Google users locked out after 15 years' use
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I started a side business with some friends during lockdown. We created an online store selling some hard-to-get long tail items, and almost instantly got some traction and growth thanks to Google Shopping. A month ago we received one of these generic automated mails that our account is banned and we were misrepresenting ourselves or a product with no details on what we did wrong. We went through the T&C's in some detail and we think we did everything they asked, and we have no idea what we didn't do well enough. We also checked in with every single client and we had near perfect scores on trust pilot, I can't recall a single incident with a client.
We've been contacting Google almost daily but almost never been able to find a human to talk to. Through unofficial channels we've found a few people in Goolge but whenever they gave us any advice on what to do it's always "off the record" or "you didn't hear it from me". Something is very rotten.
There are always replies on here about not betting your entire business on Google. Google shopping gives 2 orders of mag better conversion than any other channel we tried. For search-to-buy there really just aren't any alternatives and if Google decides to lock you out your business is basically dead. Lucky for us it was a side hustle. Here in Africa e-bay and Amazon aren't options.
More scary, since then we've found TONS of businesses in our country who have suffered the same fate in the last month, and many are well-established, popular businesses now facing existential threat.
It's incredibly scary that Google's moderation bots can be a single point of failure for a business employing 20+ people.
If I were to guess, you failed to implement ads.txt and/or your content didn't meet the standards required by some big advertisers, so auction pressure was very low for your site.
Then, they’d suffer political blowback for being anti-LGBT.
It sounds like Google is laundering third party behavior that is further dividing our society.
Perhaps advertisers should be forced (by the government, on all algorithmic platforms) to publish their targeting criteria.
Companies aren't people.
As a potentially better example, if a higher than typical number of LGBTQIIAA+ are likely to be vetegarian/vegan, then excluding them from meat based product advertising might be better use of dollars spent.
Just because an advertiser doesn't want to advertise among contentious groups doesn't mean they are being bigoted about their targeting, it likely comes down to not being worth it due to limited response from those markets.
http://www.smbceo.com/2011/03/14/25-million-small-businesses...
Not sure if they are people though
Prior to ad networks that automatically match advertisers to display space, yes.
The thing is, though, prior to ad networks, there were a lot fewer advertisers who were interested in spending time and money on doing this song and dance with a slew of tiny web properties. Most of them wouldn't even bother.
You can have no ad networks, or you can have a long tail of low-prominence websites earn ad revenue. Pick one.
2. A low prominence local newspaper has local businesses advertising in it. Your local auto mechanic on Walker Street will buy an ad in a local paper, but they aren't going to spend a penny to advertise directly on your website, even if it has the same readership #s as the paper. Because 99.9% of your website's visitors aren't within driving distance of their location.
The ad network [1] solves problem #2, by making it possible for geographically-constrained businesses to buy ad inventory on websites that only get a handful of clicks from their geographical area.
Yes, ad networks introduce plenty of problems, as people in this thread point out. [2]
No, nobody will advertise on your 1,000-50,000 reader/day website without going through an ad network. Small advertisers aren't going to pay anything for an untargeted impression, and large brand advertisers aren't going to waste their time [3] on so few impressions.
[1] I am speaking about the industry as a whole.
[2] I could mention a few other problems that people in this thread haven't pointed out, too, but that's neither here nor there.
[3] Not to mention that without going through an ad network, and by directly dealing with the website operators, making reports of your ad spend + ROI becomes a colossal pain in the ass. People who work for large advertisers are just trying to do their job, and their job consists of making their boss happy. Something that does not make their boss happy is being unable to quickly say how much money they spent, and what they got for that spend.
Perhaps their entire strategy was accidentally optimizing for a keyword that was highly valuable for a short while, who knows?
For a short while YouTubers would mention getting a mortgage in the middle of their video just to improve the rate by tricking the algorithm into showing expensive mortgage related ads.
Near enough, yes. Sure, there are millions of lines of code, and I did not read every one, but I debugged enough issues that I'm sure I would have come across this capping effect if it existed and affected more than some dormant/test accounts.
Not saying that's what happened but there's definitely motive.
Well, my site is mostly text based and I have at least 50px of space around any advertisement, so they stick out like a sore thumb and are not confusing. Eventually the daily clicks returned, but then in the last year Google started taking back 80% of my revenue at the end of the month saying it's "Invalid Traffic". This is after years of it being around 5%. I've made no changes to the site, all the traffic is organic from Google search or direct visitors. I've never once in my life paid for traffic.
I contacted Google again, but they refused to give any information because they can't share specifics for security reasons. So, I'm left losing 80% of my revenue this year and instead of making about 50k after my bills, I'll break even or make a loss.
Since then I tried switching to another company that's an AdSense partner. Of course they take a commission, but apparently they can actually show me the daily earnings with "Invalid Traffic" removed, and not give me a monthly heart attack and remove all my revenue as a surprise at once.
So, I can see how little I'm making on a daily basis now, but I'm no closer to resolving the issue because Google refuses to give any answers, so I'm completely on my own and taking shots in the dark.
The other week I tried building a database of 800 million IP addresses using lists of all IP addresses from datacenters, VPNs, proxies, TOR exit nodes, and IPs flagged as abusive. This obviously took some time to setup and I stopped showing ads to these IPs because maybe they're bad sources of traffic? That didn't seem to help.
Then I tried setting up some Javascript to not load ads until the mouse moved or a user scrolled. Maybe that would help to prevent any traffic where a user is not at the computer? Nope, didn't work.
So, I'm out of ideas. Yes, I have ads.txt configured. Yes, I have a consent manager configured.
> Your revenue is the literal sum of earnings from every click on your property. While ads are showing and being clicked on, you will always be earning more.
What you said sounds simple. However, like I said, Google can randomly drop my clicks from a consistent 500 a day to 3 and give no answers. Or, they can tell me I'm earning $250/day and then when it comes time to pay a month later, they say they can only pay $50/day and the traffic didn't meet their standards. That's a big problem when they just spent the entire month outbidding all my other advertisers.
Lastly, the site I run is filled with great people. It's a community based website with tens of millions of comments. Users on average spend 10 minutes per session, the bounce rate is incredibly low, the average user loads 30 pages a day. People like it, it's full of quality content and posts, and users are writing new comments every few seconds.
This isn't going to work well... Both Google and many advertisers will send bots to your site to scan the content. If they see javascript shenanigans going on affecting ad presentation, they'll do something between not advertising (reducing revenue) or permabanning you...
"Invalid Traffic" is nearly always some dirty business going on - either by you, or by one of your users, or a competitor, or even someone totally random hoping to blend their fraud in with some legit sites like yours.
If I were you, I'd hunt your logs for botlike behaviour and close any associated user accounts.
I wonder if they returned the money to the advertisers.
Likewise just having content Google deems unacceptable doesn't mean you aren't owed an explanation of the policy. "Hey, sorry, we've decided that blogs on breast feeding violate our policies on content and we won't be allowing you to run ads" is certainly better than silence.
That said, my point is that there is likely something specific to the OP blog that is the reason for Google turning off the ad dollars rather than the counter argument: some arbitrary nefarious business decision by a large corporation to the shut down the owner's blog revenue source to the point that OP is concerned that they will be removed from the platform as a result.
I get the sense that the content is missing part to the story.
I emphatically don't agree with this, but this seems to be the line of reasoning with a lot of things. The reality that much of science is never truly "settled" doesn't really matter.
On the one hand, I feel there are a lot of leeches to society that hop on trends to pull money from unsuspecting victims and under-delivering. On the other, I am very much opposed to corporations that half the population uses daily acting as broad censors of information.
I can't stand the censoring by tech giants. It's applied unequally, there is no recourse, and it merely serves to enforce the orthodoxy and drive dissent underground. Honestly it's like the church in the middle ages. What a dystopian moment we're living through when monopoly corporations wield that power in society.
Facebook specifically can go to hell. They're making money by selling people's precious time to advertisers at pennies on the dollar. Jewel thieves pawning stolen goods at 10% of their value is less wasteful to society as a whole. I know they don't force anyone to use their services, but neither do the tobacco companies. They just get people addicted to their product. Just because it's legal doesn't make it ethical.
Love or hate TikTok, the reason it's become so big is that their algorithm actually promotes organic growth instead of hindering it.
In any case, I'm using FB and Twitter far less these days than even a couple years ago. I happen to like debate, and discussion of competing ideas. Now it's all ad hominem attacks and vitriol. While I do sometimes engage, I simply don't enjoy it and don't fit well into the echo chambers.
I never monetized it, but it got quite a few users and I definitely could have started a path to monetization. I had ideas, such as incorporating location-based ads.
Unfortunately Chrome decided at one point it was malware for some reason. I have no idea why. On the backend I had a 1-hour time limit on files and didn't store either files or location data beyond that. Chrome would throw up a malware warning whenever someone visited the page, and that was pretty much the end of the project.
It's frustrating that they play gatekeepers to the internet, and they don't even have a fair arbitration process. They should have at least made efforts to contact the owner of the website. This should be downright illegal.
There was a similar story last month about someone running a URL shortener. It started being used to obfuscate links to porn and scams. Then it got blocked by twitter/facebook and that's the end of the road for the service.
If their spider were treating sites fairly, it’d also block google search, and the chrome team wouldn’t budge on the decision even though the rest of the company collapsed.
I hope the anti trust investigators focus on these sorts of instead of some trivially-bypassed thing, like bundling.
After the botched MS antitrust suit, I’m not holding my breath.
Still, I don't think it's right for Google to use their iron feet to stomp an entire website / product / small business / personal project just because of a small fraction of users abusing that service.
ALL services get abused at some point or another during their growth. Learning to deal with those abuses one at a time is a part of the growth of any product and nobody can be expected to have prevented all forms of abuse upfront. If the owners (e.g. me) were made aware of the specific piece of malware I would have definitely done something about it.
Seems like an extremely easy way to make copious amounts of shady cash if you've got that magic ban button at Google.
Its the same in the UK where I used to work (British Telecom) criminals used to approach call centre workers to get info.
The massive paradigm shift that occurred once these companies grabbed prominence in commerce is to go from a system where humans interacted with humans in business-to-business commerce to solve problems to a cold, hard, heartless and decidedly dangerous totalitarian algo-driven relationship.
In "the old days", if a publisher had a problem with an ad from advertiser they would contact them to discuss, let them know what the issue might have been and seek resolution for mutual benefit. I other words, adults doing business with adults.
Not so with these companies. They are brutal and cold and have no problem destroying any business at any time for any reason. I have seen this happen to acquaintances enough times on these platforms to be absolutely astounded that we haven't yet seen the mother of all class-action lawsuits. And it would be a big one.
I know people who have gone from having nice lifestyle businesses to loosing virtually all due to one of these platforms suspending their account with no explanation, no conversation and no recourse whatsoever. One day you are putting food on your table and taking care of your kids and the next Monday at 7:00 AM you are on your way to losing it all.
I've said this many times, I am definitely not for the government having their hands on everything. No way. However, this, to me, has become a situation where government needs to become involved ASAP. It isn't getting any better. We need legislators to exercise judicious control over some of these practices. These company have such command of the marketplace that if they suspend or ban someone they might as well not exist. That kind of power should not be allowed to be wielded as capriciously as these companies seem to have been doing for years.
I do understand that fraud and other issue are a reality of these businesses. Well, they need to figure out how to deal with that while, at the same time, being human and human in their treatment of those who depend on the access they provide for legitimate work.
There's always a bigger fish, you just met yours. I'm all for serious reform (and even dissolution) at Google et al., but I also don't think everything will be hunky-dory just because America's entrepreurial upper middle class gets their satisfaction. While we're swinging the antitrust hammer, might want to take a look at retail and gig "employers" too.
Government isn’t the solution to every problem. Caring or not caring is irrelevant. Reaching for a government-level solution isn’t a good thing, just have a look at nations where government plays a much larger role.
The issue is that so many of the people who say "government isn't the solution to every problem," really mean, "government isn't the solution to any problems except the ones I personally can't buy myself out of." At some point we have to realize that issues that are substantially widespread or entrenched and mature/understood should probably be nationalized at their core, with the opportunity for innovation left to the margins. Trying to extract profit from healthcare or infrastructure in particular seems quite cynical and prone to unfortunate consequences in the name of chasing lower costs.
The problem with people in the US who have convinced themselves that more government is a good thing is simple: Ignorance.
I mean that as a statement of fact, not a pejorative.
Nobody who has ever lived under heavy government control supports these ideas. The only way they gain support is by pushing the fantasy of big government vs. the reality.
Context: I have lived under those conditions. The average American has no clue.
Until it doesn't. All businesses should have a disaster plan.
This of course led to bounce rates of 99%+ for all of this traffic, which dramatically increased my bounce rate overall.
As far as I can tell, Google used this as a signal that my site was a shady/scam site and removed me from the search pages I used to rank on entirely.
Took nearly 6 months to figure out the problem, and where all this phantom AdWords traffic was coming from.
Google Shopping is just 1 channel through which you could get customers. Since you're in Africa, my guess is that SEO is WAY easier than US/Canada, so that's a viable channel. Lack of ebay/amazons in Africa is an opportunity, because you don't have them dominating the top 10 SERPs. I could go on and on and on...
Was there anything potentially illegal or sketchy about this?
Google Updated it's Terms of Service. On 3 Nov 2020
Please read terms of Api.
Google photos also 'helpfully' offers to delete your uploaded photos with 'some guarantee'!!!
If this isn't an indication of a giant shitty monopoly that doesn't care about its customers at all, I don't what is.
They have some AI ML fucking crap but can't figure basic user trust because that won't get anyone promoted nor grow some Director-level person's headcount.
Large promo-manufacturing teams that casually handle all your data. Pray to God that some L4 didn't get promoted doing some impactful work because they sure ain't gonna do maintenance work protecting your shit. Their motivations are not users, product nor team: manipulate some metrics to get promoted and move out. Horrible.
It is like building a house on the edge of a cliff then falling off the cliff one day. It was always a real possibility. Being locked out of your stuff is quite a likely end of the story with Google.
The issue seems to me that it's a global ban.
If Google only locked you out of the functionality you seem to have violated somehow, it would still be a viable strategy to use their services.
Imagine losing the ability to comment or upload videos on YouTube because you wrote something offensive or published a video with copyrighted materials.
Potentially bad for YouTube creators, but definitely not dangerous for normal users which also use other services.
Reports like this were the reason why I removed almost all Google services from my life a few years ago, but I wouldn't have done it if the bans had been granular.
The worst is that they are certainly keeping your data, because they never throw anything out, while they are preventing you from getting to it.
That is theft, pure and simple.
My point is there are limits that what private companies can do. Stretching the boundaries like that is sure to cause a strong regulatory reaction at some point.
And we are free to complain and vote to change those rules. Guess what happens then?
I do love these sorts of arguments. There is a modern expression that goes "f* around and find out". Like Standard Oil did.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Sherman-Antitrust-Act
When you have governments using Google logins or schools communicating with parents via Facebook groups, or state broadcasters reporting on Twitter as news, then the line between private company and public utility has been crossed.
Global bans "seem" to be new. I've read many stories of shell scripts randomly permanently banning android developers for life from their platform, but those stories always involved being banned from the play console and so forth, not being banned from search / maps / gmail / youtube / etc.
It seems to be news that if you tell people in public youtube comments that you vote for Trump, or whatever it is they're enforcing today, google will fight back by disabling your thermostat or whatever.
Global bans are not new. They were standard a decade ago. The reason is due to the structure of the various spam/abuse industries that plague any service that allows user generated content. What happens is this:
1. Accounts get harder to create as signup security improves
2. Black/grey-market account sellers come in and start creating accounts that get bought by spammers/fraudsters.
3. Spammer/fraudster abuses an account on service X, it gets locked for service X. They sell the accounts _back_ to the seller, who then resells the account once again with a note that it can't be used for YouTube or whatever.
4. Different spammer/fraudster buys the account, abuses it on a different service, goto step 3.
Their systems have some notion of why accounts were suspended or blocked, and the tech does support individual service level blocks. But they weren't used much back then because the pattern of a user being bad on one service and then being bad on every other service was too strong.
The problem of false positives was well known a long time ago, and the noise:FP rate is very good - if a script accidentally disabled good users with even quite low volume the people in question would be on Twitter or HN within hours making articles like this one, which did get noticed. So false account blocks were pretty rare.
Back then and still now, I think Google need to make it easier to handle this situation. Strong end-user support in these situations is hard because genuine fraudsters will happily file support tickets and socially engineer support to get their accounts back - I even witnessed auto-generated pleas to support once. They were quite convincing individually, only when you saw a few thousand of them with re-arranged sentences all begging for help with identical language was it clear they were spam. However they could still make it a lot easier, and in particular, could improve Google Takeout to be easier to use (e.g. automatically uploading the backups to various non-Google services).
How much are accounts currently worth on the market? It seems that making the recovery procedure more expensive than the worth of the account should resolve that issue. At the same time legitimate users are probably willing to invest some money in order to recover their account.
For example offer a $20 option to send a registered letter to an address provided by the user. Then Google can check if: 1) The name on the credit card matches the name on the account, 2) a given address hasn't been used too often, 3) the identity check done by the postal service (checking if the recipient actually has a given name) succeeded.
This won't be a perfect solution and there are definitely edge cases for which it won't work (in countries without registered mail, if someone doesn't have a credit card, etc.). But it should be able to cover the majority of cases where legitimate accounts have been locked.
However that's basically what phone verification does. In case of suspicion someone has to provide their mobile phone number. It's texted with a code and a counter increased. The same number can't be used over and over. Unlike credit cards, the assumption of universal mobile phone access (amongst people who have internet access) is very strong. It works very well. In this case, the account was shut down without this being possible, which is only used normally for very clear cut cases. Don't assume the full story is public.
This is a problem that is largely solved at government scale, which is what Google is now, and there's no reason not to take advantage of existing infrastructure to do so.
Why are accounts suspected of TOS violations not simply put into read-only mode instead of shutting out users completely? If the identity/authorisation of the user is not in doubt it makes zero sense to not let people download their data before closing the account.
This simple change would fix all the consumer related horror stories with zero cost to Google. In fact it would become cheaper for Google because people would stop pleading with them.
Also, why is there no one-off paid support option that covers the cost of a human checking evidence and is expensive enough to deter mass abuse by fraudsters? Why is there no option to provide a photo ID upfront so that there is always a last resort to check whether a user is who they say they are?
Read only mode would make sense for content that's truly private, or which can be made private. Nothing stops them allowing Google Takeout for disabled accounts, heck maybe they do these days.
Paid support:
1. the optics of false positives being held to ransom to get their account back is terrible. Giving the money back isn't always easy (credit cards support this sometimes but many users don't have them). And this is made worse by:
2. many accounts aren't easily verifiable. People imagine that every Google/FB user puts their entire life on these accounts. A very small number do. For those, expensive ad-hoc processes could maybe increase the account verification rate by a little bit. But most accounts that get disabled are accounts with fake names, that use exclusively one service, etc. It's extraordinarily difficult to come up with reliable ways to verify the identity of the holder of accounts that required no identity to sign up.
Right, but removing an offending comment can easily be done indepenently of any other action against the account.
>the optics of false positives being held to ransom to get their account back is terrible.
That's true and I had that thought as well, but it's clearly the lesser evil compared to stories of people losing irreplaceable data.
>many accounts aren't easily verifiable.
True, but as I said, users could be given an option to make their account easily verifiable.
If there were a definition for "set up to fail" it would be that customer... Or are we to assume google is a potentially hostile force, whenever it feels like being one.
We used to ban the sales of products that harmed customers.
What do you expect your average person to do? Set up their own mail provider?
A tiny number of companies set out to have an unbreakable joint monopoly over the Internet, and succeeded. Now you're blaming the average person for this - like the average person has the skills or the time to do anything about it.
I bought 3 Nest thermostats long before Google bought them. I wouldn’t have done so after the buyout.
If google bricks my thermostats because my kid does something dumb on YouTube (through the linked tv accounts) that will suck.
I suppose regulators could also prevent companies from bundling lockouts in that shutting down gmail for YouTube problems. Or shutting down Nest for gmail problems, etc.
The phone company can’t just randomly cut off service and ghost me. Regulators are the reason for that, as I’m sure they’d love to if they could.
If you're paying your bill, why would they care?
Regulation is part of the answer, but it's also part of the problem. If a YouTube comment wasn't at risk of "being mean" or breaking arbitrary rules (pushed by regulators, Google isn't doing it on their own), you couldn't be locked out. Corporations don't gain by cancelling their customers.
Personal experience, once I created an Adword ad using one of the image that Google Ad creator had suggested. It was nothing, just a woman in bikini. It was approved and then rejected with warning that I violated their guidelines. I wanted protest but thought probably not worth it. This could have perma banned me from Google, I stopped using AdWords.
Do you think Google really cares about this, or do they get pressure from "outside" forces to impose such rules?
I seriously doubt Google cares one wink about people posting bikini photos. These rules exist because activists put pressure on the company to enforce such rules, for better or worse.
Sure they do. If a certain customer's behaviour is alienating or obstructing other customers, then that customer gets cancelled, because they are having a negative impact (on the business - not the users!) that is larger than the benefit they provide.
That's a net positive result.
Ignoring your whole concept of "mean", it is 100% up to the company to decide what the negative behaviour is, which is part of the problem.
Sure some of it might be "mean behaviour" and so we look at it as Google doing a good thing perhaps.
But what if you went around Google's services and informed people of better alternatives to their services, and you started to actual gain traction and cause people to stop using Google?
There's nothing mean about that, in fact you're providing a good service to those people. But in Google's eyes your actions are negative, and they could just cancel your account at their discretion because they don't like what you're saying.
That is the kind of thing that regulation protects from, when dealing with essential services - and I think there's a stronger and stronger case to be made that these large providers are in fact essential services.
p.s. Devil's advocate: the theoretical actions I described above (recommending alternatives) could so easily cross the line into spam. But who decides where that line is, if Google was to be regulated?
This is not a random cancellation.
There is zero incentive for your phone company to cancel an account in good standing otherwise.
The OP said "they'd love to [cancel my account] if they could". Why would a phone company "love" to cancel accounts?
To address your point too though, there are definitely customers that the phone company is required to serve that they would rather not serve, because the costs are higher than the revenue.
Remote rural customers, customers who need accessibility-related support, certain outdated services that people are grandfathered into and don't want to cancel, etc...
And again that's where regulation protects the customer from the corporation that doesn't care about the customer's needs, unless they align with their own needs or are forced to via regulation.
So indeed, buying open API stuff only is a good start, unfortunately one still needs to be vigilant.
>You need a government regulator to stop large companies from buying up lots of small companies and adding them to this risk pool.
These two statements are not even close to arguing the same thing.
The previous commenter is saying that it's common sense that "centralizing all your data with Google" may not be a great idea, especially if you don't have any backup of that data and keep all of it in Google.
They are being downvoted, wrongly, by people who knee-jerk about the "don't need a government regulator" bit. But they only used that phrase as a kind illustration of the common sense that people should have about not having a backup of their data.
Yes, Google does need some government regulation. And yes, people shouldn't need a government regulator to tell them not to keep all their data in the cloud without any local backup at all.
They could decide to randomly throw every 5th email that is not a gmail into spam and blame it on other providers having low reliability. Make it random enough to gently encourage you to get a gmail account again.
These are extreme examples, but Google could easily do these kinds of things and there is nothing any of us could do whether we use Gmail or not; it will affect us because they control so much.
The scenario you describe does not seem so unlikely to occur...
How would that kill gmail? It's not like they're going to lose any real part of their user base. Short of a press release from google confirming the behavior, the average user is not going to go through the hassle of finding a replacement provider and then changing every email address associated with every service they use (if it's even possible for the service) all for some nebulous and impossible-to-confirm conspiracy theory put forth by tech experts and security experts that don't get listened to even when there is proof. And it's not like other companies and services would take a stand by ceasing to offer service to customers with gmail accounts- that's an incredible way to lose a vast portion of your customer base.
I wish it weren't this way, but I just can't see that bringing down gmail. Especially not when every google service requires a gmail account- probably the same one most people have had for years.
They can't afford to let 20% of that go to spam without a backlash. And if they kept doing it despite the backlash, who knows what would have happened to gmail.
Lose a few thousand dollars or an entire vacation by google regularly blackholing messages from important and expensive services like airlines, when they send you email telling you your flight departure was changed, and you'll be looking for a better email service in no time.
Now imagine this happens to 1/5 of the customers of said airline, just because of google's 1/5 non-google mail go to spam policy. It would be a scandal.
They will launch a 'secured sender' program where you pay Google a monthly fee so your company's email doesn't fall into spam.
It hasn't kill gmail. How could it unless other providers refused to route gmail emails the way google refuses to route your personal server's email.
What? You don't pay paxes in your country? No rent to the owner of your house or paid for owning the house yourself? What country is that?
You want a mail-address? Grab your own domain (thus pay "tax"), put a server there (build a "house") and you are there. Getting an address, be it physical or digital never comes for free, and there is not human right for having one.
However, that doesn't change the fact that the economic model has changed when it comes to email. We no longer pay with money, but we pay in other ways when we use Google. So it's actually worse than with mail, because there used to be a clear exchange of goods but it is now obfuscated. And thus, there is nothing mandating good service, which is why people can be randomly banned from using it.
In google's view if I accept the terms google will treat me as a customer internally and using that relationship will sell my data.
Is google not in a legal position to do this?
The acceptance of the terms creates a customer relationship
I say “steal”, because they are not opt-in.
Also, there is no comprehensive opt-out. I cannot tell their ad networks to stop tracking all the devices I own.
(They have a page for stopping tracking of things I use my Google account for. That doesn’t count: They track me even when I am not logged into Google, and even on devices that cannot log into Google.)
Also, I can’t delete my gmail accounts. They were issued by third parties that decided to outsource email to Google.
There is nothing consensual about my use of Google services. I shouldn’t be bound by their EULA. I’m sure the courts would disagree.
Sure, they have the right to cut off users any time they like. But it's ultimately self-destructive. Once trust is lost, it's difficult to regain it. I've moved away from my Google dependencies as much as I can, and have urged friends and family to do so as well. I'm only influential with around two dozen people, but once you start multiplying people like me by the millions, then Google has a problem.
And I'd argue it's at least a little immoral. Their services, especially Gmail, were set up in a way to make users highly dependent upon them. Google wanted that dependency for their path to near-monopoly status. To suddenly cut them off without the option of support or a clean exit creates real world chaos as the users try to pick up the pieces. Your email address might not be used much socially these days, but it's crucial for business contacts. For logins and customer interactions. The loss of it can cause serious damage. Google may not be legally responsible for the damage caused by a user's loss of their free services, but they're arguably morally responsible. Maybe they should pop up a warning to everyone using Gmail: "Don't rely on us. We're not going to do anything to help you if you can't use it one day."
Or more precisely: Why do you think any outsider could understand Google's rational?
History is littered with the corpses of successful companies that lost their way.
Today's Google reminds me of General Motors. Utterly dominant, untouchable. But needed to keep making more money. So they bring auto loan financing in house, GMAC. Woot, more money. But they forgot how to make money making cars. So upstarts ate their lunch.
It's a rough analog. Maybe IBM is closer.
The point is Google's rolling in cash despite their antipathy towards their end users (note that I did not say "customers"). Which will continue to be fine, until it isn't. And then it'll be too late.
Everyone pays with their data and the ads they and others are seeing. Just because you pay no cash, does not mean ther is no payment at all.
Addtionally, it's used to be quite hard to even pay in cash for googles services. Though, this changde in the last years, as there is now youtube premium and google one. But still not possible for all their services.
A contract without consideration is not a valid contract. There are a few laws in some places that require companies to provide service outside of a contractual service agreement, but those are typically limited to public utilities, emergency services, etc.
They do. But does their ToS say that your data and attention is consideration for use of their services? I do not believe it does. In fact, it says:
> You have no obligation to provide any content to our services
Throughout their terms, I don't see anything that implies an obligation of exchange.
There are certainly other rights that exist... But contractual rights to a service is not a right you'd have without a valid contract.
You can sue your caterer if they run out of food, but not the soup kitchen.
Keep in mind, this is the same public IP address that we've had for ages. I am the recovery contact for the account since she is a minor, and have filled out the forms several times now, even giving the exact date and the "verification code" from when the account was created. We are now stuck in an endless loop.
She can still access her account from a macbook and from a linux desktop, but I fear once she is signed out that she will be locked out forever.
All of my important stuff (finance, etc) is in protonmail now, and I'm happy that I made that move.
Why do they do this? Did you contact them about it? I would say it seems, at face value, that your city's utilities company did not serve you while Protonmail did.
That's fair- that's a better way of saying it. Every time I've had to email them (which admittedly has only been a handful of times) with proof of something, I always end up calling them up and they'll say "but protonmail isn't on the blacklist that IT posted, so you're lying or you sent it to the wrong place," then I'll send screenshots from a different email provider proving that I sent the protonmail email(s) to the right place, then they'll say "oh, I promise to talk to IT to get this straightened out."
It's pretty obnoxious.
1. You can't search message content. gmail is very good at this, so I've had to become more organized to make sure that I can find a particular message in protonmail.
2. Notifications on mobile do not clear if I've read the message on another device. I have to open up the app and sync to stop them from popping up with outdated information.
3. I wish that there was a way to mark a message as archived and read from the mobile notification.
Other than that, I can't complain.
(They do have Protonmail Bridge now, but it doesn't work great for alternate mobile clients unless they've changed it)
Public utilities are highly regulated, and do not have the right to interrupt your service.
edit: Family Link is also for android devices and chromebooks. She doesn't have a phone / android device or a chomebook.
Long story but fairly serious legal issues issues with their mother making false claims of care/activities etc and needed things like calander and location tracking services and this was just by far the easies way at the time. For safety reasons I put a forward to my gmail of all their incoming emails, once again best known option at the time.
I sense a problem possibly looming, but not seeing that coming clean and engaging with Google likely to be a happy experience.
Anyone got any advice, other than abandon current accounts?
If you can, your own domain backed by a fastmail or a proton is the sweet spot of easy and flexible, or at least an @fastmail, @proton or similar. With payment comes the possibility of human support, which I have received easily from fastmail.
So, now I’m in a situation where, if my gmail account gets banned, and the DNS provider decides to reset my password, then I’m permanently locked out of everything. I could point my DNS provider at my “real” email address, but that’s even worse, since needing to update the MX record could lock me out.
Does anyone have any creative solutions to this problem?
What do you mean "ground it out"?
As a consumer, I suspect hosting a "holding" domain, and possibly email, with AWS Route53 DNS might be a sensible approach that wouldn't break the bank. AWS has policies on account and password recovery that even include a notarised affidavit.
It might help to further separate your AWS account from the Amazon account you use to shop with, since there's a chance Amazon might be trigger-happy with banning if you violate one of their shopping policies with too many returns.
This is what I do.
Totally isolated AWS account that owns `my-account-recovery.com` in my country-code TLD (because I have legal rights and strong and easy access to appeals processes with that, so unlikely the domain could be wrestled from me and likely I could eventually regain ownership if lost).
I use Amazon SES for incoming email to simply drop all incoming messages as objects in a S3 bucket.
I have SNS notifications going out to my regular operational email whenever a new message comes in with the metadata (sender, subject, etc but not the body as that could contain actual reset/account recovery links) so I can keep an eye on what's coming in.
Haven't looked at my bills lately, but including domain renewal and stuff this is maybe $100/yr to establish this as a root of trust/access. Even if other accounts are breached/suspended/etc, I will still have access to this account and can recover my way down from there.
I'm putting all my eggs into the AWS basket here, but I've had a good experience with them in the past and I really can't find any examples of people being locked out of their accounts in the same way I can with Google. And I know from experience that it's not impossible to get in contact with a real live person when it's required to resolve an issue.
This doesn’t solve the “everything is in one basket” issue, but you don’t hear stories of these email providers just “closing” an account and causing immense trouble for the person, at least in part because they have actual support.
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en
Edit: Looks like Google Takeout lets you schedule the download (ie once every month)
If takeouts could be configured to download automatically through Google drive, that would be amazing.
They can. And Dropbox, and various other cloud providers.
Perhaps there's some authoritative site about what exactly you need to do?
For me, I've switched to DDG full-time for search and I'm veeery gradually swapping over to Protonmail for email (using Thunderbird as the client to ease the transition). Once email's over, I'll be able to rest a lot easier.
However, if you're a heavy Docs user, NextCloud is a Google-like suite with a few hosting options (self-hosted, third-party host, or enterprise).
If nothing else you should set up your own email address, even if it is just a simple forward to your gmail. Google blocking access to your mailbox would be pretty bad, having control of your MX record gives you an out.
The principle options are:
- Integrated replacement services. Don't do this.
- Multiple independent free services. At least you've diversified risk. Mind that these may (and likely will) consolidate with time. Skype, WebMeeting, Instagram, YouTube, GitHub, and Blogger were once freestanding companies. They no longer are.
- Self-hosted solutions. NextCloud, FreedomBox, etc., or DIY service bundles on your home, office, and/or a hosted service can avoid the problem entirely at least for highly stateful services (email, contacts, files, documents)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+alternatives
For me, that started with email. Email is a root for a lot of your digital identity.
I can't guarantee access to @gmail addresses going forward, but I can at least _start_ fixing that problem. I picked up a new domain, hosted the email with someone else, and set all my other accounts to forward to it. I updated a few really critical things right away, but for the most part it's just as I go log into various accounts with the old email address, I update it.
I didn't really bother trying to migrate the email out of my gmail account. Instead I did a bulk download from Google Takeout so I know I _can_ access that old email if I really need to find something.
Six months or so in, the bulk of my identity is now tied to a domain that _I_ own, and email hosted with someone I can trust more than Google.
It's not perfect, but already the impact if Google were to suspend my account has dropped immensely.
Cutting Google completely is something you do on principle. Instead, just look at what the impact of losing access to various services would be and address those specifically. (E.g., losing drive? Switch to NextCloud if availability is a concern; or set up a regular Takeout download if data loss only is a concern but an interruption in availability is okay, etc)
It's like pulling teeth to work with that interface to edit documents. It's hard for me to believe that anyone actually uses it.
In that case, depending what your actual acceptable risk/goal is... continue using Google Docs and set up a regular backup? Your worst case is that Google Docs goes away tomorrow, and you still have all your data you just need to spend a bit of time restoring to a different account / setting up alternative software / etc and move forward from there. For most people I expect that's more than enough.
It doesn't need to be (and shouldn't be). Just use an email provider that respects you as a customer and don't put all your eggs into one corporate basket (especially not one that treats you as nothing more than data cattle). Horror stories like this one will, over time, educate people that this behavior pattern is dangerous.
IMO self-hosting is the ideal because that aligns responsibility with incentive (and it can be done extremely cheaply), but if not, there are paid email services that actually treat the user as a customer.
Normal people will only put up with this for so long. Either regulate it intelligently now, or expect actually scary regulation a decade or two from now.
There's nothing wrong with a law that says: "You cannot close a customer's account with no remediation, no recourse, and no explanation." What is Silicon Valley so afraid of there? How is that unreasonable?
Agreed. Then they will learn that Google is not to be trusted with email and move to a provider that is (sort of like how kids migrated away from Facebook when their parents showed up, even though Facebook remains a dominant brand). Disruption occurs when an incumbent is bad at something which the disruptor beats them at. In this case, there is an opportunity for an email provider to disrupt Google by providing actual customer service. Protonmail is already making waves in this space (in addition to the encryption).
The reason I'm anti-regulation is that every law is a headache waiting to happen (and one more barrier to entry) where to me -the- beauty of the internet is that there's almost no barrier to entry once you have an internet-capable device. The more we regulate the internet, the more difficult doing something as simple as running a personal discussion forum becomes. Regulation is, at its best, a necessary evil, to be avoided until no other solution has proven viable. And there are plenty of other solutions for this particular problem.
And to clarify, I'm anti-Silicon Valley (IMO venture capital's expectation of high returns is the direct cause of many of the "evils of tech"). But I do tend to agree with the anti-regulation stance. IMO the problems people want to solve with regulation (even including GDPR) are better solved by better tech and organizations that align their incentives with those of their users.
After all, 15 years ago we still thought Google was "not evil". A lot can change in that time.
>This victim-blaming needs to stop before the tech industry backlash hits. This is exactly why we need regulation.
Google will simply dilute the language of the regulation, to the point where they will simply add a "your account can be deleted at any time for any reason, proceed at your own risk" popup during sign-up, and people will happily hit continue/next.
Systemic reform can't exclusively happen top-down or bottom-up. There needs to be some of both. We need to stop giving Google free good-will on HN. Stop up-voting Google product launches, stop promoting Chrome, etc, etc.
Cue the "businesses can choose who they do business with!" and "if you don't like it, build your own!" people.
We signed up for many of those things individually and they've connected them more and more. Now we have a single point of failure that can take down everything across all your sytems.
And it's not just those. Don't forget about Google Voice, Android, and every service where you used "sign in with Google"
eCommerce and ad supported businesses that want to avoid Google are screwed though.
This is a problem with one sided none negotiable terms of service being considered valid contracts under the law
They should not be.
We need to change data ownership laws, and force companies to do vetting on Account Creation, and put in provisions on how accounts can be terminated once a company accepts a user owned data. i.e Accounts must have a human reviewed appeal process, with full and articulated reporting as to exactly which rules were violated, and exactly what activity was the violation. And have a View Only data Take-Out period
At a minimum
Are they even valid contracts now? Many gmail accounts are missing consideration or capacity -- which are required elements of a valid contract.
Since then I use my own domain for email, could easily switch email provider while keeping the address in case there is a problem, and I'd still control access via the email to other services. Also I never rely on Google as to files, photos, or videos. I mean yeah I use Google, YouTube etc., but everything is first of all backed up on MS OneDrive. Even on my Android phone there is automatic upload of all new photos to OneDrive. Google Photos is more like for easy viewing, sharing and presentation. Not backup. Not to mention that MS Office + OneDrive storage subscription provides much more value that Google G Suite.
plus, never seen anyone complaining about getting their officce account deleted into void
i might be biased due the fact am an azure power user and have several other tools that work together
One user is even suing Microsoft because of this: (article is in german) https://www.drwindows.de/news/konto-gesperrt-nutzer-reicht-k...
Well, shit happens sometimes even with people having the best intentions to do the right thing. Though I didn't hear about a single case of MS losing people's data. But I'm sure MS would handle such situations differently than blaming it on a user and just terminating accounts.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/microsoft-36...
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/workspace/introducing...
> Others professed to have been barred from using Microsoft services,
This way i don't lose any data. I have a grandfathered custom domain, that my kids and other family members use; so it would suck. I could however move the domain anywhere. It would just be a bit more expensive.
We also back up to Amazon Photos as well, just for extra peace of mind.
Shutting them out completely: just no.
Perhaps we need similar for email forwarding - it's clear that the major email platforms (Google, Microsoft) can already handle mail that is simply deferred to another mail server (see partial cloud email transitions).
Perhaps we need the same for email? So a user can have a Gmail address, but receive their email elsewhere. Would still require an authenticated backend to let the user control the end destination email server, but that's the same for number portability. Telecoms operators handle that part, and each provider is regulated. For email it could be a basic login ability for the old account to enable picking the destination mail server.
Number portability also helped unlocked competition between providers.
Incumbent telcos fought portability, but in the end it has become a "given". There's no reason OTT services can't also have the same - email is already federated. I could see issues around whether people should be able to "port" their email and still send using their old "From" address (not least SPF/DKIM technical aspects), but the ability to receive seems an obvious one that could be handled.
The challenge for OTT services is that absent regulation to force it, if an email provider goes down, there's nobody to step up and continue to provide the relay service.
The guiding principle is that data should only be retained as long as is required to serve the purposes for which it was collected. So if your account is permanently terminated, there is probably an argument that GDPR requires the deletion of all data as soon as possible.
Recital 83 highlights the importance of preventing "accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration" of data, and Art 5(1) says "Personal data shall be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency’)"
I wouldn't want to be in Google's shoes in such a situation, as the principle of fairness and transparency would come to light, and I think it would be quite hard for them to argue against this.
You are also right that GDPR sets out principles of not retaining data for longer than is required (data protection by default), although all of these rights have to be balanced. If you could argue the deletion was not lawful, fair, or transparent, you would have a breach under Art 5(1).
The Art 20 right to portability would also be relevant here, around people's right to port a copy of their own data. Given the existence of these rights, a blanket "we nuked all your stuff" would deprive a person of reasonably exercising their rights, and I could envisage consequences for this.
It would be really interesting to see some of this get put to the test though - GDPR could become a way to force "human intervention" in some of these situations on the basis of not wanting exposure to unwanted legal risk.
The only "public utility type services" Google provides is phone service through Fi. Nothing else counts as a utility. Even then I'm not sure if being an MVNO counts.
I guess my implicit suggestion that email services be regarded as a type of public utility was a bit convoluted. But gmail is surely a close enough parallel to postal services of old (traditionally a public utility) to be regarded as such. Legislation has simply not caught up with technological developments.
The problem is that it happens to me more and more often that especially with my business contacts in larger companies my e-mail is filtered out / ends up in their junk folders / disappears for other, unspecified reasons. Simple public black lists do not show anything. I am more the developer and not the infrastructure type, but the company policies seem to contain more and more features of downgrading private domains. And in my opinion this is supported by some kind of dirty game of global IT players at technical and other levels.
Folks talk about these places and the "unlimited" bandwidth and the "friendly" abuse teams. Ergo - you can't talk to as many other places via email. The big players will crunch you down quick.
My server is at Hetzner, and there are some blacklists which block Hetzner IPs by default. You have to contact them, explain that your server is not a spam server, and hope to get whitelisted. In my case, it worked. T-Online in Germany also blocked my IP as well, but they were amazingly quick to whitelist it after I send them an email. They apologized and explained that they also block mail from Hetzner IPs by default.
Given all the horror stories I've moved all but one domain off of Gmail (mainly to preserve my grandfathered G-Suite. I don't use `@ gmail dot com` for anything other than Google services. And if you are using GMail back it up! MailArchiva [0] is free for less than 10 mailboxes and works well. In this regard at least you still have access to your mail and can possibly prove something if those emails contain any identifying information (hopefully not, but you never know what will help).
If your email is that important to you then don't run it for free. Pay for someone to host it - I've been more than happy with Fastmail for many years and also use paid for ProtonMail accounts with custom domains.
At the end of the day if you don't control the domain and don't pay for the service I don't feel like I can trust the provider to do the right thing or expect any level of support. Bring email back from the monopolized "free" tier!
Another commentator here mentioned this and the hint was worth gold. In the meantime, I changed/adjusted this in the interface of my website provider (I am also using his SMTP server) and solved an actual problem of this kind immediately (maybe also explaining the shortcomings in the past).
In general, I would admit that it is not a compelling excuse not to know something. The problem is, that I was not even aware of these keywords and after looking them up, I seemingly solved things quickly and - hopefully - permanently. People just don't constantly check all things. Especially with long term reliable services with rare, subtle and not obvious (in this case without any hint) errors.
Having just done this recently, it's more than 10 minutes, especially if it's your first time. But yes, everyone should be doing it, as well as doing their best to get off of blacklists[0]. Still doesn't stop incompetents like MS mail admins (so, @hotmail.com, @msn.com, @live.com and @outlook.com) from keeping their own internal blocklists, that you can't get off of, no matter how many times you fill out their form[1].
[0] http://multirbl.valli.org/dnsbl-lookup/
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/supportrequestform/8ad56...
Considering I've actually never heard of any of those things despite multiple people telling me to set up a mail server. I'm not sure why you're surprised.
Yes, I know spam is a problem, but it's a solvable problem, especially with a small percentage of those providers' revenue.
Another trick is to use always have forwarding enabled in Gmail, to Outlook.com or another provider. All email will be forwarded despite your account being locked, so you will not miss out on important info.
And use Google Takeout for backing up your data, at least once a year.
I wish there was a way to pay for Google (such as Google One) and it meant Google wouldn't ban your Gmail account. Period. However from reading HN anecdotes, it seems like they don't care about you (even if you're a paying customer). I realize this could feel like extortion, but it would be well worth the peace of mind.
No, but the idea is that you can point the domain at a new host and at least keep receiving future email, so that you don't lose the ability to password reset accounts, etc.
As for
> I wish there was a way to pay for Google (such as Google One) and it meant Google wouldn't ban your Gmail account
There's a reason I pay, like, €50 a year for my email hosting instead of gmail's free mail. I want to be able to actually reach a human when it comes to problems with my email instead of Google's customer service void.
And, if your mail client’s UI allows, you can even send from <whatever>@yourdoma.in to avoid disclosing your “real” address when you reply.
My favorite use-case: you sign up for foo.com with foo@yourdomain.com. Then foo sells their contact database, and now you’re getting viagra spam all day. Ok, just add a filter to auto-trash anything addressed to foo@, and the problem is solved.
The migration to fastmail.fm , including a decade of old mail messages, was flawless (if slow, but it's a lot of data!). I highly recommend this route.
And that's why I think the GDPR is one of the best things the EU has ever done.
The rate limits won't stop someone from eventually migrating out, but it might take a while.
FYI, it already is for yahoo. I got lucky that they _only_ deleted all my emails after I didn’t log in for a while, and nobody else managed to hijack the account while I was gone and password-reset all my services...
Using a custom domain with Google's paid service seems like the least drastic change and you get to keep using all their services. Maybe the support won't be as good, but the products and integrations are probably better than any other provider.
And as long as you do regular backups of your Google data, I think this seems like a good solution.
I think the downside of Google is this happens about 100x as often as other organizations.
Google security also cares about Google's security, not your security. Your odds of account compromise go way up dealing with Google.
E.g. website@yourdomain.com
The funny (er, scary) thing is I was actually thinking of switching to Google registrar for my domain after namecheap messed up their CNAME records and dropped a few days of emails (I already use GSuite). Google reliability, the promise of fair pricing and a free WHOIS protection was very attractive to me.
After this, fuck that.
Google has so many services that you could lead a reasonably diverse online life without going to another provider, without the accountability that typically comes with that sort of power. They really need to be checked.
Mail is one of the things I'm most worried about.
And many services will be like, oh, haven't seen you in a while so we sent you this code to your email to verify it really is you.
Do it now.
I no longer have access to that old number, i ditched that particular account cos it didn't mean much to me and opened a new one, wasn't worth the hassle.
Use an IMAP client. It would keep all your mail on your device, so at least you don't have to rely on having uninterrupted access to your account for your old conversations.
Actually, I'm surprised just how many people use email through web interfaces for some reason.
Gmail will often fail on exact-match searches. Unbelievable frustrating and next to useless.
Thunderbird is a bit clunky but does what you ask of it and has much better+simpler filtering options.
Which makes sense, gmail is in the cloud so it can't perform intensive search queries because that would cost way to much.
Thunderbird has a dedicated machine for it, no matter how old and slow it is it will have way more resources at hand than google will ever allocate to you, even if you pay.
Thunderbird has forks but they too need much work. The trouble with email started when free email was included in Windows thus taking the incentive away from development. Same goes for Thunderbird nowadays with free Gmail being available.
So could Eudora's for that matter. Crashes were a particular problem with large boxes (.MBX files) as they often had crosslinks from users shutting down too quickly. Trouble was that when the mailer reindexed/compressed the box it would often stop at the crosslink and the remaining mail lost (I used to advise everybody never to reindex unless they'd backed up immediately beforehand). No doubt if you were in the IT at the time then I'm preaching to the converted. ;-)
I often use this example to illustrate bad design and the need for data hardening. If the time you're mentioning was before Qualcomm announced an end of Eudora then this may have been one of the reasons to move away. That said, mail clients haven't progressed much since. The MBOX is simple and still predominates but that's a mixed blessing when we need separate index files. Essentially, those who've many GBs of mail still have a problem. Little wonder many have turned from POP/IMAP to web mail.
I have to use Thunderbird at work too, but every so often I'm glad that mutt handles IMAP as well and helps me find stuff that Thunderbird will not.
If I'll get locked out will I be able to reset my password to the other bank account I almost forgot about? How long will it take for my old recruters to figure out not to mail me there? etc.
I run Thunderbird sometimes on desktop to cache all emails locally. I also have a NAS wich is downloading emails 24/7 and I can browse all locally from backup. This also gets backed up to 2 other locations :)
Is the convenience truly that great that people are even prepared to gamble the loss of their data? Alternatively, why is it that some of us have always been mistrustful of Big Tech and most others not?
They're completely opposite worldviews.
I expect that most users think on the same level as they do with metadata: "I have nothing to hide so can't be a possible target." And if an algorithm suddenly marks them as a target (for whatever I transparent reason) they do not understand that they might just be "collateral damage" …
My IT world view was formed in the 90s when various proprietary file formats became more or less inaccessible due to "software obsolescence"). Which told me that only more or less plain text (mark-up is fine, as it is text too) will guarantee that I can access my data years later. People who started their live with Big Tech (so-called digital natives -- or is that naives? ;-) might have to learn this sooner or later.
There was a time, maybe up until 10 years ago, when Google was cool. Everyone wanted a GMail address, it started out as invite only, like Facebook. "Do no evil" was the motto. And they ramped it up slowly like boiling a frog. The evil, I mean. And here we are today.
Seems it's impossible to make predictions in this area with any certainty.
Remember, Bill Gates was paranoid about this and about Microsoft getting caught out for similar reasons especially so around the time Windows 95 came out. Even so, MS missed the boat with search, smartphones and Android.
I don't think people actually believe that anymore they just feel they have no other alternative. Google had this wellspring of good will that they have simply burned over the last 10 years or so.
It was developers who originally made Google what it was - first to search, first to Chrome.
We can unmake it as well and I think it's about time we do.
But what are the actual odds that a bad thing is going to happen to me?
1.8 billion people are currently using GMail. If 1000 "real" (ie, not bots) accounts were closed every day for the next 80 years, there's a 98% chance that I (or any other individual user) would never have a problem.
Obviously, if some number of people are having problems that's, well, a problem, but as an individual user I mostly assume that it's not going to happen to me, much like I largely don't think about the 1-in-103 chance that I'll die in a car accident.
There's nobody at Google to contact, so I have no idea how to fix it. I used to have a friend at google I could ask for special help from (this made me feel awful), but they no longer work there, so I guess I'm just screwed until they actually get some sort of official support channel, or somebody at the company that sees this message (hi!) fixes it somehow (thanks!).
I recently deleted my last Gmail account (that I had since 2001). Before doing it, I tried Google's Checkout to get the data, but it was adking me for "verification" (i.e. more info about me) to finish the download.
I just fired up Thunderbird, configured a IMAP account and... done. Almost 20 years of e-mais are now backed up at home and on a Nextcloud instance I keep on a Linode VPS.
Web is not the only way to read e-mails, friends. Use a proper client and back it up.
I decided to setup a key and backup via the api for gmail and gphoto. i should probably do drive as well...
This works for email and says it will let you upload to another account. https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back
> ...backed up at home and on a Nextcloud instance I keep on a Linode VPS.
> Web is not the only way to read e-mails, friends. Use a proper client and back it up.
But the vast majority of people aren't going to be able to casually fire up, for example, a Nextcloud instance and linode VPS. Not even close.
The long-term management of a DIY personal/household computing infrastructure for email, important files, and online services just isn't in the skill-set of most people who aren't computing professionals. It's not really even in the skill-set of most computing professionals.
I just used Google Checkout to get my music files after Google shutdown the play music service and transferred it to youtube music. I now have ~60GB of zips containing mp3's and meta-data in csv files (admittedly, it was all badly curated by me with garbage id3's and bad filenames). I'm now trying to properly tag and curate these media files and host it in some way that I can use it remotely. It's not a trivial job. Especially because I've decided I don't want surveillance capitalism coming between my music collection and me anymore (eg no spotify/pandora/apple-music for me). I'm sure it's trivial work for some of you but for me to manage a collection of music, it's a challenging project with lots of trial and error (tbh, I kind of enjoy it). Can everyone do this? Definitely not. It's a massive DIY undertaking.
If we're now talking about email and files which are more important that one's cool music collection, it's a whole other ball game. I don't think there's a good solution for those of us who don't want to roll-our-own infrastructure.
Foobar2000 with discogs addon will help you with organization; musicbrainz picard will hello you with actually identifying your files if necessary. Airsonic is quite nice for actual hosting, and allows you to create multiple accounts with limited access and time-limited shares for playlists/albums/etc. I personally use fb2k with a dozen or so addons to organize my media library and playlists (the auto-playlists feature is nice). I use airsonic for hosting; on computers I use the web interface (or fb2k) for playback; on mobile I use dsub for playback. Bubbleupnp server is also installed locally so I can share/cast to receivers that don't support subsonic protocol, though I have yet to use this since I started using airsonic.
Airsonic is a fork(?) of subsonic, and has several forks available with different feature-sets and focuses (one for japanese media, one for audiobooks, etc). The one I use is airsonic-advanced, linked below. It integrates with last.fm and listenbrainz for scrobbling, and (I think) with last.fm for artist info and similar artists (I'd like to see similar artists replaced by gnod, personally).
- https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
Wow, was GMail already being used internally in 2001?
And while I was at it, I replaced Chrome with Firefox on my Mac and never looked back.
Finally I moved all my photos to iCloud, replaced my Android phone with an iPhone, got a paid account at Dropbox, started doing backups like there won‘t be cloud services tomorrow (Carbon Copy Cloner ftw!)
I have a google account, only for using Youtube (paid). And I like their search results. Even that is too much google for my taste.
Edit: Ahh, Gsuite. I migrated to office365 (microsoft). But I use it mostly offline (Word, Excel). Actually for legacy stuff. Because I started writing my documents with Emacs + Org and export to whatever format my recipient needs, doc, html, markdown (using pandoc extensively).
Ironically I'm now permanently locked out of my old Gmail address despite knowing the password, sounds like I've made the right choice.
Seeing things from his perspective, I was amazed at how successful Google has been in convincing other businesses to take on Gmail, Google Docs, etc. When I think about the enterprise focus of Google, as well as the continuous rebranding, product EOLs, and crappy user interfaces, it's hard for me not to see Google as the new Microsoft. As a former Linux desktop user who lived through the whole MS antitrust thing, I find it absolutely bizarre that today, I'm much happier with Office 365 on the web, than I was with Google Docs.
I still worry about all my photos being in iCloud, but it seems like less of a risk since I'm a customer of Apple, rather than a product of Google.
Surely, you don't still have problems with it. Do you?
Identially the same with me. Damn terrible turn up for the books, isn't it. It just illustrates how messy things have gotten and how we need to bring major change to the internet.
That said, for me Office 365 is a step too far. On Windows I still ocassionally use the 2003 version along with LibreOffice and the latter on all my Linux machines.
I can't imagine not having access to my email - at this point I'm kind of locked in. Google keeps a lot of my passwords and I register all of my important accounts to my main gmail account. If Google were to close my account suddenly, it would certainly disrupt my life quite a bit.
Email grew into an essential part of modern life. Taking away access willy-nilly would distress most people. I understand that this is a free service and we're the product, but I believe companies should only offer email accounts knowing that access can be denied only in exceptional circumstances (e.g. abusing the email service directly).
That would worry me beyond belief. This is one of the reasons why I don't understand why people actually do it. To me, it's such an obvious problem and it's easily avoided.
(I use many of these services but they're outside Big Tech and I've no problem. For example, I use POP and IMAP email that's been around since the beginning of the internet.)
If this investigation moves forward -- unlikely under a democratic government as we'll probably have -- one of the potential outcomes are better corporate firewalls.
If Google were broken up, a la baby bells, unusual activity on Youtube might no longer result in loss of email and phone service.
It is true that horrible abusive people exist in real world, and maybe it is justifiable to flat out deny them, but account ban coming up on news stories aren't like that.
"We're a private company" is no defense against traditional anti-monopoly enforcement. New powers that make Big Tech so big should be explicitly added to the dangers anti-monopoly regulation was created to defend against.
If Google wants to lure you in, they should end up being as stuck with you as you are with them.
Also not putting all your eggs in one bag is a good idea.
The real problem is that most users don't understand why they should pay for a service that Google provides them for free.
The absence of reason makes me wonder a lot of possibilities. Maybe google bans people who use ad-blockers, maybe they didn't explicitly set that way but some of their algorithms must have figured out these users should go. I know, it is extremely unlikely but we're free to come up with reasons if google doesn't give one. Don't sit there thinking it won't happen to you(I was like that up until recently), get a domain name and transfer all important accounts to it. And do a Google takeout.
> His actions over the past 15 years lead to a 76.9% chance that he will break our ToS. Furthermore,he has clicked only on 0.000001% of the ads. Terminating him now will increase the average profit per user by 0.00000000000000000291%.
I must have gotten through to a person eventually because I was unsuspended with the message:
> We’re writing to let you know that we've unsuspended your account. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope to see you back on Twitter soon.
> A little background: we have systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk, and yours was flagged as spam by mistake. Please note that it may take an hour or so for your follower and following numbers to return to normal.
Setting up the import was insanely easy, and my Fastmail account is now configured to enable me to send using my Gmail address from directly within Fastmail. Plus after the import is finished, it will still periodically bring over any new emails received to the Gmail account.
Fuck you Google.
The root issue is Google. This doesn't happen with most companies. This is specific to Google's culture, which treats customers as statistics. That comes out of how Google thought about search and ads, and doesn't work for anything else.
The secondary issue is being dependent on one party.
I'm generally against too much regulation, but given how important e-mails are (access to all sorts of accounts, important messages from clients, tax, etc.), this is a case where a certain service level needs to be mandatory, e.g., unlocking within few hours.
With the office 365 support I did have a minor accounting issue that they didn’t intend to fix and support tried some standard responses (I needed the billing company name to be different from the Domain/account name, which isn’t possible and the support didn’t know and asked me to do a bunch of things before I figured out through a post that it’s not possible - an edge case that isn’t too much of an issue unlike being locked out)
Last time this happened with google I got lucky and found the password after trying for 3 weeks with support.
What doesn’t work that easily is resetting passwords without account access, especially since more services are switching to magic links instead of passwords (and the issues of managing multiple accounts in a standard browser password manager with things like slack having different sub domains and accounts for different projects)
For me the solution is to use a paid service or a free service at smaller business where employee/user ratio is better.
The critique on the earlier post is a little like saying it's still a problem that you need to trust your local supermarket for food. Which is true, but still much better than relying to avoid starvation exclusively on just-in-time shipments from an automated unstaffed ACME Growers Warehouse in Nowhere, USA.
The single time I needed support from them, I was replied by a person that understood my problem and while they didn't fix it (it was a feature request) it was added to their backlog.
The suggestion appeared live like a year after and was contacted saying it was available in case I still wanted to use it.
From Google, on the other hand, I never got a human reply to any issue. The one that pissed me off the most was that my location history pre-2015 disappeared for some reason and I was using it to geotag old photos. No response, no acknowledging of the issue, nothing.
I found a UI regression a few months back with the way threaded messages were working. Notified FM, they replied within a few hours acknowledging it was a bug and they would fix it asap. Fix was out within a few days, and they followed back to with me to confirm it was fixed for me.
Someone else buys the domain after me? And steals all my online accounts? (Pwd reset emails)
Namecheap is quite a popular place to buy domains, isn't it?
(myname).xyz - 10 years - £85.29 / $110.15
(myname).com - 10 years - £69.87 / $90.24
(myname).net - 10 years - £98.40 / $127.08
In a world where many people are not able to afford food for themselves[0][1], this is hardly an alternative. At minimum wage ($7.25[2]), a single domain name would take about half a month to earn, assuming you have no other outgoings, which is very likely not the case.
What coherent person would do that?
[0]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/10/01/how-confron...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/02/magazine/food...
[2]: https://www.epi.org/blog/millions-of-workers-are-paid-less-t...
> At minimum wage ($7.25[2]), a single domain name would take about half a month to earn
I don't understand.
110/7 is 15 hours, not 15 days.
If you're already buying your own domain then this is a valid solution, particularly if you can't or won't set up autorenewal.
The affordability of paying for your own domain and also your email provider is a separate conversation entirely.
>Roughley lost data including emails, photos, documents and diagrams that he had developed for his work. "My account and all its data is gone," he said.
Imagine all your photos were in Google Photos and you cant get it any more because you have somehow violated their policy? All the beautiful memories of your boy or daughter when they were young or as a baby.
Imagine the song you make, the video you took.
The Cloud, should be used as an OffSite backup. I should always have the option to have my Data, stored in a box in my house, in my own property. Those who want the convenience of cloud ( iCloud, Google's X ) can do so. But there should always be an option to have your backup not in the cloud. ( And no, iTunes Backup is not that option, it is ridiculously complicated for any average user )
This allows me and my wife to easily share photos of our daughter with each other, as well as have a backup of everything we have locally on my NAS.
Next step is to sync this of to several other storage places in case of cryptolocker or the NAS dies.
Must be new as I was looking for a tool like this a few years ago and nothing existed.
Whenever it goes off, I login to Google Takeout and trigger a full download of my data. I then download the file and put it on the hard drive of my computer, which is itself backed up to multiple hard drives via apple time machine (I have one drive i leave always plugged in, and one I plug in during the quarterly sync and then unplug for protection against ransomware or other attacks against my personal computer).
Simple, effective, and I could only ever lose up to a maximum of 3 months of data if banned from google.
1. Entire family on @gmail 2. All Android phones setup to send photos to a shared family@google account so no one needs to 'send me those pictures from Anon's birthday' - it's all getting sent into the same account.
I'm not sure how to seamlessly pull off #2 without trying to lift and move the entire family over to iPhone's or something like that.
Also, if it's the wrong kind of compromising photo, the whole family can lose the photos.
Get an owncloud/nextcloud account somewhere (or host your own) and use that instead. Works pretty much the same.
I switched from Dropbox to that about 2 years ago, not problems at all. Email, I'm still hesitation though I probably shouldn't.
I also need to detach any accounts from using Google for signin.
The next priority will be having a replica of my photo collection somewhere.
In that mode it’d at least as secure as iMessage (before Apple backdoored it by adding automatic key and plaintext escrow).
Most emails use TLS, so they’re encrypted on the wire between servers.
ProtonMail then encrypts the plaintext as soon as they receive it, for storage. It stays encrypted from that point until it reaches the client.
For most mail it’s not e2e, but it does cut down on the opportunities for the mail to get seized by anyone who can compel the provider to turn over their records.
I've used a secondary Protonmail account lately and it seems decent. I haven't used it enough to make a fair comparison but if you only gave me 5 seconds to choose I'd instantly choose Protonmail over Fastmail. Same pricing (with custom domain) IIRC.
Edit: Then again as a paying customer I might not be as easily locked out compared to a regular Gmail account? No idea.
If you're doing these two things, you're effectively protected from this issue, even if you use Gmail. Of course, it won't necessarily help you with losses from other Google services you might be cut out of. For an Android user, for instance, there's no real way around potentially losing every app you've ever bought on Google Play.
Pro-tip: use a custom domain so that you can easily switch e-mail providers in the future without vendor lock-in. It's also very easy to add aliases in Fastmail.
> Plus after the import is finished, it will still periodically bring over any new emails received to the Gmail account.
Another option is to let Gmail forward your email to the new address.
This thread prompted me to dig into it and I found a blog posting describing the process [1]. Will try this - while still digging deeper into the migration topic.
[1]: https://robbettis.com/blog/setting-a-catchall-email-for-g-su...
I don't see this on their website, will this keep working if Google bans your account?
Get your own domain "lastname.com" or "somethig.com", get it from someone who will give you 1GB catch-all mailbox.
My setup is:
Windows, MS Outlook. The emails go to the 1GB mailbox, I can access them over my phone. Once I fire up Outlook, they are siphoned down and live on my Outlook forever. My emails are around 5-6GB of .pst file(s). I backup my whole disk in two manners: selected files and folders of my C and D drives on Carbonite, and one massive (80GB) Acronis .tib file (clone of my C: - SDD) again on Carbonite. My Carbonite "footprint" is well over 1.5TB.
So my backup is 3-2-1.
3 places: local disk, external drive, Carbonite (not affiliated)(I just love their unlimited storage and ability to encrypt pre-transmit)
2 different physical locations: home/on the move & Carbonite cloud
1 online: Carbonite (nice and encrypted).
I keep some gmail accounts handy, a couple of hotmail accounts, but EVERYTHING forwards to my mail mailbox. These accounts are used for things I don't want to have a real name-surname (like a silly game or other 'stuffs'). I won't cry if I lose them.
I have been operating like this for 20 years. I do have the cost of the domain name and mailbox service, but the cost is nothing to the pain one gets of losing access to ALL the stuff from the "free service".
I do NOT use any of the Google/MS-Hotmail ecosystem, no "online drives". This setup works for me. Perhaps it may work for you/your lifestyle, perhaps not. Just putting it out there to show that one can have a perfect IT lifestyle without using any of the "free" stuff.
Edit: I am not affiliated to any of the companies mentioned above (MS, Carbonite, Google). I just made the decision 20 years ago to stay away from them (incl. Dropbox, Microsoft free or paid storage), and keep everything offline/on me, and of course accepting the risks that come with it (house burning down, burning a CD/DVD as backup method back-in-the-day), etc.
That said, the real answer is, of course, to migrate to a domain name you do own and a provider that's not known for suspending accounts willy-nilly, I'd stop just short of being your own provider, given how difficult it may be to get things right.
I use their OAuth whenever I can, all my accounts on the internet use the gmail address, most of my life is in gmail.
Losing emails is not a bug deal, I can back them up, but losing Oauth accounts and ability to reset passwords for accounts I don't have a password saved in my manager is a bigger concern.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
never use an android device
There's seriously got to be a better way. I want to get a Pine Phone but they don't sell them with service where I live yet..
Make sure you back up the stock rom first, you might need it later.
My suggestion would be to get your own domain, get an email service that supports wildcard email addresses, and get a password manager. Start migrating your accounts one by one, until you no longer depend on your gmail account for OAuth.
It will be tedious, but for most websites you can update your email address in under a minute. Put a movie on and knock them out in an afternoon.
YouTube doesn’t really listen to the content creators or fans but they will make policy changes within a week of a hyper critical article in traditional media.
BI isn’t big enough probably, need this to get picked up by a bigger paper for a major Gmail policy fix.
Incidentally, you can download your google data:
Set a reminder and do it on a regular basis. It will give you some protection from the Google Yank. (Until they yank this.)
BTW, does anyone know if this can be automated?
* Google Drive
* Dropbox
* OneDrive
* Box
1. Remove Google Analytics and Adsense. Especially Adsense seems high risk.
2. Remove free apps from Play Store
3. Stop uploading public videos on YouTube
4. Stop sharing files through Google Drive
5. Use only my own domain for emails that are forwarded to Gmail.
6 Stop storing passwords in Chrome.
Only reason I want to keep Google is for Gmail, calendar, Nest Thermostats, Nest Doorbell.
Photos are already backed up in Apple Photos in addition to Google Photos.
I'm sure large companies don't want to screw their users over and have to shut down accounts to follow some other regulation but at their scale Google does not care enough about any individual account.
That's why there has to be some set of laws ensuring people can always take their data out with them. IANAL but exporting and importing all your data to/from Google must be just a button click away even after account closure unless there's a court order.
I feel like there ought to be some kind of "let's encrypt for email" type solution to create trust but I'm not sure how it could be done.
I frankly cannot fathom how it's legal to say someone has broken an agreement without justifying what they did which broke the agreement.
I had barely used the account for months, and all of it was, "Thanks for your interest, here's our music, we don't play anymore."
Even working there, I wasn't able to get it turned back on or get any explanation as to what had happened.
I didn't really care. If it had been my prime email account, I would have cared.
I see this as theft. It's not like Google ever throws anything away, so if they cancel your account, they are literally stealing your data from you.
We can't force Google to give service to people they don't want to, but they should be transparent about it, and at the very, very least, there needs to be a way for you to retrieve all of your information if they close your account.
In a government of laws that tried to protect the average person, this would have been a given. Unfortunately, America has never had that.
All of the other options have drawbacks too. With Fastmail or another provider, you're trusting another corp. Setting up your own involves a bunch of work and difficult to solve drawbacks like spam filtering. I'm also not sure that it's harder to compromise in the grand scheme of things. There are horror stories of people losing domains too.
I think this is a prime case of out of touch governments failing to keep up with regulations. My email is part of my identity at this point and more valuable than any of the plastic that has been assigned to me by the govt. I can't think of much in my life that would be more painful to lose than that email address. Yet, we are all so powerless...
You're trusting another corp that only handles your email. Not your photos, videos, notes, phones, thermostats, doorbells(?), security cameras, speakers, TVs, youtube income/career...
China has a state issued social credit score. We have a social credit score via megacorps.
The other soft stuff is fairly trivially backed up and not locked in to any vendor. The devices would need to be replaced, which would be annoying mainly due to cost but would have no long term impact beyond that.
I get your point, but losing my email address would be orders of magnitude more painful for me than those other things.
https://www.wired.com/story/china-social-credit-score-system...
I'm not sure that drawing a parallel here is actually helping the discussion.
Anyhow yeah: megacorps control is dangerous and frustrating. Unfortunately, splitting all services across several different providers is something that requires lots of conscious effort from all users. And even after you split out everything that you use, you might suddenly realize that there is now a new service provided by one of these megacorps, which you started to use without realizing that it's linked to your main account.
You're trusting a corp that offers customer support, a service you pay them for. With Gmail you're completely on your own because you're only a small cog in the massive data mining machine. That's a pretty big difference.
That said, it's a good idea to set up a custom domain with a trusted registrar.
Only use Google SSO for things you don't care about.
While in would be a pain if I lost my google account, I can still access Twitter, Discord, GitHub, Bitbucket, stack overflow etc as they aren't bound to Google.
My emails/hangouts chats however would be lost unless I took a backup (I haven't but I might one day when I decide to go ad-free)
- Bank (requires subscription)
- SIM card (requires subscription)
- National ID card (requires reader plus a maze of Java applets)
All of them suck badly. At least national ID has NFC so technically in future can be a bit easier.
If this is true, then as in my other comment, your government really ought to be regulating Google as a public utility.
Edit: yes NZ has RealMe but there isn’t much use for it (in my xp).
p.s. IRD has it's own login system.
AWS / DigitalOcean / Linode all the way.
- 1 to $5 a month, sometimes per address. It does pile up.
- no office suite of the level of google docs/office365
- need some basic know-how to do it
- price could go down but then you have to learn about dkim, spf, etc. not your regular customers/consumers thing. Not even your regular HN reader/participant thing.
edit:
- gmail to gmail works, no brainer and the UX is the same for everyone ; your own UX/provider will introduce hiccups
So far, a few months into my experiment, zoho is really working great! For a single-person approach, zoho's cost is really difficult to compete with; you're looking at $1/month, plus the annual cost of a domain name...which of course is not free, and to your point could add up if need more accounts (for family members, etc.)...But considering other options, it could be something worth considering.
Looks like .cyou is currently the cheapest TLD at $0.65 per year for renewals. There are a lot of other options for just a little bit more. If you can afford it, pay for 10 years in advance.
One domain can be used by an unlimited amount of mailboxes.
Regarding DKIM etc, most email providers will help you with that.
GMail is only a "no brainer" if you don't care about privacy or until Google locks you out.
Not really, most mail only provider I looked at charge you one dollar or more per month per mailboxes (and/or even aliases which is unfortunate)
> Regarding DKIM etc, most email providers will help you with that.
I don't understand: why would they since they are in charge of their infrastructure ?
Fastmail has really outstanding mail support, but their calendar service definitely leaves a lot to be desired (i.e. if you want to share a calendar with a spouse with any sort of authentication, spouse needs an account too), and their file support is minimal.
I think the answer is diversification and make sure you're a paying customer for whatever service you use. Use your own domain, spread your data around, use standard formats (text, etc.), and keep backups. Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble.
That email address and account is not mine, it belongs to my brother. We connect to the accounts from the same location, have the same surname but we are different people.
Google sucks big time and I will definitely try to avoid building a business on Google products.
Seriously, NO SUPPORT is a scary thing.
I hope that with G Suite you won't get kicked out arbitrarily, but I think I could still recover from that. Hopefully the registrar will never need email confirmation to log in (assuming my DNS setup is there).
Still, I'm worried that could get me kicked out of my registrar illegitimately. Is there anything that can be done to mitigate this aside from using something super expensive like MarkMonitor?
Earlier my account at namesilo got disabled silently when they decided by themselves that my corporate credit card was somehow fraudulently used by me. I got it resolved eventually, but I fear something similar could eventually lock me out completely.
I bought into the dream of the cloud early as a GMail beta user. I used Drive extensively and imported other email accounts into GMail. Now I don’t have decades of important messages and records.
Don’t trust centralization. Hold backups on storage you fully control.
You can privately litigate breaches of GDPR, and I imagine the court would be keen to award you costs when the judge discovers the kafka-esque situation going down. Oh, and ensuring you receive your takeout as they are legally required to give.
Not sure if there's grounds for loss, as the terms and conditions are pretty tightly wrapped to say they can block you at any time and you're fine with that... Not to say that should be allowed either!
A good point well made. Several grounds here.
Like a one time download option for the user to take his data and manage it outside Google property (gmail in this case).
I think this should be mandatory and perhaps it’s high time that it’s put in some regulation.
Google already offer a way to download backups from Google Takeout. But this isn't enough because:
1- I have to remember to download an up-to-date backup myself. 2- I have to store the backup somewhere. 3- Retrieving the data is cumbersome: e.g. if I need to access my emails after a lock down I'll have to first get a recent backup that I stored somewhere then try to find a program that work on my machine that'll read the email format then import it.
This approach is open to flaws that is why I'm working on the side on a product that address these pain-points: you'll be able to automatically get backups to the service servers and it'll do all the parsing so that you can have a similar services UI (read-only) to the ones from Google.
Shoot me an email if you want to keep updated.
Did you try to process listed here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/100458?hl=en ?
If they are selling access to stuff via the account, surely revoking access without reason will have legal consequences. Couldn't it be viewed as consumer discrimination?
(They can turn around and say you violated copyright or something more specific, but they are not).
I hope you dont also own some google router or even better, "home security" device. This would make it a real pain. I am explaining this to people since the birth of gmail, but no one listens.
Let me think for a moment, what would happen if google does this to me...
[x] No google email (I have my own mail server - it is just a $90 motherboard with onboard cpu with disks)
[x] Modified ROM, no google on android
[x] No google cloud (Nextcloud is just fine, for virtualization I have bhyve. They are both just great)
[x] No applications bought from google play (If application doesnt provide "off google" licensing, I am not buying it - voting with my money)
[x] No content served by google (If I want to share video, I just upload it to my server. No annoyances about copyrights or anything else. It just works.)
[x] No data whatsoever stored in google ecosystem (actually actively fighting against them storing any information about me)
Hm, looks like - nothing?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/vi...
- I buy another laptop and install Linux.
- I connect my Google, Dropbox (which contains google backups) and Github, and they contain all data I own.
- I buy a new smartphone and connect it to Google
Simple as that. And my house doesn't need to burn down for this, when I buy a new laptop or smartphone I do the same.
Plus, all my email, documents, source code is accessible from anywhere, for when I don't have my hardware with me but have access to another device.
Everything has benefits and drawbacks, my approach definitely has drawbacks, but running your own server at home also has drawbacks.
But unlike you, I don’t care if google locks me out.
A few years ago I was happy to have all my life on Google because it's was so integrated, but recently because of (1) privacy issues are (2) risks of being banned arbitrarily, I decided to reduce my exposure to Google.
So my email is Protonmail, my browser is Firefox and my search engine is Duckduckgo. I'm still looking for alternative for my calendar and files hosting. I might shell out a pro Dropbox account.
What might be harder is Android and Play Services. I don't like the iPhone, and I don't want to bother with de-googlized custom ROMs either.
You might want to consider Nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com ) for that.
Or just upload backups of your home server's disk to the VPS.
Anyways, if you do distrust your VPS provider, you can just use it for encrypted backups, and then you'll only have to manage the key.
As for suggested alternatives to DO, there are plenty VPS providers in Europe. 1&1 or Hetzner come to mind. Maye they don't have DDoS protection, but you aren't trying to build a public website anyways.
It's called TOTP:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_One-time_Password...
It's an open standard, RFC 6238:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6238
You need to actively take advantage of it being an open standard.
There are a few ways you can do this.
1. When you set up TOTP for a site, scan that QR code or enter the text version of the code in two different TOTP authenticator apps.
You might even consider scanning the code on different devices, too.
2. You can save the QR code or text version of the code, so that you can set up another authenticator app later if you lose access to the one(s) you scanned the code in originally.
Only consider this approach if you are confident you can protect the saves code, such as with strong encryption.
3. Many sites will give you one or more one-time codes that can be used to bypass TOTP. These are meant to allow you to get in so you can set up a new TOTP authenticator if you lose access to your current authenticator.
As with #2, you need to be confident that you can securely store these codes if you want to safely use this approach.
For #2, I recommend both saving both the QR code and the text version of the code. You can get command line tools that do TOTP, such as oathtool [1]. Having the text version of the code will make it easier to use such tools, which might come in handy if your phone gets lost or destroyed and you need to generate TOTP codes before you can get a new phone.
Does your house burn down that often?
Frankly, getting deplatformmed is a much higher-probability event.
> and they contain all data I own.
No, they contain all data you think you own.
I think you've got the probability backwards, in reality.
I created that data, so it's mine by law. Or it is data that was never mine in the first place. Plus, my google data is stored in 3 places: Google, Dropbox and local system. If 2 of them fail, I still have the other.
As to who can access that data, well, that's a question for everybody isn't it? If I would run my own server on the internet that would also be the same question.
So yes, I'm pretty sure it's MY data. I'm also protected by EU laws.
You might want to try this before you feel secure enough. My mother's phone got stolen and I had a lot of trouble trying to get into here Google account for her. I was lucky enough to have logged into it once in Safari of all things on my personal laptop. Google seemed to have placed a cookie to 'remember' the device. Otherwise her google account would have been gone forever.
I now disabled all the trusted device related settings. Sure it is less secure versus hackers, but getting completely locked out isn't a great prospect either.
Yes
> My mother's phone got stolen and I had a lot of trouble trying to get into here Google account for her
The first time, my phone bricked itself (you get what you pay for. Don't buy $30 smartphones). I have 2fa. I use both Authy (syncing) and WinAuth (local, with encrypted backups) to manage my secrets. Entering the code is enough to sign in.
The second time, I was moving from an old phone to a new phone; I turned off the old phone to remove the SD card before turning on the new one, and it worked fine without turning on the old one until after signing into accounts, when I needed to transfer data for some FOSS apps (termux, Fdroid, etc).
To solve the issue you mentioned (disaster recovery), I am using rsync.net borg service.
Another 'trick' I do which considerably help is to use my gandi.net free email accounts as secondary MX and relay for my emails: - I bought my domain through gandi, I get 5 free emails account - I put gandi mail as secondary mx and I mirror the important email account as gandi mail accounts. For example, if my email is abc@example.com, I create a gandi mail account for this address - I run fetchmail on my server to fetch mails from gandi - I setup a specific email account for relay (eg. postmaster@example.com), and I configure my postfix to relay emails through gandi using this account
That way, if my server is unreachable, all emails are delivered to gandi and I can access them through gandi webmail. When everything works fine, most emails (99+% in my experience) go through the primary MX (my server). In case some are delivered to gandi or when my server is back up, fetchmail will just get them back locally.
This 'trick' helped me in numerous occasions, esp. when moving from a location to another, but it should also helped in case my house burns down.
The relay part alleviates most delivery issues: I used to have a lot of rejection (ISP MX rejecting residential IPs) or spam classification (gmail I hate you). I no longer does.
- Google detects the new phone as a suspicious device and locks your account until you can authenticate using your old phone.
- You can't authenticate using your old phone because it doesn't work anymore.
- You lose all your Google-connected data.
You don't need a house fire to fall victim to Google; merely dropping your phone will be more than enough.
This is one of the classic guys who has his own mail server.
> No google email (I have my own mail server - it is just a $90 motherboard with onboard cpu with disks)
I knew it
talking about the setup I'm a bit more flexible in some regards to save bandwidth
Cloud/data storage/services
XCP-NG + NextCloud + 3TB NAS (24/7) -local mail server+ Dynamic DNS on VPS (for mail - local sync)-online a few small VM's for various services-local
Archiving/Backup:
40TB archive NAS for daily backups of all stuff that I keep online+offline including phones,tablets, etc
Video/Audio content:
local private copies + shared though youtube (as alternatives for content blocked on youtube I use RuTube or Youku)
Edit: Forgot about the off-site backup (different country 40TB NAS as offsite mirror)
There is no vendor lock-in as long as the user has the root control of the NAS device (Or at least get their data out of the machine). If the user decided to switch to another NAS vendor, they can simply migrate the data to the new machine.
> Let me think for a moment, what would happen if google does this to me...
> {lots of stuff that is impossible for the average person}
If you're making the same comments to those who "don't listen" then I can see why. Honestly this comes off more as a gloat post than pragmatic suggestions. And this is coming from someone who used to run all of the above.
The problem is, hosting your own email is actually really hard. Not only much harder to set up than it should be Particularly so considering how old the technology is -- you'd think there would be a GitLab-like solution that is a single package for all the components but no, the end user is left working out what MTA to select, then there is choices between the DB backend, user authentication, POP3 vs IMAP, and possible a web server and web site code itself (if you want web mail as well as POP / IMAP). And that's before you get as far as SSL, login attacks (eg fail2ban), spam protection, setting up your DNS records in the exact combination to protect yourself from being identified as spam and then finally creating your user accounts. And even after all of that, you're still likely to find that Google and Microsoft just assume you to be spam because you're not running on a known trusted service. It's ridiculously hard to get right and that's before you've concerned yourself with the weekly upkeep (security updates, application updates, back ups, etc). There's a reason a great many skilled sysadmins -- including myself -- have given up bothering to run their own mail server. It's easier to trust $COMPANY and make regular backups in case of emergency than it is to run the process in reverse.
...and that's just email. Running your own cloud is also problematic -- not as difficult as email but it is still a considerable hassle and still out of the question for the average Joe.
This is the very crux of the problem. We need newer protocols so this is dead easy for anyone to do but I don't see it happening anytime soon. As Google and other Big Tech are on internet standards bodies they'd almost certainty oppose it as a more distributed internet would be bad if not ultimately devastating for their businesses.
Unfortunately, we naively let the Trojan horse into the internet years ago now we're paying a terrible penalty for our foolhardiness.
It works but I have the impression of living in the dark ages:
- I had to ask my contacts to install Signal on their phones, some just didn't follow up (we were having long conversations on WhatsApp the week before), some don't even see my messages. I receive much less messages than before, I'm left out of the cool conversations happening in WhatsApp groups).
- I thought Google's keyboard could use some improvements, but the AOSP one is much worse.
- I can't use my banking app, and their mobile web app doesn't work with KeepassDX so I have to manually enter my account infos each time.
- notifications are hit and miss. The reminder app that I found on FDroid didn't fire a reminder this morning. I had to get another Clock app, the AOSP one insisted to make an audible notification 1.5h before any alarm (it was silent on Google's).
- email clients: FairEmail is good but lacks ergonomy.K-9 mail is a joke. (I like to separate my email accounts in separate clients).
- the icons are ugly and I didn't find any way to change them.
All in all I'm not exactly living the dream right now. I don't use social medias (except YouTube on my desktop where I can block ads) I think I would have a much harder time if I had to use web apps to connect to social medias.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.pocketworkstation.pckeyb...
I wouldn't recommend doing banking on a phone anyway, although GrapheneOS should be fairly secure (and I'd use a browser, not an app).
As for security I'm not sure my desktop is more secure than my phone! Anyway I'm more concerned by privacy than security.
For some months now (maybe a year?) I've been trying to reduce dependency on google services and apps. It is a slow process, but I hope to get it done in the next year or so. Meanwhile I try to use google takeout as much as possible to keep up to date backups of my data.
My next step will be moving away from Gmail. Will probably register a domain so that I can have an address that is not tied to a specific cloud provider domain. Does anyone have a suggestion of an email provider I can use with custom domain?
https://hey.com/custom-domains/
Microsoft 365 Business Basic has support for custom domains starting at $5/month.
I don't use Google Photos, I have my own local storage, backed up in triplicate by three different processes.
Finally, I'm a heavy user of Google Drive, but that is synced locally on several machines, and backed up in triplicate using the same processes as the photos.
Never rely solely on a 3rd party for your critical data. Always have an exit plan. And test it regularly.
Since Google's processes don't seem to give access to that, you might have to sue them. If they failed to show though, you should be able to get a default judgement eventually.
(note - GDPR is in some cases privately litigable, so you don't need to wait around for a snail's pace regulator - you can indeed sue for relief and get your legal costs back in the award. I'd expect a lawyer would take this case on a contingent basis given how clear-cut the GDPR is about your right to access your own data).
Certain approved consumer groups are also able to do this as well - the regulators are too slow right now, but others are gearing up to start taking cases themselves.
Check your local laws.
And... let's just compare my personal finances to Google's finances.... carry the 1...
Today, denial of access to one's data ought to be a human rights matter.
I'd also like to see long term users have to be presented with exact details of what wrongdoing got them banned and some reasonable way to contest it. This would only apply to the big boys, not to the average website out there.
For me, I use a dedicated account for photo backups, and no interactions with any other google service. One gmail for interweb, one for IRL activities, one youtube acount for raging and one for my android with G Play.
I don't have an adscense account yet but I've read many articles how linked adscense violations destroys your personal gmails.
Also isn't it funny how we are willing to pay $100+ a month for an iPhone or premium Android with service, yet many balk at the idea of $5/month for a more trustworthy email option? (not saying MSFT is it necessary; there's multiple paid alternatives to Gmail)
When you pay for something like Fastmail, you get a human within hours to help solve the problem.
If you make them public utilities, they'll get even worse, become more politically tangled, become even more entrenched, impossible to remove and impossible to compete with. You'll put the government directly into the business of preventing competition against them via intense regulation and government-lobby protection.
There are a lot of ways to restrain big tech before you get to the public uiltity option.
I think your fears are overblown, when was the last time the power company, the phone company, the sewer company, the train operator, the postal service decided on a whim to un-person someone? Sure those organisations aren't perfect by a long shot but by and large they are trustworthy and accountable.
That's already true. Look at how Google is banning accounts without recourse. Or how Twitter and Facebook are censoring personal and public discourse to push their political agenda. Why are they able to do so? Because it is already impossible to compete with them.
I second the idea of declaring them as public utilities.
I guess we'll have to wait for some high profile people in the EU administration to be mistakenly banned by Google so they look into it.
Which kinda suggest governments should run their own email services.
No, no, no, no, no, let's not go there. Small independent hosters is a more compelling solution.
Yes, our culture is perfectly capable of delivering essential (and nonessential but nonetheless everyday) services through regulated private independent companies. Typically some sort of exclusive license is granted, yet to maintain that license certain standards must be adhered to. You can see a dozen examples of this on any high street, any business handling food for example.
It still sucks that Google has no real appeal process for this.
It was the 2nd Gmail backup software in the world when it's first released in 2006.
Multiple calls/chats to customer service said I violated their terms or service and would not tell me which term and the account remains unrecoverable.
Fuck Doordash.
So I think unless you own all the data in a server you physically control(not feasible for most), you are more safe with Google than hosting it with another provider. Also Google's server is more secure than you can ever achieve.
Meanwhile, I can think of a BUNCH of things that result in actual consumer harm by google - this included. And no, I don't give to craps about other businesses making money or not - so that whole part of the anti-trust thing seems dumb to me - yes, spammers and auto-review websites are downranked I'm sure, and I don't care.
How is stuff like this at least a bit higher on the things to think about from a govt regulation standpoint.
Some are "business-ending" serious, while others may be relatively frivolous and replaceable (like Calendar).
That said, some of the linkages can make "frivolous" services more important (like using Calendar to link business appointments, documents, and emails).
So, when a Google account gets nuked for a problem in one of the services, they all go into the toilet.
Analogy: Railway ticket vending machine won't charge your card with a ride, gives a generic message saying you're banned due to violations of the ridership agreement.
So, you can maybe take a bus that arrives once a day and takes thrice as much time due to detours, and that's if you're lucky. But if the railway operator is just a private business, then you're basically out of luck.
accept sell you a ticket, say you banned for some obscure reason,
If anybody has not downloaded their data - https://takeout.google.com
It's gotten ridiculous enough to the point that we should all be filing class action against them, and Washington should break them apart in such a way as to separate search and ads. It's stifling competition.
That said, I'll be careful to have backups of all my stuff outside google services.
I almost feel like the author had this happen.
In every single case, if you are not paying for a service, be aware you'll eventually get screwed.
In every single case, if you put too many eggs in one basket -- one computer, one hard drive, one vendor -- you'll eventually get screwed.
Google has made it very very very easy to get deeply enmeshed with their ecosystem of "free" offerings, and those offerings can become very very important to people. That's a TRAP.
I've had my Gmail account since 2004 and I am also terrified about this. I ended up re-registering my custom domain and putting it on M365 but still... it feels like, as another commenter suggested, there should be laws to allow any customers that were banned or terminated from at least getting their data via Takeout
- HN every single time someone banned for political reasons on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc.
Most likely something like that happened here too.
Considering Reddit now bans people for upvoting the "wrong political ideas" I can see Google banning people for a Youtube like or comment. But they are a private company and they can do whatever they want!
Have you got a source on that?
EDIT: I know about email clients setup to backup data, but there are other reasons I do not like to use those - unless of course that is the only way to protect data
The worst is when your card payment fails and they lock you. Now you can't pay and nobody can help you till you pay.
I've never understood why people would actually trust their data to Google or any Big Tech company when there's no guarantee one will always have access to it.
That said, we need laws to guarantee people can always reclaim their data even if their account is closed or the company goes bust.
What you mean to say is that it isn't out of the reach for anyone visiting YCombinator.
Most "users" have less understanding now, many of them having lived with this technology their entire lives, than I did at 14 when I got my first computer... A Pentium 75 with 8 MB of RAM and a 540 MB hard drive.
Then I got an Android phone and used the account for it. Then I used the calendar app which used the same account.
So it vendor lock-in all the way.
But I already migrated my email to a VPS and will migrate my calendar and contacts as well.
But this is not something everybody knows how to do.
I hope contacts would still be on my phone if I lost access, or is that hoping too much?
I have a paid Microsoft office 365 account with all my email and a lot of data on it. I backup my OneDrive regularly using an rsync-style tool. But the email is more difficult now that it's all in exchange format. I could use IMAP die the backup but Microsoft is going to block basic authentication soon.
I use my e-mail with Outlook exclusively and what I did was creating a new local Outlook account, in which I move all my e-mails from time to time. That way, there's an offline mailbox you cannot loose in case of a ban or anything like that. Just make sure you set your Outlook to download everything, not just last year or so.
My motivation was a bit different, I didn't like the idea that someone could make it to my account and see literally all my e-mails sent and received in last 15 years. I mean I do have 2FA setup, but I don't trust MS over my offline backup stored on an encrypted device.
Better advice IMO is to tell people to use a smaller provider, like Fastmail.
Since I never trusted Google, I use a well known mail provider that I pay for.
I solved it by signing up to one of the bigger paid Google services (just a free trial) and using the phone contact they gave me to have my account restored.
I don't know if they would work if you're completely shut down like in this case, or if things have changed over the last years.
It works reasonably well and my only complaint is that the spam filter is overzealous at times. Another pain point has been services where I cannot switch my email and those are stuck on gmail for now.
So they end up with the choice of "google lost data" or "customer did something wrong"
BTW, Mailstore free can backup your google e-mails handidly and is the best such client for doing so.
Does anyone have a verifiable example of being banned, unlike this anonymous one?
I've seen many stories but wonder if these are more of thought experiments than examples of real world occurrences.
Remember, this model has been around for yonks. Go away on holidays and you've turned the power and gas off beforehand and you still have to pay a connection fee even though you've used nothing - and despite the fact that the wires and pipes to you house were fully amortized many decades ago. Same goes for phone and internet services.
Right, it's a ripoff, that's why I use open software whenever and wherever possible.
I've started this process a few months ago after 14 years of gmail and it's incredibly tedious and I'm not half done yet. I am trying to move my accounts on my new e-mail address. I'm lucky I have a password manager that lists most of my accounts
Either regulate them as public service if you think "winner takes all" is valid.
OR
Make concrete rule to make sure winner doesnot take >50% of market.
This is the only solution I can think of.
- You can import your emails, but it might not be realistic to import all your history. It's going to take ages and fill up your new account quota. So what I did is first do a cleanup of my gmail history (remove things like mailing lists, promotion emails, etc) then export only the last year. I can still log to gmail if I need to access an older email.
- You can't expect everyone who has your old gmail address to know your new email address, so you need to accept to live with a forward from gmail potentially forever
- Most services will let you change your login email address, some won't. In this case you can either create a new account or accept to keep the gmail account as login.
2. I really want to know more about that too!
You wouldn't if there were an international telephone-like directory. We seem to have forgotten that this was the actual function of old fashioned paper based telephone books.
As I see it, it's imperative that something like this be established as it's the first step in unshackling ourselves from being permanently locked in to Big Tech. Similarly, we need portable email addresses and portable IDs that we can use anywhere and with any service. As this HN news story illustrates, we need these more than ever and we need them soon.
These won't be easy to implement as Big Tech will oppose them every inch of the way. For starters, we'd need legislation that would enforce Big Tech to compulsorily use these IDs. As Big Tech is in the pocket of governments, this won't be easy.
This seems really easy to do, but also sort of niche (who remembers to backup their email?)
Do not use everything from one source. Do not become dependent on a supplier, especially if you do not have any contact possibilities.
I hope that's just a temporary coincidence.
Title should be: “Users banned on Google after 15 years' use”
Brexit allows them to start again on that side of the Atlantic, albeit on a smaller scale.
However, there were data protection acts in 1998 and 1984, and it seems unlikely the general principle of access to personal data -- which was there before GDPR -- would be removed.
There should be a lawsuit over this.
There should also be legislation that mandates that companies like Google (or Apple) that hold critical amounts of user data, need to have a reasonable process for customers to restore their accounts, or take out their data.
At the very least, Google should allow him to take his data out of their system.
This is such a shitty behaviour, it makes me angry. I hope he'll follow up with a court case.
Google Updated it's Terms of Service. On 3 Nov 2020
Please read terms of Api.
If you had a Chromebook, and Google locked your account. Does the scenario described in the article imply that you can no longer can log into your own laptop?
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en
If this scenario happens, you can think of it as Google terminating the lease early. No biggie.
There's a whole pile of AC700 Chromebooks around, with no upgrade path as far as I know, at least if you don't want to be p4wn3d.
Including AC700: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...
For a while, there were, but they disappeared, and now it's a web of 404s and obsolete documents. Most recommended chrubuntu, but (1) that relies on obsolete ChromeOS components, which introduce security issues (2) someone said that's now dead too.
I'll see if Chromium builds for it. Thanks for the pointer. There's a lot of AC700's out there.
Congratulations!
If the model number doesn't have a typo, it might be expired. Most of the ones not listed tend to be expired, and many vendors sell expired ones.
Oh ohs!
If so, you're in good company. Many less affluent, less educated families find themselves there. Some find they wasted $150 on a Chromebook which has a few months left, and some keep using it, and find their data held for a few grand in bitcoin.
Thanks Google!
But I suspect you have the CB514, not CB154, which IS listed, and which expires in 2024. If so, you've got almost four years left. Congratulations!
I guess it beats Android, where the same happens, only without the warning.
Never heard of Apple locking out devs? Do they?
This platform is in constant competition with it's own capitalistic and identity-less values. I say they're identity-less because let's face it, it's almost guaranteed that Google/Facebook/Twitter/Reddit don't have enough people that are like you and your community on every team that touches stuff that you and your community interact with to give a proper shit about your values or how you will perceive something. I might even take this a step further and say they've developed their own culture for the internet and you either adhere or die. You can swap in and extrapolate any group that has some measure of depth to it in that statement and it'll still be true. That's why, in my mind, there's this desperate race for diversity and to reflect all things at all times. Don't get me wrong, I love to have a diverse workforce, and in my experience the teams that weren't all predominately one characteristic have always been more productive and fun. I'm just extrapolating why these things suddenly matter, almost ten fold, to companies that run platforms.
I've seen people here suggest that developing more tools will help suppression, faulty-auto-moderation, deplatforming, etc... but let's be real. It won't. Maybe you'll more accurately identify people who are violating your terms of service and can vomit up some reason as to why with explainable AI. I don't really view that as a win though and here's why:
Americans ran from King Henry because he was willing to chop peoples heads off and imprison them without having to answer to the public that he ruled over. We created The Boston Tea Party because of a relatively small tax. Some people laugh at that event, but it goes to show you that when you have the haunting memory of a tyrant in your past, the latest cut feels like open heart surgery without anesthesia.
In the end Americans decided that if even one person were sent to the guillotine without a fair trial it was one too many. Our laws have reflected that since, but we have also stripped many of those ideals away in favor of racist ones or convenient ones (at times). Now Mega Corporations are your new King Henry, and all the smaller corporations who buy services from them are their Dukes. They'll either do as the King says or as the saying goes, "Off with their heads!".
https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/gold-coast-...
> It should be illegal.
> How is this not regulated?
No one forces you to use these services. They're voluntary.
Imagine you're looking for storage for some stuff.
One company advertises a storage service, which is free, but there's a clause in the contract that says, "We can take your stuff at any time, for any reason, no backsies."
Would you trust your stuff to that storage company?
No, you wouldn't. That's insane.
But somehow you rub a computer on it and everybody loses their common sense.
- - - -
Folks are naive (in re: computers) so you can either: 1) educate them, or 2) exploit them. FAANG et. al. choose to exploit their users, quite ruthlessly too IMO. A few companies actually try to educate their users (a very few. Adafruit, Wolfram, ... who else? I'm sure there are more but I'm drawing a blank right now. Basically any company that's built around teaching people what computers are and how to use computers, rather than farming "lusers".)
- - - -
To me the weird thing is how many people choose to be exploited peasants rather than educated Users.
It's extra-weird to me when the peasants start jumping up and down shouting "Rabble rabble!" instead of just using some other non-exploitative system.
(But then most folks' behaviour has never made sense to me, come to think of it. So what do I know? "Nationalize FAANG!" "Rabble rabble!")
Your storage service isn't used for your primary identity/access management to your house, bank account, or utilities, and this is where your argument breaks down.
Much like internet should be a regulated utility (in the US at least) due to how integrated with modern day society it is, the right to an unalterable email address should also be considered, especially due to the fact that it is used for identity management across numerous services.
The vast majority of users out in the world use these free services because they don't know anything else, and nor would I expect them to. As pioneers we the technical community herded them at these push button solutions decades ago, and now it's up to us to realize we've somehow failed them at this point by locking them into monopolistic companies that don't have their best interests at heart.
1. We educate them and start promoting services which won't pull the carpet out from under them on a whim
2. We start advocating for regulation on the existing services and force them to comply
If anything that strengthens my argument.
> The vast majority of users out in the world use these free services because they don't know anything else, and nor would I expect them to. As pioneers we the technical community herded them at these push button solutions decades ago, and now it's up to us to realize we've somehow failed them at this point by locking them into monopolistic companies that don't have their best interests at heart.
To me this just sounds like the worst sort of techno-elitism. You're describing a world of Morlocks and Eloi and campaigning for veganism.
> 1. We educate them and start promoting services which won't pull the carpet out from under them on a whim
Yes. I agree.
> 2. We start advocating for regulation on the existing services and force them to comply.
No. I disagree. I have come to believe that it's just simple hubris to think that we (the technical community) have any clue what's going on in re: normals using computers. Did you predict Twitter? I sure didn't.
I predicted a lot, like coin vending machines for raccoons, and mesh networking. But no one cares about those things. Half the world thinks Facebook IS the Internet.
Google-- FAANG and the other corps, are already AIs that merely farm human beings. The sick (IMO) thing is that most people are hunky-dorey with it. Amazon is one of the most trusted entities according to polls.
Sovereignty is jealous: either these mechanical gods with humans for cells will become the new de facto governments of the world, or we nationalize them, which I don't even know what that would mean...
Er, um, I got a little ranty there at the end, eh? Sorry. What I'm saying is, if they are private corporations then grabbing their services by legal theft is bad pool. If you really want to wrest control, go whole hog and nationalize the suckers.
That was pretty much my point.
Anyways, I think in a way we are saying the same thing. Keep fighting the good fight.
It was, wasn't it. Heh.
I guess I'm basically saying that those folks bear at least some responsibility for their own ignorance. It's not like people haven't been trying to reach them and help them, eh?
> Anyways, I think in a way we are saying the same thing. Keep fighting the good fight.
Cheers! You too.
The problem is that they are a lot less voluntary then you think in certain segments.
* Running ads against a blog without using Google Adsense puts you at a disadvantage.
* Running an online store without Google Shopping puts you at a big disadvantage.
* Bootstrapping an online video show without YouTube is effectively impossible.
So if you are, say, an independent videographer, YouTube is not voluntary. The alternative is to not be an independent videographer, or to kludge together 5 other services that will get you 10% of the viewership and 10% of the revenue.
In other words, what I hear you saying is that their excuse for (what I'm calling) theft is that the thing they're stealing is really good.
Also, nobody is arguing that people are "being forced" to use google services, feel free to quote a single person here that said that.
> nobody is arguing that people are "being forced" to use google services
My point is that they entered into the [contractual] relationship voluntarily and now that they have become dependent on their provider some folks here are saying that they want to alter the deal by legal end-run as opposed to just using some other service or trying to renegotiate en mass ("Google users' union", "Boycott Google", whatever) or creating or promoting alternatives.
If you want to be a lemming and jump off the cliff, I don't like it but it's your life. The specific thing I'm on about here today is, don't jump off the cliff and then shout for the government to give you a parachute.
> [these services] are a lot less voluntary then you think in certain segments.
> So if you are, say, an independent videographer, YouTube is not voluntary.