Google disabled my husband's account
twitter.com
twitter.com
This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible.
The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose.
The only reason these tech companies managed to get so big is because they'll cheat at anything that requires human scale. Support, moderation, taking responsibility for the content they host. They somehow managed to skirt on that just as the web was transitioning from a wild west to a somewhat ingrained, regulated place and the world is worse off for it.
Because they skirted on all this, they are now somehow the world's gatekeepers on modern communications. If you don't play ball with them, you're cut off from almost everyone. Their recklessness and callousness ironically put them in the position to rule over the rest.
Imagine I make a laser bug zapper and install them at every fast food joint in the US. 9999 out of 10000 times it zaps an insect. 1 out of 10000 times the laser fires it blinds a child.
I could wax all I want want about the 99.99% accuracy, the _relative_ accuracy won't mean a thing to the million people blinded by it.
When there is a mix of spambot garbage and human beings that being harmed the right metric isn't the ratio. Blinding a million children wouldn't go from unacceptable to acceptable just because the level of insects swarming around a restaurant increased by a factor of 10. The harm stands alone, and there is a level of harm which could not be justified by any amount of boring spambot influx.
I care about the crime rate, or car accident rate, or botched surgery rate, because it tells me the odds that something bad will happen to me.
Given a stable rate of bad things, population growth alone causes more bad things to happen.
If we took your argument about absolute harm seriously, then we should, say, encourage population reduction until there are only 10k human beings on the planet. That would surely minimize the number of bad things that continue happening to people.
It is trivial to ban every spammer: ban everyone.
If you ban most spam while significantly harming some of your users, you've done your job poorly.
I don't really see how this line of argument really translates to this issue with Google. First of all I should have acknowledged that imprisoning data is almost assuredly unacceptable and that unless Google is acting directly in response to a law enforcement action they should give you a way to download your data when they tell you that they have chosen not to continue the business relationship they have with you.
But there will be cases where they cannot do that, and in some cases it will be a mistake but the reason they cannot solve this problem cheaply is because usually it is not a mistake and so litigating 99,999 cases to find the one worthy of saving is a hard case to make, why should Google pay for that?
I should have mentioned up-front that this article scared the hell out of me and I'm probably moving to Fastmail. I've had my own domain for going on two decades and am still grandfathered into the free gsuite for it but I'd much rather pay someone who will support me than use a free service that could cost me access to data that I might want again in the future. I also realized I could be vulnerable to a trap where my DNS account is disabled at the same time my email is, meaning I couldn't even move the DNS without first recovering access to my mailbox.
I don't think it's that big a leap to say that it is unlikely that there is any plausible reduction in spam from an automated facility that justifies the kind of extreme harm and disruption created by locking an honest user out of their decades long email-- which might be more damaging to them then a home fire--, with zero effectual recourse. Yet it happens because the cost of the spam is on google's 'balance sheet' while the damage to the user is not.
So that is the sort of argument that I'm making. I think google is creating damages wildly out of proportion to any plausible benefit, but it works out for them currently because the damages are externalities.
Were Google a more conventional company the threat of litigation (even litigation they'd ultimately win) would help internalize some of these costs, but Google has grown to such a size and scope that even the federal government finds prosecuting them to be extremely daunting.
There should still be a solution though. Maybe this is a terrible idea, but one idea: Google could sell a service where you pay them $200 and they thoroughly review your case, tell you what happened and work with you to restore access to data, maybe even setup email forwarding for 90 days or something that comes reasonably close to making you whole even if they can't restore service.
If in the course of doing this work they figure out they screwed up closing the account in the first place, the money is refunded. Of course fraudsters would not generally want to sign-up and pay this money as - even if the information of how they were caught was worth $200 - that would create a paper-trail. And it could still be the case that Google is under a FISA letter or something and can't fulfill this service, and in that case they'd refund your money as well.
Not about how you detected them, but you should tell them what you detected. E.g. if you're using a spam filter, you don't want spammers to know which exact keywords triggered the classification, but it wouldn't hurt much to let people know that their account was locked for sending spam instead of some other reason.
For instance, it is a prison-time offence for an individual employee of a financial institution to tell a customer they filed a SAR on them.
The way you get kafka is BSA compliance officers have personal liability for this reporting, so they prefer not to have customers that trigger reporting, but they cant tell a customer why they are dumping them, so the word comes from ‘on high’ or an algorithm and thats it. Nobody internally can help because for their own good they do not know the reasons for account termination.
This may be that or it may not, but probably its not that google is being dicks to its own employees. It is an outcome of a pernicious set of government and institutional dynamics.
You're missing half of the analysis. What percentage of account suspensions are preceded by an SAR filing?
(Probably not many.)
Google has none, this is why Microsoft and Amazon excel leaps and bounds above Google in customer experience
Google has the ego of a market leader. They don't care for their customers, that's nothing new.
[0]: as an example, obtaining root on a container in an Azure DevOps CI pipeline. You have to bind-mount the Docker management socket into the container, then use that to gain initial root access and install sudo, then use sudo to run all your commands. I don't recall ever having to do that on any other CI service.
While the rest of MS is improving those 2 teams are still a problem, the "cloud" is ripe with ways to obfuscate and needlessly complicate licensing to over charge companies and MS excels at that
I think the "cattle, not pets" implications haven't quite sunken in yet. Stragglers get turned into mutton.
People willingly chose the free option and chose to not pay companies that would have offered support.
I get support from Fastmail, and Migadu and Target and banks and plenty of other companies. I also provide support for my businesses.
Support usually sucks with monopolies, such as ISPs who know you have no alternative. But even then, I’ve always been able to get someone on the line to fix my issue.
Anyone who's had to deal with Google support for paid business accounts will tell you that the situation is barely any different for paying customers. Things might be different for very large businesses who are spending millions per month, but that's hardly relevant to how Google might handle email customers hypothetically paying $9.95 a month for a personal mailbox.
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I do not understand why anyone defends consumer abuse by businesses. Unless they work for said businesses, or own their stock, there is absolutely nothing to gain by siding with an abusive business over an abused customer. The business isn't going to reward their supporters' loyalty by treating them better.
Collaborating with hostile entities is not a redeeming quality.
Then don’t pay google $10 a month. I don’t. I do the work of supporting businesses that I think deserve it. I know some businesses have monopolies that customers can’t fix by voting with their wallet, but email isn’t one of them.
> Collaborating with hostile entities is not a redeeming quality.
Using their free services and not voting for the right candidate in the market by paying for the service is collaborating with hostile entities (in the example of email where there is no monopoly and almost zero cost to switching).
This is largely based on my own observations and could be wrong, but it's my theory. Tech companies robbed an internet culture they didn't even realize or appreciate existed, and then shoved a bunch of people who had never used the internet before on it and convinced them that Facebook was the internet. Or rather, that the standards, norms, and culture on Facebook was somehow reflective of everything outside of Facebook. Just replace Facebook with the growing list of companies who engage in "platforms" in varying degrees.
tldr: this obsession with centralization made no sense to the way we do things as a human species, any of our values, any of our culture, and we let it happen anyway. The chickens have come home to roost.
If our dictionaries vary to much in their definitions then our communication becomes more and more difficult.
Maybe dictionary is not the best analogy (this is just an analogy) but I hope I'm getting my point across with this example.
To the extent that what you are saying is true, it is only true because these companies have walled themselves off. You used to be able to chat with Facebook users over XMPP even.
It just sucks for the internet. I don't think, if those companies ceased to exist, that they would automatically get recreated because of some inevitable niche or market law. I think that they got where they are because of a fluke of the times they were created in -- people could not grasp how they make money.
In large scale, what you're asking is more dubious. If you concede that the United States alone has 11 major cultures, then you have to begin a process of "on-boarding" everyone onto your new, structured culture that your platform is designed around. That's why these debates about who is represented in the building of the platform come about, because under that model those concerns take center stage and they should.
I guess what I'm saying is the whole problem never needed to exist. There's better ways to share information than being on one platform.
Gmail's spam filtering. Recaptcha's bot rejection. Facebook's identity verification. Paypal's secure credit card processing. Google de-ranking link farms. Youtube's hosting costs. All of these very effectively solved real problems with the old web, and those problems were growing as bad actors became more sophisticated.
I like the old web too, but I do appreciate that an attempt to return to it would still require very effective tools to solve at least some of these problems, and they'd require constant improvement to keep the roving bandits at bay.
> Facebook's identity verification.
The ability to choose an identity online not connected to your legal or in-person name, to make it more difficult to find and stalk you in person, is a feature, not a bug.
For these purposes, an actual Real Verified Name is overkill, and a unique identity number would be enough. But Facebook offers that service for Free(TM) so there's not much incentive to the site operator to aim for something more minimal. And with GPT-3 and other systems inching closer to passing the Turing test, this only makes alternatives more challenging for them.
Those are problems in the Wild West that would need solutions if we were to reclaim the net from Facebook and Google.
(Google no longer rejects or bans you for fake-sounding names, ever since the Google+ controversy, but it still enforces a Western-style first/last name instead of other cultures' name formats or single-part usernames.)
> Facebook's identity verification
in real life, do you need to know the real name of the cashier and see their contract so you can trust them with your payment? You don't, you use common sense.
> Google de-ranking link farms
hey, haha, and what do we get instead? Monopoly on ad-driven search engine, great, I'd rather have link farms since I can easily filter those out with little brain-power. I can't do that with paid-for-propaganda
Now imagine we'd leave the way it was, people would learn how to deal with it, the same way you learned you can't leave unlocked bicycle in a city. It's a price to pay for anonymity, and we should all have right to be anonymous on internet.
A couple of ideas I've had:
- Leverage PGP and trust rings for identity without a need for non-anonymity. This could be structured in a nuanced manner so that we respect pseudo-anonymity while also maintaining the integrity that real identity brings.
- A wholesale education of the populace, instead of an education by fear, of the power of anonymity and services which further anonymity.
- A move away from the advertising and services-exploitation business model. Not that we can't have service oriented businesses, but those businesses cannot be exploiting people to do labor and a bottom line price.
- A data ownership model which establishes a monetary value for different types of data. We already do data classification inside mega-corps, and we're able to establish and correlate it's sensitivity. Extrapolating this to value would not be stretch. Users consent which data they give up in exchange for services. The price for the service is adjusted based on what data they give up, and how they choose it will be used (Data for marketing may be more valuable than say data for behavior research, or even vice versa!)
Gmail spam filtering? Isn't particularly good. I run my own email infrastructure and I get way less spam through it than on my gmail address. And I don't do anything particularly special other than configure postfix correctly.
Recaptcha? Was there ever a more hated piece of user abusive technology? Plenty of rage against it here in many discussions. I won't do business anymore with any site that won't let me buy without identifying 27 traffic lights in slow motion (looking at you adorama). We're all better off if this dies.
Facebook verification? Don't know what value this brings to anyone other than FB.
Youtube? Granted.. Hopefully with bandwidth costs reducing over time, decentralization becomes more viable.
Paypal? Always pay with credit card directly. The regulatory consumer protection for that was well in place before internet commerce even took off.
The original potential of the internet was in its fully decentralized functionality. Usenet being a great example (owned by nobody, hosted peer to peer) which should be studied a bit more now that we have generations of developers coming up never having known it. Of course, it was (mostly) overrun by spam. But unlike email where spam is pretty much defeated, there was never a meaningful effort in addressing spam on Usenet (forums and mailing lists took over instead). Applying the same techniques to NNTP could well be equally successful.
If there is any desire to avoid the internet becoming fully a new cable-tv controlled by just a few major player we need to pursue research into decentralized services as a priority.
(If nothing else, consider at least running your own email infrastructure if you're technically capable. Keep the foot in the door so it doesn't close permanently.)
And while I hate using recaptcha, I also had the even more unpleasant experience of watching a forum that I moderated die under a crushing assault of spam bots that were smart enough to make it past the built-in CAPTCHA. Recaptcha isn't there to solve problems for the people who interact with it, it's solving problems for the people who chose to put it on their site.
I wrote in a sibling comment what value Facebook's login brings to the sites that opt into it. (Offload all the work of password handling, claims about stolen accounts, preventing sockpuppetry and catfishing, etc).
But there should be accessibility laws to prevent government agencies from blocking access to citizens/taxpayers using these proprietary technologies.
I don't know offhand of an open-source captcha library that's nearly as effective as reCAPTCHA. All the old "wavy lines through slanted text" ones are completely broken with current OCR techniques.
The problem with such opaque systems is that it can go terribly wrong, but the answer is to not centralize anything important; always keep a backup. After all, the cloud is someone else's computer.
Why?
edit: also, I have the battle scars from moderated a few niche online forums/properties that were mildly popular. People who abuse services are surprisingly tenacious and creative. If there is the potential to make money - even a little - you get abusers who are tenacious, creative and sophisticated
Unfortunately the devil’s advocate has brought us no closer to an understanding of the problems posed by OP: how to appeal an unknown violation, how to regain access to ones data, etc.
Disclaimer: not saying anything about the qualities of said services.
Not at all.
Being able to more efficiently access other systems and employees at your company than outsiders isn't "unjust" in any way.
Not being able to do so, seems very broken and weird. :(
Getting your account unbanned shouldn't require having an insider.
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There should be a clear reason for why an account is banned. When you're accused of a crime in a society, we don't just tell you to read abstract law. We tell you exactly what you've been accused of, such that you can defend yourself appropriately. There is this basic principle in English law that states:
- It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
What's been happening with many of these companies is that many guilty actually do escape, whilst many innocent actually still do suffer.
Although, in this case, I guess the guy was just looking for any qualitative explanation for how to fix the situation, not specifically asking for exceptions to policies to be made.
Couldn't that same argument be used to support secret laws and secret courts enforcing those secret laws? After all, we're definitely seeing the problem of people going as close as possible to the line without overstepping.
I think those laws would help tremendously, but mostly by forcing everyone to be overly cautious not to break them, creating strong chilling effects. They'd stifle freedom, and so does Google's secret law system.
To minimize fallout, I think it's more useful to split up Google along services (Search, Youtube, Gmail, Office/Suite etc). You could search for double plus ungood things on Google Search then without running the risk to loose access to your emails.
No need to have new secret laws - there are already enough obscure laws that I guarantee you have broken many of them whose statute hasn't expired. That is why you shouldn't speak to cops without a lawyer.
That said - it's not a Google problem as it's the norm. Most services, banks or even potential employers will tell you the reason for declining service - not because they want a chilling effect, but because there are so many ways it can get wrong (for them).
I've said this before here, I'm pretty libertarian, and very much in favor of small gov, but at this point its become clear that anyone who strives to become an internet platform where market dominance equals monopoly or duopoly, should be held to strict regulatory standards, re: free speech, appeals, etc. similar to what a gov entity is held to.
About that - the government can be pretty opaque. I too would like some strict regulatory standards to apply to the CBP.
And I'm definitely not "so sorry" about.
That means having another phone number, right? I tried to make a Google account for this kind of purpose, but had no way to receive the text they insist on without linking the new account directly to the old one.
I'm going to suggest (without any backup) that it's much more common but you simply don't hear about it.
> It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal
"You must understand, all problems are [user]'s own. If you only made certain to properly follow proper protocols, no such problems would exist!"
> but you don't know what you're being accused of doing.
"If there is a problem, fill out complaint form, and place it in an envelope addressed to the name of the hospital in which you were born."
# The Onion wasn't supposed be a prescient view of our future.
The "facts" are a bit misleading though. You won't hear stories like this when it isn't framed as a case of an algorithm gone rogue, and of course whether the billion-dollar shepherd assumes it is infallible or not is something being projected onto the story.
My Twitter account got disabled many months ago due to "suspicious activity". I did not do anything. At the time I talked to someone with whom I disagreed respectfully on a CS-related subject and was not political. Next thing that happens is that it asks me to verify via phone and only then I am able to use my account. I am not going to do that, so yeah.
What I believe happened is that he attempted to login to my account a few times, which triggered their bullshit...
I suspect if there would be enough demand for this service, a "grey" industry of people buying prepaid SIMs and renting access to them would appear.
This assumes there is a way to tell which numbers are prepaid or not. To the best of my knowledge they both originate from the same pool of numbers and it is impossible for an outsider to tell whether a given carrier's number is prepaid or postpaid.
The Internet has been the single best thing that has happened to the world ever. Information is effectively free now. It's given limitless opportunity to billions of people everywhere in the world, regardless of class or wealth or social status. Largely, the Internet itself is not discriminatory.
Sure, it has its downsides, like misinformation, and 1 in 10m people getting locked out of their accounts.
I lost my Google account, which was tied to my phone number (Google Voice), a few years ago. It sucked. But, honestly, it wasn't even as bad as losing my license.
I'll take free information for that.
Are you certain you two are speaking about the same concept?
Not "somehow". Our national leaders in the US since Google was created have been fabulously pro-business, to the extent that they have never updated our laws governing privacy for the computer age (IE, limiting what businesses can do with data) and they've gutted consumer protections along the way.
Since the US government is so thoroughly corrupted by money, once a corporation is large enough they can effectively write their own laws. Google and others have done this, so there's no law stating that they must give consumers rights in a dispute, must provide their data, or even must be fair.
Government + money = corruption.
This. And it happens in all businesses Google is part of. As a website owner who monetized with AdSense for a decade, this year their algorithms suddenly decided that 33% of the ad revenue was from "invalid clicks". The month before this happened, I was experimenting with a different ad provider. My suspicion is when I returned to AdSense the month-over-month increase in revenue tripped up the algo. Talking to Google reps was of no use because they have no control over the algo. I lost ~$12K in revenue over 2.5 months and eventually just stopped using Adsense.
"! We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon. If you would like to learn more, please see our community guidelines. To contact us about this decision, please email reviews - help@amazon.co.uk."
The 'community guidelines' link goes to a page with what the rules are, but doesn't say what rules have been broken.
We emailed Amazon, using the email address in the post and got this reply:
"I relayed your information to the team trained to handle this scenario regarding your inability to post reviews. They are not able to provide an exact date or time when they expect this issue to be resolved. For more information about our policies, please see our Community Guidelines (http://www.amazon.co.uk/review-guidelines) We appreciate your patience in this matter.
Warmest regards,"
'Warmest Regards'? Really - you just told me she's locked out and it's gonna stay like that for the foreseeable future. :(
An approved Google software update bricked it. This was, by all accounts, a known issue.
The phone was under warranty. I sent it back.
They shipped me a scratched up refurbished phone. It ran fine for a week then bricked itself due to the same software update. I sent that back.
They sent me another, even worse scratched up refurbished phone. That too bricked after a week due to the software update.
I've got $3,000 worth of hold charges on my CC whilst Google are playing footsie with my phones. I sent that phone back.
They "lost" it and claimed I sent back a different phone. Then that became that I sent back a phone with a different serial number. Then a different model of phone. I pressed for details but they could never tell me any details about the phone I had allegedly sent back.
They wanted me to pay for all the phones, then eventually just the one phone that was missing. Finally Google admitted "we lost the phone but that's your problem."
After a month I said "fine, you fix this shit or I am doing a charge back." They didn't fix it. I did a credit card charge back for the thousands of dollars currently on hold on my card.
Google decided to disable my Google payments account so I couldn't use the Playstore. Or buy groceries using Google Pay. Or process any subscription items attached to the Google payments account. Or access my store rewards cards stored in my Google Pay wallet.
Google still owed me for the cost of the original phone that was a brick that I no longer possessed after it was sent to Google.
I took Google to small claims, and won.
Google decided that wasn't to their liking and disabled the Google account attached to the phone.
Fuck Google.
P.S. Please stop up-voting. This is not a vote-worthy post. It is simply a "this is what happened." Save your attention for something that is worthy. Save your anger for things that matter.
Did you decide to go for Round 2 in small claims court and get the account un-disabled?
Sadly, you cannot do it in Small Claims Court. SCC cannot provide injunctive relief -- you can only sue for monetary relief.
To get an injunction to have the account unblocked, you'd have to sue Google in the big-boys Superior Court, and/or federal court, which may cost more and require having a proper lawyer.
Consumer abuse isn't an emergent property of algorithms. They're designed, by people, to abuse consumers.
remember if you do not pay for a service you are the product, and 90% of google services and algorithm's are deigned to control their product (aka the users)
This is the root of the problem; to google and their devs you the user are not a person, are not a human, you are just raw ore for them to mine, refine, pack and resell to their consumer the advertisers
The judiciary will not be happy with Google seemingly taking a reprisal against you for wining against them in small claims court.
It might be worth speaking to a lawyer to see if you can seek punitive damages.
This was me and my Nexus 5, like you I baby my phones and exercise care. An update bricked it, they sent me a scratched refurb with shaky buttons and a creaking case as a replacement. :-/
Could you share your process and arguments? I'd really like to pursue it while I still can.
If every consumer wronged by a supplier did this we wouldn't be having this discussion at all because suppliers would never let such problems happen or escalate that far.
Check Google's terms of service.[1] They're not too bad. There's no forced arbitration. You can go to Small Claims Court in Santa Clara County, CA.
Google lists the reasons they can terminate an account. It's not a "sole discretion" thing; they have specific reasons listed. So Google will have to show in court that you violated those terms.
Definitely go. Google will have to send someone, or they lose.
In practice, you'll probably have your problem fixed shortly after your process server delivers the subpoena to 1600 Amphitheater Parkway.
California small claims court instructions: [2]
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/small-cla...
> Most large national businesses can be sued in any state, but smaller businesses that are headquartered in another state, do no business in your state, and have no physical presence in your state can be sued only in the states where they operate.
Some other states do allow attorneys in SCC, however.
Keep in mind that anything you take to a Small Claims Court you can also take to to a Superior Court, where only lawyers are allowed, unless you're an individual, and are representing yourself.
Not every state bans lawyers from SCC. But in California, you'd only face a lawyer in SCC if you sue them for not returning your money, or they sue you for not paying them their fees.
With that said, the company can still pump tons of money into things behind the scenes, but because the stakes are so low, and not necessarily precedent-forming, they're not likely to actually invest that much money into fighting you. And even if they do and you lose, since you brought the lawsuit and there are no attorney fees, the most you'd end up spending is the court fees (potentially the company's court fees, but those are minimal too.)
https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1316569623593127937?s=...
The difference between Small Claims and Superior is that in the former you're generally not allowed to bring an attorney, whereas in the latter you may actually be required to bring one.
Does anyone know whether account suspension without a reason is actually something that a pro-se litigant has any chance of suing these big companies for, and winning at all?
That only applies to individuals.
Corporations are not only allowed, but in fact required to be represented by an attorney in court. Even small claims. Corporations do not have pro se representation rights, and only an attorney can represent another person.
The thing that may be daunting about Superior Court is that the judge is supposed to take it easy on pro-se litigants, but at the same time, they are still supposed to be impartial, and can't really act as your own lawyer.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_1...
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...
It might also have been a good idea to wait out until it was no longer possible to appeal the decision, before going public with the outcome.
IANAL, but I think there was still a good chance that the guy could have won an appeal if he had appropriate counsel represent his case, using appropriate discovery and other instruments to properly mount a defence.
Google allows this for GSuite at $5/mo I think.
I guess they get the same treatment
i.e. Google's unlikely to hand over the dossier they've assembled on 'what your husband has been up to that we considered bad enough to shut down their account'
Most definitely not saying this isn't a false positive - but the handling process for it it must assume it's a positive.
Now why the poster's husband can't get the info - that is somewhat worrysome.
- it's weird to be mistreated by your employer's own product (just the irony bend to it)
- if you want to appeal after a dead end, your choice is to make a huge public PR nightmare, or try to make an internal post/plea that gains traction. you'd be doing your own employer a service if you could have this issue resolved without a PR nightmare
I was in a similar situation when I worked at Google. My brother kind of disappeared, and my family asked if we could at least check if he logged into Gmail. I asked and was told no, and I understood why -- it's up to my brother to share what he's up to, not Google. (My brother was fine; just didn't like replying to email or answering his phone.)
If you're not going to use that data when you get an opportunity like this to fix something, what's dogfooding and "trusted testers" all about?
It's sticking in your head in the sand out of a misguided attempt at being unbiased, instead of fixing things.
Companies serve the shareholders. Shareholders want to spend as little money as possible on user support. I think new regulations are a good way to solve this problem for everyone. US consumer protection laws need updating for the Internet age.
It's been 20 years this month, I'm still waiting for a response.
Now every time I have the opportunity to make a case against using any Google service in a business I'm working in... and I worked in a few big Telecom and IT businesses for the past 15 years, like the first internet provider in my country.
One account from the middle of the batch, while I was the _only_ one with access and definitely had not done anything unusual with it (and certainly nothing we hadn't done with the other half dozen accounts) was banned before we could provide it to the client.
I opened a ticket with the accounts team and didn't get a reply. I escalated through our AdWords contact since account support was, as expected, useless. Figured given overall our company spent millions a year maybe they could at least get this looked at. They were apologetic, but realistic in telling us that there was basically nothing that could be done and it was unlikely anyone would ever respond to the ticket so we should probably just register another Google account and cross our fingers that one didn't get banned.
Found the old email the other day. Just passed 6 years with no response from the accounts team.
I was on the receiving end of a similar issue with Google Pay Support for Android and it took weeks for Google to unblock in-app-purchase transactions, even via internal escalations from friends who work there. I guess I should count my blessings that it got cleared up at all.
The casual cruelty and opacity is just ridiculous. Surreal and bizarre that this extends even to their own employees. I really do hope this finally serves as a wakeup call for Google, but I'm not holding my breath.
Just create a new account - no one is ever going to care.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465
The underlying reason in that instance, was the mistaken identification of childporn.
https://nhwn.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/the-thomas-monopoly-af...
That’s some nostalgia for me, used to read almost every post of his blog. I see his last post was about an year back.
Say, if you can get into an annual plan, similar to what's there for hardware devices like Apple Care+. Just that, in this there is someone to help you through issues.
We used to pay 10% of our AWS bill for the AWS support plan because when you needed the help, it really made sense to have someone looking at it with some SLAs.
A second option is, Google can just make consumer Gmail as an ad free paid service and then provide support for it as well. Plenty of people are paying $10/month for email services, so we have a price point that works for people. Email is very crucial to online identity, and I would trust Google the most with security among the other providers so I would happily pay for it.
Edit: As someone pointed out, they have Google One at least for storage. It has proper support. Maybe it makes sense to extend it for other services as well. https://one.google.com/about
It wouldn't, because Google is averse to any kind of customer support even for paying services. Even the "support" people that get attached to highly paid YouTube, GSuite, and other accounts get regularly stonewalled like this person and cannot help.
The only solution? Make sure all of your data is always backed up somewhere else.
I'm basically down to email and some old Google Drives I need to clean out. Found a project in this thread that should help me with the Drives, just working on email now..
I'd happily pay for some sort of assurance -- "if you violate our TOS, we'll just put your email in receive-only mode" or something like that.
The other nice thing about this is you can be bob@domain.com rather than bob2746293@gmail.com and you can provide email accounts to your family and friends.
GANDI themselves once accused me of ToS violation because one account uses my initials ( as on my bank account ) instead of my forenames that they demanded. I migrated everything out of that account ASAP.
Ideally you need two completely different domains ( to avoid potential trademark issues ) in two different TLDs at two registrars.
You should have just put a full stop after that.
I've heard support is much better for GCP - but for me, the whole Google brand is tarnished, and because of my experiences with Adwords, I always choose Azure and/or AWS over GCP.
However the reps were pretty up front that as soon as a support issue crossed the line onto any other team at Google... you best just figure out a workaround, because even once we'd already crossed the threshold and had someone inside Google working on our behalf, there was just nothing that could be done.
And yeah, this has led me to be extremely resistant to moving _any_ infrastructure we care about to GCP. I have zero faith my account won't just be suddenly banned one day with no effective recourse. And I'd also never recommend any "paid support" option they offered like some people are suggesting they provide, because I'd have no faith in their support team being able to actually solve the sorts of issues that are hard for people to solve on their own.
Whenever there is a systemic problem, fixing the system is always a better solution than trying to fix individual behaviors. Backing things up is a good idea but that doesn’t fix the problem, it just helps mitigate some of the effects of the problem.
If you insist on using Google, keep backups elsewhere. You cannot rely on them for support (although you might be able to get it, don’t count on it).
I found it easier to move everything to Office 365. Google Takeout can export all data directly to OneDrive without having to download anything.
This right here is amazing and describes very well the moment in time we are living in. When using a Microsoft file format is [righly] considered the "open", "friendlier" option it really means the alternative [Google] is terrible. Microsoft used to be the Evil Borg that had everything proprietary.
Want support for working with AWS? The more you pay the better it gets.
In my experience, people transfer money to other people in exchange for items or services, and vice versa.
Storage is paid, so I assume support is available.
https://medium.com/bling-financial/google-has-threatened-to-...
I suppose I could roll my own solution, but frankly I get tired of maintaining my one-off projects like that after a year or two.
Wiki mentions Gmail having 1.5 billion users. Imagine even 100M of them paying $100 per year. Makes Gmail a $10B product just on paid subscriptions, that is not a small amount.
Are you saying the software to perform the syncing costs more than a few dollars per month?
The operational costs could be more than that per user if you want regular updates. That's disregarding engineering time.
You also don't want it to be VC backed because such businesses will not be worth billions. (and if it will try to become such you will have similar problems as google)
Only in the event that Google locks you out, at which point you can create a new backup elsewhere. If Google has a copy and you have a physical copy, then Google would have to lock you out at the very same moment your house burns down for you to lose any data.
Regardless of where you store your personal data, the proverbial buck always stops at your desk when it comes to assuming responsibility.
Paying someone else to store your data gives you someone to hold accountable to what happens to your data. But that accountability is always limited and doesn't dismiss you from managing that relationship. For instance, the other party is still entirely free to bring terms and conditions to the table, which are meant to mitigate liablity as far as the party which will host your content is concerned.
Put more succinctly, even when you rely on a cloud service, you're still on the hook to assure safety and backups of your own data.
> I suppose I could roll my own solution, but frankly I get tired of maintaining my one-off projects like that after a year or two.
Yeah, I'm gonna prod you on that one. :-)
For e-mail, you could run an script once a month that harvest all your e-mails over IMAP and roll them into TXT, HTML, EML,... whatever. You could go for one big file, or discrete files. You could even pain yourself and fit everything in an mbox file. Roll everything in a ZIP or TAR ball. Then you'd store output file in whatever service you want.
You could spin up a VPS, provision the entire thing and set up a script that does all that as some service or cron job or whathaveyou. Now you've got an entire stack to take care off. Not what you want.
Maybe this is a good use case to go serverless. You could string something together using AWS serverless. Write an AWS Lambda in Python or Java. Should be one single script. Store your e-mail backups in S3 or somewhere else.
The idea of such a solution is that it just runs in the background and it runs in a robust fashion with not too many moving parts. So, here you have something running indefinitely as long as the bill gets paid. Or amazon doesn't cut you off. But at least you've now got your e-mail mirrored on two independent services, which is marginally better then where you are right now. The only other major constraint here is being able to restore your e-mail from that backup in case of disaster.
Otherwise I recommend using your own cloud storage buckets and/or a local NAS to store your data. It's easy enough to backup and sync across all of them now with various tools and services.
Support and customer experience is an afterthought for Google. They probably don't set out to be cruel, but they're very cavalier about incidental casual cruelty.
I probably could try to bisect if there is a specific type of data that prevents Takeout on my account, but I haven't bothered as I think I have all the important data otherwise backed up.
In theory it's great in practice you don't have access to it.
So you just need to configure the takeout once a year and you'll automatically receive a backup once every two month.
The amount of money you need to pay google a year to change that attitude runs in the six digits.
Here’s the reality. Cable companies have methods of verifying their customers identity when they deal with support requests for private services. Banks have a very good verification process. Phone providers use tools like pin codes and other methodology (see https://www.removemyphone.com/learn/prevent-your-phone-numbe... for instance) to solve this problem. Domain name services (even Godaddy and the like) have figured out how to largely solve this verification problem despite their numerous other shady business practices.
Are you telling me that Google with their many geniuses can’t find a technical approach to dealing with this? We have multi-factor authentication and other tools. People are willing to pay money for human support.
I can’t believe that Google can’t figure out some means of providing this. Their refusal to me is one of the most evil business practices on the Internet while they pretend that they’re the paragon of virtue. It’s really sick to me and hopefully this case is a wake up call to at least one Google employee how backward and customer unfriendly their overall practices are.
They've done that, as they have both business and personal (the latter as a component of Google One) paid support plans.
With no new input from the user, how could anything change?
Has anyone tried "Try to restore" and had it ... work?
As far as I know, the reason no company divulges information like this is to stop the endless protests and appeals from people. Dealing with people who believe they've done nothing wrong even though they have is tiresome and expensive and the more information you give them, the more ammunition they have to protest.
The result is innocent people like (presumably) OP's husband getting shafted by a short email without any details, but it's finanicially unattractive to change the system so without court or legislative action I doubt Google will improve their services any time soon.
The Sixth Amendment applies to criminal action by the government. Google isn’t the government, and even if we were to pretend they were, they are neither applying a criminal law nor imposing the kind of punishments which are inherently criminal no matter how the law authorizing them is characterized, so the Sixth Amendment is far from applicable.
Were they the government, either 5th (federal) or 14th (state) Amendment due procesos rights might be an issue, but, again, Google is not the government.
Tutanota was the one service I found that let you add (IIRC) arbitrary amounts of storage to your plan, but I found their web interface to be kinda clunky, and let the account expire. I keep wanting to look into this again, but never get around to it.
There's no official Linux client, but there are open source ones that perform well.
You could drop your mbox onto a OneDrive sync and then use fetchmail or similar to rip it out of your provider. Each email could be individually encrypted, so you won't have to deal with a 500gb blob to sync.
This is what it took:
* Connect to Outlook and sync locally
* Sort All Mail by sender
* Delete All Mail per senders that aren't important
It took me a day, and I'm glad I did it. Not that painful. Outlook was a champ through the whole process.
Now I can move somewhere else, which I will.
I remember services available 5+ years ago that would help you with this kind of thing (scanning through email archives by sender), but the ones I remember have all morphed into "tame your inbox" apps, which doesn't solve the same problem.
It's fairly easy to extract your data.
I use Outlook to access it on my work PC, the Android app on my phone, and the web interface elsewhere. Seems quite usable and painless, to me; even search.
But then, I fastidiously organize my email and so I don't need to rely on "smart" , privacy violating, deeply intrusive search.
My gold standard is mutt with its powerful and fast search filters (gmail is a serious downgrade).
Protonmail's lack of search is crippling.
Email export ... I don't even want to think about.
With a paid account it is trivial to export your emails as well: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/export-import-...
I still use a Google account for my Android phone, but my PinePhone should be shipping in a few weeks.
I'm done with Google. Good riddance.
You have no effective recourse should Google Googleify your Gmail account.
Somehow related - long, long time ago in one of Google services I've used an account bound to my 'external' email that I've been using actively back then. Just few days ago I had a need to login to this service. I know my login (and I still have access to those e-mail), I know my password, but since I haven't used that account for a few years Google wants to send me a verification code on some phone number. Even that the last 2 digits displayed by Google on the verification screen match my phone number apparently I've made a mistake back then and provided a wrong phone number. There is a zero possibility to contact a human person at Google support and their docs in general provide a gentle 'fuck off'. I understand (somewhat...) the scale they operate at, security concerns and hey, I'm not a customer really here. Still it is rather infuriating that I cannot do anything. Fortunately the account and that service is not that important... :/
I've started to untangle myself from Google services some time ago and this incident will only accelerate this. Unfortunately - in general - our dependency on digital services will only increase anyway. With so many services providing some kind of 'free' tiers and all the effort needed to backup your stuff spread across so many accounts it will only get worse.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/british-police-station-mocked-...
It's illegal to sell a knife to someone under 18! As a Canadian, I owned a half dozen pocket knives by the time I was 10, and took them camping and so forth.
It's illegal for an adult to carry a knife without good reason! I carry one on me all the time, because I often need one.
It blows my mind how far down the authoritarian rabbit hole they're going, rather than addressing the root causes of violence.
Public authorities are at least theoretically accountable to the public, unlike a billion-dollar megacorp which isn't accountable to any force on this planet.
A public authority is required to reply to requests unless there is explicitly a gag order. Of course the reply may be _the account is disabled as part of ongoing criminal investigation_ but again, once everything's done they will be required to disclose information.
Couldn't figure out yet...
The reason is that despite being a corporate costuemer we don't pay enough to have access to support, and some issues we had, the only thing the FAQ and documentation did was redirect us to a page behind payment.
I self host email using the standard dovecot/postfix
Barring that. I still have my gmail account.
I had this issue a couple of times (with Comcast IIRC) in the early oughts (somehow I found myself on a RBL/DNSBL). I resolved that fairly quickly.
I haven't had problems since. Just to make sure, I implemented SPF/DKIM/DMARC in my DNS zones. And I'm sure implementing DNSSec didn't hurt either.
And except for those few times 15-20 years ago, my environment has worked like champ.
One assumes that it will require no more effort than when your Google account tanks or gets hacked?
Preferably, you should use your own domain (atleast for signing up).
Or use something like Tutanota [0], only for signing up for stuff. They have a very generous free plan. You should open it only to verify new accounts, and for 'forgot password' links.
[0]- https://tutanota.com
As a side question, to those who use google drive or similar, how do you stand it? I hate having to click through a bunch of dialogues to do stuff. Just being able to use a plain HTTP link is much better. I put stuff I want private in a directory that requires HTTP basic auth and it's so much easier. I can copy to/from on a phone by VPNing into my house and using a samba client. So much easier.
Use fastmail for email: it's best of breed outside of gmail. (This isn't damning with faint praise; it's quite good. Just not as good as gmail).
Use Arq for backup from your devices into google cloud storage or aws s3.
But as long as you're using an @gmail.com address as your digital identity, your access to all of your online accounts is tied up in that single arbitrary point of failure, to a company that does not view you as a valuable customer.
(Apparently that's coming this year! https://hey.com/custom-domains/)
It's run by the same company as Rimuhosting and Zonomi, if you're familiar with either.
Then the trust is placed in your registrar. Maybe that's where the trust should be placed from your perspective, but do note that you're still choosing to trust another organization who's interests may not totally align with yours.
The likelihood of loosing a domainname in my country (Germany) is fairly low unless you used it to actively (and provably) spread malware or commit other crimes (and your registrar will have to prove it and better hope they filed a police report, or their cancellation goes poof).
I don't upload any photos or other files anymore, though. The problem is that you can never fully trust those cloud providers to keep the data safe, so you need other backups anyways. I was thinking about using a more trustworthy service for off-site backups though.
Also having a backup of the email messages is very handy.
I work at a bank and it's absolutely critical that we do not let anyone know of our reasons for banning/suspending accounts while there's fraud investigations on the account.
Investigations take a long time since we need to determine if the fraud/criminal actions were 100% done by the user of the account, or if the account was compromised and was used as a proxy. 90% of the times we find it's a third party takeover and the user is cleared. There's a good chance his husband's account was taken over and someone was using his Drive to host pirated movies.
Think about the other side when thinking about a situation like this. I'm sure Google is taking this very seriously.
Every human deserves an email account, linked to if not publicly exposing their real identity, access to which is not revocable except by court order.
Not too sure about that. There are some pretty poorly behaved people in the world that like hurting people for various reasons (including none.) I'd rather things stay on the anonymity side.
Does anyone know an estimate of how likely this is to happen to an individual on a per year basis?
Obviously that risk will change as the organization changes, but if it's happening to a couple hundred good faith accounts a year I'd probably put it off for quite some time.
There's zero chance Google would ever volunteer this information, anything you see on here is probably a WAG at best.
I had exactly one Google account and I lost it - along with all data - too. So for me it is one out of one.
No reason given. They just don't let me log in anymore.
I would say closer to 70 million
I want to negotiate, but since you started with such a low number, it won't be worth it.
700 million people only from my country (India) would be a good start if you want to continue.
How small is the question.
I have cell service on Google Fi. Long, painful (still-ongoing) story short, they shipped me a Pixel 4a that had no cell service. I went back and forth with support for ten days. Then they shipped me a replacement phone. I confirmed my current address. They sent me a shipping notification for my current address. FedEx ended up delivering the package, no signature required, to a town I used to live in five years ago. I double checked and my current address is the only one on the account.
Going back and forth with support has been useless. I paid for a phone that doesn't work, and I'm being charged for service that I can't use. My last recourse is to refute the payments with my CC company....but that also seems like the quickest way to get my entire Google/YT/Google Fi account locked up because it's all tied together.
Yes, one of the places that I back up photos is google photos and I pay them $ for that.
I'm assuming you think that is an important thing to condition on?
I am not planning on refuting any charges that google gives me any time soon and would try and back up all of my data before doing that.
Even in a case similar to mine, visiting takeout.google.com before doing anything with billing is always a great idea :)
They can and sometimes will shut you off with no reason given, no access to your data, and no recourse (& NO, appealing when no charges are specified, and no info or reasoning for their decision other than "yup we confirmed you violated our TOS", is not recourse, even in a Kafka world).
This guy can get nothing even though he works at Google.
It isn't like these major companies are short of funds to provide actual customer service, they just refuse to do so, basically saying "what are you going to do about it?".
It's a Devil's Bargain, and too many buy it.
Seems plenty of people around here think it is a good idea to leave critical functions to a company where you are the product.
Edit: minutes later some upvotes too, so controversial, it seems. If there's a counter-case (other than convenience and "low" risk, I'd like to see it
I found a way to view this if you have a paid admin account for your organization, but I don't see a way to view a list of previous OAuth granted requests for a free Google account.
I'm not sure if it's a complete list however, as I use "sign in with google" for almost nothing (for exactly this reason).
Phone numbers are just sequential numbers, that are assigned to carriers, when consumers transfer numbers the carriers just re-assign ownership via an assignment swap.
An email address by contrast is an undefined/minimally defined identifier in front of an @ and the message is just thrown to the domain to do something with.
Which is to say, mobility is impossible, because there's no cross-vendor standard for the identifier part and even if there was, both parts make up an email address which would send it to the wrong vendor anyway.
It is like having a phone number that ended with a network specific postfix and using it to route at the network level. It would make phone numbers non-transferable too.
I use it for years, because it's a very liberating feeling to OWN YOUR DATA and not be in a risk of something like this. It's even more convenient than any cloud drive I tried.
But this is a distant memory, and nowadays I avoid relying on any single big corporation for anything. Particularly I avoid Google.
My main email is in my own domain(s) (paid in intervals of ten years) with gandi.net.
Using Duck duck go everywhere I can.
I have an Android phone by necessity and because there is no real alternative. I download all my pictures and store them with pCloud instead. No G-drive or Dropbox, as I can't trust these services at all.
My Gmail account is used for things that can get spam. All important accounts are in the email of my domain(s).
If Google decides to cancel my Google account, it would be a minor nuisance, mainly related to reinstalling the smartphone apps with another account, and that's it.
It’s not as easy and robust as it should be, but it helps me sleep a tad bit better at night.
From GSuite click the 9 grid dot application menu and choose Account. Go to "privacy & personalization". Find "Download or delete your data" section and click the "Download your data" link. Seems to be a comprehensive download system including everything I could imagine (including my gmail history which is probably most important).
If anyone knows how to automate this, (e.g. to my local machine using a script, or iCloud/Dropbox) I would love to hear it.
But ... seeing this kind of thing, I need to reconsider and at least keep a monthly backup or something ... as far as you know, it's not even going to be your fault when you get locked out, so you shouldn't assume it just won't happen to you.
> And this is how it ends. No one fucking tells me to assume good intent ever again. Fuck all of this. Our lives are in a bind because of this BULLSHIT
Tiniest violin.
Too many Googlers like him (and here on HN) mistakenly believe they're not evil, just because of that motto (which Google removed) and because the workforce is full of progressive agitators.
Are you sure? The image in the tweet linked seems to me like the login screen you get on desktop, not a mobile notification.
Nobody is claiming that. Malice is not the issue here; the issue is the effect of having an account banned without recourse or transparency.
What I'm saying is there shouldn't be outrage until we figure out that the OP isn't lying, which there seems like there is reasonable doubt for. Because for very evil circumstances I wouldn't expect there to be transparency either for legal reasons.
The difference? You own the data on your own drive.
Getting information on this stuff is difficult, given the blank check the NSA has had from 1959 onwards: https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/516064-stat...
Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Address is misinterpreted by many and totally forgotten by others. Please listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyBNmecVtdU
Google banning accounts stories is usually a one-sided thing. Who knows if Google had a very good reason to ban his account.
But even if this were the case, it is pretty unfair to not at least know what you are being accused of.
If someone's actually in charge there, they need to really do a big shake up in whatever team deals with these fraud and account closures as they've been ruining the brand
The key takeaway is to not to get reliant on any service (free or paid) without having a backup plan if it went away.
The final response from them just says it was a ToS violation: https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315988742545514496
So all of his husband's data, including "very important and irreplaceable" personal photos, are inaccessible due to a presumed ToS violation. I wonder that violation could be...
Tech companies love to be roach motels for your data. They want to lull you into dependence on their platform for mostly innocent reasons. If they have something you need make sure you have your own copy.
"Not going to tell you. But if you apologize, I might unpunish you."
Hmmm... Abusive relationship much Google?
One day they just stopped letting me log in.
They show me a text saying that to log in, I have to give them my phone number. Well, I don't want to give my phone number to Google. When I signed up, it was not stated anywhere that one day they might hold all my data randsom and blackmail me to give them my phone number.
Gmail is not that great anyway, it’s too heavy to use their webmail and using IMAP is a major pain due to their stupid labels and not having real folders.
Is there a service (other than Facebook) that has this capability?
Is there a technology that we should be driving adoption of that would allow me to host my own SSO?
OpenID was that technology, but it didn't really get any adoption. OpenID Connect seems to be the replacement based upon OAuth, and seems to be pretty easy to implement if you already support OAuth.
So you can easily set up your own SSO, but nobody will let you use it to log in.
What is different about Amazon?
https://www.businessinsider.in/retail/furious-customers-say-...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121022/07340420786/amazo...
seriously I just checked the google takeout page and saw a looong list of services. I would be devastated if somebody were to 'disable' my google account.
Of course, we are small SaaS and not Google but sadly I’m not aware of a better solution.
It sounds like they're at the point where they are supposed to contact a friend who writes for the New York Times, or similarly prominent outlet, to have a story written about their predicament.
This usually resolves the issue, but if it does not, they should run for and win a U. S. Senate seat, then forward the details of their issue on official Senate letterhead.
I thought it would be implied since GP was not serious either.
> Our lives are in a bind because of this BULLSHIT
> I am out of office reconsidering whether I should work at a company that continuously escalates its attacks towards my family.
> [looking for]... A company that provides a steady salary and respects me, my nationality, culture, ethnicity, sexuality and my family
It's very hard to take this stuff seriously when someone is claiming lack of access to to their emails and photos is an attack on their life, family, sexuality, etc.
There's emotion there, but I don't see their words as being beyond the pale.
No. Don't use the cloud for that.
"But maybe we can fix the cloud by adding more cloud to the cloud, so that we can back up the cloud to the cloud?"
No. Stop using the cloud.
"But I have (hundreds of gigs of photos|twenty years of emails) there! I was going to pour a glass of nice Chablis and gingerly sift through them all on a Tuesday evening!"
No. Stop using the cloud.
"But I'm working on the next Great American Novel and I couldn't possibly be tasked with syncing a backup of it to a USB stick!"
No. Stop using the cloud, damnit! How hard is it to understand?
Personally ethics play a big role in my happiness, but I acknowledge and appreciate that being able to chose is a rare privilege.
EDIT: Grammar