it wasn't and they knew it wasn't, they had already admitted that point. The phone company can actually tell when there is an issue on their end you know.

The issue was some of there equipment was missing a lid. So when it rained, it filled up faster than it drained and shorted the circuit. The solution was put the lid on that should be there.

But please, don't let facts (that you didn't know) get in the way of you continuing to rant as a previous field tech get in the way of telling people to suck things up because for some reason you still don't feel like doing that job.

Oh and I am fully aware of the difference in responsibility at the NID.

Phone company techs are extremely defensive. (This is often the case with cable company techs, too). Source: I used to regular DSLReports. Holy crap. XD

Where do you draw the line between "public pressure" and "whining" and "working around shit customer service?"

I think it's ridiculous that you have to make a fuss on Twitter to get anything fixed these days, but that's a failing of the 'normal' customer service channels most of the time.

Not even true. I have had this problem and had it traced to water ingress in a junction box some distance away.

Not sure where it is in the US / rest if world, but in Australia the point of demarcation for residential houses is the 1st phone point, so any issues in the line are almost certainly the telco's problem.

I had the same problem. Verizon's solution was to install FIOS. They didn't want to spend the time or money to fix the underground copper.

I had a similar issue, except after some asking around it turned out that the entire street's internet would go down when it rained heavily (in England, so this is pretty often). It still took around a year to get fixed.

> They need to change something soon on their policies or they'll start losing customers.

Nah, there are new users born every minute.

Starting to think there might be a market for a service to securely back up your cloud data to not-the-cloud.

Google provides takeout but that's no use once your account is removed/locked.

There was some drama last year with respect to the ticket sellers (StubHub, TicketMaster), and the NBA:

Before Kobe announced his retirement, a guy bought tickets to the last Lakers home game. They weren't doing very well, and it was against another low tier team, so tickets were cheap (~$100ea?). Months go by. Then Kobe announces his retirement, so this is going to be his last home game ever. Shocking - months after he's bought these tickets, he's contacted by the reseller saying "sorry, the original owner of the tickets said he listed them in error and they're no longer available to you. here's $50 and a refund"... until he kicked up a fuss on Twitter.

The other, more egregious?

Guy with Playoff tickets to the Warriors is told they're fraudulent by TM. He kicks up a fuss, because initially they say "oh, sorry, too bad, playoffs, sold out, etc". TM realizes he has 250K Twitter followers, and "hey, we got you tickets, we reached out to the Warriors and they helped out"... thinking this deserved a pat on the back for their awesome customer service.

Except - cue all the people who jumped on that to say "Guess those of us with non-stratospheric follower numbers are just getting your 'oops. refund + $50 to your next purchase' emails, and you're only reaching out to people who might damage your reputation..."

One of my biggests concerns is that Google products are so pervasive.

I have a google device, that uses Google search, that sells me Google ads, while I'm using my Google email, that I read watching a movie in my Google play store, and all the data that I didn't specifically opt out of is backed up on Google cloud (somewhere, it's not in my Google Drive though.). Even my work uses Google Apps for work.

I've been feeling it forward a while now but last week I kind of cracked, when I realized I couldn't do a damn thing without using at least once Google service. They have to be one of the most evil, data hungry, invasive corporations of our time and we just hand over our lives with zero recourse because, “it's in our terms of service.". I know most tech giants have migrated to this business model now but I'm out. I can't do it anymore.

I know that a smart phone with data is basically an employment requirement now but I'm decoupling everything else I can and switching my device to Apple.

Lol, moving to Apple to escape an evil company that doesn't care about its users!

Moving to Apple because it's the best choice. If you have an argument that there is someone better, please let me know.

Best choice for you maybe.

It's not perfect, but I'm quite happy with Android overall. I would have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the Apple evil empire.

Your complaint was that you couldn't do anything without using at least one google service, and your solution was to not use any google services, thus rendering your initial assertion invalid. Unless, of course, you plan to not do anything on your Apple phone.

If you think Apple is anywhere near as a evil as Google you should rethink your priotities.

I used to think that Apple was worse, but seeing Google these last 3-5 years, its exceptionally worse.

And I still use google services, I said that my work uses Google Apps, so I'm stuck with that for now.

I read HN almost every day, and AFAIK there are only a few incidents of accounts being cancelled, which, while worrying, don't strike me as exceptionally strange for a company the size of Google, and I would be willing to bet that Apple has done the same thing, and has exactly the same lawyer-y cancellation conditions in their TOS (we can do whatever we want!).

I thought Google were pretty good about encrypting everything between their datacenters also to hopefully avoid/mitigate governmental spying.

I was impressed that Apple took a stand about breaking into that iphone of the dead terrorist though. And just the fact that they brought the issue of government spying into the public eye was a very good thing.

Which events are you talking about that make Google "exceptionally worse" than Apple? Legitimate question, I'm not married to either company.

The worst thing for me personally about Apple is their schedule of obsolescence ("courage"!) and arbitrary decisions about what you're permitted to do with the hardware you paid for.

I don't actually like the idea of the cloud much at all. I personally wish that there were realistic options for self-hosted, encrypted solutions that work just as well as google/icloud. "The cloud" is just other people's servers. Both companies' solutions make me nervous in slightly different ways.

It's been a few days, I don't know if you or anyone else will ever see this but....

> I personally wish that there were realistic options for self-hosted

man, me too! that would alleviate a lot of my concerns but the whole home server idea has struggled to gain any real traction.

>Which events are you talking about that make Google "exceptionally worse" than Apple?

There are a number of specific events as well as the over-arcing trend.

First and foremost, they aren't even hiding it anymore [1].

They have censored 1m websites and 2b individual URLs because other companies asked them too [2].

They monitor every god damn thing you do [3][4][5], yes even your android keyboard data [6].

And then make it available to law enforcement [7].

Finally, let's not forget, they are an ad company [8] so it's in their best interest to sell more ads.

So, all of that being said, the general trend is the most disturbing thing of all. As google grows their ad company, they are expanding into more and more areas of your life. Now, Ok Google is a household term [9], and they gather more and more data to sell more ads [10]. It entirely possible that you are spend more time with google than you do with anyone else. Your phone is next to you all day, you search with google, your email and chat is scanned by google, your keyboard actions are monitored by Google. Google earth takes pictures of our roadways and houses, google streetview takes pictures of the vehicles in your driveway.

They have root access to 90% of mobile smart devices [11]. Everything we do, say, buy, utter, mumble, research, discuss is being handed over to the worlds largest advertising company, whose job it is to direct traffic to people who pay them [12][13]. That means its there JOB to to dismiss legitimate content which is explicit censorship, with the additional benefit of the chilling-effect [14], and instead serve you something that will sell more ads [15].

> The worst thing for me personally about Apple is their schedule of obsolescence.

So much this! This one of the main reasons I avoided apple products for a long time. But with the privacy concerns these days, "not being able to upgrade RAM" is not a viable excuse for using google or Microsoft products. However, I still refuse to buy a macbook, linux works very well these days as a nearly drop in replacement for windows or osx.

So that's it. Apple is more secure, even if only by default without policy considerations, because their business model is about selling products, not ads. And when you consider policies, it's not even a close fight, apple is clearly the best large company when it comes to user privacy [16][17].

[1] http://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/

[2] https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright...

[3] http://thefreethoughtproject.com/snowden-allo-google-messagi...

[4] https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

[5] https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infocollect

[6] https://www.xda-developers.com/swiftkey-and-google-keyboard-...

[7] https://www.theatlas.com/charts/4JqqQblol

[8] https://privacy.google.com/how-ads-work.html

[9] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/not-ok-google/

[10] https://decentralize.today/googles-pixel-phone-and-other-ai-...

[11] http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp

[12] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/google...

[13] https://protonmail.com/blog/search-risk-google/

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

[15] http://searchengineland.com/google-continues-testing-new-sea...

[16] http://www.apple.com/privacy/

[17] http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/22/apples_iads_allows...

Hmm... Interesting. Thanks for the explanation. I'm still not 100% convinced that Apple's only trying to sell devices and not data, but I understand your points.

Re: your note [7] "And then make it available to law enforcement", from the same site http://qz.com/620423/heres-how-often-apple-google-and-others... , Apple handed the data over more often than google, but just received less requests?

I'm just scared of everything nowadays...

I have full sympathy for the person. Recently there was a news on HN about Google cloud being cheaper by 50% [1].

We must be very much worried about Google's record of ill treatment of its users, both paid/free. You cannot and should not rely on Google for anything critical to your business unless you are close friends with someone working at Google and that too at a higher up position to be able to get out of such bad situation relatively easily. I had commented there something that I will not repeat here. [2]

I hope (I may be a fool to hope so still) this type of frequent bad-light may make Google amend its ways.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993021

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994769

What I can't understand is, whether the frequency of this happening is increasing or the news of it finding wide coverage.

> You cannot and should not rely on Google for anything critical to your business unless you are close friends with someone working at Google

I personally think that you shouldn't "rely" on any third party for the critical things. The critical things are your competitive advantage and you should be in control of them, right?

Critical things aren't necessarily your core competencies, nor your market advantages.

More like having electricity in your main office. You don't necessarily need to own your own power source and battery bank if the reliability of the public grid is good enough for your business.

But if the public grid is only 98% reliable, and you need power 99.9% of the year, you do need a hot backup system.

Google isn't providing the service that is down for many customers x% of the time, but a service that can fail catastrophically and permanently for x% of customers.

As long as anyone can say that a Google robot permanently cut them off from a service that is important to them, without any meaningful recourse, you simply cannot trust Alphabet with critical pieces of your business, even to the extent that you can trust your local power utility to keep the lights on in your office. There are plenty of businesses that can operate without a backup generator. But nobody can trust Google, PayPal, Amazon, Stripe, L4, Square, et al to be their sole service provider for some function critical to the business.

Those businesses are trying to be Internet utilities, but are neither as trustworthy as nor as reliable as a regular utility. Would you be comfortable buying gas from the gas company if every so often they intentionally burn a customer's house down, then tell any aggrieved survivors to suck it up and get lost?

> Those businesses are trying to be Internet utilities,

I think those businesses are fighting tooth and nail to not be (seen as) utilities, because they don't want the oversight and regulation of a utility.

They are trying to be de facto utilities without being de jure utilities.

All the money and control, none of the responsibilities or regulation.

> You cannot and should not rely on Google for anything critical to your business unless you are close friends with someone working at Google and that too at a higher up position to be able to get out of such bad situation relatively easily.

The question here is what alternatives do you suggest ? Solid, reliable and equivalent solutions.

Solid, reliable are very desired but you have to also consider, support, trust and control.

I know this is difficult and painful but not impossible and really worth. Recent news of gitlab moving out of cloud to own infra is worth looking. These [1,2] are worth looking at.

For a start, here is a very brief answer. I'm sorry if it doesn't answer your question neatly. One of my seniors gave me this advice and I am more than indebted for that.

For anything (e.g. data, email) you think is critical for you, you should try to host it yourself (on prem or VPS) and (not or) some backup with a company which you trust. e.g. Your email address should be yours, you may still forward lot of your email to gmail but you don't use the gmail address for anything critical. Fastmail for email, backblaze for backup may also be good alternatives. Disclaimer: not affiliated to fastmail/backblaze; though a happy user.

The advantage is you get good support from these guys and it's well worth the price.

Again it's not simple and one has to do a serious cost/benefit analysis.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/5cp9ol/gitlab_movin...

I have moved my mail, contacts and calendars to FastMail.com for the exact same reason a few months ago. 50$/year buys me some peace of mind. I use personal domain, so that I am not locked to them in case things go wrong.

Currently those guys are just amazing - the have proper iOS push notifications support, for example, which is not present in Gmail (fucking political reasons, I believe).

Same here. And I'm wondering if I really need a smart phone. A feature phone does phone and text, and that's all I mostly use (YMMV).

I am currently locked out of all paid Google services because I committed the crime of changing countries while holding an active Google Developer Account/Wallet. I've talked to them over the phone, and they were entirely unhelpful.

In contrast, Amazon's phone service is great. Get yourselves sorted google.

Google has always had terrible general support and I am sure they do not have any incentive to change that. The support from tech guys, if you get that far, is excellent though.

I had a similar problem. There's literally NO solution other than opening up a new account.

It was a wake up call. I've since moved most of my digital life onto other services.

Please tell me how to avoid this case. (according to Google)

One solution is to try not to need those services.

What services did you switch to, and at this point what feedback can you share about those services?

PayPal is the same. I had to close the account and open a new one in the other country.

What were you supposed to do according to them?

I have Google Developer account too, and I'm "changing countries" regularly (travel a lot).

Could you please enlighten me what dangers there are?

Thank you and I hope the best outcome for you.

This is so annoying I have to be worried about these things even though using plenty of their paid services where I really expect the support. I have had 10 Android devices, 3 Chromebooks, published apps, paid for Google storage, for dev account(s) etc.

I feel like google would rather accept losing marketshare on services than actually make an effort to hire even a limited but empowered support staff.

Can you say more about this? I may have a country change in my near future.

Same for me! I check every couple months to see if anything changed in the Google Wallet policy but I lost all hope now. It's outrageous.

This is exactly my problem now. I've moved to another country and now cannot buy any movies or TV shows on Play Store using the Google account I've had for 10 years.

Phoned and emailed Google support, but they just insist that I'm not allowed to change country. I've even tried using an HTTP proxy located in my old country with a credit card registered in my old country, but still Google blocks me.

If I knew about this restriction I would never have signed up for Google Wallet.

I had the same problem trying to buy XBox Live with my MSN/hotmail account 12 years ago. Seems like Google is becoming the new MS as far as their products go.

What the actual!

I must point out that I am an actual customer, that have paid actual money services delivered, not just a user and someone else's product.

I must admit that I have never read more than some random bits of the terms and conditions, but moving does not strike me as an obvious justifiable reason for terminating the contract..

They haven't terminated my contact, I just get a payment error whenever I try to buy a movie or TV show.

Curiously, there's no error when buying Android apps or extra Google Drive storage. Seems there's some extra restriction that Hollywood is placing on Google.

I must point out that I too am an actual customer. In fact, I'm a customer in two ways: I paid Google thousands of dollars in commission on sales I made through Google Wallet; and I'm trying to pay money to watch TV and movies.

I travel quite a bit. Changing countries regularly and mix up stuff like a swiss home location, german credit card, and thai phone number.

So far google did not care at all. I assume because i dont randomly change devices.

Any pointers why this could happen?

Well, something similar happened to me as well. I moved (just a few kilometres, too). In fact, it happens in about half of the cases when I'm logging in in some new location.

I want to log in (to Youtube or whatever) from the machine and the browser I always use, just from a different IP. Then I get asked for a phone number (any phone number) to verify that it's me[1], which in itself is a nonsense. That "another way to sign in" includes asking me for a date when that account was created (what???) and sending a code to email, which sometimes works, sometimes it does not.

I mean, when I was moving, I fully expected to never be able to get my account. What an utterly rubbish service. And people actually put significant amount of money to it?

[1] https://puu.sh/rrKyG/678746a09e.png

Edit: And how do you "call a rep" anyway? I haven't seen anything even remotely resembling live support, i.e. one that isn't community-based or self-service.

Hi Aoyagi,

I work at Google, and I would like to take a look at what happens to your account during login. The situation that you are describing sounds surprising to me.

If yes, then could you provide a contact point so I may contact you with my corporate credentials (corporate e-mail) to verify myself?

What everyone here is asking: Why does it take someone posting on HN to get a response? Why can't you just have a basic customer service system set up?

Not cost effective, obviously.

Hey! I believe it's just due to me logging in from new locations/countries quite often and Google's account hijack protection kicks in. Up until that point it's completely understandable (although I'd prefer if there was an option to disable that altogether). What happens later, however, is beyond me.

Also, I forgot to mention (I wanted to!) that I've never given Google any phone number or logged into an Android device (with that account).

Sometimes I am able to get through with the email verification, sometimes I cannot. By the way, this issues goes back to at least 2014, when the form looked different: http://puu.sh/sqFDT/0c3eea00d9.png

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."

- Lily Tomlin [1], before a robot came along that could do the same job cheaper

[1] https://youtu.be/CHgUN_95UAw

Also true for all of the other natural monopolies in your area, 'cable' included.

Tell me about it. But at least I can get Comcast to fix themselves without having to complain to the whole Internet successfully.

> But at least I can get Comcast to fix themselves without having to complain to the whole Internet successfully.

Maybe you can, but lots of people can't:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Comcast%20service%20stories

(At least you can easily get a representative to say personally that they won't be helping you!)

Maybe it helps that I have customer service experience myself? All I can say is that I've never had trouble with them. But I suspect that'll change as soon as anything happens that can't be solved by Tier 1 or a truck roll.

I think that the root of the problem is that most of Google's core services developer are Americans, with American cultural peculiarities.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that for an average American, moving to another country is something that less than 1% of population does, and it is like once a lifetime event.

Here in Europe, on the contrary, it is relatively common to stumble upon a German guy living in France, or a Brit living in Germany, or any combination whatsoever, and many are changing their place of living more than once, especially in the academic environment (I have 5 residence cards of different European countries).

The same goes with the localization approach. Google or Apple always want to give me services in the language of the country I currently live in, instead of remembering my priority language (English, even if I am not a native speaker), and sticking with it, even if I am now in Spain or Italy.

Changing countries is really common in Europe. Probably we need more European companies in the Internet space to adapt to our way of living.

Insightful comment ...

I'm not sure I'd call it an "American cultural peculiarity". I imagine it's much the same in other physically large countries. It's also a consequence of immigration/residence policy. Even before the EU, I'm sure it was quite a bit easier to get residence in another European country as a European, vs as an American or Mexican or South African.

Well, I am Russian now living in Switzerland (and occasionally Spain) who used to live in Denmark and Italy before.

Casual, matter-of-fact immigration is a fact of life these days.

Physically large countries: Russia, China, Brazil, US, Canada, India. Of those, only US and Russia have this peculiarity.

From the US perspective, the EU is a lot more like 'the US' and individual 'EU member countries' are more like 'states'.

I happen to view the EU as a slow-motion process of converting Europe in to one 'super nation' just like the US eventually became (remember, it was originally 13 distinct colonies).

Ultimately I believe the preferable goal is one world government. A government which would only exist to ensure a few common rights/laws were common, and for leadership should any life not of commonly terrestrial origin appears which doesn't cause an extinction event. (Trying to phrase that to include AI, artificial biological life, and actual aliens.)

We only need one good solar flare similar to one we had 150 years ago to end modern civilization.

I don't think so. It will be spectacular, and will cause great havoc, but in 1-2 years, most of critical infrastructure should be restored.

We humans are like cockroaches when it comes to survival.

1-2 years without critical infrastructure and you think the billions in big cities entirely dependent on next day deliveries of groceries and without access to fresh water for miles wouldn't descend into some post-apocalyptic warlord movie with 90% of them dead?

We survived World War II, with similar conditions throughout all Europe.

Well, fortunately this man got help, but this is the customer service of automate everything -- win the lottery of creating enough buzz for the media/Reddit to pick it up, or you're fucked. Suddenly, having your call forwarded for help to Asian calling-center doesn't sound such a bad idea...

That would be a mistake. Companies have replaced humans that can actually solve your problem with humans that just placate you and occasionally sell you on something else.

I had a problem with T-Mobile, where I tried to convert my month-at-a-time plan to a family plan, and T-Mobile completely disabled my phone, irrevocably broke my SIM to the point where I had to buy a new one (paying the setup fees).

I spent HOURS on the phone (someone else's phone - mine wouldn't work) with various reps in various departments before I finally just ejected and changed to another phone company.

They even filled their subreddit with paid shills who will just shout down anyone who comes there with a problem.

Honestly, Google isn't doing that bad in comparison.

Honestly, considering human nature, it's better to have someone to yell at (sorry, reps) and ask for the boss than sending e-mails to a black hole (Google).

Yeah, have had similar problems, dealing with Google support is a nightmare.

I can't use Google Ads at all anymore. I once had an account for a business in NY, and I was listed as the point of contact for it. Lost access to that account when I moved (locked out due to changing location, Google refused to offer any means to recover it), and now I can't sign up for Google Ads with my name on any account. It simply informs me that I'm already using the service on another account, and that I should use that for Ads.

And I suppose without an account you can't contact the support for Google Ads to see if maybe they can fix it? (Since people always argue that Google support is only shit for the free products)

Correct. Since I can't get through account creation at all I'm mostly stuck. I've tried social media, but without much luck there as well.

And that's why I moved most of my website registrations to a name@mydomain.com address and host the server myself on a $4/mo VPS. Still, my domain name is tied to my gmail address. Now I'm paranoid I'll lose access to my gmail, and my domain name quickly after. (remember the @N guy?)

Unless I manage to learn some social engineering skills or hire myself a marketing team I doubt I'd be able to get my stuff back. I'm no social butterfly, I'm not pretty and I've got some serious Eastern European accent.

So I'm considering maintaining two mail servers with different companies and different registrars, both pointing at each other. Such that in case I lose one, I can recover with the second.

Am I crazy?

What I'm planning to do is move the services I have registered with my Gmail account to a Fastmail account, and migrate my Gmail archive to that service. They handle contacts and calendars too, and their basic service is $3/month. That's cheaper and easier than running one's own mail server.

I've been test driving their service for a few days and so far it feels much more intuitive and faster than Gmail. It also works properly on every browser I've thrown at it, and their Android app is nice. I'm going to spend the next few days pruning my Gmail archive before transferring it so I don't have to buy the 25GB plan from Fastmail, then I'll tell all the services that use the Gmail address to use the Fastmail address instead. That second task will be the most time consuming and frustrating one, but it's worth the effort to break the chains of the big G.

(Edit: Corrected the price for Fastmail's basic service)

Good luck. I did the same and now I have all sorts of issues when employers send Calendar invites to my (ex-Google, now Fastmail) email address. I cannot accept them due to weird errors, etc. Not the best look if you're ostensibly an Operations guy. :)

I don't use Google services for anything work related (we're government so we have "good old" Outlook and Exchange), just personal stuff and side work. Basically, as long as it can sync with the calendar and contacts on my phone, I'm set.

Thanks for the warning though, and maybe one of the FastMail devs will see your post and address it.

We're not aware of any general issues like that. Please open a support ticket with the full details and we'll happily investigate: https://www.fastmail.com/action/support/

I'm absolutely certain it's not you, but some lingering record in Google that thinks there's some mismatch when I go to accept.

>Am I crazy?

Yes, for hosting your own mail server! I read and remember that it is quite annoying to maintain it and get it right so you won't get flagged as spam.

That's why I just pay $5/month to fastmail instead, so I do not have to worry.

If you're concerned that your domain registration is tied to your Gmail address, consider having different addresses on different providers (e.g. Outlook.com, your own domain, etc.) and assign different addresses to the Registrant, Admin, Billing and Technical contacts. You could also use a separate Gmail account, though that could be slightly riskier if the accounts get linked somehow by the giant data vacuum.

If you're tired of having your data taken hostage and want to host your own stuff, you can set it up easily with sovereign (https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign/)

If they had a way for people to talk to them and fix these situations, those affected wouldn't have to garner a bunch of attention in order to get it fixed. Just a crazy dream I guess.

I think it's all about staffing levels. This [1] maths isn't something I've checked, but it does make sense, alas, you'd need 20,000 staff to deal with 1 query every 3 years from 0.1% of a billion users.

[1] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-support-staff-limits-139...

If any company could afford to staff 20,000 tech support people (who don't exactly command the highest salaries) it'd be Google. It's not a matter of cost. They choose not to.

You know what would be even crazier is if they built stores to put those thousands of employees in, so that customers could talk to a real live person when they had problems or questions.... nahh that could never work.

You read that incorrectly, he states 0.1% of users has an issue per day, which is equivalent to 1 query every 3 years from 100% or your users (3 times 365 times 0.1% is a bit more than 100%).

I did a little back of the napkin math and came up with something similar. However, 20k staff would cost Google between $1b and $2b per year, which they absolutely have. They've been consistently posting quarterly earnings of around 5b, 20b per annum.

They just don't want to pay for it, and the users don't care enough to force them to.

In addition, I think google could probably solve the problem with paid support. That would limit volume and pay for itself. Then people who are having a serious problem (like being locked out of their Reb account) could have some recourse. Unless they already do this and I'm not aware?

One option is to use premium rate phone lines, That way, people pay for support via their phone bills. It's far from perfect but it might be better than nothing...

Creating noise on HN, reddit is a sure way of getting their attention, but there has to be a better way to deal with issues when everything is automated. Does Google have a single point of contact for such issues?

They are a rough company do deal with. I think they do a lot of internal chargeback that people give a shit about so even when you find a sympathetic ear, the person on the other side gives no shits.

It's always a challenge when I travel for pleasure to other European countries (I'm from SE-Europe) and when Google tells me I cannot log-in into my email account when using my phone. Luckily most of the times I also carry a laptop, which surprisingly enough does not have the same limitations, but it still sucks.

Key points:

Asks to provide scanned id and cc info to restore account access. But google fails to reinstate account.

This user was actually able to get hold of google customer reps who told him only way is to start afresh, talks to supervisor and supervisor "assures" that everyone there in his department absolutely cannot help and that my only hope is to reply to the emails and try to appeal to them.

All purchases made with old account will not be moved into new account if user opens new google account, which by the way requires a new credit card too as old cc info is associated with blocked google account!

What!! Does google even read their own stupid resolution process??

He was able to contact google customer care but they couldn't fix it until the user got some love on reddit and twitter.

I have nothing to say, really

So all it takes to get stuff like that resolved is to get on the HN and the /r/android front pages.

You, as a user, are geolocked, it's not only Google, it's everyone.

The only excuse they have to do that is the different countries legislation, but besides that, like any geolocking, it's just not fit for "I can access my stuff, my services, from anywhere in the world because ... internet!", nope ... you can't.

I had the problem with Google, google dev license with a wallet, moving to another country ? well then create another google account, no other choices, period.

Can't we have the option to be a google dev in 2 different countries ? no you can't.

Same for Google Ads, even more so if you connect ads to a bank account to get paid.

Same with Apple, same with Facebook, same with Paypal, same with Microsoft Xbox, etc.

Some tricks can work: using a Google Apps for your domain email when you move to another country, alter slightly your name or use your middle name to create another account for the same service but from another country (and a different bank account), alter your gmail with old google trick +something eg. username+fr@gmail.com and username+uk@gmail.com etc.

If you move often it get old pretty quick.

I've been caught out by this before. This could be resolved by allowing city/country/IP range level whitelisting of login locations ahead of travel, or by providing a list of temporary download tokens for later authentication from unusual locations.

And no, I'm not giving you my number.

How many regular users would know to do that/know how to do that?

Or, even better, they can have proper customer service since the problem was eventually sorted out which suggests it could have been sorted out with the very first phone call. It's not like resolving a billing problem caused by moving hasn't been done hundreds-of-thousands of times before. Maybe Google should ask the assistant manager of a bank how it's done.

I think Google should offer paid consumer support for their free services for instances like this. I wouldn't mind paying $40-50 if I get locked out of my gmail for 2 days.

I use my gmail for many important services as my main email. Looks like time has come to change that.

This is an example of Artificial Stupidity; what we get when the pipe dream of AI fails.

And I thought Privacy was the main reason to avoid Google when possible...

Just FYI: I know the pain it has caused the user.

Eventually his account was unlocked

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5dif8j/psa_google_...

Quote from above link

""To protect our customers from fraud and abuse, we routinely monitor account behavior on Google Play and take action on potentially suspicious activity. Unfortunately, in your case, your account was wrongly flagged and suspended. I have just reopened your account..." "We strive to provide excellent care to all our customers but we have obviously failed you in this instance. I sincerely apologize for the stress and inconvenience this has caused you. You can reply to this email if you have any questions and concerns. "

Who is "I" in the "I have just reopened your account"? Because apparently whoever that person is ended up being the "right" person to contact.

Figuring out where he/she works (what department) would be helpful in determining how to navigate this issue for future users.

Exceptions are costly in any circumstances, and will be abused by attackers wherever possible.

I don't know of any company or even government that has a solution for this issue that isn't too costly in at least one of: false positives, false negatives, monetary cost, time cost, or some set of the previous failures during the 'error handler'.

Ultimately, the root cause of this failure is the lack of a strong 'digital', opt-in, national/global identification system. Along with your government issued plastic would be a government signature on your digital signing keys. That would make "identity theft" far less possible and would vastly reduce the false positive/negatives for cases like this where you are establishing that you are who you say you are for banking/related activity.

I wonder if this account holder had a couple of medium sized Android apps on Google play. Would he lose the apps and all the work behind them? Makes it scary to develop small and medium size Android apps.

Actually the Play Store Developer account is often the source of people's Google accounts getting suspended. As a point of note, you should always publish apps on a completely separate account from the Google account you use, and keep all details like address, phone, and payment accounts separate, as to avoid either one being affected by the other.

With both the Play Store and the Apple App Store, since only one company decides whether or not your app is listed, developing a mobile app can be a pretty risky investment, since one company can make all your work worthless in short order.

The sad part is, he doesn't seem to be the only one. There are other people having the same problem.

Google's behavior will continue until enough people leave to seriously impact their bottom line.

Google has horrible customer support. That is well known fact for almost a decade.

I workaround most of those issues by using VPN. Google always thinks I am sitting in datacenter in Germany.

Just wait until they lock your account because the location of the IP and the GPS disagree...

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