Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people in this thread talking about losing their store credit and app/content purchases. I'd imagine the worst case scenario could be much worse. Apple runs fairly popular cloud storage services that are strongly encouraged to you for your photo storage and files. The photo storage especially has an option to automatically delete your local media because it's already backed up on Apple's servers. Will these all be locked out without warning or recourse for a miscellaneous card whoopsie?

Even standard files on iCloud. Who knows how important the average users' cloud files are to them? (I don't use public cloud storage at all anymore because of this exact fear - what if some arbitrary billing/transaction error locks me out of everything without recourse?).

To be fair I've no idea what the person in question got their account locked for and if there was any shadiness involved but I doubt they'd write about it publicly (or get access restored) if there were, which implies that at any time your account and your data can be taken away for something entirely mundane.

It makes me really concerned in fact how Google would handle something similar to this - given that for Chromebook users everything (literally EVERYTHING you would normally do locally on a computer) is in/via your Google account.

For exactly this reason I never trust online photo storage for anything other that disaster recovery. Google Photos still, after nearly two decades, won't tell you if they're storing an original copy or compressed facsimile of your photos. And after having the Android App randomly and surreptitiously turn on compression for uploads, there is simply no trust left.

So. SyncThing on my phone and laptop, and an a little herd of external drives. It makes me feel like a digital prepper or something. Sigh.

Actually. I think I have just self identified as a digital prepper and I like it. Time to download my Google content.

I think this is completely OK. We treat our physical valuables with care. Why would we treat our digital valuables otherwise?

> Google Photos still, after nearly two decades, won't tell you if they're storing an original copy or compressed facsimile of your photos.

One recent anecdote: When I used my Pixel 2 with its free original quality backup, I used motion photos for a few things. 3 years later, now, on another phone (or even the web viewer) some of these motion photos are not loading. Some of them then load on the web but have video compression artifacts (i.e.: B-frame artifacts).

I'm glad the original photos are intact from what I can tell, but this is extremely off-putting, given I was 100% in the Google ecosystem -- from hardware to account setup -- and still got burned somehow.

> It makes me really concerned in fact how Google would handle something similar

Very poorly, it seems. There are a bunch of stories scattered around HN about Google not only irreversibly deleting personal accounts, but entire paid Google Apps for Business setups. A whole company gone because the admin uploaded one ripped movie to their personal Drive, for example.

Many of these did get mostly resolved after someone carefully exploited the Kevin Bacon rule to get in contact with a Google employee, who then made some noise internally. But many couldn't be even with insider help, as some deletions are (were) apparently instant and irreversible.

There is a famous google support post going around where a woman begs the support to help them get her account back and the support just parrots a canned text reply. But afaik google only has working support for paid users.

Nope, the paying users have a similar level of support i.e. a well-trained parrot

That's not 100% true. One of the best things I ever did was ditch all my clients who used my servers for mail onto corporate gmail accounts. They actually do get someone on the phone when they have a problem. The thing you have to consider is that someone on the client side is getting paid $8/hr to call Google and someone on the Google side is getting paid $8/hr to respond, and as long as it doesn't bubble up to being anyone else's problem this is probably better than having a CEO call a dev lead at 5am and ask why the mail isn't working.

Ask to speak to the data controller; they have to provide you with a copy of all the data they have on you. Once it gets legal things tend to move quicker.

This only works in certain countries.

Take a few weeks holiday to the EU and solicit it while there; I believe the GDPR would apply to you in that case.

Have three kinds of backups. Physical drives (2) and an online backup that's not through Apple, Amazon, Microsoft or Google. And don't use any of their built-in services; in fact, firewall yourself from them. Then it's no fuss. You'll never have to deal with their "customer service".

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