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Comment by muse900 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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..."

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.

>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

> 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.

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...

> 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.

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