Google plans to partner with banks to offer checking accounts

As far as opening a google checking account goes I think I will be avoiding that one. Diversifying my critical online services might in some sense be a higher security risk, but safer from it all being wiped out in one go.

[1] http://isync.sourceforge.net/

I used Dropbox and now MEGA to sync photos off my phone, but I copy all that stuff to my NAS and backups. I use Drive for some things, but I wouldn't be screwed if it went away. I disable almost all the major Google apps on my Android phone and hope to switch out to Lineage + miniG soon.

I use a self hosted TTRss currently (Google Reader was garbage and it dying was really good as I realized what good RSS readers were actually like).

I need to set a reminder to do more regular Facebook exports/backups. No one should be in the situation where a single provider killing your access means you loose a huge chunk of your content. Self hosting has its own problems and yes, a lot of people don't have the knowledge/means/time to do it, but man I'm glad I made it a priority.

My phone number is still on Goolge Hangouts. I need to find a better solution for that as well.

With what is going on with big internet players censoring and deplatforming people, why would one trust these people with your money.

The surface area for misclassification is much larger in Google’s case as they close down the entire account without any mechanism for appeal.

Yes, but what bank has the surface area of google? If I do something in a an area that has _literally nothing_ to do with banking ( say google stadia ) that a bot thinks is fishy - will I have all of my funds locked up over that mistake?

A bank might suspend your checking account if it detects suspicious financial transactions on the account. The goal here is (ostensibly) to protect the account owner.

Google, as per the precedents it has repeatedly set, could suspend your checking account for participating in a stream on YouTube and following the streamer's instructions to spam chat with emotes in order to vote on his path through the game, as happened to Markiplier and his followers. That's far beyond what anyone should consider reasonable risk for being able to access their bank account.

That's not the entire story. Not only do banks have tons of regulations that they have to follow, a concept of "algorithm determined that we shutdown the account and we can't explain to you why" does not exist there.

Not even sure how to call google. Google Maps has issues with father in laws address. They also have some made up city name near where Ive lived on and off for 30 years, not a single person calls it that. Amazon hides their number or changes the location on their website frequently.

I have purchased a domain and used it to underpin a fastmail account; personally, I don't share in your line of reasoning and don't want to continue to trust Google.

Your point on Paypal is valid, and people dealing with Google checking are making a risk calculation like people dealing with Paypal do (but of course, one would hope that over time, the offerings improve; Google entering this market new should be offering something better than Paypal).

It's strange to me when someone restates the misbehavior as though it's a justification. If someone is abusing commenting, block them from commenting, sure. Don't disable all their other products. If someone is abusing two products, disable their whole account, then? Sure, if you want. That reduces the false-positives by about a square factor (0.1% -> 0.0001%)

YouTube's denials about why it happened are again dumb, and a chat ban in YouTube should in no way affect the rest of your Google account. Just acknowledging that it happened isn't a good explanation.

"Ya our rules are dumb and on manual review we were still stupid assholes"

It's also impossible to get ahold of anyone at YouTube and YouTube's "ya we manually reviewed it and fucked up" is just another admission that their pile of a system just doesn't work.

I'm moving away from Google and any other provider like them. These incidents only impress the need to do it faster. I can't risk having my business and life ruined because of a youtube algorithm with no one behind the wheel.

I recommend everyone else do the same. Just the idea that YouTube chat bans would connect to other portions of the account means google is not interested in you. Every interaction with them is a threat to your digital well being where your whole account can be banned. It's totally unacceptable given the position they're in.

And it can all be manually reviewer and you'll be told to go fuck yourself and if you aren't markeplier or whoever you have no recourse.

Fuck that shit.

Google needs to do more than a Reddit comment. This is the second time you have done this, and you supposedly seriously damaged a few of the people involved (I'm guessing they are SOL in terms of that, and I don't want to be SOL). "Oops" only cuts it the first time.

To me, this is stunning. IMO, Facebook beat MySpace because of their real name policy. However IMO this was because it enabled discoverability which got the network past a critical point. If I'm on a social network, I want to instantly know who friends and acquaintances are.

Saying "real names are good because I don't want to talk to someone with a silly screen name" is a complete misunderstanding of the product. It's not about the personal preferences of power users, it's about casual users being able to use the network reasonably efficiently.

Sure you can ask users to link accounts or whatever, that's part of the puzzle, but getting the network going is literally the problem you're trying to solve. Understanding how real names fit into the puzzle is pretty important.

I'm not stunned that you disagree with real names. I'm stunned that (apparently) no-one tried to convince you why it was a good idea beyond the preference of some hypothetical power-user.

As for global lock-outs ... yeah. Google isn't the only game in town, when it comes to email and data hosting. They're the only game in town when it comes to drunken comments on silly political videos (or my cat sitting on my keyboard as a livestream runs, or some accidental cut and paste error or whatever else will upset them). If I have to pick one, I'll keep watching Youtube and I'll take my serious business elsewhere, I hope Youtube is making a ton of money for them.

I've never thought of it that way. That's hilarious.

Reading this whole thread has made me realise I really need to at least back up my ~15 years of gmail emails somewhere else. I don't care much about the rest but that would be a killer.

> Larry talked a lot about the desire to get people signed in to Google search.

I don't do that and still use the search engine from time to time. It is really annoying, since you have no control about settings, that could very well be controlled by a cookie.

Google just plainly started putting business interest above user interest. I even doubt the intention of wanting to provide a better service. Or at least not for the "customers" that visit the page to search.

The intention was pretty transparent from the start. And there is a reason this intent is probably only communicated internally.

I think the problem with Google is mainly the leadership, which changed profoundly with the success of Google in my opinion. Almost as if they don't even know why they were successful in the first place.

$70/m for a mobile plan seems ridicilous.

I had Google Wallet years back. At one point while I was traveling, I lost my debit card and thankfully had my Google Wallet card as a backup. I was able to transfer money to the card from my checking account, though I only moved over what I needed for short periods of time. This resulted in multiple movements of money to my Google account, which in turn resulted in Google flagging this as suspicious and preventing that account from using Google to pay for anything (I couldn't even purchase via the Play Store even if I selected my non-Google debit/credit cards as payment methods). They asked for verification of who I am, and I supplied the correct documents to them multiple times. Each time I was told that those documents did not suffice with no explanation as to why they were not reauthorizing my account nor why the documents I sent them weren't up to their standards. Just "Nope, go away."

For some dumb reason I insisted on proceeding with signing up for Fi, and found it super easy to just create a new Google account specifically for that. I've been increasingly uneasy about the longevity of this account because of that experience and realize now that it was probably foolish to migrate my phone service to a company that had already fucked me, but c'est la vie.

This already happens, a lot.

Do something that generates a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report (generally, stuff that looks like money laundering) and your bank will cut you loose, and they aren't legally allowed to disclose why. Running a marijuana dispensary? Forget about a bank account.

People will still have free will (to the extent they ever have) no matter how individually tailored ads get.

I cannot see how you can not be happy about that. This is definitively not a lie or something.

[0]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

Further, having as many children as the environment can support, regardless of the consequences for the environment or its destruction, is natural for nearly every life form. Look at invasive species like Asian carp or zebra mussels.

On that note, a faang oozing into banking should absolutely raise antitrust questions.

There is no end game, we need more superfluous gadgets, faster things, smarter things, for what ? God knows, but it seems we can't do without it. We won't stop until we're forced to.