4 ms·

No 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

• billsmithaustin 9y ago
  Rather than ascribing this to Google's maliciousness or overzealous use of power, is it possible that the shutdown was accidental?
  • NoPiece 9y ago
    An accidental shutdown can still fall under overzealous use of power.
  • WithHighProb 9y ago
    "accidental" launched a nuclear bomb...
  • seabird 9y ago
    You'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 ago
      Wouldn'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 ago
    After 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 ago
        Even if it is an algorithm: So? Just because an algorithm made the bad call doesn't mean it's OK.
  • xiaoma 9y ago
    I 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 ago
    I 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 ago
    Since 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 ago
    Although 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  Jordan 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 ago
    Why do you feel the need to put quotes around Peterson's title?
    • shallot_router 9y ago
      Probably because he disagrees with his views, and surely no true professor would say something he disagrees with.
      • jolux 9y ago
        I 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 ago
          Despite 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 ago
            Most 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 ago
  This 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 ago
    Sorry 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 ago
      https://www.ampproject.org/ https://www.ampproject.org/ (first hit on DDG.gg for '"amp" google')
    • robteix 9y ago
      I'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 ago
      Accelerated 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 ago
        The 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 ago
  This 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 ago
  We'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 ago
    Google'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 ago
      Fwiw. Duckduckgo is using Bing under the hood I believe.
      • vanderZwan 9y ago
        That'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 ago
  I 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 ago
    That'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 ago
      All the spam filtering in the world won't help you after your account evaporates.
      • weberc2 9y ago
        No, 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 ago
          I 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 ago
            Fair 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 ago
  Er, 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 ago
    Your Honor, please consider the thousands of banks I didn't rob.
    • weberc2 9y ago
      I 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 ago
        Thank 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 ago
  Yup, love the product and software -- hate the service. I cannot vouch for the lack of evil. :(