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Google reverses its ‘digital death sentence’ for Pixel phone resellers

346 points by drewg123 10y ago

viridian 10y ago
Good to hear. I think the whole event was a net good for everyone, based on how many HN commenters responded to the news by offloading as much of their data off google servers as possible. Glad to see google doing good by undoing their own evil.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  google has always been good about not doing evil while undoing their own evil. you're all idiots.
- existencebox 10y ago
  Anecdotally, this news is what finally pushed me to set up automatic backups, and I can speak for many of peers for whom this was the final motivator as well. I'd be VERY curious to see their internal metrics (data egress volume over time, etc), and my intuition as someone in the business of data analytics/strategy, this sort of reversal likely has some chuckle-worth KPIs behind it.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Yeah, I mean, for Google the damage is already done, many of these customers won't trust Google again, plenty of HNers or readers of news sites will consider alternatives as well. At this point they're just stopping the bleeding from their perspective. When you can't get your account reactivated unless your plight ends up going out over Associated Press, the company deserves no kudos for finally fixing it.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Outside of the HN bubble, millions and millions of people use Google products and have no reason to treat this as the straw that breaks the camel's back. For one, a lot of businesses are dependent on google services like email because there aren't many alternatives that can match google's price and sprawling integration.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      I am aware of how much smaller of a percentage of users will be affected outside of HN. But given the exponentially wider audience of say, an AP story, we can assume at the very least, multiples of the size of the group of HN people who will switch, will switch after seeing the news story.
      - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
        Those you say will switch are themselves a very small proportion of the people who will become enraged by the story but in the end change nothing and continue to use Google products.
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      But it would be good for this info to reach a wider audience. It's frustrating--Why can't THESE stories be the ones Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: by grandma and not the ones about chemtrails and Obama hiding illegal aliens in UFOs?
      - whyagaindavid 10y ago
        Do u think people stop checking fb news feeds to get out of filter bubble or promoted news due to this election result (does not matter which side you are from). Or did anyone in the wider population have 1password or use 2FA... People are ‘Security Fatigue’ https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/10/security-fatigue-can-cause-computer-users-feel-hopeless-and-act-recklessly https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/10/security-fatig...
- massysett 10y ago
  I've been thinking of switching to Fastmail; email is important and I'm not too happy leaving it with a company that owes me nothing.
  - zachlatta 10y ago
    You could also sign up for Google Suite on your personal domain. I used to be on Fastmail and started running into serious deliverability issues. I'd send emails that'd never be received and people would send me emails that'd never show in my inbox. I spent a month trying to get their support to figure out what was wrong, but the response was just "there's nothing wrong" the entire time. Used to love Fastmail, but can't recommend it to anyone that depends on their email.
    - brongondwana 10y ago
      can you tell me the ticket number? I'd love to look into what happened there. Too late for you, but maybe we can make sure things are easier for the next person.
      - zachlatta 10y ago
        Ticket 796081. Also ran into lots of trouble with calendar. Other tickets I had trouble with that weren't resolved were 706457, 611829, 598481, 564293, and 541661.
  - yladiz 10y ago
    Migrating to Fastmail is really simple from Gmail as they have an IMAP import tool and you can set all mail to forward and delete from Gmail to your Fastmail account. I set up Fastmail yesterday after seeing the news about the Google account disabling yesterday. It took a couple hours to migrate all of my mail since I have had my Gmail account since 2008.
digi_owl 10y ago
The whole thing reeks of overly aggressive automation. And while Google has reverted these cases, i fear they have not changed their automation to match. I am right now looking at two stories of people that has trouble with Google because of some security system or other has picked up "oddities" in the payment activity.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  Which part of the automation failed? It appears to have identified with perfect accuracy an organized ring of phone scalpers. I think their account abuse team should be roundly congratulated.
  - mplewis 10y ago
    They didn't punish the scalpers.
  - m3rc 10y ago
    Why should a scalper even be punished by having their email shut down? That's not a service connected to the phones.
oolongCat 10y ago
Can someone explain what happened to google. I mean, it was once a company so many of us looked up to and now little by little its becoming the "evil" in their own mantra "don't be evil".
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  One word: Shareholders. Most of the changes started around 2011, when Larry Page took over as CEO. That's when Google switched from developing open standards to developing walled gardens, killed Google Labs, started disincentivizing 20% time, etc. (Check out the 10 year stock history for Google, draw a line at April 2011, when Larry Page took over, and notice you have effectively marked the line between Google being a company worth praising, and a company with a meteoric stock price rise.)
- pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  they announce a new partnership project with microsoft every day
- nilved 10y ago
  Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks "I'm going to do some evil today." Everyone has their own definition of the word. And trusting a corporation is never a good idea.
- bb101 10y ago
  The larger and more successful a company becomes, the greater the distance between senior management and the hierarchy underneath. Once the spotlight of fairness and corporate values is removed, psychopaths amongst middle management are free to rule their minor fiefdoms as they see fit, wreaking havoc along the way until challenged.
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    This assumes that everyone is pretty much a comic villain :)
    - 10y ago
chrisper 10y ago
Yes, great. But if you are not able to get news coverage about your problem, then you are out of luck? Yeah, sorry, Google. I once trusted you, but now I am migrating away from everything Google (except search).
- johnnyfaehell 10y ago
  So you stop using everything but the thing they care about?
  - mcintyre1994 10y ago
    Presumably it's more moving away from everything that stores data they care about. I don't care if I lose my search history, that'd be annoying because Google would get dumber, but ultimately whatever. Losing emails or photo backups or Drive though, is stuff I care about.
  - chrisper 10y ago
    Yes, because if they close my account I can still use google search. My goal is not so much about harming them by avoiding them, but rather to not be dependent on them.
  - massysett 10y ago
    They certainly care about having gigabytes of mail that they can scan for patterns and use to target ads.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Sadly, yes. It's like calling a congressional representative and not having donated enough money to their campaign for your words to be worth their time, yet it's somehow even less fair and accountable. Also, DuckDuckGo?
  - chrisper 10y ago
    I haven't used DuckDuckGo in years. Has it improved?
xiaoma 10y ago
Sadly, it appears Google has abandoned their former motto, "Don't be evil". This is completely sociopathic and amoral and a human had to have approved the action. It's overwhelmingly likely that without the massive media backlash, Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise defenseless customers. I don't say this lightly and it pains me to say it but they need to be regulated.
- aikah 10y ago
  > Sadly, it appears Google has abandoned their former motto, "Don't be evil" It was at a time Balmer made Microsoft look bad.Now that he is out, Google looks as bad as Microsoft, even worse, at least when you have a issue with a Microsoft product there is the community and some kind of support.
- kllrnohj 10y ago
  > This is completely sociopathic and amoral and a human had to have approved the action. How is it sociopathic and amoral to ban scalpers? > Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise defenseless customers. Defenseless doesn't mean innocent, and there's no evidence that these users were falsely accused or otherwise innocent of the violations they committed.
  - mplewis 10y ago
    They didn't punish the scalpers. They punished the end consumer.
    - kllrnohj 10y ago
      You are incorrect. The people that were punished were people that ordered phones on behalf of someone else and had those phones directly shipped to that someone else. Buying something with the sole intention of reselling it for profit is the literal definition of scalper. The words you're looking for are mastermind and pawns. The pawns took the fall (as they usually do), and the mastermind didn't get hit.
xbmcuser 10y ago
If you are scamming or cheating someone dont use your real email. If you do then you should be willing to loose access to that account.
- whyagaindavid 10y ago
  Absolutely. It is sad that people in hn are condoning this act. FTA: Obviously, this is a pretty shady arrangement on all the participants’ parts, and it does warrant a response of some kind from Google.
  - thesimon 10y ago
    Because reselling your devices should not be allowed?
    - arjie 10y ago
      Buying things discounted that are discounted because you say you'll adhere to certain Terms of Service and then violating those Terms of Service will have consequences. It's discounted if you hold up your side of the deal and if you don't, then this is what's going to happen. Scalpers are a cancer.
      - rlpb 10y ago
        > Buying things discounted that are discounted because you say you'll adhere to certain Terms of Service and then violating those Terms of Service will have consequences. That's fine. Terminate contracts with these users then, or sue them for your losses. But throwing away their data is a step too far. It's like finding out that your bank doesn't want to do business with you any more but also that they aren't going to give you your money back. Google could give these users a data dump, at least. A Terms of Service violation is a civil matter. Even the courts don't punish contract violators; they only require damages to paid to make the damaged parties whole. Punishments are reserved for crimes, are supposed to be proportional, and you're entitled to justice judged by your peers. A digital death sentence is the right term for this. In what way is this proportional? How is Google justified in doing so much more for so much less?
bit_logic 10y ago
Google needs to realize that their services (such as Gmail) are critical to a lot of people. I understand why they don't want to offer free support for a free product, they would get flooded with useless support requests. However, they need to offer a paid support option. Something like $25 per support request call. This would reduce the calls to only truly urgent and necessary issues. It's possible to get something similar using Google Apps and a custom domain. But they need to start offering paid support for the free services (@gmail.com) as well.
- UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
  That would be good. But I also feel like Google treats people's accounts without a lot of respect. They've successfully integrated into every part of people's lives, and people have a Google Account at the core of their digital identity. It would be better if Google killed services offered one by one instead of killing the entire account. It would be inconvenient not being able to pay via Credit Card with my Google Account, but it is nothing compared to losing all of my email/purchases/cloud stored files/etc.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    I don't think you can suggest a company treats people's accounts with a lot of respect when they allow automated processes to bulk ban them by the hundreds, and offer no appeal process other than making a PR nightmare for them on blog sites.
- jseliger 10y ago
  Google needs to realize that their services (such as Gmail) are critical to a lot of people Google will realize this when a) people pay for them and/or b) people start leaving the platform. There are options for paid, supported email, like Fastmail and others. They probably have .01% of the userbase Google does.
  - notatoad 10y ago
    >There are options for paid, supported email, like Fastmail and others also, gmail. Google Apps has paid support that you can call and talk to to get problems resolved.
captainmuon 10y ago
I would understand it if they kicked the customers out of their webstores for physical products. Or if they forbade reselling via license, and had a contractual penalty (where permissible by law). But closing your email accounts? Google (the company that sells phones) and Google (the company that hosts all your digital life) are only incedentally the same entity. It's like your power company also sells toasters, and you resell a toaster on ebay, which they dont like, and then they cut your electricity in retalliation. It's like if Alphabet bought a company running tollways, and they banned you from using their streets.
- sp332 10y ago
  It mentions that most people made up brand-new accounts to run the deal from. If Google's initial investigation showed only brand-new accounts, it might explain their move to delete the accounts entirely. They reversed the decision when they realized real accounts were getting caught up as well.
  - Ph0X 10y ago
    Yeah, let's be honest, if you're running a scheme like this, you probably have a hunch that it may not be the most legal thing ever... why the hell would you use your real account with all your information instead of making a new dummy account? They probably assumed it was a bunch of fake account and deleted them all in one big swoop, but once they realized a few of them were real, they restored them... Just the media blowing things out of proportion, and for some reason everyone's defending these people who were doing something clearly very shady and wrong. I do agree though that the thought of losing access to all your data is scary, and people should definitely do takeout and be more conscious about it, but in this case specifically, it was hardly Google's fault. Google is at the end of the day a service, and if you go on their lawn and start shitting all over it, what do you expect will happen?
    - kuschku 10y ago
      > Google is at the end of the day a service, and if you go on their lawn and start shitting all over it, what do you expect will happen? Or, rather, Google is a utility. At least Gmail is by now. That has very interesting implications.
simosx 10y ago
If it was not publicised that much, the accounts would remain suspended. Many who use AdSense get their accounts suspended and have almost no chance to figure out what happened and overrule the suspension. When their domain gets blacklisted due to a suspension, they can never use AdSense again.
kchoudhu 10y ago
I'm sure the potential for a first sale doctrine smackdown in the courts had nothing to do with this.
noja 10y ago
What kind of authorisation is needed for someone at Google to close a user's account?
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  You are making the mistake of assuming any human intervention is required.
alyandon 10y ago
It's good to see my paranoia about depending on a single cloud provider is not entirely misplaced. Losing access to my Google account because of some virtually unaccountable automated process would suck but at least I do frequently export my contacts, email, drive, etc and back that data up to other providers. The driving force for my mistrust of depending on one cloud provider for everything was getting burned by a hosted email service that I used for everything. Since I didn't control the domain I had no recourse. Taking the lesson learned, I moved to a privately owned domain for my critical stuff and now I can instantly point to another provider (or my own server) of choice.
jwebb99 10y ago
Why does Google care if I resell my Pixel phone? Seriously, does anyone know?
- notatoad 10y ago
  They don't care if you resell your pixel phone to a friend or put it on craigslist. They care if you and a thousand other people are being paid to purchase stock for an unauthorized reseller. Google (and any other product company) wants their products to be sold through authorized channels only so they can manage distribution, keep pricing consistent, and ensure that the devices are legitimate and have not been tampered with before sale. Customers receiving phones with malware pre-installed is a real problem for companies like oneplus and xaiomi who don't clamp down on unauthorized resellers.
  - yladiz 10y ago
    That's a fair point, but the only reason this kind of thing happened is because they purchased their phone via Google from their Google Account, and the consequence, their account being disabled, is really out of proportion with the act of selling the phone to a reseller. I think it would be more fair for Google to limit the ability to purchase products in the future for people known to have done this, but significantly unfair/burdensome to disable their account as their account potentially has their entire life on it. It would be akin to the power company deciding something you did was "bad" and turning off your power, or your landlord kicking you out because of something "bad" they didn't like, regardless of your "bad" action.
- whyagaindavid 10y ago
  Dont you thing of these people who "participate in an organized ring" had a real business - that was scammed they would remain quiet? Take for example PPI insurance scam in UK. Copied from below: FFS. If you're going to participate in an organized ring to deprive people of buying a scarce item so that you can flip it to your ring leader for a profit so that the ring leader can then mark it up and sell it for considerably more then you deserve what's coming to you. This isn't just about reselling an individual phone. They knew full well what they were doing was shady.
intrasight 10y ago
Great that they did so, but as others are pointing out, with this snafu Google has pointed out a major flaw with having all your eggs in one basket with a company that lacks Chinese Walls between their subsidiaries. As it is unlikely that there will be any regulatory changes, the prudent course of action is to spread your eggs around.
jliptzin 10y ago
It is terrible that you can't get any help from a human unless you make a big stink and are lucky enough to get press coverage about your issue. PLEASE, please let us pay you money so that we can talk to a human when the products that we depend on, and our businesses depend on, become inaccessible to us.
johansch 10y ago
I guess I never really "trusted" Google as much as I trust most (rich and leading) nation states to handle my identity trustfully, providing a suitable mechanism (this is often quite expensive) for dealing with clerical or automatic mistakes in a mostly decent way, etc. I've been a Gmail user since 2004 and have since (like everyone else, more or less) tied my online life around it. I don't care that much for backups (honestly, I don't store that much super memorable data in the google cloud - I have a separate, offline backup system for that stuff.) What I do care for is the availability of my personal gmail as a fallback authentication mechanism for these hundreds of online services I've signed up for during the past years. I would recommend anyone who uses Chrome and its password manager to use the recipe at https://github.com/megmage/chrome-export-passwords https://github.com/megmage/chrome-export-passwords to get a list of sites and corresponding passwords. I just printed mine out (all eleven pages). Don't bother storing it on a local drive - it's just another fat target to be stolen. Up next is going through all those services to see which is critical or non-critical, and how I can get into them if I no longer have access to my primary gmail address. Facebook is probably a big one for most people. (Annoyingly - I tried to add my mobile phone number to FB recently, but at a first attempt I couldn't get it to just be a rescue number, rather than a rescue + spam messages via sms number.) Some services allow multiple email addresses - for that I guess something like Microsoft's free outlook.com service could be suitable. I'm also considering removing my credit card details from my Google Account. Seems like you're much more likely to be a target of their automated policing if there's actual money involved. (If they don't want stuff like this to happen, maybe they should invest a little more in that dirty annoying customer management area.)
whyagaindavid 10y ago
Whether is it password or privacy or news bubble the general population is down with ‘Fatigue’ that hn-geeks advice. They just are overburdened. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/10/security-fatigue-can-cause-computer-users-feel-hopeless-and-act-recklessly https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/10/security-fatig...
libeclipse 10y ago
I've got to say, Google is one of my favourite companies, but when things like this happen it makes me question if we should allow a single corporation to have this much control over our lives.
Animats 10y ago
This is why you should not use Google free services for anything important. Google could turn them off tomorrow. You have no contractual guarantee against that. Do mail through IMAP. All your devices can sync to a IMAP server. The IMAP server built into Android isn't bad at all. Use Thunderbird on desktops and laptops. Most ISPs offer free IMAP. Or you can get your own domain and use IMAP from a server on it. No ads, too.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  Search is fairly important and competition just isn't as good.
  - Animats 10y ago
    IMAP has search. Tap the magnifying glass icon on the Android client.
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      I was unclear and was referring to web search sorry.
hd4 10y ago
This should be a massive wake-up call for anyone using Gmail (i.e. 99% of those who come to HN), and at the very least we should diversify away from using purely Google products, i.e. consider Outlook for business/banking-related emails. There's no point in trusting them after they did this once, even if they may have reversed it. The fact is they did it once.
tn13 10y ago
For anyone who uses email a lot (most tech people do) it is a bad bad idea to let Gmail keep all those emails for you. I have Google Apps account with periodic archives setup to DRopbox. If google bans me I have to only change the mx addreses and move to something else.
- bdcravens 10y ago
  Very true, but imagine the amount of services you wouldn't be able to get into (Facebook, Twitter, Github, etc)
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    He won't lose any service just by changing his MX record. (Or, at least, won't lose any after the DNS cache everywhere clears.)
whyagaindavid 10y ago
BTW, Google did not ban them from life using gmail; the people who lost the accounts may OPEN new accounts?
bit_logic 10y ago
I'm trying to think of an alternative ecosystem that allows similar level of convenience to the Google ecosystem. Here's the best I could think of: (NOTE: this is for the AVERAGE user, so nothing complex like buying a custom domain) - Fastmail for email - Dropbox for data sync/storage - Switch to iOS devices My reasoning is that companies focused in one area (such as email or storage) and offering paid accounts will be much more responsive to any issues since it's their core business. And for iOS, it's because there's the option to go to any Apple store and get immediate support for anything. For example, if I'm suddenly locked out of all my Google Play purchases, I'm SOL. With Apple purchases, I can at least go to an Apple store and there's a chance of getting it resolved. That in-person human contact option is very very important and something Google doesn't offer at all.
- ivm 10y ago
  I have been using exactly this setup for over 3 years (6 years of Dropbox) and I'm very happy with it. It would be great to somehow sync Fastmail and iCloud contacts and calendars but I'm ok with Apple's platform lock currently.
socrates1998 10y ago
This really made me realize how much I need to find a way to backup stuff and move away from Google free products if I need to.
jwtadvice 10y ago
All of your data from the smart phone service, however, is still going to be available for government surveillance purposes. This makes me unlikely to buy this product - from a reseller or not.
pejrich 10y ago
Can someone explain the scheme to me? I don't quite understand it. I buy a phone from Google, then ship it to NH, they sell it in NH and I make a profit? How? How could it possibly be enough to make it worth it?
thirdreplicator 10y ago
This is so 1984 it's disturbing. I'm a hardcore Google fan with tons of photos of my children saved to their cloud. All of my business-critical, financial, and personal messages are stored up there. Losing access to all that is like losing your basic human rights. It's scary how dependent I am on this one company for being able to participate in the modern world....
nikital 10y ago
A lot of people in the comments recommend getting a personal domain, but doesn't that just move the single point of failure to the registrar? For example, quoting NameCheap's TOS: "In the event of termination [..], You agree [..] that Namecheap may take control of any domain name associated with the terminated Services." (https://www.namecheap.com/legal/universal/universal-tos.aspx https://www.namecheap.com/legal/universal/universal-tos.aspx) A single company can still wipe your online identity. Is there any solution for that? Maybe getting a domain directly from ICANN somehow?
- Mythanar 10y ago
  Just use joker.com or other registrars with sane terms of service. Namecheap (together with GoDaddy et al.) is really close to the bottom of the barrel, and should not be used as a representative example of what good registrar should look like.
- yladiz 10y ago
  You can purchase from a NIC for the TLD, but it's pretty difficult and you would likely still be at the whim of their TOS. It's arguably better to switch to a domain name provider as you can more easily get an SLA that makes termination difficult, and in any case switching to a reputable registrar means your domain getting "unjustly" terminated would be much less likely.
petre 10y ago
This is silly. I will never buy anything from Google.
chinathrow 10y ago
Whith stunts like that, Google risks to be regulated heavily. If they continue to pull stuff like that again, I really wish them the regulators on the front porch by now.
balls187 10y ago
Holy smokes, google was wiping Gmail accounts? I'm glad they reversed their decision, but damn, it's time to move off Gmail.
Animats 10y ago
I just don't see the need to depend on Google for anything. They have a good search engine, even though it's ad-choked. (Search for "credit card".) But for everything else, there's an alternative. IMAP for mail, paid backup services, Github. I don't even have Google enabled on my Android phone; at initial power-up, when it asked for a Gmail sign up, I clicked "later" and then deleted the "first time" program. Google went bad a few years ago. Google had to pay $500,000,000 to DoJ to avoid criminal prosecution in the "sportsdrugs.com" case. "Federal agents created www.SportsDrugs.net, designed to look “as if a Mexican drug lord had built a website to sell HGH and steroids,” Mr. Whitaker said in his account of the sting… At the agents’ direction, Mr. Whitaker said he signaled his illegal intent to Google ad executives, including Google’s top manager in Mexico. As a tape recorder ran, he walked Google executives through the illegal parts of the websites. He said he told ad executives that U.S. Customs had seized shipments, for example, and that one client wanted to be “the biggest steroid dealer in the United States.”" "Mr. Page, now Google’s chief executive, knew about the illicit conduct, said Mr. Neronha, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island who led the multiagency federal task force that conducted the sting. “We simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on,” he said in an interview after the August settlement…". Never forget this. [1] http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_journal_takes_us_inside_th.php http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_journal_takes_us_inside_th....
endgame 10y ago
One of my projects for this weekend is to move off GMail for my main email address. It's too much of a risk.
jussij 10y ago
> The violation, in a nutshell, involved consumers who bought their phones from Google’s Project Fi mobile operator, then shipped them to a reseller in New Hampshire, a state with no sales tax. That looks a lot like Google's own tax minimization/avoidance policy, except they do it on a worldwide basis.
cfv 10y ago
I don't like this; their general MO has always been google giveth, and google can take it away. Introducing inconsistency can only lead to more people trying to disagree post-facto with google, and eventual lawsuits
talideon 10y ago
You know what's ridiculous? Google's EMEA HQ is in Ireland, yet they're not selling them here. Instead, we have to pretend we're in the UK or order though a reseller.
apapli 10y ago
"Google may be within its right to take an action — perhaps ban violators from buying more phones or ask them to export their data and move to another provider — but it shouldn’t have the right to completely shut off someone’s digital life instantly, with no warning." While I don't disagree with the authors position here, if TC want to be seen as a source of quality journalism they really should ensure their "journalists" keep their personal opinions to themselves.
- whyagaindavid 10y ago
  look at 1 for a more thorough analsis crowd-sourced inventory acquisition program using the consumer Google site. It instructed people to buy phones from the Project Fi site and list the dealer's NH address as their "home address" so phones would be shipped directly to the dealer. The buyers were then paid enough to make a profit on the transaction (probably helped by the fact that NH has no sales tax), and the New Hampshire dealer would later resell the phone at a markup http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/google-bans-users-involved-in-pixel-phone-resale-scheme-later-relents/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/google-bans-users-inv...
  - apapli 10y ago
    your point being?
achalkley 10y ago
They probably saw a spike in searches like "How to migrate from Gmail"
tmptmp 10y ago
Imagine Google/Apple/Microsoft or any such big business controlling your home appliances via their IoT enabled devices. They can literally kill you by disabling these devices (e.g. room heaters, refrigerators etc) in the time of need. Be warned, say no to "IoT by big corps". I hope, enough people get educated about the dangers posed by this.
flippyhead 10y ago
It's things like this I wish there was an open source, self hosted gmail clone that's approximately as good as the real thing.
gengkev 10y ago
Years ago, when Google+ was first launched, you had to enter your birth date to create a Google+ profile. But my friends and I were under 13 at the time, and a few friends had their accounts disabled due to their age. There was a minor fuss about this online, including from people who had accidentally clicked the wrong birth date. (Though they did re-enable accounts if you sent them ID or made a $0.05 credit card purchase.) As for me, though, I was terrified at the thought that my account could have been disabled, had I entered my actual birth date. Even back then, I had a fair amount of data stored on my Google account. The incident was enough to get me to start downloading data from Google Takeout once in a while. It's been a while since my last backup, though. I hope this incident serves as a wake-up call to both me and everybody who "owns" a Google account. I also wish that Google would allow at least some disabled accounts to download their data from Takeout: that would make me feel just a little bit safer.
dsrajapaksha 10y ago
I see a lot of comments suggesting FastMail and other email service providers with custom domains. Can someone explain how FastMail differs from Microsoft Office 365 Plans like Business Premium which allows custom domains and exchange because to me Microsoft seems to be the better option with Office suite and OneDrive storage. I'm skeptical thinking whether Microsoft could also ban a paid user's account like this without any prior warning or export option.

346 points by drewg123 10y ago

Good to hear. I think the whole event was a net good for everyone, based on how many HN commenters responded to the news by offloading as much of their data off google servers as possible. Glad to see google doing good by undoing their own evil.

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
google has always been good about not doing evil while undoing their own evil. you're all idiots.
existencebox 10y ago
Anecdotally, this news is what finally pushed me to set up automatic backups, and I can speak for many of peers for whom this was the final motivator as well. I'd be VERY curious to see their internal metrics (data egress volume over time, etc), and my intuition as someone in the business of data analytics/strategy, this sort of reversal likely has some chuckle-worth KPIs behind it.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Yeah, I mean, for Google the damage is already done, many of these customers won't trust Google again, plenty of HNers or readers of news sites will consider alternatives as well. At this point they're just stopping the bleeding from their perspective. When you can't get your account reactivated unless your plight ends up going out over Associated Press, the company deserves no kudos for finally fixing it.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Outside of the HN bubble, millions and millions of people use Google products and have no reason to treat this as the straw that breaks the camel's back. For one, a lot of businesses are dependent on google services like email because there aren't many alternatives that can match google's price and sprawling integration.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    I am aware of how much smaller of a percentage of users will be affected outside of HN. But given the exponentially wider audience of say, an AP story, we can assume at the very least, multiples of the size of the group of HN people who will switch, will switch after seeing the news story.
    - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
      Those you say will switch are themselves a very small proportion of the people who will become enraged by the story but in the end change nothing and continue to use Google products.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    But it would be good for this info to reach a wider audience. It's frustrating--Why can't THESE stories be the ones Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: by grandma and not the ones about chemtrails and Obama hiding illegal aliens in UFOs?
    - whyagaindavid 10y ago
      Do u think people stop checking fb news feeds to get out of filter bubble or promoted news due to this election result (does not matter which side you are from). Or did anyone in the wider population have 1password or use 2FA... People are ‘Security Fatigue’ https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/10/security-fatigue-can-cause-computer-users-feel-hopeless-and-act-recklessly https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/10/security-fatig...
massysett 10y ago
I've been thinking of switching to Fastmail; email is important and I'm not too happy leaving it with a company that owes me nothing.
- zachlatta 10y ago
  You could also sign up for Google Suite on your personal domain. I used to be on Fastmail and started running into serious deliverability issues. I'd send emails that'd never be received and people would send me emails that'd never show in my inbox. I spent a month trying to get their support to figure out what was wrong, but the response was just "there's nothing wrong" the entire time. Used to love Fastmail, but can't recommend it to anyone that depends on their email.
  - brongondwana 10y ago
    can you tell me the ticket number? I'd love to look into what happened there. Too late for you, but maybe we can make sure things are easier for the next person.
    - zachlatta 10y ago
      Ticket 796081. Also ran into lots of trouble with calendar. Other tickets I had trouble with that weren't resolved were 706457, 611829, 598481, 564293, and 541661.
- yladiz 10y ago
  Migrating to Fastmail is really simple from Gmail as they have an IMAP import tool and you can set all mail to forward and delete from Gmail to your Fastmail account. I set up Fastmail yesterday after seeing the news about the Google account disabling yesterday. It took a couple hours to migrate all of my mail since I have had my Gmail account since 2008.

digi_owl 10y ago

The whole thing reeks of overly aggressive automation. And while Google has reverted these cases, i fear they have not changed their automation to match. I am right now looking at two stories of people that has trouble with Google because of some security system or other has picked up "oddities" in the payment activity.

honkhonkpants 10y ago
Which part of the automation failed? It appears to have identified with perfect accuracy an organized ring of phone scalpers. I think their account abuse team should be roundly congratulated.
- mplewis 10y ago
  They didn't punish the scalpers.
- m3rc 10y ago
  Why should a scalper even be punished by having their email shut down? That's not a service connected to the phones.

oolongCat 10y ago

Can someone explain what happened to google. I mean, it was once a company so many of us looked up to and now little by little its becoming the "evil" in their own mantra "don't be evil".

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
One word: Shareholders. Most of the changes started around 2011, when Larry Page took over as CEO. That's when Google switched from developing open standards to developing walled gardens, killed Google Labs, started disincentivizing 20% time, etc. (Check out the 10 year stock history for Google, draw a line at April 2011, when Larry Page took over, and notice you have effectively marked the line between Google being a company worth praising, and a company with a meteoric stock price rise.)
pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
they announce a new partnership project with microsoft every day
nilved 10y ago
Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks "I'm going to do some evil today." Everyone has their own definition of the word. And trusting a corporation is never a good idea.
bb101 10y ago
The larger and more successful a company becomes, the greater the distance between senior management and the hierarchy underneath. Once the spotlight of fairness and corporate values is removed, psychopaths amongst middle management are free to rule their minor fiefdoms as they see fit, wreaking havoc along the way until challenged.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  This assumes that everyone is pretty much a comic villain :)
  - 10y ago

chrisper 10y ago

Yes, great. But if you are not able to get news coverage about your problem, then you are out of luck? Yeah, sorry, Google. I once trusted you, but now I am migrating away from everything Google (except search).

johnnyfaehell 10y ago
So you stop using everything but the thing they care about?
- mcintyre1994 10y ago
  Presumably it's more moving away from everything that stores data they care about. I don't care if I lose my search history, that'd be annoying because Google would get dumber, but ultimately whatever. Losing emails or photo backups or Drive though, is stuff I care about.
- chrisper 10y ago
  Yes, because if they close my account I can still use google search. My goal is not so much about harming them by avoiding them, but rather to not be dependent on them.
- massysett 10y ago
  They certainly care about having gigabytes of mail that they can scan for patterns and use to target ads.
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Sadly, yes. It's like calling a congressional representative and not having donated enough money to their campaign for your words to be worth their time, yet it's somehow even less fair and accountable. Also, DuckDuckGo?
- chrisper 10y ago
  I haven't used DuckDuckGo in years. Has it improved?

xiaoma 10y ago

Sadly, it appears Google has abandoned their former motto, "Don't be evil". This is completely sociopathic and amoral and a human had to have approved the action. It's overwhelmingly likely that without the massive media backlash, Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise defenseless customers. I don't say this lightly and it pains me to say it but they need to be regulated.

aikah 10y ago
> Sadly, it appears Google has abandoned their former motto, "Don't be evil" It was at a time Balmer made Microsoft look bad.Now that he is out, Google looks as bad as Microsoft, even worse, at least when you have a issue with a Microsoft product there is the community and some kind of support.
kllrnohj 10y ago
> This is completely sociopathic and amoral and a human had to have approved the action. How is it sociopathic and amoral to ban scalpers? > Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise defenseless customers. Defenseless doesn't mean innocent, and there's no evidence that these users were falsely accused or otherwise innocent of the violations they committed.
- mplewis 10y ago
  They didn't punish the scalpers. They punished the end consumer.
  - kllrnohj 10y ago
    You are incorrect. The people that were punished were people that ordered phones on behalf of someone else and had those phones directly shipped to that someone else. Buying something with the sole intention of reselling it for profit is the literal definition of scalper. The words you're looking for are mastermind and pawns. The pawns took the fall (as they usually do), and the mastermind didn't get hit.

xbmcuser 10y ago

If you are scamming or cheating someone dont use your real email. If you do then you should be willing to loose access to that account.

whyagaindavid 10y ago
Absolutely. It is sad that people in hn are condoning this act. FTA: Obviously, this is a pretty shady arrangement on all the participants’ parts, and it does warrant a response of some kind from Google.
- thesimon 10y ago
  Because reselling your devices should not be allowed?
  - arjie 10y ago
    Buying things discounted that are discounted because you say you'll adhere to certain Terms of Service and then violating those Terms of Service will have consequences. It's discounted if you hold up your side of the deal and if you don't, then this is what's going to happen. Scalpers are a cancer.
    - rlpb 10y ago
      > Buying things discounted that are discounted because you say you'll adhere to certain Terms of Service and then violating those Terms of Service will have consequences. That's fine. Terminate contracts with these users then, or sue them for your losses. But throwing away their data is a step too far. It's like finding out that your bank doesn't want to do business with you any more but also that they aren't going to give you your money back. Google could give these users a data dump, at least. A Terms of Service violation is a civil matter. Even the courts don't punish contract violators; they only require damages to paid to make the damaged parties whole. Punishments are reserved for crimes, are supposed to be proportional, and you're entitled to justice judged by your peers. A digital death sentence is the right term for this. In what way is this proportional? How is Google justified in doing so much more for so much less?

bit_logic 10y ago

Google needs to realize that their services (such as Gmail) are critical to a lot of people. I understand why they don't want to offer free support for a free product, they would get flooded with useless support requests. However, they need to offer a paid support option. Something like $25 per support request call. This would reduce the calls to only truly urgent and necessary issues. It's possible to get something similar using Google Apps and a custom domain. But they need to start offering paid support for the free services (@gmail.com) as well.

UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
That would be good. But I also feel like Google treats people's accounts without a lot of respect. They've successfully integrated into every part of people's lives, and people have a Google Account at the core of their digital identity. It would be better if Google killed services offered one by one instead of killing the entire account. It would be inconvenient not being able to pay via Credit Card with my Google Account, but it is nothing compared to losing all of my email/purchases/cloud stored files/etc.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  I don't think you can suggest a company treats people's accounts with a lot of respect when they allow automated processes to bulk ban them by the hundreds, and offer no appeal process other than making a PR nightmare for them on blog sites.
jseliger 10y ago
Google needs to realize that their services (such as Gmail) are critical to a lot of people Google will realize this when a) people pay for them and/or b) people start leaving the platform. There are options for paid, supported email, like Fastmail and others. They probably have .01% of the userbase Google does.
- notatoad 10y ago
  >There are options for paid, supported email, like Fastmail and others also, gmail. Google Apps has paid support that you can call and talk to to get problems resolved.

captainmuon 10y ago

I would understand it if they kicked the customers out of their webstores for physical products. Or if they forbade reselling via license, and had a contractual penalty (where permissible by law). But closing your email accounts? Google (the company that sells phones) and Google (the company that hosts all your digital life) are only incedentally the same entity. It's like your power company also sells toasters, and you resell a toaster on ebay, which they dont like, and then they cut your electricity in retalliation. It's like if Alphabet bought a company running tollways, and they banned you from using their streets.

sp332 10y ago
It mentions that most people made up brand-new accounts to run the deal from. If Google's initial investigation showed only brand-new accounts, it might explain their move to delete the accounts entirely. They reversed the decision when they realized real accounts were getting caught up as well.
- Ph0X 10y ago
  Yeah, let's be honest, if you're running a scheme like this, you probably have a hunch that it may not be the most legal thing ever... why the hell would you use your real account with all your information instead of making a new dummy account? They probably assumed it was a bunch of fake account and deleted them all in one big swoop, but once they realized a few of them were real, they restored them... Just the media blowing things out of proportion, and for some reason everyone's defending these people who were doing something clearly very shady and wrong. I do agree though that the thought of losing access to all your data is scary, and people should definitely do takeout and be more conscious about it, but in this case specifically, it was hardly Google's fault. Google is at the end of the day a service, and if you go on their lawn and start shitting all over it, what do you expect will happen?
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > Google is at the end of the day a service, and if you go on their lawn and start shitting all over it, what do you expect will happen? Or, rather, Google is a utility. At least Gmail is by now. That has very interesting implications.

simosx 10y ago

If it was not publicised that much, the accounts would remain suspended. Many who use AdSense get their accounts suspended and have almost no chance to figure out what happened and overrule the suspension. When their domain gets blacklisted due to a suspension, they can never use AdSense again.

kchoudhu 10y ago

I'm sure the potential for a first sale doctrine smackdown in the courts had nothing to do with this.

noja 10y ago

What kind of authorisation is needed for someone at Google to close a user's account?

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
You are making the mistake of assuming any human intervention is required.

alyandon 10y ago

It's good to see my paranoia about depending on a single cloud provider is not entirely misplaced. Losing access to my Google account because of some virtually unaccountable automated process would suck but at least I do frequently export my contacts, email, drive, etc and back that data up to other providers. The driving force for my mistrust of depending on one cloud provider for everything was getting burned by a hosted email service that I used for everything. Since I didn't control the domain I had no recourse. Taking the lesson learned, I moved to a privately owned domain for my critical stuff and now I can instantly point to another provider (or my own server) of choice.

jwebb99 10y ago

Why does Google care if I resell my Pixel phone? Seriously, does anyone know?

notatoad 10y ago
They don't care if you resell your pixel phone to a friend or put it on craigslist. They care if you and a thousand other people are being paid to purchase stock for an unauthorized reseller. Google (and any other product company) wants their products to be sold through authorized channels only so they can manage distribution, keep pricing consistent, and ensure that the devices are legitimate and have not been tampered with before sale. Customers receiving phones with malware pre-installed is a real problem for companies like oneplus and xaiomi who don't clamp down on unauthorized resellers.
- yladiz 10y ago
  That's a fair point, but the only reason this kind of thing happened is because they purchased their phone via Google from their Google Account, and the consequence, their account being disabled, is really out of proportion with the act of selling the phone to a reseller. I think it would be more fair for Google to limit the ability to purchase products in the future for people known to have done this, but significantly unfair/burdensome to disable their account as their account potentially has their entire life on it. It would be akin to the power company deciding something you did was "bad" and turning off your power, or your landlord kicking you out because of something "bad" they didn't like, regardless of your "bad" action.
whyagaindavid 10y ago
Dont you thing of these people who "participate in an organized ring" had a real business - that was scammed they would remain quiet? Take for example PPI insurance scam in UK. Copied from below: FFS. If you're going to participate in an organized ring to deprive people of buying a scarce item so that you can flip it to your ring leader for a profit so that the ring leader can then mark it up and sell it for considerably more then you deserve what's coming to you. This isn't just about reselling an individual phone. They knew full well what they were doing was shady.

intrasight 10y ago

Great that they did so, but as others are pointing out, with this snafu Google has pointed out a major flaw with having all your eggs in one basket with a company that lacks Chinese Walls between their subsidiaries. As it is unlikely that there will be any regulatory changes, the prudent course of action is to spread your eggs around.

jliptzin 10y ago

It is terrible that you can't get any help from a human unless you make a big stink and are lucky enough to get press coverage about your issue. PLEASE, please let us pay you money so that we can talk to a human when the products that we depend on, and our businesses depend on, become inaccessible to us.

johansch 10y ago

I guess I never really "trusted" Google as much as I trust most (rich and leading) nation states to handle my identity trustfully, providing a suitable mechanism (this is often quite expensive) for dealing with clerical or automatic mistakes in a mostly decent way, etc. I've been a Gmail user since 2004 and have since (like everyone else, more or less) tied my online life around it. I don't care that much for backups (honestly, I don't store that much super memorable data in the google cloud - I have a separate, offline backup system for that stuff.) What I do care for is the availability of my personal gmail as a fallback authentication mechanism for these hundreds of online services I've signed up for during the past years. I would recommend anyone who uses Chrome and its password manager to use the recipe at https://github.com/megmage/chrome-export-passwords https://github.com/megmage/chrome-export-passwords to get a list of sites and corresponding passwords. I just printed mine out (all eleven pages). Don't bother storing it on a local drive - it's just another fat target to be stolen. Up next is going through all those services to see which is critical or non-critical, and how I can get into them if I no longer have access to my primary gmail address. Facebook is probably a big one for most people. (Annoyingly - I tried to add my mobile phone number to FB recently, but at a first attempt I couldn't get it to just be a rescue number, rather than a rescue + spam messages via sms number.) Some services allow multiple email addresses - for that I guess something like Microsoft's free outlook.com service could be suitable. I'm also considering removing my credit card details from my Google Account. Seems like you're much more likely to be a target of their automated policing if there's actual money involved. (If they don't want stuff like this to happen, maybe they should invest a little more in that dirty annoying customer management area.)

whyagaindavid 10y ago

Whether is it password or privacy or news bubble the general population is down with ‘Fatigue’ that hn-geeks advice. They just are overburdened. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/10/security-fatigue-can-cause-computer-users-feel-hopeless-and-act-recklessly https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/10/security-fatig...

libeclipse 10y ago

I've got to say, Google is one of my favourite companies, but when things like this happen it makes me question if we should allow a single corporation to have this much control over our lives.

Animats 10y ago

This is why you should not use Google free services for anything important. Google could turn them off tomorrow. You have no contractual guarantee against that. Do mail through IMAP. All your devices can sync to a IMAP server. The IMAP server built into Android isn't bad at all. Use Thunderbird on desktops and laptops. Most ISPs offer free IMAP. Or you can get your own domain and use IMAP from a server on it. No ads, too.

lostlogin 10y ago
Search is fairly important and competition just isn't as good.
- Animats 10y ago
  IMAP has search. Tap the magnifying glass icon on the Android client.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    I was unclear and was referring to web search sorry.

hd4 10y ago

This should be a massive wake-up call for anyone using Gmail (i.e. 99% of those who come to HN), and at the very least we should diversify away from using purely Google products, i.e. consider Outlook for business/banking-related emails. There's no point in trusting them after they did this once, even if they may have reversed it. The fact is they did it once.

tn13 10y ago

For anyone who uses email a lot (most tech people do) it is a bad bad idea to let Gmail keep all those emails for you. I have Google Apps account with periodic archives setup to DRopbox. If google bans me I have to only change the mx addreses and move to something else.

bdcravens 10y ago
Very true, but imagine the amount of services you wouldn't be able to get into (Facebook, Twitter, Github, etc)
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  He won't lose any service just by changing his MX record. (Or, at least, won't lose any after the DNS cache everywhere clears.)

whyagaindavid 10y ago

BTW, Google did not ban them from life using gmail; the people who lost the accounts may OPEN new accounts?

bit_logic 10y ago

I'm trying to think of an alternative ecosystem that allows similar level of convenience to the Google ecosystem. Here's the best I could think of: (NOTE: this is for the AVERAGE user, so nothing complex like buying a custom domain) - Fastmail for email - Dropbox for data sync/storage - Switch to iOS devices My reasoning is that companies focused in one area (such as email or storage) and offering paid accounts will be much more responsive to any issues since it's their core business. And for iOS, it's because there's the option to go to any Apple store and get immediate support for anything. For example, if I'm suddenly locked out of all my Google Play purchases, I'm SOL. With Apple purchases, I can at least go to an Apple store and there's a chance of getting it resolved. That in-person human contact option is very very important and something Google doesn't offer at all.

ivm 10y ago
I have been using exactly this setup for over 3 years (6 years of Dropbox) and I'm very happy with it. It would be great to somehow sync Fastmail and iCloud contacts and calendars but I'm ok with Apple's platform lock currently.

socrates1998 10y ago

This really made me realize how much I need to find a way to backup stuff and move away from Google free products if I need to.

jwtadvice 10y ago

All of your data from the smart phone service, however, is still going to be available for government surveillance purposes. This makes me unlikely to buy this product - from a reseller or not.

pejrich 10y ago

Can someone explain the scheme to me? I don't quite understand it. I buy a phone from Google, then ship it to NH, they sell it in NH and I make a profit? How? How could it possibly be enough to make it worth it?

thirdreplicator 10y ago

This is so 1984 it's disturbing. I'm a hardcore Google fan with tons of photos of my children saved to their cloud. All of my business-critical, financial, and personal messages are stored up there. Losing access to all that is like losing your basic human rights. It's scary how dependent I am on this one company for being able to participate in the modern world....

nikital 10y ago

A lot of people in the comments recommend getting a personal domain, but doesn't that just move the single point of failure to the registrar? For example, quoting NameCheap's TOS: "In the event of termination [..], You agree [..] that Namecheap may take control of any domain name associated with the terminated Services." (https://www.namecheap.com/legal/universal/universal-tos.aspx https://www.namecheap.com/legal/universal/universal-tos.aspx) A single company can still wipe your online identity. Is there any solution for that? Maybe getting a domain directly from ICANN somehow?

Mythanar 10y ago
Just use joker.com or other registrars with sane terms of service. Namecheap (together with GoDaddy et al.) is really close to the bottom of the barrel, and should not be used as a representative example of what good registrar should look like.
yladiz 10y ago
You can purchase from a NIC for the TLD, but it's pretty difficult and you would likely still be at the whim of their TOS. It's arguably better to switch to a domain name provider as you can more easily get an SLA that makes termination difficult, and in any case switching to a reputable registrar means your domain getting "unjustly" terminated would be much less likely.

petre 10y ago

This is silly. I will never buy anything from Google.

chinathrow 10y ago

Whith stunts like that, Google risks to be regulated heavily. If they continue to pull stuff like that again, I really wish them the regulators on the front porch by now.

balls187 10y ago

Holy smokes, google was wiping Gmail accounts? I'm glad they reversed their decision, but damn, it's time to move off Gmail.

Animats 10y ago

I just don't see the need to depend on Google for anything. They have a good search engine, even though it's ad-choked. (Search for "credit card".) But for everything else, there's an alternative. IMAP for mail, paid backup services, Github. I don't even have Google enabled on my Android phone; at initial power-up, when it asked for a Gmail sign up, I clicked "later" and then deleted the "first time" program. Google went bad a few years ago. Google had to pay $500,000,000 to DoJ to avoid criminal prosecution in the "sportsdrugs.com" case. "Federal agents created www.SportsDrugs.net, designed to look “as if a Mexican drug lord had built a website to sell HGH and steroids,” Mr. Whitaker said in his account of the sting… At the agents’ direction, Mr. Whitaker said he signaled his illegal intent to Google ad executives, including Google’s top manager in Mexico. As a tape recorder ran, he walked Google executives through the illegal parts of the websites. He said he told ad executives that U.S. Customs had seized shipments, for example, and that one client wanted to be “the biggest steroid dealer in the United States.”" "Mr. Page, now Google’s chief executive, knew about the illicit conduct, said Mr. Neronha, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island who led the multiagency federal task force that conducted the sting. “We simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on,” he said in an interview after the August settlement…". Never forget this. [1] http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_journal_takes_us_inside_th.php http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_journal_takes_us_inside_th....

endgame 10y ago

One of my projects for this weekend is to move off GMail for my main email address. It's too much of a risk.

jussij 10y ago

> The violation, in a nutshell, involved consumers who bought their phones from Google’s Project Fi mobile operator, then shipped them to a reseller in New Hampshire, a state with no sales tax. That looks a lot like Google's own tax minimization/avoidance policy, except they do it on a worldwide basis.

cfv 10y ago

I don't like this; their general MO has always been google giveth, and google can take it away. Introducing inconsistency can only lead to more people trying to disagree post-facto with google, and eventual lawsuits

talideon 10y ago

You know what's ridiculous? Google's EMEA HQ is in Ireland, yet they're not selling them here. Instead, we have to pretend we're in the UK or order though a reseller.

apapli 10y ago

"Google may be within its right to take an action — perhaps ban violators from buying more phones or ask them to export their data and move to another provider — but it shouldn’t have the right to completely shut off someone’s digital life instantly, with no warning." While I don't disagree with the authors position here, if TC want to be seen as a source of quality journalism they really should ensure their "journalists" keep their personal opinions to themselves.

whyagaindavid 10y ago
look at 1 for a more thorough analsis crowd-sourced inventory acquisition program using the consumer Google site. It instructed people to buy phones from the Project Fi site and list the dealer's NH address as their "home address" so phones would be shipped directly to the dealer. The buyers were then paid enough to make a profit on the transaction (probably helped by the fact that NH has no sales tax), and the New Hampshire dealer would later resell the phone at a markup http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/google-bans-users-involved-in-pixel-phone-resale-scheme-later-relents/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/google-bans-users-inv...
- apapli 10y ago
  your point being?

achalkley 10y ago

They probably saw a spike in searches like "How to migrate from Gmail"

tmptmp 10y ago

Imagine Google/Apple/Microsoft or any such big business controlling your home appliances via their IoT enabled devices. They can literally kill you by disabling these devices (e.g. room heaters, refrigerators etc) in the time of need. Be warned, say no to "IoT by big corps". I hope, enough people get educated about the dangers posed by this.

flippyhead 10y ago

It's things like this I wish there was an open source, self hosted gmail clone that's approximately as good as the real thing.

gengkev 10y ago

Years ago, when Google+ was first launched, you had to enter your birth date to create a Google+ profile. But my friends and I were under 13 at the time, and a few friends had their accounts disabled due to their age. There was a minor fuss about this online, including from people who had accidentally clicked the wrong birth date. (Though they did re-enable accounts if you sent them ID or made a $0.05 credit card purchase.) As for me, though, I was terrified at the thought that my account could have been disabled, had I entered my actual birth date. Even back then, I had a fair amount of data stored on my Google account. The incident was enough to get me to start downloading data from Google Takeout once in a while. It's been a while since my last backup, though. I hope this incident serves as a wake-up call to both me and everybody who "owns" a Google account. I also wish that Google would allow at least some disabled accounts to download their data from Takeout: that would make me feel just a little bit safer.

dsrajapaksha 10y ago

I see a lot of comments suggesting FastMail and other email service providers with custom domains. Can someone explain how FastMail differs from Microsoft Office 365 Plans like Business Premium which allows custom domains and exchange because to me Microsoft seems to be the better option with Office suite and OneDrive storage. I'm skeptical thinking whether Microsoft could also ban a paid user's account like this without any prior warning or export option.