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Let's go a bit more general. I operate on the realization that google will one day arbitrarily destroy my gmail account for absolutely no reason. At any time.

• lqet 6y ago
  > This is what free gmail means to me. Same goes for youtube I would add (free) Github to that list.
  • arkitaip 6y ago
    Only Github has a MUCH better track record than Google on these matters.
    • PopeDotNinja 6y ago
      Unless you live in a place like Iran or Crimea.
      • toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Most of us don’t.
        • PopeDotNinja 6y ago
          My point is that it sucks to discriminate against people just based on where they live. One day you're in Sevastopol working remotely for some company that uses GitHub. The next day some politicians decided your in a "bad" place and your permanently banned. It sucks, and hopefully it won't happen to you or me, but it totally could.
          • deleted 6y ago
            [deleted]
          • ARandomerDude 6y ago
            You act like this is arbitrary. "Politicians" with radically opposed worldviews, and from multiple countries, have endorsed this policy, including all recent presidents. If you live in Iran, not having GitHub is a problem, but not your biggest one.
            • deleted 6y ago
              [deleted]
          • fossuser 6y ago
            These are international government sanctions - the companies cannot choose to ignore them without severe consequences.
          • lonelappde 6y ago
            Sure, but that's a consequence of international war. The war (and the warmongers) is your main problem. The rest are a large pile of details. When the tanks roll in I'm not worried about my GitHub issues.
        • komali2 6y ago
          This comment, perhaps unintentionally, does imply that the people in those countries deserve less, are less than, us. That's a morally reprehensible position to take, imo. Is that your position? Are you aware of that implication behind your comment?
          • lkbm 6y ago
            No, the comment implies that risks that only apply to people in two countries don't apply to people not in those countries. This doesn't in any way suggest they deserve less or that their risk is morally irrelevant. Simply that the risk to them is not something I need to factor into the risk assessment of my own account.
      • zapttt 6y ago
        shhhh. silicon valey doesn't know there's life past berkley.
      • moron4hire 6y ago
        That one isn't Github's "fault", though. That's going to happen if you use any service incorporated in the US.
        • dmos62 6y ago
          Why is that? Is private business obligated to follow host country's foreign policy? My instinct is to hold the business responsible for these decisions.
          • eythian 6y ago
            Sometimes, yes. If the host's country's government applies sanctions to your country, they may have to stop allowing you to use their services.
          • afarrell 6y ago
            Yes, a private business is obligated to follow the laws of any country where they hold assets that can be seized by the police of that country.
            • dmos62 6y ago
              Censorship is a law in US now? Or, are you saying that it's law to follow its foreign policy? In that case you sure have a round-about way of saying that.
              • freeone3000 6y ago
                The Trading with the Enemy Act empowers the Office of Foreign Asset Control to come down very hard (million-dollar fines and years of jail time) on anyone dealing with a sanctioned nation (N.Korea, Iran, Cuba) or anyone on the list of Specially Designated Persons and Nationals. This is absolutely the law, yes.
                • dmos62 6y ago
                  The accounts were closed because they were business accounts from sanctioned countries? I didn't realise that. I had misunderstood that Github was enforcing the said countries' censorship.
    • numpad0 6y ago
      GitHub is also much newer. Microsoft, its parent company, isn’t all that better as well. I think there were OneDrive-triggered killing spree at some point when they made backup to it more or less silent and offended by what people were “uploading to website”
    • ken 6y ago
      Are they still? I’ve certainly noticed in other areas (like tech support) they’ve gone from “hungry startup” to “division of mega corporation”.
  • mceachen 6y ago
    If you've cloned your repos you've already got your most important data (except issues, wiki, and releases, which may be unused or non-critical).
    • ken 6y ago
      GitHub wikis are repos, too, so they’re trivial to clone.
      • wadkar 6y ago
        For those wondering how: just replace .git suffix with .wiki.git suffix to the repository URI and you can access the Wiki (assuming it is enabled for the given repo)
    • henryfjordan 6y ago
      Releases use the git tag system so you might lose the release notes or build artifacts but you at least can rebuild
  • ryandrake 6y ago
    It seems like a pretty safe default policy for any service you get for free, or where the company is under no contractual obligation to you to do, well, pretty much anything.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• fbelzile 6y ago
  > I operate on the realization that google will one day arbitrarily destroy my gmail account for absolutely no reason. No! We need to demand more from Google (or, at least our lawmakers). I have a business that relies on a Chrome extension to be on their web store. Say I accidentally trip off something in their opaque machine learning algorithm that determines my extension (or even a YouTube comment!) breaks their terms of service. They would have the right to completely block my account and remove the extension. Effectively, wiping out how I make a living with a single automated bit flip. It hasn't happened to me, but the people that share horror stories of how it happened to them scares the $#!7 out of me. As the Internet gets more privatized and less "open", I just wish there was something that required a fair "trial" of my account being suspended. The balance of power online is slowly shifting and I feel there needs to be something protecting the rights of individuals (the public) online.
  • notechback 6y ago
    Actually I'm wondering if you can use the GDPR for this. It gives you the right to ask for a copy of your data. This counts for places where you don't have an explicit account so presumably o could get a copy of all data from my account even if I lose access?
    • icebraining 6y ago
      Probably, but depending on that rather than making regular backups is a bit mad. https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/ even lets you schedule regular archiving.
      • grok22 6y ago
        Looking at the choices on that takeout page, I realized that there were a number of Google services I didn't event know about: "Google Arts & Culture", "Crisis User Reports", "Handsfree", "Textcube".
      • lonelappde 6y ago
        If you have 100GB+ with Google, takeout doesn't work. Either you have to manually download files 2GB at a time reauthenticating each time, or try a 50GB download the times out on the server side as gets cancelled with auth error. There's no way to but a physical backup or run a long running process to fetch your data reliably over the course of the week. It might work if you get an GCE VM and crossload your Google takeout to cloud storage and then download using cloud storage APIs.
• foolofatom 6y ago
  This actually happened to me recently with hotmail. The forced migration to outlook just deleted everything, with no explanation.
• lonelappde 6y ago
  Has anyone done a social science research study to estimate the chances of losing a Google account? This is an important number. 1% annual chance? bad deal. 0.01% annual chance? Maybe worth the risk. 0.0001%? Sure, I'm more likely to get hit by lightning.
  • downerending 6y ago
    I lost one of my (two) Google accounts. Still had username/password, but IIRC, they demanded text confirmation from a phone I no longer had. Tried absolutely everything, but they wouldn't budge. Not sure how to judge the annual risk, but there seem to be a lot of other stories like this. I prefer to think of it in terms of "nines" of reliability. My account was "up" pretty continuously for maybe eight years. It's been "down" continuously for four years plus the next thirty-plus that I might need it. So, a total downtime of 0.81. Being charitable, I'll call that one "nine". Nowhere in tech would that be considered acceptable.
• xkcd-sucks 6y ago
  >I operate on the realization that google will one day arbitrarily destroy my gmail account for absolutely no reason. At any time. Because. Due to reasons. Those reasons which include the knowledge I will likely never have anything clearly explained. Reasons I cannot appeal. At all. This sounds very much like the old-world Christian conception of "acts of God" re: natural disasters and the like. The Catholic Church has the concept of saints, highly placed people that intercede with God on behalf of common people. For dealing with Google, modern people petition "influencers"
  • rdiddly 6y ago
    The idea is old but not exactly old-world: I wouldn't be surprised to find the phrase in some insurance policies even today for example. But the whole concept of chalking things up to a God is interesting -- basically whether you believe in a God or not, it's a stand-in for anything that exists apart from us, wasn't created by us, certainly doesn't exist FOR us or do our bidding, and might do things with indifference to us that either help or hurt us. Pretty good antidote to hubris if you asked me. But yeah that does happen to be a pretty good description of Google for most people, not to mention something like COVID-19.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• stcredzero 6y ago
  I operate on the realization that google will one day arbitrarily destroy my gmail account for absolutely no reason. At any time. Because. Due to reasons. Those reasons which include the knowledge I will likely never have anything clearly explained. Reasons I cannot appeal. At all. You're dead right. So now, in addition to trying to exercise every day, and unpack another box from moving every day, I'm committing to moving one account email to Fastmail every day. Famous people have lost content on google and youtube. Blocked emails. Lost videos. etc etc. I'm a nobody. If famous, "important" people have their accounts "accidentally" deleted There have been far too many incidents where people who become virally infamous immediately have their accounts blocked or deleted mysteriously, followed by having them restored with no explanation. This indicates that Google/YouTube employs people who will arbitrarily abuse their power in the control of these valuable and highly private information resources, over whom Google/YouTube has too little actual control of oversight.
• bit_logic 6y ago
  Google is running a free service and have limited resources for customer support. I think everyone understands that. But why can't they make better use of that support using algorithms and data analysis? For example, they probably get thousands of requests for account assistance. But they have full access to the emails in the account. And related metadata like age of account, volume of emails, other services used (Android apps released, Youtube videos created), and others. It should be simple to create an algorithm to prioritize the requests. So if an account was created a week ago and doesn't have much history? Low priority. An account is 10+ years old and has regular bank statement emails incoming? Highest priority. And if that's too much work, just provide a paid option. Tell users that if their issue is really important, then pay some amount (such as $50) to get immediate urgent support. The user with a one week old account won't care enough to pay. The spam scammers obviously won't pay. But the user with all bank accounts, brokerage accounts, other important services going through their gmail account? They will likely pay to get assistance. Instead every account gets the same shitty treatment. They could easily identify the important accounts to look into first using data analysis and algorithms. They're supposed to be good at this stuff! Or provide a paid option. Or do both. Only explanation I can think of is that it doesn't look good enough for a promotion so nobody at Google cares.
  • gaogao 6y ago
    Google does actually have a paid option. Buying extra storage space for Gmail and Google Drive (Google One) is theoretically supposed to come with support, as one of their touted features.
    • scrollaway 6y ago
      Aside from Google One, there is also GSuite: https://gsuite.google.com/ https://gsuite.google.com/ I pay for a personal google account there. It gives me the peace of mind everyone's talking about. And I get customer support when I need it.
      • dan-robertson 6y ago
        Have you ever used that support?
• narrator 6y ago
  This is why I pay a small amount to Google every year for my email account. Why not? Might as well be the customer instead of the product.
  • softwarejosh 6y ago
    you are definitely both
    • thekyle 6y ago
      Depends on if he's talking about GSuite or Google One. The GSuite terms of service and privacy policy are quite different from the Google One ones.
  • logifail 6y ago
    > This is why I pay a small amount to Google every year for my email account Q: Wouldn't it be better to pay a small amount to $anyoneOtherThanGoogle ?
• narrator 6y ago
  When you have something from the government like an ID card. They can't just turn it off. You have due process rights and right to appeal them turning off your ID card, etc. With private companies you don't have that. That's the danger of privatization of everything, due process rights go out the window. Downvotable Material: There's a certain billionaire who wants to privatize the right to travel through a certain "passport" he's advocating. Will they just be able to turn you off and there will only be non-existent or unresponsive customer service that will just tell you that there are "reasons" why you're not in the system any more and they are a private company and can do whatever they want and buying their product is optional, when it really isn't. Hopefully, if this ever comes to pass, there will be extensive regulatory legislation like the Fair Credit Reporting Act to keep this sort of thing subject to due process and transparency. The global nature of this "passport" means that when in foreign countries with weak judicial systems they might still be able to arbitrarily terminate your account.
• thsealienbstrds 6y ago
  Let's go even more general: I would be unable to download PlayStore apps without violating the EULA. Did you know my apartment building's washing machines are literally inoperable without an app? For every app, you need access to the app-store platform. I wouldn't care so much if it's optional. However, we are at the point where we can't use basic household appliances without apps...
  • type0 6y ago
    > I wouldn't care so much if it's optional. This is exactly the argument that android/ios apps, google accounts etc, is it optional or not. I couldn't go to the gym where I paid in advance because I didn't have supported phone (latest android or ios). You'll always have a choice right, now it's the choice to wash your clothes by hand. Who knows next time you might not get an apartment without a gov approved android/ios app on your phone, it's a brave good old world again.