72 ms·

Don’t Mess with The Google

• ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  I'd say I'm surprised that Google would lock you out of your own data despite their claims that you still own your own data, but Google has repeatedly demonstrated that this is not the case. I would be surprised if any of these users get their data or their accounts back without involving a lawyer, based on prior examples. The author says they've contacted the EFF, and hopefully the EFF will offer assistance. This is one of the biggest problems with these vertically-integrated ecosystems, your entire online life becomes managed by a single company, which can revoke your access at will, effectively deleting your existence from the Internet. Don't be the sort of person who falls for this. Get a domain you control, direct mail from it to a mail service controlled by a different company than the domain. Make sure you have a contingency for issues with either one. Ideally make sure neither of those services are run by Google.
  • larrynopage 10y ago
    with us giving google more and more of our data, this is scary.
  • manicdee 10y ago
    You own your data, just not the box it is stored in or the gate you pass through to get to the box.
    • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      Much like a landowner owning all of the land around your property cannot reasonably deny you the right to cross their property to get to yours, I'd argue if Google does not own your data on their service, they must grant you access to that data at bare minimum. I'm not super well versed in the details, but my suggested reading would be discussion of easement rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement
• mendelk 10y ago
  TL;DR: At least 200 people participated in a scheme in which they purchased (multiple) Pixel phones and had them shipped to a dealer in NH for resale to others, in contravention of the Google ToS. In response, Google suspended all their accounts, without the option to download any their stuff, including email and drive data, etc.
  • larrynopage 10y ago
    Crazy
  • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Is a ToS rule like that even legal? This comes a bit more from copyright law, but the US has the "right of first sale"[0] which guarantees individuals the right to sell works they purchased to someone else. I can't imagine this protection would be weaker on physical purchases. Additionally, Google's Terms of Service also says you own your data, including IP rights: "You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours."[1] I would question if refusal to grant users access to download their own data could be considered theft. Of course, IANAL, but if I were any of these people, I would seek the opinion a real one immediately. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine [1]http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/ http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/
    • drewcrawford 10y ago
      Yeah, very legal. The "right of first sale" means that you can't be sued (well, you can be sued but they would lose) if you sell a book you own. It doesn't say that the publisher of that book must continue to sell you additional copies or that the author won't give you a dirty look if you pass in the street or that someone may take steps that don't involve suing you for copyright infringement to discourage your activity. This is, by the way, the same trick that powers RHEL – the binaries are all GPL, so you can totally redistribute them to anyone. If you do though, RHEL will cancel your account. You own your data but not the servers on which that data is stored, so you can't compel Google to give you access to it, any more than you can compel me to produce your comment from my browser cache if you lose it. Refusing to give you access to their servers definitely isn't theft. Very legal. Arguably unethical, but that's a different question.
• brazzledazzle 10y ago
  Could this have been fraud detection automation? I would be shocked if they didn't at least let you dump the contents of your account and setup temporary mail forwarding. It's their service and these people didn't follow the rules but when they ask us to essentially entrust our digital lives to them they owe even the misbehaving users (as opposed to criminal users) who broke a TOS agreement something more than just scorched earth tactics.
• qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  And this, Ladies and Gentlemen, is why you back up all of your files locally.
  • djsumdog 10y ago
    But e-mail is more than that. It's how many services authentication/re-authenticate you. You can't even connect a new computer to your Steam account without 2-factor. And if all you have is an e-mail account, then you loose access.
• vilhelm_s 10y ago
  This really seems like it needs to be regulated in law. For telephone companies, there are rules about when they may disconnect you, e.g. the Arizona Utilities Division write > f I am unable to pay my entire bill, what can I do to maintain local dial tone? > The Arizona Administrative Code specifically states that a telephone company may not disconnect a customer for failure to pay an unregulated portion of their bill. To maintain local service, you must pay for the regulated (landline) charges on your telephone bill while you work to resolve problems with the other portion of your bill. If you fail to pay the unregulated charges on your bill, those services may be subject to disconnection and a deposit to reestablish. (R14-2-509) > How much notice does a telephone company have to give before disconnecting service? > A telephone company is required to give 5 days advance written notice before disconnecting service. (R14-5-509 Section E) In this case, Google killed people's email without any prior warning, and in retaliation for an unrelated business transaction (selling smartphones). Having your email disrupted like that is at least as bad as getting your phone cut off.
  • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Willing to bet if any of them were Google Fi or Google Fiber customers, their phones would be cut off as well. Of course, much of their fight with AT&T over pole attachment rights has been Google's unwillingness to be classified as a "telecom"[0]. I suspect Google is very unwilling to be held to these sorts of legal responsibilities. "Basically, the current regulations require companies with utility poles in the public rights of way to provide access to certified telecommunications providers and to TV/cable companies," Paul Lewis, assistant manager of telecommunications and regulatory affairs in Austin, told Ars. "Google is not a certified telecommunications provider, and it's a video service provider as opposed to a television/cable company." If Google were to apply to the Public Utility Commission of Texas to become a qualified telecom, "It would make them subject to all of the state and federal telecommunications regulations," Lewis said. [0]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/why-att-says-it-can-deny-google-fiber-access-to-its-poles-in-austin/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/why-att-says-it-c...
    • linkregister 10y ago
• vuanotino 10y ago
  This is so low and childish that I am sure only Google could do something like this.
  • dang 10y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, and especially not vitriolic ones. Throwing acid around is damaging to the kind of discussion we're hoping for.
• vvanders 10y ago
  Wow, way to burn trust in your brand over a few hundred phones.
• macinjosh 10y ago
  This just disgusts me. This is the problem with giving everything we rely on to a for profit corporation like Google, et al. It's not your data if they can take it away from you. Your data is their profit center so we should demand more of these companies or simply avoid them as much as possible.
  • jerf 10y ago
    Cheese off the government enough, and they'll freeze everything, bank accounts, ability to be hired, your freedom to not be in jail, everything, not just "your account with them". The problem isn't the "profit" bit, it's the "everything" bit.
    • xaa 10y ago
      I agree that the "for profit" bit isn't the problem, it's the sheer size of Google. Everyone who has been paying attention has watched with dismay as Apple and "don't be evil" Google (along with other, smaller, actors) have become increasingly amoral over the last decade. Same goes, of course, for the government. I don't see any reason to believe that there's anything other to it than sheer size: as a company gets larger, it becomes less driven by humans and more driven by its corporate structure, or whatever. I use FastMail, and I don't imagine for a second that it would act any more ethically if it were in the same position of market dominance.
      • brongondwana 10y ago
        I'll let you know if we ever get to that point :p Right now we're very much driven by humans.
  • rebootthesystem 10y ago
    Get off the "for profit" theme please. This has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Google is an ass. That's it. Simple as that. A totalitarian regime.
• arkitaip 10y ago
  I would shit bricks if my Google account was suspended. It is the super node that connects pretty much every other service that I use.
  • kinkdr 10y ago
    Then these news should be a wake up call for you.
  • pmyjavec 10y ago
    Imagine those people that have homes fully connected to Amazon and Google, locks etc, Wow!
• throwaway76543 10y ago
  I recently made a decision to stop running my own mail server, figured it was long, long overdue to pay someone to handle my email for me. Stories like this are why I didn't pick gmail for this service, which would have otherwise been my first choice.
  • el_benhameen 10y ago
    May I ask who you chose?
    • mos_basik 10y ago
      I am also interested. A while back I set up email using my personal domain using Google Apps after discarding the idea of managing the while thing on a vps and after checking out a few providers like Protonmail. It basically came down to price and convenience; Google was on par with others for price and I really like the Inbox interface.
    • morganvachon 10y ago
      Not the OP, but I've been looking at Fastmail for a while to replace Gmail for a robust dedicated email service. I haven't felt the push to pull the trigger yet, until reading this article.
      • brongondwana 10y ago
        We (FastMail) are really nice people :)
        • peddicord 10y ago
          Does FastMail have any equivalent to Inbox (reminders/snoozing emails)? I started to migrate last month, got lazy when I realized how much I used those, and then I think my trial account lapsed. This article might scare me enough into trying again anyway, but if I can find any replacement for reminders (Fastmail or otherwise) that's as nice to use I'll jump over so fast.
• addicted 10y ago
  Wow, this is so messed up. And for doing something that I believe the law mandates companies to allow their customers to do, i.e. resell their purchases.
• kinkdr 10y ago
  We have to stop being naive about our email accounts. My recommendation is to buy a domain name use that as the primary email. It may cost in total around $100/year but it is definitely worth it.
  • relics443 10y ago
    I hear clintonemail.com is available
    • divbit 10y ago
      Every time I see that, I feel it should be camelcase.. it just reads to me as clin-tone-mail for some reason.
    • relics443 10y ago
      Too soon?
      • lern_too_spel 10y ago
        It isn't available.
  • exolymph 10y ago
    How do you figure the cost would come to $100?
    • kinkdr 10y ago
      $20 for the domain name, $6/month for the email hosting.
  • dublinben 10y ago
    You can register a domain for ~$15/yr from a registrar like Gandi, and they will include several email accounts. Anyone who cares about their online presence should do this.
  • hellofunk 10y ago
• relics443 10y ago
  Just curious here, but why are people outraged over this? They clearly violated Google's policy, and there were repercussions. Those rules are there to protect Google; perhaps their only legal recourse to cover themselves after a rule violation is to suspend the account?
  • addicted 10y ago
    What if your landlord cut off access to your apartment, and everything inside, because you happened to have 3 guests visit and stay with you this month, instead of the 2 allowed by the lease? Would that be okay with you? And that wouldn't even be as bad as this, because a lease is a far more legally applicable document unlike TOS's which no one reads. Further, at least your violation there is related to your apartment. The TOS being violated here was for a hardware device that isn't the service being disrupted. And the worst part is that the act that was in violation is one that governments want to encourage, to the point that owners are protected from being sued. Since Google can't attack them the ordinary way, they are using their leverage on those users with their other products to prevent them from conducting this act. This whole thing is terrible in many ways.
    • relics443 10y ago
      A. Landlords can most certainly terminate your lease because of that. They can't throw you out immediately because of tenant protection laws, and they have to let you get your belongings once you're evicted. B. ToS are just as legally binding as a lease (provided they are presented in the right manner, which is how Google presents them). No one cares of you actually read them or not. As soon as you check the box that said you read and agree to them, you're legally bound to follow them. C. No one ever said that repercussions have to match the violation. As I said, perhaps suspending the account is the only way Google can comply or protect themselves legally. D. Google has no interest in attacking anyone. They simply follow the protocol they set for this occurrence. The common denominator here seems to be that people are getting outraged that they can't break the rules and get away with it.
      • 10y ago
• taurath 10y ago
  Pretty incredible - especially with how little that a hardware product purchase has to do with a user's data. Imagine for a moment that google required people to have an account to access all their services - that they have the ability to cut you off arbitrarily across ALL their services for a TOS violation should scare anyone. Imagine if facebook cut your account and thereby ties to many of your friends and acquaintances for promoting a competing ad company? These companies have lulled us into their systems with good intentions and free services, and now they wield tremendous power over our lives. I don't actually want to go back before the days where these services were fragmented and it was very difficult to juggle many closed services instead of a few. Still, its what happens when the company owns the whole vertical of individual user's data.
  • serge2k 10y ago
    > I don't actually want to go back before the days where these services were fragmented and it was very difficult to juggle many closed services instead of a few I do. I'm sick of the giant web companies. Especially since they make their money off fucking ads.
  • duaneb 10y ago
    > Imagine if facebook cut your account and thereby ties to many of your friends and acquaintances for promoting a competing ad company? This is very imaginable. Facebook has never attempted to be privacy or user friendly; DO NOT USE IT. You are the only product they have of value. In general, do not use third party login for anything personal you care about. It's not a password; it's nothing you control.
    • brazzledazzle 10y ago
      I remember when Spotify switched to requiring facebook for signup and were pushing linking the accounts on existing users. Perhaps it was a bug but at one point they made finding and following other users very difficult without facebook integration. Apparently they switched back to allowing email signup again some time ago but it left a very sour taste in my mouth. I still have my account today so I suppose that's a testament to how well they've run their service outside of that issue. Anyway, I hope developers keep incidents like this Google one in mind and let people create standalone accounts. Certainly at the very least supporting more than one provider and allowing you to link another email address if they don't feel comfortable dealing with the very serious responsibility of managing and encrypting usernames and passwords.
• sabujp 10y ago
  What if you pay google a monthly/yearly fee for gmail? Can they cancel your account then?
  • DrAwesome 10y ago
    Apparently so. On the Google Apps/G Suite (which is basically the paid business version of Google services, including Gmail) page about restoring a suspended user (https://support.google.com/a/answer/1110339 https://support.google.com/a/answer/1110339), "You can’t restore an account that was suspended for abuse or for breaching the Google Terms of Service. To see why a user was suspended, click the exclamation on their account page for an error message. Then see below for your corresponding recovery options."
• lubujackson 10y ago
  Taking the "no" out of "Do no evil". Now it's 33% more efficient!
  • morganvachon 10y ago
    The phrase is "don't be evil", so it's actually "don't" they should excise.
• mmagin 10y ago
  Reminds me a lot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
• chj 10y ago
  A reminder: I need to migrate my email account away from gmail, one service at a time. Can't imagine the day when same thing happens.
• vvanders 10y ago
  Slightly OT: Is there something funny going on with this post? 1 hour, 103 points and it's already at the bottom of HN?
  • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    It's often quite stunning how quickly posts showing malpractice by Google disappears off the front page of HN. I wouldn't dare speculate as to why, but it's pretty common.
  • falcolas 10y ago
    User flags burying the story most likely. Happens frequently when problems such as these are due to "their own damned fault."
• wyager 10y ago
  Anyone have any good links on how to host your own email with spam blocking and such?
  • morganvachon 10y ago
    It's incredibly difficult and time consuming. I've found that a good compromise is to buy a domain name (or use one you already have), and pay for a reseller hosting account with a reputable service provider. You'll get a level of customer support that is far above a standard hosting account, full control over your email settings, and you'll have full root/WHM access to your account. As a bonus you can spin up a website whenever you want for testing or production, and make back your monthly fees by selling webspace to a single client. It sounds like a lot to just have good managed email, but I only pay about $15/month for the reseller account, barely more than a regular hosted account. I went with A Small Orange, they have incredible support and they stay on top of abuse reports so their emails servers never get blacklisted. I've also used Tiger Technologies in the past and they are superb as well. With that said, I'm still considering replacing Gmail with something like Fastmail even though I'm satisfied with the email service from ASO. Having a web-based account outside the reseller hosting umbrella makes two-factor auth a lot easier to manage.
  • alistproducer2 10y ago
    You can't run an email server from a residential address b/c most ISP's block port 25 and 587. That being said, there a project called mail in a box, that attempts to be a plug and play solution. You'll have to host it on a VPS provider (Digital Ocean, for example) and even then you'll have a hard time keeping your email from being black holed by major email service providers like Google.
• xj9 10y ago
  This is precisely why use (and pay) a variety of providers for my services. No single point of failure AND I am directly a customer.
• stillAbnormal 10y ago
  But there's one option they didn't mention: DON'T BUY THE GOOGLE PIXEL. I mean, that's the real message I'm getting from all this.
  • TheCoelacanth 10y ago
    You mean: DON'T USE ANY GOOGLE SERVICE.
  • mrbill 10y ago
    Or, "Don't buy the Pixel through Project Fi with no intention of activating Fi service, just so you can get the phone shipped to a reseller quicker".
• rebootthesystem 10y ago
  This sort of thing truly needs to run into regulatory force. I don't believe in government being up our collective skirts for everything but regulation does have its place and this, I think, would be appropriate use of such power. And this does not apply to just Google. We've had run-ins with Google, Facebook and Amazon on different fronts and for different issues. And, in all cases, our clients had their accounts suspended forever, permanently, done, no more. One case happened about six years ago. Google opened-up a product called, if I remember correctly, "AdSense for Domains". The idea was that, rather than park your domains with GoDaddy (or whoever) and have GoDaddy earn $0.02 and give you $0.005 on ads placed on your domains you could, instead, park them directly with Google and get paid directly. One of our clients had over 250 domains on GoDaddy. They decided to move them ALL to Google. The process entailed moving them over to the Google provided DNS, followed by an automated approval process that took minutes. All 250+ domains got moved and all 250+ domains got approved. About three days later: "All your Google accounts have been suspended due to fraudulent activity on your Google for Domains pages". Upon digging, it appears they claimed excessive clicks on ads. Well, nobody clicked on any of them. At least not our client. The domains were many years old and were logging ad clicks on a regular basis when parked with GoDaddy for years. In other words, normal behavior. So, Google acted like a totalitarian regime run by an asshole and cut off our client. All for the $50 a month these parked domains were going to earn him. What really sucked was that his AdWords account got rolled into that as well, so they lost all ability to use AdWords to promote their legitimate business. No appeal. No email. No way to communicate. Can't get more despicable than that. Oh, wait, you can! A different client. They had been advertising their products on Facebook with some results. Nothing great, but they were learning. Their product, for women, featured images of a woman wearing a normal bikini. No, nothing racy, just a normal looking bikini worn by a model. Facebook flagged the ads as inappropriate despite the fact that, during the same period of time, you could regularly see half-naked Victoria's Secret ads on FB all the time. So these guys, not wanting to get into trouble, changed-up their ads to simple graphics. No problem. About six months later they decide to take advantage of a lucrative affiliate program for a business course. They decided on a budget and started to advertise it on FB. No scam, a course tens of thousands of people had taken. Legit through and through. About a week into this FB emails: "Your advertising account has been suspended permanently." No reason given. They reached out to FB with their appeal form. No reply. Tried again. Snotty reply saying "Please consider this decision final. This will be our last communication". And so, this company, a valuable and upstanding member of society, is now cutoff from advertising on Facebook forever. Done. For life. This, in no uncertain terms, is pure highly refined bullshit totalitarian crap. This is NOT how business is done outside of the realm of games played by petulant children. It is disgusting, to say the least. In the real world business people engage in conversations to find common ground. If a magazine doesn't like your ads, the editor will discuss them with you and seek modifications. They don't cut you off for life. That's some violent bullshit there. No, I think it's high time the likes of Google and Facebook visit the receiving end of a good government style reaming. I'm so sick of it I am more than willing to get the ball rolling. What's the best course of action? Any law firms who read HN interested in a nice fat class action lawsuit? Consumers can't be treated like this. It has been going on for many years. High time we put an end to it. Any takers?
• rdtsc 10y ago
  > he people affected don’t have access to Gmail, Google Drive, Google Voice, or anything from Google. They don’t have any access to gift cards, bills, travel confirmations, work documents, etc that were saved in their Gmail accounts. Yikes. That is scary. A large part of my online life is tied to Google. I was even debating getting a Project Fi phone too. Because well it is convenient and cheaper, but it would mean sink everything even deeper into Google. For fun though, let's imagine if Google or Facebook ran a country. They would control the news you read, the apps you can install, they know where you are at every single instant (via your phone), they know all your secrets (who you talked to, what sites you visit, how often), they know who you know (contacts), Nest thermostat at home even controls how warm or cold you should be. In return you get all the super shiny and new stuff: latest technology, watches which measure your cholesterol, VR games, best email experience, unlimited archiving of your photos, really fast tear-free rendering of web pages. But if you make a wrong step your plug is pulled and you have no recourse. You go to the store to buy something, you just don't exist in the system - no access to you account. Can't travel because it refuses to route you. You can't talk to email or chat to other people because they can't reach you.
  • pmyjavec 10y ago
    "Nest thermostat at home even controls how warm or cold you should be." This is creepy as maybe it means they could mess with your sleeping habits!
  • prebrov 10y ago
    Yeah, that's why they don't want to run countries (be a government) - legitimacy of political power comes with a social contract, fluid and quite vague, unlike TOS. Violating it often ends up in bloodshed and revolutions.
• alistproducer2 10y ago
  The world's growing dependence on mega-services provided by the likes of Google is why I started the Free Data Foundation. The goal of the project is to support OSS that can replace "free" services that subsist on our data. Interestingly enough the maiden project is tentatively called Tmail (short for torrent mail). It works somewhat like TOR in that it will depend on volunteers to host nodes that will communicate with existing email providers (outlook, gmail, yahoo, etc) and relay the mail over 80 to RPis preloaded with MDA (mail delivery agent) software. The goal is be able to expand the service to allow people to sign up for email accounts without running their own software (a la gmail). It gets way deeper than that, but I'll leave it there. You can follow the project at https://github.com/freedatafound/ https://github.com/freedatafound/. I've also bought http://freedatafoundation.org http://freedatafoundation.org but there's currently nothing there.
• euske 10y ago
  I can't help but wonder how many people had this kind of account suspension for random reasons? I bet most of them aren't noticed. These people should be more vocal, because regular folks just have no idea how risky to rely on just one company for everything they do online. In future, I'd hope some sort of digital risk management become a common practice, just like a fire drill or food storage in real life. They should also be taught in schools.
  • jdc0589 10y ago
    I had an account suspended, I still don't know why. It was a generic account my roomate and I used to manage stuff that we shared at the time. I still have some stuff hooked up to it. Logged in one day to get my new credentials from PIA and it was disabled. All I did was open a ticket from the backup account listed (my main account) asking what the deal was, and....POOF! account reactivated.
• tempestn 10y ago
  I'm mildly uncomfortable with my primary address being outside my control. (Like most, I use gmail too.) A year or two back I registered stretch.email, as Stretch is, in fact, my last name. Obviously most of the more common 'stretch' domains are taken, but this one was available and seemed appropriate. I have since discovered that enough services don't support newer tlds as to make it basically unusable for authentication purposes. Anyway, I guess I'll probably end up with mail@[firstname][lastname].com, but with some disappointment. I suppose I can always keep the .email and just forward it to the other though.
  • matt4077 10y ago
    Strange – I've been using a .coffee domain and haven't run into a problem yet (although I've only used it maybe 30 times, not adding too many new accounts these days)
    • tempestn 10y ago
      Many things support it, but many don't. I'd say something like 1/4 of the time I have problems. And often stupid problems, like sign-up works, but unsubscribe doesn't. That's frustrating.
      • matt4077 10y ago
        Sometimes bugs just happen to be terribly convenient, don't they?
• hn_user2 10y ago
  This is a big wake up call for me. I have everything in google: Drive, email, voice, docs, sheets, etc. I was actually about to sign up for Fi. The convenience of everything in one place is great. But I don't think I had quite thought through a disaster like this. With this article in mind, need to reevaluate. I guess either regular local backups and/or diversification of service providers would be a good step.
  • mistermann 10y ago
    I think not using anything Google is probably the wisest move as they have made it very clear on numerous occasions that they simply do not care about customer service. The problem is, they're so damn convenient.
    • techsupporter 10y ago
      > The problem is, they're so damn convenient. And this is the crux of the problem. "Oh, that'll never happen to me" until it does. I've been asked several times, "why do you go to the trouble of [hosting your own e-mail | not having the same mobile # on SMS as on Hangouts | using ownCloud instead of Google Drive | and other greatest hits]". Stories like this are why. They're not at all uncommon, they're a disaster for the people affected, and they're clearly not a wake up call for Google to get any better about their free-to-the-end-user services, so I've no motivation to change my practices.
  • zhte415 10y ago
    1. Have your own domain name. You can change provider from Z to Y at the flash a DNS record gets updated. Email is designed as a federated service, but to be so your email _address_ needs to be too. 2. For files, use a cloud solution and have 2-3 computers updating their local copy (home PC, work PC, phone, small Pi box acting as server). I have a Digital Ocean box running ownCloud, soon to change to nextCloud. Put your code or next essay on Git. 3. Don't trust any service provider, especially if they're not dependent on explicit income. You can still have everything in one place, but that place is many places at the same time. 4. Don't store what you don't need to. Complication and confusion also comes from hording. Don't need it? Delete it, and be assured it is completely deleted.
• shmerl 10y ago
  Hm. Another lesson - avoid Google for critical accounts. Having your account handled by someone who can suspend it because they didn't like how you bought your hardware is simply too risky, besides just how weird it sounds. It highlights that Google wields too much power over their users.
• m0llusk 10y ago
  Better yet: Don't do business with fascists.
• dingo_bat 10y ago
  Wait you have to have a Google account just to order a pixel phone? How dumb would you have to be to do that when you're doing shady reselling deals? But this is why I distrust any online transaction that cannot be done without a guest account unless there's some solid reason. There's no such reason for buying a phone.
  • whyagaindavid 10y ago
    100 % agree. They tried to outsmart Google and got outsmarted!
• Animats 10y ago
  This sort of thing is why I don't have an active Google account. I don't feel the need for one. (I do worry about dependence on Github, though. Github needs a mirror.)
  • romanovcode 10y ago
    Just use Gitlab. It's free and open-source.
• jdietrich 10y ago
  Rule Zero: Never rely on a URL that you don't control. Use your own domain name for your e-mail addresses. Use your own domain name for canonical links to content. If you control the URLs, you do not depend on any one provider. Rule One: If you only have one copy, you have no copies. It is an act of faith to assume that a Youtube video or a file in Google Drive will remain available, just as it's an act of faith to assume that a hard drive will never fail. Anything from a hacker to a natural disaster could destroy your data. The "cloud" is made of servers, not magic. If you follow these two rules, you have nothing to fear. Google could suspend my account tomorrow and it would be nothing more than an inconvenience. I change a couple of DNS records, restore some data from nearline and I'm back in business like nothing happened.
  • indiv0 10y ago
    While I'm in complete agreement with you (everyone should be responsible for protecting and ensuring the integrity of their data), it seems a little unreasonable to expect the average gmail user to purchase a domain name, link it to an email provider, (optionally) migrate their emails, etc. Same goes for YouTube videos. Content creators typically maintain copies of their work, but casual youtubers don't.
    • jdietrich 10y ago
      I don't think it is unreasonable. I think we've fallen into a culture of low expectations regarding the ability of "normal users". Many people will (perfectly legitimately) choose convenience over quality or reliability, but I think we should be pushing users to engage more seriously with the tools that they use. We can certainly do more as developers to make things easier, but I think we have a tendency to pander to an imaginary "AOL granny". We often present oversimplified advice, because we expect too little of users. To pick a random example, I think we're too eager to say "use Dropbox" rather than "use Dropbox, but buy yourself a NAS too because X, Y and Z". I think that there's a substantial latent desire among ordinary users to have more control over their technological lives. People are increasingly worried about the power of big tech companies, but they don't know what to do. We aren't doing a good enough job of informing users; those big companies have an obvious incentive to keep users uninformed. We're not communicating the risks and benefits well enough, we're not providing clear explanations of the alternatives to the Big Five. In the process of writing this comment, I've had several startup ideas. I hope that the people reading this are having ideas of their own. I think that there are substantial opportunities to start returning control to users.
• known 10y ago
  "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." --Reagan
• kajecounterhack 10y ago
  Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and don't have any real context into why this occurred. Speaking as myself, a private citizen. I work in Spam & Abuse and it's possible that this is the result of some clustering algorithm that was trying to take down sharders / phone buying rings. It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility (that legitimate customers would be used to shard purchases) and I'm pretty sure if the affected customers appeal they'll be reinstated, maybe with a warning. I certainly wouldn't characterize this as intentionally punishing the individuals who purchased phones on Google's part -- notice that only users who directly sent their phones to the reseller's address were taken down. Smells like automation to me. The "deleting all their data if the appeal doesn't go through" thing is actually because of privacy policy and Google can't keep your data around for longer than 90 days give or take after your account is suspended. Again it seems heavy-handed but is more a perfect storm of big-company policy decisions with good intentions overall. Know that if you ask Google to remove your account, you'll actually get everything wiped! (That's a good thing imho!) It really is unfortunate that FPs (or "mostly-FP"s) in Google's systems impact people so badly. FWIW for most Google services if you abuse them you usually get a service level suspension rather than your entire account suspended, probably for this exact reason.
  • BorisMelnik 10y ago
    thanks for clarifying, I thought the same thing right away as well: smells exactly like automation. I could never see Google suspending an entire account for one person selling one phone.
  • lifthrasiir 10y ago
    I believe automating a whole account suspension is not a good idea at all.
  • brlewis 10y ago
    Retention should be longer if an account is suspended on Google's initiative than on the user's initiative.
  • ubernostrum 10y ago
    It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility "Very possible"? More like "guaranteed". Everybody who pays the slightest bit of attention knows Google has a gigantic blind spot when it comes to thinking through the consequences of algorithms and automation. And there's no sign that the company is interested in fixing that, ever.
• oygoogle 10y ago
  Why did they let the order go through and cancel their accounts?! they should of canceled the order
• oygoogle 10y ago
  Why did they let the order go through and cancel their accounts?! they should of canceled the order
  • stefek99 10y ago
    Good thinking, same here.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 10y ago
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• chrismcb 10y ago
  Is this even legal? To hide something life this in terms and conditions? It goes against what most people consider "to purchase"
  • quickben 10y ago
    Some things are, some things aren't and yet still get put into EULAs of all sorts.
• DavidWanjiru 10y ago
  Is it legally enforceable for a company to dictate what you can or cannot do with a phone that you bought from them? Sure, the terms said whatever they said, but is it enforceable/constitutional? I mean, people sell their phones all the time for whatever reason.
  • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Probably not. In this case, everyone set their shipping address to one location though, so Google simply cancelled the orders. (And then digitally killed everyone who placed them.) Had they shipped them to themselves and then shipped them elsewhere, this would not have been possible, but it would have cut into their profit margins a lot.
  • Roboprog 10y ago
    Yeah, that was going to be my question. (if) I bought and paid for your phone, why do you give 2 shits about what I do with it? Of course, maybe the answer is "we sell the phones at a loss, and you are only supposed to get one, so we have a tentacle around you". Who knows...
    • wccrawford 10y ago
      It may also be that they were preventing scalpers.
  • taneq 10y ago
    I would have thought the Doctrine of First Sale protects you legally (as in, they can't sue you for reselling a phone), but I don't think there's any legal protections on provision of a service. Bottom line: Never rely on a corporation.
    • kevin_b_er 10y ago
      The doctrine of first sale is dead. It died to the copyright cartels. You own nothing where a copyright is involved. The copyright maintains ownership of the device, not you. The courts may have once done something about books with shrinkwrap agreements forbidding sale, but the same does not apply to software or things containing software.
• p2t2p 10y ago
  That is exactly why I transferred my email to paid fastmail account. That is why I'm gradually resigning from usage of any Google services except search. That is why I'll never ever buy anything from google. I had figured out everything when they closed Google Reader. I understood that they give no flying whatever about their users. Because you, people, are not their customers. You are their commodity and advertisers are their customers. So yeah, don't mess with your owner. update: spelling
  • pmyjavec 10y ago
    Try DuckDuckGo, it's really quite good!
• kutkloon7 10y ago
  "Ignorance of the terms isn’t an excuse, so be sure to read them." I stopped reading after this sentence. The American legal system is so stuck-up and disconnected from reality it would be funny if people wouldn't be screwed by it so often. Lawyers are given way, way to much power and common sense seems to be dead. Lawyers are paid humongous amounts of money for simple tasks, while big companies can and will pretty much screw whoever they like.
• vacri 10y ago
  It is beyond shitty that the notification mail doesn't even give a clue as to what the violation was. It's a bit hard to mount an appeal against a genuine mistake if you're clueless as to what that mistake was.
• albertTJames 10y ago
  That's it. I will never use google for anything vital anymore.
• pmyjavec 10y ago
  "Quite frankly it’s scary to think about how much I rely upon Google for everyday life. Losing everything that I’ve accumulated with Google for the past 15 years would be devastating." It's probably best not to lean on a private entity like Google so heavily. People are literally giving them their whole lives. I've stopped using practically all of their services (maybe a search here or there), for this and many other reasons. I've hardly been inconvenienced at all.
• setq 10y ago
  First post, might as well be a cautionary tale. My father, a pretty old programmer by anyone's standards, regularly warns me of this sort of thing. He was pretty much shafted by CompuServe many years ago on a miniscule scale compared to what is possible now. He lives his life in what I previously described as a paranoid bubble of data control. Until I inevitably burned myself with Google. I have no idea what happened but my account was terminated suddenly. No warning and no explanation as my backup address was no longer valid. This was two years ago. I lost documents, account details, contacts, calendars, email history, conversations between people on hangouts plus my phone decided to ask me to sign in again and became as useless as a dumbphone instantly. Took about a month to reorganise my life and I lost contact with people, failed to complete tasks because my record was gone, lost control over my personal finances which were in Google sheets. Probably burned a week of my life on this as well. Now using a cheap Nokia 106, POP3 box with gandi.net, mozilla Firefox and lightning, encrypted USB sticks for backup and LibreOffice. Never been happier. I am genuinely afraid of going through this again. Everything remains portable between OS and provider now. Things are more volatile than we realise. I understand my father now. I'm not against using all in services like Google but you need backups, an exit plan and a DR strategy explaining where all the services will go plus the time to carry it out. If you don't have these or it's too expensive to do this even for a personal user, don't even cross the starting line with the product. Edit: Also beware of potential mergers, political whim and products being redacted or broken for long periods of time. All of these have affected me over the years.
  • Klover 10y ago
    Questions: how did you get lightning assuming you're talking about the browser for Android which does indeed not require Google integration, on a Nokia 106? And is this link by Google not an easy enough of a solution for backing up your Google stuffs? https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en
    • setq 10y ago
      I'm talking about Lightning as in the Mozilla calendar. I don't use a smartphone any more. Google takeout isn't or at least wasn't comprehensive at the time. There are other lock in items. Also it takes time and effort moving it somewhere else still, isn't instantly useable etc unless you can read vCards and iCal feeds..
• majewsky 10y ago
  > At a bare minimum Google should have allowed emails to be sent to their accounts and not bounce back to the sender as undeliverable during the appeal process. I don't know. When an email is delivered to the destination mail server, that counts similarly to having a letter delivered to your physical mailbox. The time of delivery is important for any deadlines mentioned in the letter/email. If I'm locked out of my Gmail for 4 weeks, and then find a 3-week-old mail that had a 2-week objection period, I'm out of luck. (Unless I've got a good attorney and the willingness to defend my case in court.) Also, when a mail is bounced as undeliverable, the sender will notice that I won't be able to react to the mail, which might prompt them to contact me on another mode of communication if the matter is urgent.
• whyagaindavid 10y ago
  1. Why is everyone here condoning the act of these people to make _extra_ money? 2. If you are doing such shady stuff create a new Gmail account and do it
  • Figs 10y ago
    Regarding question 1: (1) Because the First Sale Doctrine is supposed to give people the right to resell their legally acquired goods. Retaliating against people who resell something they paid for already is extremely bad form on Google's part, even if they have found a tortuous way to legally do so. (2) Regardless of whether Google was justified or legally within their rights to do so, cutting off people's email with no warning is alarming. Many people depend on Google's email and data storage services; if they're going to cut off your access because they don't like what you've done on something completely unrelated that may be a good sign that all of us should stop using Google's services while we can still do so gracefully. What if next they decide that they don't want to continue offering email service to people who bought an iPhone instead of an Android? Or people who voted for Trump? They could most likely determine both of those facts if you are using GMail as your primary email provider... People here aren't really approving of what those folks out to make a quick buck were doing specifically -- they're concerned about the way Google does business.
    • whyagaindavid 10y ago
      Thanks for (1). BTW, if it makes business sense for the folks to resell mainly for profit; google can also retaliate in a way they like to respond. This is like tax-evasion - if you find better accountants/tax-consultants you do better than your govt. In principle -> these people tried to outsmart Google -> and got outsmarted. Not that I am justifying Google's actions. For (2) I look at it from a different point of view. I am glad that Google did not cut email for some random Joe - just using a random-number-generator. Only those that did something which _may_ be hurting their business. please note, I am not supporting G totally. > What if next they decide that they don't want to continue offering email service to people who bought an iPhone instead of an Android? But what is your problem then? If they do not offer please move away. It is the same with apple; unless you have a _actual_ apple hardware you cant open appleID or even watch apple live product launches. While I am not condoning Google or apple, it is how they want to do business.
• whyagaindavid 10y ago
  The OP should have advised people in the forums, do not use your original userID with google to mess. Create burner account.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• cammil 10y ago
  I think this would be illegal in the UK due to the Data Protection Act: Some excerpts from Wikipedia on DPA: "Personal data shall be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date." - Would Google be allowed to discard emails sent to you from others? Would this constitute personal information? "Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data." - Would Google be allowed to prevent access to your personal information? Seems like the DPA should protect against this...
  • Singletoned 10y ago
    That's an interesting point, but my reading of that is that Google would be fine. They can't accidentally delete your data, but they can do it deliberately.
  • LukeB_UK 10y ago
    I believe that personal data in the context of the Data Protection Act means data about you, so it wouldn't.
• bitmapbrother 10y ago
  >Don’t Mess with The Google What a bunch of scammers. Not only did they deprive people that actually wanted the phones for their personal use, but they also engaged in a coordinated effort to profit from them.
  • Singletoned 10y ago
    > What a bunch of scammers. Not only did they deprive people that actually wanted the phones for their personal use, but they also engaged in a coordinated effort to profit from them. That's pretty harsh. They weren't depriving anyone of anything. Selling the phone on means that someone who wants one for personal use, gets one. And there's nothing inherently immoral about coordinated efforts to make a profit. That's what businesses are after all.
• facepalm 10y ago
  It's really a problem with Google offering more and more services. On the one hand it is nice and convenient, but every additional service increased the risk of everything being lost because of some silly mistake.
• _pmf_ 10y ago
  God help you if you use your Google account to sign in to important services.
• barnacs 10y ago
  Besides not depending on centralized (especially 'free') offerings of any single company ourselves and spreading the word, warning people with less technical insight, there are some things we can do when building services to help the average user avoid this: - Offer at least one properly decentralized authentication option. Do not force your users to depend on google/facebook/github/whatever authentication services. - Provide a way for registered users to change their email address and/or authentication method. - Even on your backend, try your best to avoid locking yourself in to the services of a single provider, be it hosting, storage, email or anything. By doing so, you are not only locking in yourself, but indirectly your users as well. Prefer open source and self hosted services.
• homero 10y ago
  That's really fucked up of Google
  • quickben 10y ago
    Well, what do you expect from an advertising company?
• tiatia 10y ago
  "1. Don’t mess around with Google or any company that you simply can’t live without." Wrong. Get off of google ASAP. I have my own email. Yes I pay, yes it is a little bit less convenient. But I don't have to worry about such stuff. I still use the search engine but should actually use startpage.com instead. Gandi offers Email with domains. If you have your own domain and need email services, you can also use this guys: http://infomaniak.ch/ http://infomaniak.ch/ Less than US$20 per year. And non EU non US jurisdiction as a bonus. There are python scripts available that back up your google email data via IMAP. I downloaded everything before I moved.
• bad_user 10y ago
  The worst thing about it is that it's almost impossible to talk to a human about the problems you're having with Google's free services. Even if this was a honest mistake, there's no human to talk to in order to correct it. And yes, you could pay for Google's G Suite (former Apps), which does have support available, but then again that locks you in, because you can't migrate purchases and connections to a free account later. Free stuff is never free, you end up paying one way or another. I have long since migrated off Google Apps and am paying for FastMail and Dropbox (with the 1-year history add-on), which ends up being about $243 per year, or about $20 per month. Now that's kind of expensive. Along with other recurring payments for online services, I end up paying about $38 per month for online stuff. Now I'm being a frugal kind of guy, having suffered from poverty in the past and I'm not paying for useless shit I don't need, but if you can afford it, then allocating about $50 per month for your online independence is worth it, because the alternative is to be held hostage by companies like Google.
• pksadiq 10y ago
  The good (really, the bad) news is that whatever seems to have happened, haven't really happened. No user's data is ever deleted by Google (or any other company) ever, even if you have deleted your account. If you run some hosting company, you know it. You have backups and backups of backups. Once I contacted a website who frequently SMS'd me to scrub my phone number and to not do that again. They did it right, but after a few weeks I began receiving SMS again. Probably they ran into some issues and some of their data were restored from their backup. Some companies could even have read-only backups so that they can have their data saved even in a massive attack. Some developers have argued me not to ever delete user data. Just mark it is deleted, and never show it to user again. Having a way to actually delete your data may be used by some attacker to bring your service down.
  • londons_explore 10y ago
    At Googles scale you can be sure that if they didn't delete things they said they did they would be in big trouble. In the modern world it isn't acceptable to keep backups indefinitely. Big web companies keep backups for 14 days. When you close your account, 30 days later they delete it off the main servers, 44 days later they delete it from the backups, which might take 4 days in case of a national holiday or strike in the drive-crushing department, so 48 days.
• thinkMOAR 10y ago
  "Don’t mess around with Google or any company that you simply can’t live without." If your life/internet usage is that simple i think you might need to take some computer/internet lessons in learning about alternative services that work just fine. There is internet beyond google and Facebook.
• TheArcane 10y ago
  I shudder at the prospect of getting my Google account disabled. I'm way too dependant on it for email, Chrome, and Android.
• csomar 10y ago
  Most people are missing the important piece here: The terms of service is preventing you of doing whatever you want with a physical product you bought. The F!. You bought the phone with full retail price. You didn't break any laws (as far as I understand it). Why does Google has a say on what you can do with "your" phone. 2018: You can't sell your phone (as a used phone). 2020: Google Drone picks up user phone from his apartment as he is banned from Google.
  • ryporter 10y ago
    Google doesn't have a say on what you can do with your phone. Google does have a say on what you can do with their service. These people were clearly trying to game the system. Google caught them red-handed and has now exercised their rights.
    • dvirsky 10y ago
      But the phone's terms did state (according to TFA): “You may only purchase Devices for your personal use. You may not commercially resell any Device, but you may give the Device as a gift.”
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • csomar 10y ago
        That's exactly my point. I'm critiquing their policy.
        • dvirsky 10y ago
          Sorry, I read it as protecting their policy
      • tclancy 10y ago
        This is (one of) the problem with EULAs: even if I noticed that while not really skimming the EULA, I would ignore it as it seems completely unenforceable from a legal standpoint. I buy something from you and you get to determine what I can and can't do with it? Don't let EA and the other AAA game makers hear about this!
• seanhandley 10y ago
  That's pretty rich, coming from a company that likes to avoid paying taxes.
• apatters 10y ago
  Google has simply gotten too big and too impersonal. If they were smaller, only did one or two things, and locked you out of those things because of a ToS violation it'd be frustrating but it wouldn't be catastrophic. Similarly if they just had more humans interacting with their customers, then incidents like this would get resolved in a more humane way (but can you really do that at Google scale?). We live in the era of tech giants owning vast swathes of worldwide markets because they got there first and developed proprietary IP to make it work. Which they deserve plenty of credit and have been rewarded richly for but I would prefer to see the pendulum swing back at this point to businesses which have a more personal touch. Fewer giants, more mom'n'pop shops which might not ever make anyone a billionaire but would create jobs for people who interact with other people. Customer service, consulting, service businesses built on open source IP, humans running the machine--that is one possible future. The other is a couple of tech giants controlling everything and the machine running the humans. I know which one I'd rather live in. One change we can all make to promote this is simply limiting the business we do with companies that make it hard for you to get in touch with a person. If the market starts to value the human touch more then these companies will improve or be replaced.
• ap22213 10y ago
  Is it unusual to have such terms in a hardware device? I'm guessing that Google loses money on the hardware but makes up the difference in other ways (i.e. personal data, etc). But, other industries use the same model without such terms. Are they trying to lock down identity so that it almost always has a one-to-one relationship with the device?
• anentropic 10y ago
  This should be illegal Good grief, I'm off to backup my shit now
• dvcrn 10y ago
  Maybe a bit of a contrary opinion here but I think Google is in the right. You break the terms that you agreed no when creating your account, you loose your account. I was in a similar situation recently where I lost my adsense account. My appeal got rejected, and once they made the connection to my other adsense account which was run by a business entity, they banned that adsense account as well for violating the terms with creating another adsense account. That it was linked to a YouTube channel that lost monetization and partner status didn't matter. That it was not even breaking the terms as it was owned by a legal entity instead of me as a person didn't matter either. Try to contact a human to get this mistake out of the way? Impossible. It's important to know how fragile your entire online existence can be. Plan for these kind of things and backup often. Don't trust cloud services and have a emergency strategy ready. For me, I took control over my domain, moved it to fastmail and would be ready to rewire the mx records to a different server anytime. My dropbox account is getting auto-pulled to my NAS at home which is powered by a RAID setup, and once a week the files are compressed and stored somewhere else. It's setup in a way that if dropbox deletes a file, the NAS doesn't delete it unless manually given permission to wipe deleted files. Same goes for Google Music - all files I buy or upload are getting auto-downloaded to the NAS and securely stored. I have multiple Google accounts for different things: Music, YouTube, Analytics and all services that allow it have multiple account managers setup, just in case a account is getting terminated and login is no longer possible. Then I still have 1 google account that I am using as login email for very important things, just because it's the least likely to get compromised. After signing up somewhere with OAuth, I also immediately go into the settings and give myself a password and valid email to not rely on the OAuth provider. Paranoid? Don't think so. Since knowing that my data is waiting at home for me and can't just disappear, I am sleeping a lot better. It was a bit annoying to go from the convenient "my google account is my life" to this solution, but the ease of mind is so worth it.
• stefek99 10y ago
  I ratified peace treaty with Google - I trust their service more than my ability do properly configure backups and servers. Example here? Someone abusing T&C and making profit on their phones... It's just like printing counterfeit money, stealing profit from the gov. No wonder why they got unhappy.
• rsp1984 10y ago
  1. Don’t mess around with Google or any company that you simply can’t live without. I know a better rule: Organize your life and data so you don't depend on a company. Many people forget that Google isn't some sort of official service provided by the government but a public for-profit company that's largely guided by shareholder value maximization. While there's no doubt that the latter has big advantages over the former in many areas, there's a lack of public education on this matter. People (unfortunately including me) trust Google with so many kinds of personal data, it's scary.
  • kowdermeister 10y ago
    > I know a better rule: Organize your life and data so you don't depend on a company. Quite unfeasible request. You'll meet companies at the end of one line or another. You have to trust some company. You still need server providers, you still need a domain name, you still need reliable hardware manufactured by a... company.
• Kenji 10y ago
  Some people had family photos saved in their drive that are now lost. It’s the 21st century version of losing priceless mementos in a house fire. ...I feel no pity for them. That's what backups are for. Real backups. Like, on HDDs that you have in your hands. It has never been cheaper to back up data than today.
• whyagaindavid 10y ago
  is there a google IFTTT that will copy all data from Google to say One drive -everynight?
• ac166 10y ago
  Bizarrely I wrote a novel last year about this kind of thing happening in the future. If anyone wants to read it I'd love some feedback ;)
• woliveirajr 10y ago
  It's gaining media coverage: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-suspends-customer-accounts-for-reselling-pixel-phones https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...
• coolaj86 10y ago
  I'm co-founder of Daplie (https://Daplie.com https://Daplie.com) and we offer a home cloud (pointedly dubbed "Cloud") that competes with some (or potentially all) of Google's G Suite. The Internet never seemed so small, closed, and locked as when we got our notice that our ads account was suspended (and we got no explanation other than that the reason was 'on a list they weren't allowed to talk about'). It suddenly became super clear just how much Google monopolizes the web and had the power to censor products and services and ideas they don't want. Not evil, eh? ...
• gregn610 10y ago
  What happens with someones 2FA accounts that use google authenticator in this scenario?
• fest 10y ago
  I just did a cursory search for options to backup google account. The most comprehensive option seems to be https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout, which offers to save data from almost all google services to a downloadable ZIP file. That is manual solution though, with no official way to automate. Other option is to back up data from each service separately with different tools: * offlineimap for GMail, * goobook for Google Contacts (mainly for Android contacts), * gdrive for Google Drive. * other tools for other services. I'm curious to hear other's thoughts on their experiences with this.
• aRationalMoose 10y ago
  This is a cautionary tale for those who buy solely into one eco-system. I know the convenience makes it tempting, but they control everything and if you do something they don't like, even unknowingly, you'll pay a price. Amazon too, has been known to blacklist folks, without warning and with only one chance to appeal.
• Mikho 10y ago
  The same Gmail block happened to me circa 2010 without any explanation. It just stated that I "may be violated one of the service policies". Lost all data and access to every service that I didn't remember password for. Since then: 1. Use my own domain for email w/ Google apps to be able to reset it to different mail provider fast if something happens w/ Google access. Office 365 allows to use own domain--while paying for Office and cloud anyway why not connect own domain to the service. 2. Never use Facebook etc to authenticate anywhere--the same thing could happen w/ Facebook access. Access to services should not be directly connected to social activity. Now always password and email so access to a service could be easily recovered via email.
• bawana 10y ago
  This is a watershed moment for Google. Providing free email service was a way for them to get lots of data. The goal of course being to learn to massively scale computer networks, how to maintain them, back them up etc. Your data was the equivalent of 'cannon fodder' in their secret goal of controlling the world. Clearly, email has now become a burden. They can get orders of magnitude more data from the internet of things whose number now exceeds the human population on this planet. And all these things are talking to each other, sending data, etc. Our lives are inextricably dependent on these things - like automobiles, telephones, electricity, factories, etc- When google learns to optimize these networks, supply chains, distribution channels, etc. they will control the substrate on which we base our lives. People's behaviors, choices, values , etc will be manipulated without them even knowing it. Witness the first and most superficial attempt at this game - facebooks' 'fake news' campaign. Eventually, the AI that will inform these choices will be so complex that humans will not even know how to recognize it, let alone stop it.
• tyingq 10y ago
  Yandex mail is a decent and free alternative. You can even use your own domain with no charge: https://domain.yandex.com/domains_add/ https://domain.yandex.com/domains_add/ They could, of course, do something similar to what Google did here, but using your own domain mitigates some of that.
  • oridecon 10y ago
    In my experience, Google flags most Yandex (and Zoho) e-mails as spam. They probably justify it with some "you must train our network to accept your address" bullshit.
• digi_owl 10y ago
  Didn't some kid get their email shut down because they were under the age for having a G+ account? It is insane how coarse grained Google is regarding all this. You would think they could shut down one part of the account without killing the whole account.
• ensiferum 10y ago
  Why would you put your data that matters to something like Google and trust it? I keep my data that matters locally on my disk. And a backup of it too on a removable usb-drive. Call me old fashioned.
• ryanmarsh 10y ago
  This is why Apple and Google will eventually become horrible evil companies. I won't do anything to piss off Google or Apple because my life is stored in their ecosystems. This, they can get away with being shittier than AT&T. The financial loss I would sustain if Google locked me out would be substantial. The emotional loss if Apple locked me out would also be substantial. My entire personal life is basically in iCloud in some form or another. My situation might be a little extreme because I travel constantly and stay in touch with my family digitally but my tight coupling with a digital ecosystem will become the norm.
  • lloeki 10y ago
    > My entire personal life is basically in iCloud in some form or another. True enough, only for me it's just not stored only in iCloud, (something that is cumbersome to accomplish with Google services). If I get locked out of my iCloud account, everything (that matters) is right there locally on my Mac.
• darreld 10y ago
  Being locked out of my Gmail account is something I have worried about in the past. I have moved all essential email traffic to a domain I control. I do worry about my wife and her photos though. She uses Apple photos primarily but syncs them to Google Photos. Is there an open-source cloud photo-management solution like Nextcloud or something?
• StanislavPetrov 10y ago
  The lesson here is not "don't mess with Google". The lesson here is "don't be entirely dependent on a corporation".
• tracker1 10y ago
  I think I'd be really in deep sh*t if this happened to me, I have all my domains under google domains now, not to mention the vast majority of my email/contacts/sheets etc are all google managed... even with a dump, it would be excessively difficult to move/recover my accounts on other systems tethered to my gmail.
• ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
  If this is true it is very disturbing. I have a Google Apps for Work account, I wonder if anyone of these people did. They would lose their business email access.
• CJKinni 10y ago
  I've been thinking a lot about my personal dependencies, and how I can mitigate points of failure. The mental exercise I've been going through is basically imagining Netflix's Chaos Monkey [1] running loose on my life. How can I be resiliant to data loss? Job loss? Cognitive loss? There are ways I can mitigate these risks, and some ways I can test to see if my mitigation strategies will work in practice. But how do I do that without devoting my life to it? It's nice to dream of some kind of antifragile existance going forward, but for now the easy conclusions tend to come down to the 'two is one and one is none' variety. Backup everything I can, including but certainly not limited to my data and services. [1]: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into-wild.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-in...
• fredgrott 10y ago
  This is miss-titled, ity should read Do not mess with Google's Pixel TOS when buying that device.
• jwtadvice 10y ago
  I lost a Google account for using it to post a combative message on the State Department's youtube channel. Google didn't tell me that, of course, but I don't use that particular account for many things and it was the only thing I used that account for in a long time. Likely part of the push by Washington to get information companies to guide what dialogue is acceptable to post online.
• lifeformed 10y ago
  This has always scared me but the risk is low enough that I never feel like spending the time to figure out how to migrate my gmail account. Is there a paid service out there that just does it for me automatically?
• Jeralt 10y ago
  Does a service exist that compresses your entire Google Account (GDrive/Docs/Gmail/etc.) to an archive and then uploads it to your Dropbox (or other cloud storage) account? I don't want to ditch using Google, I'm too integrated, but I would like to back up everything to a second source just in case.
• wakkaflokka 10y ago
  Not that I plan to spite Google, but this is one reason I use Google Takout to download all of my data (photos, email, etc.) periodically.
• davemel37 10y ago
  Looks like Google is reinstating accounts. http://www.slashgear.com/pixel-phone-flipping-scheme-googles-statement-on-a-ban-hammer-17464528/ http://www.slashgear.com/pixel-phone-flipping-scheme-googles...
• mikebay 10y ago
  I really hope people would stop using google. It's quite scary how people trust these liar companies, that definitely are not your friend. Alternatives needed from nicer companies..
• pascalxus 10y ago
  Executive summary lesson: don't by a new android phone, especially if it's a google pixel, or Risk getting your account banned. Good job google, great way to maintain your customer's confidence.