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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine how people depend so heavily on free accounts from Google. Which notoriously ignores help requests. And typically don't retain backups. Seriously?

But bottom line, it's Google's business what they do. And with a free account, there's no recourse. Except maybe getting to HN front page, and reaching someone sympathetic at Google.

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"Free accounts" is misleading. Google is not giving anything away for free. They scan the emails and obtain valuable information regarding the user preferences and conversation, which later they use to tune their ads. We are the product.

And, in the case of people like the banned professor, traffic to Google sites (e.g. blog) is multiplied.

We make it sound like Google is gifting us with free email. They're not.

> They scan the emails and obtain valuable information regarding the user preferences and conversation, which later they use to tune their ads. We are the product.

At least for the "free" Gmail, as of two months ago (June 2017) Google promised to no longer scan email content. That change is coming in the near future. [1]

[1]: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio...

That's a fair point. But what would we call them, then?

Edit: We call them "non-paid" obviously.

I mean, they have _millions_ of users that have never had a problem. It's far more likely this is a mistake than any kind of malicious act, just given the sheer number of customers they have.

We've had multiple people prominent enough to make the front page of hacker news in the last few months. Maybe we should get some statistics on how many people are prominent enough and controversial enough to land on the front page of hn, then work back to how many of their millions of customers are actually affected. Its probably a lot more than just 1.

Well there is now at least one highly motivated statistician out there to analyze the data you suggest. But how do you get the data to him?

Yes, I suspect so. What it takes, arguably, is being just controversial enough to attract complaints and/or attention from algorithms. But not famous enough for a ban to attract huge attention in mainstream media.

If it only happens to one out of millions, why can't they have an actual responsive human being to respond to queries?

"We have so many zillion customers that we're forced to use bots for customer service" and "Only one out of a zillion customers has this kind of problem" would seem to be mutually exclusive.

Well, I've read that Google customer service is quite responsive, for paid accounts. And regarding non-paid accounts, determining algorithmically which queries merit human replies is arguably just as difficult as determining which accounts have violated ToS.

I doubt that this is a mistake, exactly. It's likely intentional, albeit through unreliable automation. I mean, from Google's perspective, false positives are arguably far less problematic than false negatives. And I'm sure that it happens more than we know. Given that most affected users have no way to get attention.

Edit: OK, so I'm dyslexic. False negatives are arguably more problematic, because they attract more attention.

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