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Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story
- xiaoma 9y agoNo idea what all was on his blog and other google accounts, but according to the article they were used for his work at the university. Also some credible sites like the NYT linking into the disabled blog: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/the-stock-market-has-been-magical-it-cant-last.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/the-stock-market... Google may have had some good reasons or it may have just been an example of ML discriminating against a name like Salil. Either way, it's very disturbing how Google shuts down accounts without warning or a reasonable resolution process. They did this to a Canadian psychology professor earlier this month (and then silently restored access after Joe Rogan picked up the story). I'm extremely loathe to wean myself off of Google's products, especially Gmail. But I can no longer really see it as a safe place to have verifications of all my other accounts sent with all the risks of automated flagging, technical error (which cost me my pre acquisition YouTube account when they forced everyone onto Plus), and their increasingly aggressive security / account recovery mechanisms that ask for information such as the exact month a decade old account was created.
- billsmithaustin 9y agoRather than ascribing this to Google's maliciousness or overzealous use of power, is it possible that the shutdown was accidental?
- NoPiece 9y agoAn accidental shutdown can still fall under overzealous use of power.
- WithHighProb 9y ago"accidental" launched a nuclear bomb...
- seabird 9y agoYou're missing the point entirely; even if it was accidental, would you have access to your accounts? Would your email be a reliable way to reach you or verify your ownership of another account? Would people able to access the content you've posted? The answer is quite obviously "no," and that doesn't cut it for people need rely on services like these for their everyday workflow. We wouldn't consider "accidental" AWS downtime acceptable, so why will we accept it from Google?
- tazard 9y agoWouldn't using ones own domain and gsuite alleviate some of these issues? If Google were to shut down your account, you could update your mx records to a different mail server such as fastmail or self hosted as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and be back up and running relatively soon (of course you still wouldn't have your connected YouTube/G+ etc accounts). Although as I write this it occurred to me, you would likely loose all your contacts and calendar unless they were backed up prior...
- jwilk 9y agoAfter review, your account is not eligible to be reinstated due to a violation of our Terms of Service. Doesn't sound like an accident.
- pishpash 9y ago"After review, ..." -- signed, an algorithm. Google is not a human facing company, you're most likely conversing with a bot even when you don't think you are.
- baybal2 9y ago>Google is not a human facing company, you're most likely conversing with a bot even when you don't think you are. In reality, all big dotcoms hire legions of human 'reviewers' in cheap countries distanced from the civilized world
- CaptSpify 9y agoEven if it is an algorithm: So? Just because an algorithm made the bad call doesn't mean it's OK.
- xiaoma 9y agoI didn't ascribe anything to malice, though I do miss the "Don't be evil" Google of the early 2000s. It's more an issue of mass automation and the errors that accompany it. This is a company with 93 billion dollars in cash on hand and billions of dollars of profit per quarter that doesn't even offer email support for forced closures of long standing accounts.
- breadbox 9y agoI think that's the point, actually. (Unless there's some political issue that I'm missing.) Google can make a simple mistake and the customer has to bear the burden of it. When something like this happens, there's no indication that Google will or even can address the mistake in a timely fashion -- or maybe not ever. Google's basic philosophy of no customer service for free products means there isn't much you can do, other than wait and hope, or raise a stink and hope.
- dragonwriter 9y agoSince it was supposedly reviewed and denied, it wasn't accidental. There may be mistakes of fact made by Google or different reasons than those the target has complained of, but the opacity of the process makes it impossible to determine either of those.
- pishpash 9y agoAlthough not terribly enlightening, we can still ascribe malice to an algorithm as a shorthand for its essential behavior. In the end it's a black box, can you rule out anything?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- muninn_ 9y agoI haven't used Gmail for probably 5 years and have just used an iCloud account for mail. Why would I need Gmail that would make it so hard to change what email you use? Is it just getting a new address and exporting contacts or are there some features I missing?
- jolux 9y agoJordan Peterson, the "Canadian psychology professor" you mention, agree or disagree with him, clearly has political motivations and is explicitly politically active. He's an entirely different case from this.
- bbdbdbdbsbwhs 9y agoWhy do you feel the need to put quotes around Peterson's title?
- shallot_router 9y agoProbably because he disagrees with his views, and surely no true professor would say something he disagrees with.
- jolux 9y agoI just thought it was interesting you (edit: you're not parent, I meant parent) didn't call him out by name, and I wanted to make the connection explicit.
- xiaoma 9y agoDespite being successful for an academic, he's not exactly a famous psych prof at the level of say, Steven Pinker. Before politics collided with his work this year he didn't seem to be politically active at all, either. It might have changed a bit after Joe Rogan's podcast but to be honest, most people outside of Canada probably have no idea who Jordan Peterson is.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jolux 9y agoMost people, no, but he's immensely popular with a certain section of the right. Nonetheless I was a bit confused because you seemed to be implying that Peterson is just another apolitical academic who caught the short end of the deep learning stick, when there's a lot more evidence that his ban could have been politically motivated. I don't understand why I'm getting downvoted for that.
- theWatcher37 9y agoThis type of behavior + AMP has pushed me off google completely. I'm determined to cut them out of my technical life entirely, I've even switched myself and everyone I know/support off their DNS. I can't support their shady practices anymore.
- metalliqaz 9y agoSorry for being that guy, but what is AMP in this context?
- jwong_ 9y ago> The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) is an online publishing format, created by Google
- jszymborski 9y agohttps://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/ (first hit on DDG.gg for '"amp" google')
- robteix 9y agoI'm not the parent but I'm sure they mean Accelerated Mobile Pages[0] [0] https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/
- FuriouslyAdrift 9y agoAccelerated Mobile Pages It's a weird accelerator thing for mobile. I've never quite figured out its use case except to hoover up more metrics for Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
- amrrs 9y agoThe use case is simple: Transcend through adblockers and show ads in mobiles. Mobile users primarily use adblockers because websites suck their data and also speed. AMP ensures faster content delivery and lite data and also comes with ads.
- metalliqaz 9y agoThis kind of thing is exactly why I don't have a G+ account. When it launched people were getting their accounts banned left and right because of the real name policy, and when that happended their gmail was toast. I can't afford to lose my gmail. I never allowed it to create a G+ account for me. Same with YouTube when they combined them. Just imagine losing control not only your email, but also every account that is tied to that email. Nightmare.
- pishpash 9y agoWe're already beginning to see this effect in "customer service" fields: talking with intellectually deficient and apathetic bots to solve any problem is the worst experience ever, and Google is leading the charge.
- Nomentatus 9y agoGoogle's AI jumbling up my search queries and insisting on answering entirely different questions from the one I asked has finally pushed me to duckduckgo (which is greatly improved and not yet as botty.) So I bet you're right thinking it's a demented bot. Such bots (and especially, "forests" of bots) tend to punish anything that's sufficiently eccentric. This could be countered by a separate forest of bots that looks for and identifies "mere eccentricity" (such as very heavy internet search use that will inevitably trigger many false bot hits re terrorism merely due to the law of averages.) But we're not that sophisticated yet, it would seem, judging by results. [Run to the patent office! First to file means anyone can steal this idea!] Luckily, in this case, you won't be hit with a drone strike because you have an odd web site; but in other cases sudden death from the skies has been the result of bot analysis of mass intercepted communications targeting entirely innocent people. Just to be clear, I actually rather like the idea of drone strikes on bad guys, just not idiotic-algorithm-triggered drone strikes, thanks so much.
- WalterSear 9y agoFwiw. Duckduckgo is using Bing under the hood I believe.
- vanderZwan 9y agoThat's a bit of an oversimplification. From the FAQ page: > When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links. For many categories of searches (restaurants, game of thrones, code documentation, etc.), there is usually a specialized search engine (Yelp), content site or other source that does a better job at actually answering the searches than a general search engine does with just links. Our long-term goal is to get you Instant Answers from these best sources. > To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack, which allows anyone to propose and develop Instant Answers for DuckDuckGo. On the backend, we have a classification and relevancy engine that selects the best sources for a particular search and displays answers to you in real time, be it for recipes, products, images, and hundreds of other categories. > In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources EDIT: changed link to more elaborate FAQ one.
- Clubber 9y agoI strongly recommend everyone to look into hosting your own mail server. DigitalOcean will rent you a Linux VM for $5 a month or something crazy like that. You can figure out how to install postfix/dovecot/squirrelmail it in a few hours. If nothing else, it keeps critical functionality decentralized, and you learn something and $5 a month for career insurance is pretty damn cheap.
- zeppelin101 9y agoThat's a very cool idea, but the spam filtering of gmail can hardly be matched. On the plus side, now you could send emails with much larger attachments.
- mirimir 9y agoAll the spam filtering in the world won't help you after your account evaporates.
- weberc2 9y agoNo, but the odds of my email account going away (while catastrophic) seem pretty unlikely, and not having to sift through spam every single day is a pretty nice perk. Basically strong spam filtering support is a requirement for any tool I use, and I'm happy to hop off of Gmail if another tool delivers comparable value.
- mirimir 9y agoI do get that. And perhaps you're discreet enough online that your Google account will never attract scrutiny. But it's something that every Google user ought to keep in mind, I think. I'm guessing that Salil Mehta never even considered it.
- weberc2 9y agoFair point, but I don't understand why people think this is a case of Salil offending Google's censors and not simply algorithms gone awry. I got downvoted for expressing this doubt elsewhere in this thread, but no one could answer. I just can't parse a motive for Google to censor him on (as far as I know, he didn't criticize Google's diversity policies or anything of the sort).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- b4ux1t3 9y agoEr, Google has millions of users who have absolutely no problems. One (or even dozens) of bad stories is a tiny percentage of the interactions that take place on their services. It's _far_ more likely to be a mistake than anything untoward, just based on the sheer numbers.
- cityhall 9y agoYour Honor, please consider the thousands of banks I didn't rob.
- weberc2 9y agoI think you misunderstood; he's not saying "Google isn't very bad because they made one small mistake", he's saying "Why should I switch from Google simply because there is a minuscule chance that they might make a mistake that affects me".
- b4ux1t3 9y agoThank you. Realistically, what's the likelihood that any single user who uses gmail is going to get shut down? Literally one in millions.
- xiaoma 9y ago>"Literally one in millions." Unless you work at Google and are privy to internal information, how could you possibly know that? The only reason you're hearing about this case is because the account holder is a university professor who lost a long standing Blogger site—used at his school and linked to by the NYT—and then the story made it to the front page of HN. It's overwhelmingly likely that the vast, vast majority of people who lose access to their Google accounts never make it onto your radar.
- weberc2 9y ago> Unless you work at Google and are privy to internal information, how could you possibly know that? It's an estimate, not an exact figure.
- justbaker 9y agoYup, love the product and software -- hate the service. I cannot vouch for the lack of evil. :(
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- weberc2 9y agoIt seems like this is probably an accident, and not an attempt to censor reasonable political views. I would hope they learned their lesson last time.
- 5trokerac3 9y agoAn accident that they even shut down his blog? Perhaps a mistake, but definitely no accident.
- weberc2 9y agoIt seems reasonable to me that Google's banhammer is largely algorithmic, and that the algorithm made an error. I can't think of any reason for Google to ban him intentionally.
- vim_wannabe 9y agoI wonder how much I would lose if my Gmail was deleted... Everything I have is behind that address. What would be my best bet to move to if I'm too much of a bad to host my own email?
- curiousgal 9y agoHosting your own email is a huge hassle, and getting pass spam filters is hard. Many website allow adding alternative email addresses so maybe one should use different providers.
- jameskegel 9y agoDo you need email?
- Clubber 9y agoIt sure beats giving out your cell phone number on the internet for people to contact you.
- torbjorn 9y agousing google's "takeout" feature you can back up all of your gmail/google acct data.
- gaius 9y agoIf they haven't already blocked you...
- sbov 9y agoIt's easier to just have your own domain and host your domain's email with a provider, such as google/fastmail/etc. This will let you change hosts if you feel the need to. The hardest part is switching all your accounts to use your new domain.
- mirimir 9y agoI've had good experience with Riseup and VFEmail. Even cock.li ;) I've always used separate accounts for personal, work, etc. For stuff that really matters, it's best to own your own domain. That way, if you lose an account, you can just reroute mail to the new account.
- rbcgerard 9y agoI recall a lot of commentary on this site (especially around cloud flare) that the "worst" need to be banned and lot of skepticism about a "slippery slope" - can't speak to the content of this particular case but seems pretty far from the worst of the worst.
- syshum 9y agoWhen you are actively slidly down the slope it becomes hard to say a slippy slope argument is not valid
- Animats 9y agoDup of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15065742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15065742 but neither source provides much clarity, although they contain the same information.
- daxorid 9y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15065742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15065742
- shaqbert 9y agoThe automated canned answer is what rubs me the most here. There is a professor who trusted Google's Gmail and Blogspot product, gets the Axe for some violation of Terms of Service or Quality Guidelines, and does not get a clear and straight answer what specifically he did wrong, or how he can remedy the situation. I wish one of the Googlers reading this here could reach out internally what is going on here. I'd wager though that the professor's Google account did something wrong, and might be even a serial offender in Google's eyes, so as to warrant a ban. Question is though if the professor himself did something wrong.
- jszymborski 9y ago> I wish one of the Googlers reading this here could reach out internally what is going on here. Or better yet: 1) move to a reputed, paid e-mail account (fastmail, mailbox.org, tutanota, protonmail etc...) 2) there used to be baywords.com for uncensored blogs, but I think you can trust posthaven.com.
- PeterisP 9y agoIn such messages, not telling how he can remedy the situation is intentional. It illustrates that their goal&decision is not that they want him to try and change some behaviour (whatever that might be) but that they want to discontinue the relationship even if the behaviour changes, or (in the case of actually malicious users that need to be banned) gets hidden or kept at a 'slightly below the boundary' level, which is not the intended result. Also, not telling what specifically he did wrong is also intentional. They have already decided that they don't want any future relationship. At that point, telling which behavior exactly went over the line is counterproductive - since it would invite that information to be challenged, and they've preemptively decided that no, they don't want to read the response or excuses or reasons, they've made a decision already; and throughly explaining and defending a decision takes much more effort than simply making one, effort that Google doesn't want to spend on every banned person.
- xpaqui 9y agoVery good read.
- googler231 9y agoIt seems that his ban may be political in nature according to his tweet. https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/898912228128296960 https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/89891222812829696... Salil Mehta: "Shameful: if you show probability work like Hillary having lower election odds, then this is new definition of hate speech. @JulianAssange"
- dragonwriter 9y agoClearly, he claims that it is tied to 2016 political campaign position. No substantive evidence for that is presented, though.
- dhimes 9y agoI interpreted it to mean that he showed that Hilary's campaign was overconfident on polling, and with proper statistical analysis she would have seen something closer to the truth. He apparently has worked for both Obama and Trump.
- dragonwriter 9y agoYes, and that is all relatively uncontroversial (that he did that, or at least presented material which purported to do that.) What is controversial and unsubstantiated is his suggestion that that is the reason for the ban.
- bassman9000 9y agoSeems Is that tweet in violation of Google's Terms and Conditions? edit: formatting
- lightedman 9y agoTwitter is not owned by Google. Google's ToS cannot interfere with his activity on a property they do not own. That would be tortious interference of contract.
- mirimir 9y agoI can't imagine how people depend so heavily on free accounts from Google. Which notoriously ignores help requests. And typically don't retain backups. Seriously? But bottom line, it's Google's business what they do. And with a free account, there's no recourse. Except maybe getting to HN front page, and reaching someone sympathetic at Google.
- b4ux1t3 9y agoI mean, they have _millions_ of users that have never had a problem. It's far more likely this is a mistake than any kind of malicious act, just given the sheer number of customers they have.
- nxc18 9y agoWe've had multiple people prominent enough to make the front page of hacker news in the last few months. Maybe we should get some statistics on how many people are prominent enough and controversial enough to land on the front page of hn, then work back to how many of their millions of customers are actually affected. Its probably a lot more than just 1.
- mirimir 9y agoYes, I suspect so. What it takes, arguably, is being just controversial enough to attract complaints and/or attention from algorithms. But not famous enough for a ban to attract huge attention in mainstream media.
- glitcher 9y agoWell there is now at least one highly motivated statistician out there to analyze the data you suggest. But how do you get the data to him?
- mirimir 9y agoI doubt that this is a mistake, exactly. It's likely intentional, albeit through unreliable automation. I mean, from Google's perspective, false positives are arguably far less problematic than false negatives. And I'm sure that it happens more than we know. Given that most affected users have no way to get attention. Edit: OK, so I'm dyslexic. False negatives are arguably more problematic, because they attract more attention.
- AdmiralAsshat 9y agoAfter the last time Google shut down a random high-profile person's life (i.e. their website, their email, their account, etc), I immediately downloaded Thunderbird and got a locally stored copy of all my emails. If Google shut down my account tomorrow, I think I could recover from pretty much everything else (although I'd have a hell of a time with the Android phone), but a decade and a half of emails are damn near irreplaceable.
- thegayngler 9y agoThis story is making me reconsider my allegiance to Google Email and other services. For my more private stuff I use other services. I only use Gmail for junk like I used to use Hotmail back in the day. My Gmail was compromised at least twice.
- thegayngler 9y agoWhat if you have your Android Phone tied to their services etc and this is the way Google behaves. This type of unexplained behavior from Google could literally ruin someone's life.
- balladeer 9y agoIt happened with a phone and he had to create another Gmail account. He was locked out iirc. But his online life mostly revolves around Fb so he didn't care much I think.
- mmagin 9y agoHaving hosted my own email for about 18 years, I don't really think relying on free services from Google is any better than when we used to change ISPs (or when we graduated from college) and had to get a new email address. I'm not seeing "google is evil" here as much as "we need to do more to inform people that free services from giant companies may change or go away at any time without notice."
- fageyogurtspoon 9y agoZero Hedge is pro trump FAKE NEWS.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- damnfine 9y agoAre you trolling? Did I miss a scarcasm tag? I am no fan of Trump, but writing off anything pro trump as fake news is beyond ignorant. Take a miniute and replace everytime you say 'trump' with 'obama' and see if you would still want to be your own friend.
- dang 9y agoWe've banned this account for violating the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- alexdowad 9y agoWhy doesn't he say which of Google's terms of service he supposedly violated? He just spends the whole 3 pages saying that he hasn't done anything wrong, without even once saying what he is alleged to have done wrong. Seems a bit dishonest.
- CaptSpify 9y agoIt's my understanding that he doesn't know what he did wrong. Google won't tell him.
- noselasd 9y agoHow can he know what he allegedly have done when google have not told him ?
- psyc 9y agoThey don't tell you. My whole YouTube channel was removed 2 years ago, and the only auto-mail I got said "TOS violation". I have no idea what the problem was. When I followed the instructions on how to reinstate, I got a page saying the channel wasn't recoverable. There was no indication of how to get any other resolution.
- cwyers 9y agoIs there a reason this link is to a blogspam site that is just copying a post from Zero Hedge?
- lightedman 9y agoKnock out Title II protections for Google. No more of this nonsense.
- cmurf 9y agoGoogle Takeout https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Takeout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Takeout Problems though: if your account is already disabled, you can't use this as far as I can tell; and there's no diff option, it's a monolithic backup each time. But it might provide a strategy to limit data loss resulting from having an account disabled for whatever reason.
- jxramos 9y agoWhat exactly is the file format that one downloads?
- blfr 9y agoDifferent formats for different services and for some even a choice of formats: iCalendar for Calendar; HTML, CSV or vcard for Contacts; json or KML for location history (Maps); mbox for Gmail... You can see your options before/without exporting anything.
- jxramos 9y agoNice, glad to hear it's a sane format and not some drudgery back handed punishment sort of thing like an obscure binary dump.
- cmurf 9y agoContacts vcf; Chrome stuff is html and json; Drive is exactly the files in Drive (as is) including directories; Photos directory also has a metadata.json file for each directory and then one for each image, haven't looked at the contents; Hangouts is json and png; Keep is html; Mail is a single file "All mail Including Spam and Trash.mbox"; Voice is html and mp3; Wallet is csv. These are all put into either a zip, tgz or tbz. The different archive formats have different max download sizes. Looks like the tbz has a 50G download size limit.
- aabbcce 9y agoI'm guessing posts like these had something to do with his banning (the zero hedge link references his blog post, but his blog has been shut down): http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-18/blm-paradox-black-accountability-matters http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-18/blm-paradox-black-a...
- everybodyknows 9y agoTLDR: Skip forward to penultimate paragraph, read, and consider effort of trying to parse the rest of the piece.
- alecco 9y ago# 1 176 points 2h Android Oreo # 4 32 points 2h Winning the War on Error (scroll to bottom) #29 157 points 2h Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google Soon this thread will be out of the homepage. Keep up the great work guys!
- columbia_prof 9y agoColumbia prof here. He is not a professor at Columbia nor even an adjunct professor. He is a lecturer in the school of professional studies: https://search.sites.columbia.edu/people/sm786 https://search.sites.columbia.edu/people/sm786 The school of professional studies at Columbia offers "certificate" and "professional degrees" with minimal academic standards. Within the university, it is considered an embarrassment. Advertising this credential is very misleading. This is a far cry from being, for example, a professor in the world class statistics department at Columbia. I don't know the gentleman nor the facts of this case, but I'd be very suspicious of someone advertising a Columbia SPS affiliation.
- Tenoke 9y agoThis and some of the tweets where he seems overly zealous make me suspicious. E.g.: Here[1] He is suggesting he was blocked for Probability work on Hilary's election odds. Here[2] he is implying they are doing it in connection with him being a math educator, and tweeting at all kinds of famous accounts with maximum sensationalism (though in his defense, the only way to get support from google is to make a massive stir). None of that means anything on its own, and this would be far from the first time Google have closed an account by mistake (though Id be very surprised if the ban was of a political nature). 1. https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/898906185969139714 https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/89890618596913971... 2. https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/898730013037477889 https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/89873001303747788...
- CaptObvious2 9y agoWhat did you think would happen? Tolerating the remove of anyone's freedom should be fought. Even if they are not your bed fellows. Do nothing, and expect more of this to follow.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stillsut 9y agoCouple years ago some enterprising folks got together to teach "Software Carpentry" to academics: git, open data, plotting with open source software, etc... Seems like there's a new set of skills that academics need to learn; paging Dr Assange.
- colin_fraizer 9y agoCan someone explain what specifically triggered Google's nuclear response to Prof. Mehta?