14 ms·

Why I Quit Using Google

378 points by thekyle 7y ago

mirimir 7y ago
He's damn lucky. Today's Google would have suspended all associated accounts. Right?
aladine 7y ago
I also switched to Fastmail too. Its interface is rudimentary similar to Google few years ago. It has full suite of services like calendar, notes, storage... What I like is its simplicity which Gmail may bloat with too many features. One notable feature of Fastmail is alias: you can create other emails alias to your main account and use that to create different rules. Super handy and convenient. If you worry about encryption, probably ProtonMail is a better choice. For me, Fastmail is good for my usage. P/s: if you want to sign up for Fastmail, here is my referral link https://ref.fm/u12211285 https://ref.fm/u12211285
- newscracker 7y ago
  If you're going to plug referral links for credit, may I suggest that you switch to significantly cheaper services that are also privacy focused? You can choose from mailbox.org, mailfence.com, runbox.com, migadu.com, mxroute.com, posteo.de (no own domain support), Tutanota, ProtonMail and many more.
carapace 7y ago
"Backups are a tax you pay for the luxury of restore." Folks, back up your shi^H^Htuff.
ReverseCold 7y ago
I remembered seeing this post on Mastodon, and it turns out this website federates. My response from Mastodon is listed as a comment on this website. The wonders of ActivityPub...
- nolroz 7y ago
  I tried getting into Mastadon a while back but didn't manage to find decent instances to subscribe to. There's just so many! Any advice on where to get started?
  - yogthos 7y ago
    There's a friendly sign up guide available now https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
  - snisarenko 7y ago
    Hey, I am working on a mastodon aggregator, which can help with exploring instances and figuring out which one to join. It should be launching soon! https://mastodonia.club https://mastodonia.club
    - Kye 7y ago
      I hope you get consent from people and instances before aggregating any data like posts and profiles. This kind of thing is very unpopular on the fediverse if done the wrong way. Meaning without permission.
      - snisarenko 7y ago
        That's a fair point. I am definitely not trying to anger the fediverse community. I just want to make it more discoverable. I was assuming since mastodon instances have public apis, and public "explore" feeds, creating an aggregator was no different than creating a mastodon instance with a different ui. I am also being pretty respectful in terms of how frequently I ping the api. I also include contact information the user-agent that hits the api. I would respect any instances request to stop aggregating. Also this tool is linked directly in the mastodon documentation https://mastovue.glitch.me/ https://mastovue.glitch.me/
yogthos 7y ago
I setup a personal NextCloud instance on a $5 Digital Ocean last year, and along with Fastmail, it replaced all the Google services I've been using. It took about an hour to get up and running, it went through version updates without a hiccup, and never gave me any trouble. I found it to be completely hassle free, and I can highly recommend it to anybody looking to take back control of their privacy.
- awill 7y ago
  It's not accurate to imply this is so easy. You're now responsible for your data, security and uptime. That means patching, backups and plenty of ops work.
  - Klonoar 7y ago
    I agree - I've been doing this crap for 20 years, it's not "about an hour". This is an afternoon at the least. Context: I've done it for myself and others recently.
    - yogthos 7y ago
      I installed it using Snap and Let's Encrypt using this guide [1], and everything worked out of the box. Been running and upgrading it since without a single issue. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-nextcloud-on-ubuntu-16-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst...
  - yogthos 7y ago
    Sure, easy for a technical person. That said, Digital Ocean has automated backups, and security mostly consists of making sure you do your updates in a timely fashion. I've literally had to do no other ops work in over a year running NextCloud, and I haven't had a single downtime. Running a server for yourself and your family is a far smaller effort than administering a public site.
gfiorav 7y ago
Open software does not mean non-proprietary. Free software is what your looking for.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
telegrammae 7y ago
What's reasonable is if you want to avoid using Google services (for whatever reason), then you do not need to be fanatical about it. Move off gradually, one service at a time, and keep using some Google services, if you really must - why not?
- thatsenough 7y ago
  Because that doesn't feed into the outrage machine and drive clicks.
  - close04 7y ago
    The fact that a company is allowed to amass so much of your digital life but then lock you out with no recourse should cause outrage. It's no different than if your landlord, your bank, or the post office decided one day to lock you out and not even bother to give you an explanation, let alone to give you back your money and property. We live in a world where services like the ones Google provides aren't just optional, they're critical for so many people. Some have less money in the bank or home than the value of their emails, contacts, media, and whatever else may be stored in Google's systems. Some of those things are priceless. I agree that it's Google's right to refuse to have/keep you as a user/customer but they should be legally forced to give you back all of your data or at the very least give a generous notice period.
    - buran77 7y ago
      Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Having your data confiscated like this is definitely outrageous and should be illegal. Right now we rely on this being bad PR for the company doing it but that's not enough especially for the giants. The user pays for the service by allowing the provider to monetize their data not by forfeiting the right to even get a copy. I'm actually hoping that some regulation will be put in place to protect users and ensure that they never lose their data.
      - BuckRogers 7y ago
danemorgan 7y ago
I get the email thing. And I've actually been moving critical accounts away from my personal Gmail for a while now. As for the rest, the services I use, I use them because they work better than any of the other options I have tried. I'll admit that that amounts to as substantial number of services.
- godzillabrennus 7y ago
  I have never understood using a gmail.com account for anything important. It’s always been inexpensive enough to buy a domain and have an email address associated with it. I also don’t understand startup founders who tie personal emails into a business email account. Keep a separate email.
  - xref 7y ago
    For one, a personal domain is less secure than a gmail.com domain. There have been quite a few targeted hacks, like Mat Honan or any number of crypto-holders, where a personal domain was socially engineered to be transferred to a new registrar (or password reset on existing registrar) where the attacker controls the MX records, thus your email, thus your password resets. It’s much harder to transfer gmail.com, office.com, etc
    - deanmoriarty 7y ago
      That’s something I’ve been worried about since I switched to a custom domain email address that I point to another mail service: I protect my registrar account with 2fa, but I still think that the chances of someone hacking via social engineering my DNS registrar (Gandi) or the MX provider are much higher than someone hacking my 2fa personal @gmail.com account. I might just be paranoid.
- SanchoPanda 7y ago
  I think the key here is you have tried the other options, and importantly - you clearly know how to set those other services up if need be. For many if not most people, that would be entering the wild unknown.
abhisuri97 7y ago
Wouldn't it be best for google to allow you to download a takeout of all your files in the case that your account is suspended?
- HenryBemis 7y ago
  "..best for google.." If google gave a crap they would put a phone number to that email so you can talk to a human and resolve any issue. From numerous conversations in HN and iRL, everyone who has a spat with the G-people is royally screwed. A true hostage. What you suggest would be great for the user. But why would google care for that? You broke their rules, you have to pay. Here, have some pain. I don't blame them for having rules. I blaim the G-users for accepting them and giving google all this power, that is often (and stupidly) mis/ab-used. On the other hand, I have to admit that for less technical folks, having all-in-one is a life saver. Vast majority of the member of this forum though do not belong to that group.
  - pugworthy 7y ago
    > If google gave a crap they would put a phone number to that email so you can talk to a human and resolve any issue Do you know how insanely hard that would be to staff and manage such an operations for a global corporation? It had a 1 BILLION MAU back in 2015.
    - zamadatix 7y ago
      Google One gets you 1 year of access to human support for a year so apparently not that hard. I'm sure many people would rather pay that amount just to get their ban reviewed rather than lose their existing email, chat, photos, files, and phone number. The 3 other ~1 trillion dollar tech companies all have customer support without issue.
      - davchana 7y ago
        I think once the account is banned, then you can't log into account to buy that Google One membership. You need to buy it before the ban.
xenator 7y ago
I love that other companies have sustainable alternatives to Google services. But these articles looks more like hype train and doesn’t really add any new value for me. You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day. Probably I’m getting old but I remember times when Google doesn’t exists. We had software for files, messages, calls, calendars etc. It was based on different protocols, may be less secure and more naive. But it was ok for these days. There is life outside of Google, and always was. May be for “millenials” you need to be brave to leave this circle, but I don't getting it. What is so special in using other providers? Is it just... normal?
- stanferder 7y ago
  > What is so special in using other providers? Is it just... normal? It's probably not normal. I've heard of Google, but not Fastmail, Matomo, Nextcloud, Collabra, Plex, Jellyfin, F-Droid, Aurora, Lineage, PinePhone, Simple Mobile Tools, Hover, Matrix, PocketCasts, AntennaPod, or "Ting".
- jolmg 7y ago
  > You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day. Switch to another small one when they start to get big. Try to keep them all balanced. If only one person doing that was enough to get a nice competitive market...
- awb 7y ago
  > You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day. This. At some point you have to trust someone. Even if you're off Google you're leaking data with your phone, credit card, smart TV, ISP, genetic testing, etc. I know privacy isn't all or nothing but with Email the party I'm communicating with already has a copy of the communication that they could forward to anyone or save with any other provider. I'd say ethics might be a larger reason to switch.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
tomaszs 7y ago
The same goes for Facebook. My company uses a legimate Business Account to handle ads of our clients. Nothing shady there. Regular SMB ads. More or less a month ago i receive an email the whole account has been blocked due to some violations. Whole freaking account. Without any warnings. We had clear history. And this means essencially you can close your company if you run only FB ads because you can not create another ads account. Eventually they recovered the account in 48 hours and wrote they are sorry. But the thing is it does not solve the problem. You can loose your business just by a system mistake in a second. And it seems like there is always a way out. But there is not always. Really, does a company of a size of a Facebook or Google care about one person or one small business? I had a Instagram account for 10 years with my photos and fought 6 months to get it back after hacker takeover. Believe me i have tried everything to get it back. And no, there was no way. There is no number you can call to fix it. Its just so dangerous to have such single points of failure nowadays like Facebook or Google. Both for business and personal use. Its just great to hear a person who was able to remove it.
- therealmarv 7y ago
  Yes you are so right. Your topic and text (single point of failure) reads for me like a beginning of a whole article. Nowadays there are also new Fintech banks who operate like Google and have only chat and no telephone support. Imagine getting locked out of your bank account (because of a false positive in an Anti Money Laundering AI) and you can reach nobody in time.
  - tomaszs 7y ago
    Exactly. Part of this problem is visible right now with PayPal, one of greatest FinTech projects. AML lockdowns but also disputes. Lately i have read people sell for twice the price just because one of two transations aproximately is a fraud.
oth001 7y ago
I've had a problem with trying to sign into my approved AdSense account the past few weeks. "We encountered an error. An engineer is looking into the issue." No way to contact them. I'm done with Google as well. I'm never going to use a service that doesn't provide a way to contact support.
- mdesq 7y ago
  I'm somewhat surprised Google hasn't taken the old Microsoft route of just charging per call for support on their free accounts. MS used to be $300 way back IIRC. Google could probably charge $500.
xwowsersx 7y ago
I'm not entirely clear on what Nextcloud is. Is it meant for teams/organizations? What does the author mean by "Google Contacts → Fastmail → Nextcloud Contacts"?
- sedatk 7y ago
  He switched to Fastmail first, then to Nextcloud?
- Semaphor 7y ago
  It’s somewhat of a one-stop cloud service, only (usually) selfhosted. Many prople use it mainly as Dropbox/One Drive/Google Drive replacement which works great, but depending on what apps you install (some of those might be default apps, others community provided), you get a mastodon client, caldav, carddav, calendar, notes, webmail client, video chat, office document editing, media viewer and other similar stuff. I didn’t yet manage to get it working, but there is even a plugin that supports fulltext scan search via tesseract OCR. All of these things work just as well for teams/orgs (including LDAP/SSO) as they do for a single user
xwowsersx 7y ago
I recently switched to Fastmail and I'm very happy. The web and mobile apps are blazing fast and simple. My favorite feature is being able to add unlimited aliases which sends/forwards to whatever address I choose. This has enabled granular control over my inbox as I have receipts@mydomain, bills@mydomain, finance@mydomain, etc. If I want to try some service, I might create an alias. If they end up spamming too much, I can simply delete the alias or apply other rules.
- Semaphor 7y ago
  I use fastmail with my own domain, so it’s always service@domain.tld. I only need to create aliases if I have to write them so the from/sender is correct. And I love how fast their webmail is compared to the slowness of gmail.
  - xwowsersx 7y ago
    I too use it with my own domain. I don't get what you mean you only create aliases if you "have to write them". Can you elaborate?
    - Semaphor 7y ago
      Sorry, "when I have to write an outgoing email to that service"
Animats 7y ago
I haven't used Google for anything but search in years. It just seemed unnecessary. Mail is on Thunderbird connected to an IMAP server. Browser is Firefox. Phone is Android minus all the Google stuff, plus FDroid. Phone mail is K-9 mail. Maps are on ZNavi. Location provider is Mozilla. Software development and docs are on Github. Backups are on iDrive. Videos are uploaded to Vimeo. OS is Ubuntu LTS. Sometimes I use Discord. A few months back, I switched my default browser to Bing, because Google was returning too many ads above the fold. No big deal. Just fewer headaches without Google and Microsoft.
- bagacrap 7y ago
  Bing and Google are browsers now?
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Bing and Github are Microsoft...
plg 7y ago
Isn't a reasonable solution to pay google for gsuite? It's $50* per year or something? Then the "there's nobody to phone and no appeal and data could just be _gone_" concern goes out the window. *edit: $6 per month so $72 per year
- therealmarv 7y ago
  Not a bad idea. But there are services even today which are not working with GSuite accounts. The funny side of things is also that at least here in EU GSuite accounts have also different privacy rules.
- stanferder 7y ago
  What stops Google from suspending a paid account, assuming they issue a pro-rated refund for anything paid in advance?
  - cryptozeus 7y ago
    24/7 support by phone or email.
    - Paul-ish 7y ago
      Are you still a customer if you are suspended?
undershirt 7y ago
Google Fi lets me text and call people from my computer if i lose my phone (through Hangouts). Not sure there's a replacement for that.
- avip 7y ago
  There's also no drop-in replacement for the G-docs suit, nor for google-play of course. Firebase has no alternative. Google got some pretty useful things up there.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- sgarman 7y ago
  There are some options like pushbullet that come close; but I think that relies on our phone being on and having a connection.
paul7986 7y ago
I quit using their search due to their sudden lack of ethics in the last few years. As well as my own disgusting experience I had doing business with them (treated me like garbage when invited to demo my tech. All their competitors I met with around same time were professional/respectful; deal or no deal) and then more so other stories detailing they do the same to others. Upon seeing that I was like wow my experience wasn't fringe it's in their DNA now. I no longer can support a company whose tagline is "Do No Evil," yet that's exactly what they do!
- freshbagels 7y ago
  > treated me like garbage when invited to demo my tech Do tell this story.
  - paul7986 7y ago
    See the first comment in which I detail my experience with Google ATAP which mirrors the OP's story. She demoed her invention in an interview with them & they patented it without her knowledge/consent. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
    - paul7986 7y ago
      Some other examples of Google (Google X even) stealing from the little guy/girl inventors & researchers... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-google-is-patenting-work-he-put-in-the-public-domain/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go... https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/17/8048779/google-x-eli-attia-lawsuit-flux-architecture https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/17/8048779/google-x-eli-atti... https://twitter.com/ahandvanish/status/1072953071179874304 https://twitter.com/ahandvanish/status/1072953071179874304 I've spoken with some of these people and hear there are many more examples yet those people put it behind them or don't want to come out against the biggest tech company. That's too bad as for too long in history those in power and position have stolen from the rightful creators.
Mistri 7y ago
Has anyone else had experience with getting their Google account suspended? I literally use it for everything in my life, and without it I would probably lose access to a lot. I would change away from Google in a heartbeat but it just seems like too much effort if I can avoid getting my account suspended in the first place. If anyone has gotten their account suspended, what was it for and how can I avoid it?
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Several times, several different accounts. Fortunately Google is (or more accurately, was) simply a convenience for me. I have not yet fully deactivated the several Gmail accounts I have still standing, though those are largely inactive, and most are strictly associated with specific nyms I'd created (one notably after a primary nym account was suspended). The best way to avoid having your Google account be suspended is to not have one. But moving to self-hosting, or increasingly, entirely offline, has been a goal and project of the past few years. I touch a few Google services directly: - Google Scholar: still amongst the best academic search engines I'm aware of. - Google Ngram Viewer and Google Trends: quite useful for tracking concepts over time. - Google Maps: There are times OpenStreetMap's search simply falls down even when specifying lat/lon coordinates directly, Because Reasons. Google Maps is my fallback, but I still rely on it far more than I'd care to. - Gmail: Secondary for several accounts. - YouTube: still the largest online video hosting service, though alternative interfaces (https://invidio.us/ https://invidio.us/) and alternate hosts (both centralised and federated or self-hosted) are increasingly viable. YouTube's UI tweaks and aggressive pre-roll ads over the past several months have been aggressively user-unfriendly. - Google Web Search. A very distant second to DuckDuckGo, but still necessary for 1) date-bounded search, 2) getting overall counts of results (occasionally useful), and 3) rare edge-cases where DDG doesn't turn up expected/desired results (GWS is ~50% successful here). I don't know if it's because I rely so heavily on DDG that I'm influencing its results, but I find that both searches and content that I've posted tends to turn up high-ranked on it. I'm not as aware of this with Google.
  - rapnie 7y ago
    I like to self-host too, and there is a huge amount of awesome selfhosted [0] software to be had. Only problem is, you have to be willing to become a moderately good sysadmin and spend your time doing the chores to keep your systems up-to-date. This takes considerable amount of time. Dropping the ball once, and you may find yourself hacked (I had this recently when being slow in updating a nginx reverse proxy). [0] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
tibiahurried 7y ago
I started using DuckDuckGo and so far I have been happy with it. Though sometimes I still need to resort to Google. Firefox is my primary browser. I constantly use a VPN. Bottom line I try my best to limit the ability of Google to track me. That said, I still use GMail / GDrive / GDoc and keep a backup of everything on Amazon Drive were I also store my photos along with Apple Cloud. Basically, if Google were to close my account I will be able to recover all my data from Amazon. I trust these 3 companies to be serious about security. It will be a nightmare if I were to deal with 10 small companies and their vulnerabilities. Also, hosting everything myself? Security nightmare no thanks.
spicyramen 7y ago
While I read other opinions about this article not bringing anything new that we already know, as an Enterprise user this reminds me that the people running Google Cloud is the same that comes from this consumer world or new grads with 0 Enterprise experience, which believe their product is perfect and user is wrong. We just completed an evaluation of AWS, Azure and GCP and our leadership raised this concern...which came true when opening GCP account and support was not as responsive as AWS, or Azure. AWS and Azure I even had real people calling us and contact us to understand our use case...I know GCP is bring more people from Oracle and other companies which can help them change this, in the mean time, we still will.invest in AWS, Azure and IBM
xwowsersx 7y ago
I have a Google One subscription so I pay Google for storage. Google could suspend my account and I'd have no recourse whatsoever? I'd have no way of getting my 10s of thousands of photos back?
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  I hope you have backups, at the very least. Yes, most subscriptions generally say in the ToS that the account and all assets may be closed/deleted at the sole discretion of the provider. It's anecdotally rare, but depending on the company (quality of customer service), it may be irreversible, or take a long time to fix. My personal rule is to never trust a third-party to "protect" my data; there is no such thing in today's market and legal frameworks (unless you have a face-to-face relationship, and even then, backups!)
  - xwowsersx 7y ago
    Thanks. What's the cheapest or most cost-effective way to backup all my photos? S3?
    - boring_twenties 7y ago
      Buy an external hard drive or SSD, download the photos to it, put it in a safe place away from your other computer stuff.
      - xwowsersx 7y ago
        That's viable for sure, but one thing I'd like is regular backups of the photos from my phone (where most I take most of my photos). That's the nice thing about Google Photos with Google One - all my stuff is backed up to the cloud regularly. I understand, though, that this comes with some risk.
        mceachen 7y ago
        I use Resilio Sync, and have tried SyncThing. Both work. They both have an app you run in your phone, and a companion app you run on macOS, Windows, Linux, or your NAS, and it syncs (even through a NAT) whatever you've configured to backup on your phone to N servers. If you're away from home, you can run it on your laptop next to you, so your phone is backed up quickly, and then throughout the day you laptop can sync with your home server while you're out exploring. It's nice. I have two backups online, and an external drive I rsync to monthly then turn off. Before you delete your originals in Google Photo, use Takeout to validate the files. Mine (at "original quality") were mangled.
tiatia 7y ago
OSM is great. Here.Com is another proprietary option
xwowsersx 7y ago
For those who don't know (I didn't), you can create and download archives of any of your data on Google by visiting https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
- mceachen 7y ago
  Just an FYI: if your Takeout archive fails with errors, try creating multiple archives, with only one large service selected per archive. My photos archive didn't even work that way, I had to create albums and back then up one by one. But it did eventually work.
  - xwowsersx 7y ago
    Thanks for the advice
milemi 7y ago
I wish OP had gotten to the bottom of why the account got suspended and told us about that.
- tbodt 7y ago
  It is completely impossible to answer this question
  - milemi 7y ago
    I doubt that. Googling "google customer service" gives me this https://www.google.com/contact/ https://www.google.com/contact/ How about starting there and telling us what happened? I don't see any mention of any attempt to figure it out.
6ak74rfy 7y ago
I was considering setting up a Nextcloud instance as a replacement for Google Drive. I did some math and realized that I’ll be paying a lot more on that route - 1TB on Lightsail+S3 vs Lightsail+SSD vs Google Drive. The last was by far the cheapest. Are there ways to bring down this cost? I know some people argue that I could use that host for other self-hosted services to amortize cost but i don’t pay monthly recurring fees for a lot of other things (but I do for Google Drive).
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  Either actually self-host or look outside of Amazon's offerings, because they aren't known for being inexpensive compared to competition. I run Nextcloud on my own hardware and VPN in because Nextcloud isn't something I want exposed to the wider internet. Not very long ago there was a CVE that effected some Nextcloud (and other) setups.
- fallenhitokiri 7y ago
  A little bit more expensive, but IMHO a good compromise considering it’s hosted NextCloud is https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share I’ve been using it for a few months and my only complaint so far is that you cannot setup your own (sub)domain but get a random one assigned that’s IMHO not easy to remember.
new2628 7y ago
I was deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem ... I would upload all of my family photos to Google Photos and all of my personal documents to Google Drive ... I used Google Hangouts ... My home is covered with Google Homes ... I have easily invested thousands of dollars into my Google ... Honest question: why should one take advice from someone showing such a systematic pattern of poor judgement?
- Spearchucker 7y ago
  Maybe because just a few short years ago Google was the darling of the internet because search and chrome were better than anything else. People believed the do no evil spin. And back then why wouldn't they?
  - new2628 7y ago
    Many of us already saw it differently back then and often had to face ridicule when pointing out concerns with these services.
    - BuckRogers 7y ago
      I still do face ridicule. While HN might be a bit behind one of us that was already suspicious of Google, the average developer is still loving Chrome and will look at you like you're a maniac if you breach the topic of ditching the browser.
- tempodox 7y ago
  Tentative answer to your question, with an optimistic outlook: Good judgement comes from experience. You get experience by learning from mistakes. Mistakes come from bad judgement.
WA 7y ago
I’m glad I never started with Google products in the first place. Except for search and maps, but they aren’t tied to an account.
revskill 7y ago
Main reason is don't seriously use Google or any social network anymore is because of privacy. They never respect my privacy. OK, i still use their services, but just for non-serious work.
- simion314 7y ago
  It depends, I do not use gmail for personal/private messages just work and login to webpages, I do not use maps or location or assistance on my phone either, but this story still sounds scary because google has many products and a ban on youtube(where they forced people to use google accounts) will lock you out of everything. Part of the solution for this problem would be if you get a ban on Youtube you can still use gmail and the other products. Other part of the solution is to tell people what exactly they did wrong, I sometimes got warnings from Sony that I did something against the TOS and not to do it again but not details what I did (my son plays games on a PS4, I tried to look into the chats he made recently but I could not find anything to explain it so I tried the best I could to explain him to watch his language because he could get locked out the games) and like others said some human support would also help a lot.
2ion 7y ago
Who can afford for their main email account (gsuite, paid), cloud hosting (if you use it, maybe even for business), means of payment (gpay), backup and storage (drive) to get banned/locked without meaningful support just because you happen to post a comment on a yt video that some googler or algorithm found offensive/non-pc or you happened to log into your account from the wrong IP address, city or continent? As soon as I started travelling frequently, gmail/google was not longer an option. You can't rely on it. Can't trust it. That, on top of everything else is a dealbreaker.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  The logic applies to basically ALL cloud based services. We had our entire company profile for Indeed disabled because a couple of our ads were commission-based positions - which only became an issue when paused those postings (because they don't care while you're giving them money). Their appeals process was non-existent, and they turned off everything - the whole account - so I couldn't even post for an accountant. Literally all cloud based companies have this danger.
BuckRogers 7y ago
I'm not necessarily anti-Google, but only use their services when I consider them best of breed. That's my policy across the board. Gmail in 2004 was as good as it got, then everyone caught up, just lately in 2019 did I find Gmail to have gone beyond the pack again. The ability to schedule emails in Gmail is something I've missed from Outlook (desktop) for a long time, and it does it serverside unlike the desktop Outlook app. The downside to Gmail is that the default user experience is pretty poor. You have to enable the preview pane yourself, and if you don't, you also would have to enable the auto opening of the next email after you delete one otherwise it takes you back to the list. Gmail's list of emails has the star on the far left, and all other quick controls on the right. It's pretty absurd. But if you disable categories and the rest of Google's convoluted ideas, enable the preview pane and set it to the compact layout, I haven't seen a better free webmail today. I would switch to Outlook.com just to split my email account from Youtube and Google Maps, if Microsoft supported scheduled sends. iCloud.com would be my first choice but they don't have a robust calendar system like Outlook and Gmail (iOS reminders only, no email reminders). Same concern with ProtonMail (I never saw the appeal to FastMail). Hosting my own is a non-starter because I feel with all the competition in webmail that I really shouldn't have to, there are good free services.
tekknik 7y ago
How does one leave the large corps for things like movies and tv shows? I used google for the longest time and recently switched to apple but i’d love to self host and buy drm free media. i’m guessing people doing this are using p2p or something?

378 points by thekyle 7y ago

He's damn lucky. Today's Google would have suspended all associated accounts. Right?

I also switched to Fastmail too. Its interface is rudimentary similar to Google few years ago. It has full suite of services like calendar, notes, storage... What I like is its simplicity which Gmail may bloat with too many features. One notable feature of Fastmail is alias: you can create other emails alias to your main account and use that to create different rules. Super handy and convenient. If you worry about encryption, probably ProtonMail is a better choice. For me, Fastmail is good for my usage. P/s: if you want to sign up for Fastmail, here is my referral link https://ref.fm/u12211285 https://ref.fm/u12211285

newscracker 7y ago
If you're going to plug referral links for credit, may I suggest that you switch to significantly cheaper services that are also privacy focused? You can choose from mailbox.org, mailfence.com, runbox.com, migadu.com, mxroute.com, posteo.de (no own domain support), Tutanota, ProtonMail and many more.

carapace 7y ago

"Backups are a tax you pay for the luxury of restore." Folks, back up your shi^H^Htuff.

ReverseCold 7y ago

I remembered seeing this post on Mastodon, and it turns out this website federates. My response from Mastodon is listed as a comment on this website. The wonders of ActivityPub...

nolroz 7y ago
I tried getting into Mastadon a while back but didn't manage to find decent instances to subscribe to. There's just so many! Any advice on where to get started?
- yogthos 7y ago
  There's a friendly sign up guide available now https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
- snisarenko 7y ago
  Hey, I am working on a mastodon aggregator, which can help with exploring instances and figuring out which one to join. It should be launching soon! https://mastodonia.club https://mastodonia.club
  - Kye 7y ago
    I hope you get consent from people and instances before aggregating any data like posts and profiles. This kind of thing is very unpopular on the fediverse if done the wrong way. Meaning without permission.
    - snisarenko 7y ago
      That's a fair point. I am definitely not trying to anger the fediverse community. I just want to make it more discoverable. I was assuming since mastodon instances have public apis, and public "explore" feeds, creating an aggregator was no different than creating a mastodon instance with a different ui. I am also being pretty respectful in terms of how frequently I ping the api. I also include contact information the user-agent that hits the api. I would respect any instances request to stop aggregating. Also this tool is linked directly in the mastodon documentation https://mastovue.glitch.me/ https://mastovue.glitch.me/

yogthos 7y ago

I setup a personal NextCloud instance on a $5 Digital Ocean last year, and along with Fastmail, it replaced all the Google services I've been using. It took about an hour to get up and running, it went through version updates without a hiccup, and never gave me any trouble. I found it to be completely hassle free, and I can highly recommend it to anybody looking to take back control of their privacy.

awill 7y ago
It's not accurate to imply this is so easy. You're now responsible for your data, security and uptime. That means patching, backups and plenty of ops work.
- Klonoar 7y ago
  I agree - I've been doing this crap for 20 years, it's not "about an hour". This is an afternoon at the least. Context: I've done it for myself and others recently.
  - yogthos 7y ago
    I installed it using Snap and Let's Encrypt using this guide [1], and everything worked out of the box. Been running and upgrading it since without a single issue. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-nextcloud-on-ubuntu-16-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst...
- yogthos 7y ago
  Sure, easy for a technical person. That said, Digital Ocean has automated backups, and security mostly consists of making sure you do your updates in a timely fashion. I've literally had to do no other ops work in over a year running NextCloud, and I haven't had a single downtime. Running a server for yourself and your family is a far smaller effort than administering a public site.

gfiorav 7y ago

Open software does not mean non-proprietary. Free software is what your looking for.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

telegrammae 7y ago

What's reasonable is if you want to avoid using Google services (for whatever reason), then you do not need to be fanatical about it. Move off gradually, one service at a time, and keep using some Google services, if you really must - why not?

thatsenough 7y ago
Because that doesn't feed into the outrage machine and drive clicks.
- close04 7y ago
  The fact that a company is allowed to amass so much of your digital life but then lock you out with no recourse should cause outrage. It's no different than if your landlord, your bank, or the post office decided one day to lock you out and not even bother to give you an explanation, let alone to give you back your money and property. We live in a world where services like the ones Google provides aren't just optional, they're critical for so many people. Some have less money in the bank or home than the value of their emails, contacts, media, and whatever else may be stored in Google's systems. Some of those things are priceless. I agree that it's Google's right to refuse to have/keep you as a user/customer but they should be legally forced to give you back all of your data or at the very least give a generous notice period.
  - buran77 7y ago
    Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Having your data confiscated like this is definitely outrageous and should be illegal. Right now we rely on this being bad PR for the company doing it but that's not enough especially for the giants. The user pays for the service by allowing the provider to monetize their data not by forfeiting the right to even get a copy. I'm actually hoping that some regulation will be put in place to protect users and ensure that they never lose their data.
    - BuckRogers 7y ago

danemorgan 7y ago

I get the email thing. And I've actually been moving critical accounts away from my personal Gmail for a while now. As for the rest, the services I use, I use them because they work better than any of the other options I have tried. I'll admit that that amounts to as substantial number of services.

godzillabrennus 7y ago
I have never understood using a gmail.com account for anything important. It’s always been inexpensive enough to buy a domain and have an email address associated with it. I also don’t understand startup founders who tie personal emails into a business email account. Keep a separate email.
- xref 7y ago
  For one, a personal domain is less secure than a gmail.com domain. There have been quite a few targeted hacks, like Mat Honan or any number of crypto-holders, where a personal domain was socially engineered to be transferred to a new registrar (or password reset on existing registrar) where the attacker controls the MX records, thus your email, thus your password resets. It’s much harder to transfer gmail.com, office.com, etc
  - deanmoriarty 7y ago
    That’s something I’ve been worried about since I switched to a custom domain email address that I point to another mail service: I protect my registrar account with 2fa, but I still think that the chances of someone hacking via social engineering my DNS registrar (Gandi) or the MX provider are much higher than someone hacking my 2fa personal @gmail.com account. I might just be paranoid.
SanchoPanda 7y ago
I think the key here is you have tried the other options, and importantly - you clearly know how to set those other services up if need be. For many if not most people, that would be entering the wild unknown.

abhisuri97 7y ago

Wouldn't it be best for google to allow you to download a takeout of all your files in the case that your account is suspended?

HenryBemis 7y ago
"..best for google.." If google gave a crap they would put a phone number to that email so you can talk to a human and resolve any issue. From numerous conversations in HN and iRL, everyone who has a spat with the G-people is royally screwed. A true hostage. What you suggest would be great for the user. But why would google care for that? You broke their rules, you have to pay. Here, have some pain. I don't blame them for having rules. I blaim the G-users for accepting them and giving google all this power, that is often (and stupidly) mis/ab-used. On the other hand, I have to admit that for less technical folks, having all-in-one is a life saver. Vast majority of the member of this forum though do not belong to that group.
- pugworthy 7y ago
  > If google gave a crap they would put a phone number to that email so you can talk to a human and resolve any issue Do you know how insanely hard that would be to staff and manage such an operations for a global corporation? It had a 1 BILLION MAU back in 2015.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Google One gets you 1 year of access to human support for a year so apparently not that hard. I'm sure many people would rather pay that amount just to get their ban reviewed rather than lose their existing email, chat, photos, files, and phone number. The 3 other ~1 trillion dollar tech companies all have customer support without issue.
    - davchana 7y ago
      I think once the account is banned, then you can't log into account to buy that Google One membership. You need to buy it before the ban.

xenator 7y ago

I love that other companies have sustainable alternatives to Google services. But these articles looks more like hype train and doesn’t really add any new value for me. You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day. Probably I’m getting old but I remember times when Google doesn’t exists. We had software for files, messages, calls, calendars etc. It was based on different protocols, may be less secure and more naive. But it was ok for these days. There is life outside of Google, and always was. May be for “millenials” you need to be brave to leave this circle, but I don't getting it. What is so special in using other providers? Is it just... normal?

stanferder 7y ago
> What is so special in using other providers? Is it just... normal? It's probably not normal. I've heard of Google, but not Fastmail, Matomo, Nextcloud, Collabra, Plex, Jellyfin, F-Droid, Aurora, Lineage, PinePhone, Simple Mobile Tools, Hover, Matrix, PocketCasts, AntennaPod, or "Ting".
jolmg 7y ago
> You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day. Switch to another small one when they start to get big. Try to keep them all balanced. If only one person doing that was enough to get a nice competitive market...
awb 7y ago
> You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day. This. At some point you have to trust someone. Even if you're off Google you're leaking data with your phone, credit card, smart TV, ISP, genetic testing, etc. I know privacy isn't all or nothing but with Email the party I'm communicating with already has a copy of the communication that they could forward to anyone or save with any other provider. I'd say ethics might be a larger reason to switch.
- chrisco255 7y ago

tomaszs 7y ago

The same goes for Facebook. My company uses a legimate Business Account to handle ads of our clients. Nothing shady there. Regular SMB ads. More or less a month ago i receive an email the whole account has been blocked due to some violations. Whole freaking account. Without any warnings. We had clear history. And this means essencially you can close your company if you run only FB ads because you can not create another ads account. Eventually they recovered the account in 48 hours and wrote they are sorry. But the thing is it does not solve the problem. You can loose your business just by a system mistake in a second. And it seems like there is always a way out. But there is not always. Really, does a company of a size of a Facebook or Google care about one person or one small business? I had a Instagram account for 10 years with my photos and fought 6 months to get it back after hacker takeover. Believe me i have tried everything to get it back. And no, there was no way. There is no number you can call to fix it. Its just so dangerous to have such single points of failure nowadays like Facebook or Google. Both for business and personal use. Its just great to hear a person who was able to remove it.

therealmarv 7y ago
Yes you are so right. Your topic and text (single point of failure) reads for me like a beginning of a whole article. Nowadays there are also new Fintech banks who operate like Google and have only chat and no telephone support. Imagine getting locked out of your bank account (because of a false positive in an Anti Money Laundering AI) and you can reach nobody in time.
- tomaszs 7y ago
  Exactly. Part of this problem is visible right now with PayPal, one of greatest FinTech projects. AML lockdowns but also disputes. Lately i have read people sell for twice the price just because one of two transations aproximately is a fraud.

oth001 7y ago

I've had a problem with trying to sign into my approved AdSense account the past few weeks. "We encountered an error. An engineer is looking into the issue." No way to contact them. I'm done with Google as well. I'm never going to use a service that doesn't provide a way to contact support.

mdesq 7y ago
I'm somewhat surprised Google hasn't taken the old Microsoft route of just charging per call for support on their free accounts. MS used to be $300 way back IIRC. Google could probably charge $500.

xwowsersx 7y ago

I'm not entirely clear on what Nextcloud is. Is it meant for teams/organizations? What does the author mean by "Google Contacts → Fastmail → Nextcloud Contacts"?

sedatk 7y ago
He switched to Fastmail first, then to Nextcloud?
Semaphor 7y ago
It’s somewhat of a one-stop cloud service, only (usually) selfhosted. Many prople use it mainly as Dropbox/One Drive/Google Drive replacement which works great, but depending on what apps you install (some of those might be default apps, others community provided), you get a mastodon client, caldav, carddav, calendar, notes, webmail client, video chat, office document editing, media viewer and other similar stuff. I didn’t yet manage to get it working, but there is even a plugin that supports fulltext scan search via tesseract OCR. All of these things work just as well for teams/orgs (including LDAP/SSO) as they do for a single user

xwowsersx 7y ago

I recently switched to Fastmail and I'm very happy. The web and mobile apps are blazing fast and simple. My favorite feature is being able to add unlimited aliases which sends/forwards to whatever address I choose. This has enabled granular control over my inbox as I have receipts@mydomain, bills@mydomain, finance@mydomain, etc. If I want to try some service, I might create an alias. If they end up spamming too much, I can simply delete the alias or apply other rules.

Semaphor 7y ago
I use fastmail with my own domain, so it’s always service@domain.tld. I only need to create aliases if I have to write them so the from/sender is correct. And I love how fast their webmail is compared to the slowness of gmail.
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  I too use it with my own domain. I don't get what you mean you only create aliases if you "have to write them". Can you elaborate?
  - Semaphor 7y ago
    Sorry, "when I have to write an outgoing email to that service"

Animats 7y ago

I haven't used Google for anything but search in years. It just seemed unnecessary. Mail is on Thunderbird connected to an IMAP server. Browser is Firefox. Phone is Android minus all the Google stuff, plus FDroid. Phone mail is K-9 mail. Maps are on ZNavi. Location provider is Mozilla. Software development and docs are on Github. Backups are on iDrive. Videos are uploaded to Vimeo. OS is Ubuntu LTS. Sometimes I use Discord. A few months back, I switched my default browser to Bing, because Google was returning too many ads above the fold. No big deal. Just fewer headaches without Google and Microsoft.

bagacrap 7y ago
Bing and Google are browsers now?
BlueTemplar 7y ago
Bing and Github are Microsoft...

plg 7y ago

Isn't a reasonable solution to pay google for gsuite? It's $50* per year or something? Then the "there's nobody to phone and no appeal and data could just be _gone_" concern goes out the window. *edit: $6 per month so $72 per year

therealmarv 7y ago
Not a bad idea. But there are services even today which are not working with GSuite accounts. The funny side of things is also that at least here in EU GSuite accounts have also different privacy rules.
stanferder 7y ago
What stops Google from suspending a paid account, assuming they issue a pro-rated refund for anything paid in advance?
- cryptozeus 7y ago
  24/7 support by phone or email.
  - Paul-ish 7y ago
    Are you still a customer if you are suspended?

undershirt 7y ago

Google Fi lets me text and call people from my computer if i lose my phone (through Hangouts). Not sure there's a replacement for that.

avip 7y ago
There's also no drop-in replacement for the G-docs suit, nor for google-play of course. Firebase has no alternative. Google got some pretty useful things up there.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sgarman 7y ago
There are some options like pushbullet that come close; but I think that relies on our phone being on and having a connection.

paul7986 7y ago

I quit using their search due to their sudden lack of ethics in the last few years. As well as my own disgusting experience I had doing business with them (treated me like garbage when invited to demo my tech. All their competitors I met with around same time were professional/respectful; deal or no deal) and then more so other stories detailing they do the same to others. Upon seeing that I was like wow my experience wasn't fringe it's in their DNA now. I no longer can support a company whose tagline is "Do No Evil," yet that's exactly what they do!

freshbagels 7y ago
> treated me like garbage when invited to demo my tech Do tell this story.
- paul7986 7y ago
  See the first comment in which I detail my experience with Google ATAP which mirrors the OP's story. She demoed her invention in an interview with them & they patented it without her knowledge/consent. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
  - paul7986 7y ago
    Some other examples of Google (Google X even) stealing from the little guy/girl inventors & researchers... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-google-is-patenting-work-he-put-in-the-public-domain/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go... https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/17/8048779/google-x-eli-attia-lawsuit-flux-architecture https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/17/8048779/google-x-eli-atti... https://twitter.com/ahandvanish/status/1072953071179874304 https://twitter.com/ahandvanish/status/1072953071179874304 I've spoken with some of these people and hear there are many more examples yet those people put it behind them or don't want to come out against the biggest tech company. That's too bad as for too long in history those in power and position have stolen from the rightful creators.

Mistri 7y ago

Has anyone else had experience with getting their Google account suspended? I literally use it for everything in my life, and without it I would probably lose access to a lot. I would change away from Google in a heartbeat but it just seems like too much effort if I can avoid getting my account suspended in the first place. If anyone has gotten their account suspended, what was it for and how can I avoid it?

dredmorbius 7y ago
Several times, several different accounts. Fortunately Google is (or more accurately, was) simply a convenience for me. I have not yet fully deactivated the several Gmail accounts I have still standing, though those are largely inactive, and most are strictly associated with specific nyms I'd created (one notably after a primary nym account was suspended). The best way to avoid having your Google account be suspended is to not have one. But moving to self-hosting, or increasingly, entirely offline, has been a goal and project of the past few years. I touch a few Google services directly: - Google Scholar: still amongst the best academic search engines I'm aware of. - Google Ngram Viewer and Google Trends: quite useful for tracking concepts over time. - Google Maps: There are times OpenStreetMap's search simply falls down even when specifying lat/lon coordinates directly, Because Reasons. Google Maps is my fallback, but I still rely on it far more than I'd care to. - Gmail: Secondary for several accounts. - YouTube: still the largest online video hosting service, though alternative interfaces (https://invidio.us/ https://invidio.us/) and alternate hosts (both centralised and federated or self-hosted) are increasingly viable. YouTube's UI tweaks and aggressive pre-roll ads over the past several months have been aggressively user-unfriendly. - Google Web Search. A very distant second to DuckDuckGo, but still necessary for 1) date-bounded search, 2) getting overall counts of results (occasionally useful), and 3) rare edge-cases where DDG doesn't turn up expected/desired results (GWS is ~50% successful here). I don't know if it's because I rely so heavily on DDG that I'm influencing its results, but I find that both searches and content that I've posted tends to turn up high-ranked on it. I'm not as aware of this with Google.
- rapnie 7y ago
  I like to self-host too, and there is a huge amount of awesome selfhosted [0] software to be had. Only problem is, you have to be willing to become a moderately good sysadmin and spend your time doing the chores to keep your systems up-to-date. This takes considerable amount of time. Dropping the ball once, and you may find yourself hacked (I had this recently when being slow in updating a nginx reverse proxy). [0] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

tibiahurried 7y ago

I started using DuckDuckGo and so far I have been happy with it. Though sometimes I still need to resort to Google. Firefox is my primary browser. I constantly use a VPN. Bottom line I try my best to limit the ability of Google to track me. That said, I still use GMail / GDrive / GDoc and keep a backup of everything on Amazon Drive were I also store my photos along with Apple Cloud. Basically, if Google were to close my account I will be able to recover all my data from Amazon. I trust these 3 companies to be serious about security. It will be a nightmare if I were to deal with 10 small companies and their vulnerabilities. Also, hosting everything myself? Security nightmare no thanks.

spicyramen 7y ago

While I read other opinions about this article not bringing anything new that we already know, as an Enterprise user this reminds me that the people running Google Cloud is the same that comes from this consumer world or new grads with 0 Enterprise experience, which believe their product is perfect and user is wrong. We just completed an evaluation of AWS, Azure and GCP and our leadership raised this concern...which came true when opening GCP account and support was not as responsive as AWS, or Azure. AWS and Azure I even had real people calling us and contact us to understand our use case...I know GCP is bring more people from Oracle and other companies which can help them change this, in the mean time, we still will.invest in AWS, Azure and IBM

xwowsersx 7y ago

I have a Google One subscription so I pay Google for storage. Google could suspend my account and I'd have no recourse whatsoever? I'd have no way of getting my 10s of thousands of photos back?

K0SM0S 7y ago
I hope you have backups, at the very least. Yes, most subscriptions generally say in the ToS that the account and all assets may be closed/deleted at the sole discretion of the provider. It's anecdotally rare, but depending on the company (quality of customer service), it may be irreversible, or take a long time to fix. My personal rule is to never trust a third-party to "protect" my data; there is no such thing in today's market and legal frameworks (unless you have a face-to-face relationship, and even then, backups!)
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  Thanks. What's the cheapest or most cost-effective way to backup all my photos? S3?
  - boring_twenties 7y ago
    Buy an external hard drive or SSD, download the photos to it, put it in a safe place away from your other computer stuff.
    - xwowsersx 7y ago
      That's viable for sure, but one thing I'd like is regular backups of the photos from my phone (where most I take most of my photos). That's the nice thing about Google Photos with Google One - all my stuff is backed up to the cloud regularly. I understand, though, that this comes with some risk.
      - mceachen 7y ago
        I use Resilio Sync, and have tried SyncThing. Both work. They both have an app you run in your phone, and a companion app you run on macOS, Windows, Linux, or your NAS, and it syncs (even through a NAT) whatever you've configured to backup on your phone to N servers. If you're away from home, you can run it on your laptop next to you, so your phone is backed up quickly, and then throughout the day you laptop can sync with your home server while you're out exploring. It's nice. I have two backups online, and an external drive I rsync to monthly then turn off. Before you delete your originals in Google Photo, use Takeout to validate the files. Mine (at "original quality") were mangled.

tiatia 7y ago

OSM is great. Here.Com is another proprietary option

xwowsersx 7y ago

For those who don't know (I didn't), you can create and download archives of any of your data on Google by visiting https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

mceachen 7y ago
Just an FYI: if your Takeout archive fails with errors, try creating multiple archives, with only one large service selected per archive. My photos archive didn't even work that way, I had to create albums and back then up one by one. But it did eventually work.
- xwowsersx 7y ago
  Thanks for the advice

milemi 7y ago

I wish OP had gotten to the bottom of why the account got suspended and told us about that.

tbodt 7y ago
It is completely impossible to answer this question
- milemi 7y ago
  I doubt that. Googling "google customer service" gives me this https://www.google.com/contact/ https://www.google.com/contact/ How about starting there and telling us what happened? I don't see any mention of any attempt to figure it out.

6ak74rfy 7y ago

I was considering setting up a Nextcloud instance as a replacement for Google Drive. I did some math and realized that I’ll be paying a lot more on that route - 1TB on Lightsail+S3 vs Lightsail+SSD vs Google Drive. The last was by far the cheapest. Are there ways to bring down this cost? I know some people argue that I could use that host for other self-hosted services to amortize cost but i don’t pay monthly recurring fees for a lot of other things (but I do for Google Drive).

heavyset_go 7y ago
Either actually self-host or look outside of Amazon's offerings, because they aren't known for being inexpensive compared to competition. I run Nextcloud on my own hardware and VPN in because Nextcloud isn't something I want exposed to the wider internet. Not very long ago there was a CVE that effected some Nextcloud (and other) setups.
fallenhitokiri 7y ago
A little bit more expensive, but IMHO a good compromise considering it’s hosted NextCloud is https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share I’ve been using it for a few months and my only complaint so far is that you cannot setup your own (sub)domain but get a random one assigned that’s IMHO not easy to remember.

new2628 7y ago

I was deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem ... I would upload all of my family photos to Google Photos and all of my personal documents to Google Drive ... I used Google Hangouts ... My home is covered with Google Homes ... I have easily invested thousands of dollars into my Google ... Honest question: why should one take advice from someone showing such a systematic pattern of poor judgement?

Spearchucker 7y ago
Maybe because just a few short years ago Google was the darling of the internet because search and chrome were better than anything else. People believed the do no evil spin. And back then why wouldn't they?
- new2628 7y ago
  Many of us already saw it differently back then and often had to face ridicule when pointing out concerns with these services.
  - BuckRogers 7y ago
    I still do face ridicule. While HN might be a bit behind one of us that was already suspicious of Google, the average developer is still loving Chrome and will look at you like you're a maniac if you breach the topic of ditching the browser.
tempodox 7y ago
Tentative answer to your question, with an optimistic outlook: Good judgement comes from experience. You get experience by learning from mistakes. Mistakes come from bad judgement.

WA 7y ago

I’m glad I never started with Google products in the first place. Except for search and maps, but they aren’t tied to an account.

revskill 7y ago

Main reason is don't seriously use Google or any social network anymore is because of privacy. They never respect my privacy. OK, i still use their services, but just for non-serious work.

simion314 7y ago
It depends, I do not use gmail for personal/private messages just work and login to webpages, I do not use maps or location or assistance on my phone either, but this story still sounds scary because google has many products and a ban on youtube(where they forced people to use google accounts) will lock you out of everything. Part of the solution for this problem would be if you get a ban on Youtube you can still use gmail and the other products. Other part of the solution is to tell people what exactly they did wrong, I sometimes got warnings from Sony that I did something against the TOS and not to do it again but not details what I did (my son plays games on a PS4, I tried to look into the chats he made recently but I could not find anything to explain it so I tried the best I could to explain him to watch his language because he could get locked out the games) and like others said some human support would also help a lot.

2ion 7y ago

Who can afford for their main email account (gsuite, paid), cloud hosting (if you use it, maybe even for business), means of payment (gpay), backup and storage (drive) to get banned/locked without meaningful support just because you happen to post a comment on a yt video that some googler or algorithm found offensive/non-pc or you happened to log into your account from the wrong IP address, city or continent? As soon as I started travelling frequently, gmail/google was not longer an option. You can't rely on it. Can't trust it. That, on top of everything else is a dealbreaker.

koheripbal 7y ago
The logic applies to basically ALL cloud based services. We had our entire company profile for Indeed disabled because a couple of our ads were commission-based positions - which only became an issue when paused those postings (because they don't care while you're giving them money). Their appeals process was non-existent, and they turned off everything - the whole account - so I couldn't even post for an accountant. Literally all cloud based companies have this danger.

BuckRogers 7y ago

I'm not necessarily anti-Google, but only use their services when I consider them best of breed. That's my policy across the board. Gmail in 2004 was as good as it got, then everyone caught up, just lately in 2019 did I find Gmail to have gone beyond the pack again. The ability to schedule emails in Gmail is something I've missed from Outlook (desktop) for a long time, and it does it serverside unlike the desktop Outlook app. The downside to Gmail is that the default user experience is pretty poor. You have to enable the preview pane yourself, and if you don't, you also would have to enable the auto opening of the next email after you delete one otherwise it takes you back to the list. Gmail's list of emails has the star on the far left, and all other quick controls on the right. It's pretty absurd. But if you disable categories and the rest of Google's convoluted ideas, enable the preview pane and set it to the compact layout, I haven't seen a better free webmail today. I would switch to Outlook.com just to split my email account from Youtube and Google Maps, if Microsoft supported scheduled sends. iCloud.com would be my first choice but they don't have a robust calendar system like Outlook and Gmail (iOS reminders only, no email reminders). Same concern with ProtonMail (I never saw the appeal to FastMail). Hosting my own is a non-starter because I feel with all the competition in webmail that I really shouldn't have to, there are good free services.

tekknik 7y ago

How does one leave the large corps for things like movies and tv shows? I used google for the longest time and recently switched to apple but i’d love to self host and buy drm free media. i’m guessing people doing this are using p2p or something?