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But with services this big people don’t look at the percentages, they look at the hard numbers. It doesn’t matter if 1M people are <0.1% of Google’s user base -

But with services this big people don’t look at the percentages, they look at the hard numbers. It doesn’t matter if 1M people are <0.1% of Google’s user base - if they lose their data people will start migrating off, because that’s a scary number, and the media will report “1 MILLION people lost their accounts!”, not “0.1% of people lost their accounts.”

wpietri 7y ago
And how would people know? Google has ~ 1.5 billion users. If something happens to 1 in 1000 people, then a) it won't happen to most people, b) most people won't know anybody it happened to, and c) maybe it happens to a friend of a friend. If they hear about it, they will likely say, "Oh, I'm sure there's a reason." A reporter might hear stories about people who lose their accounts. They might even find those people. But so what? Right here in this discussion we're hearing those stories. Could this be happening to a million people across the globe per year? Sure. Does anybody know the true number? Nope. So if you could discover the hard number (which you can't), maybe you could get a tech reporter to write about it. Then Google PR would go into action. They'd say correctly that it's a small fraction of their users, that keeping everyone safe is a difficult problem, and that they work hard to make sure everybody who should have access does, but sometimes people get swept up in Google's crime-fighting. All of which is true! Then they'll turn back on the accounts of the people the reporter actually talked to. PR will say that they've made process changes that have solved the problem, the reporter will include the happy endings, and that will be the end of it. Just for comparison, tobacco kills about a half-million people a year in the US. It's totally unnecessary, but it's profitable for the tobacco companies. As long as it's killing somebody else, people are basically fine with it. If they can be chill about that, they will certainly be chill about you losing your Google account. They'll think you probably did something.

wpietri 7y ago

And how would people know? Google has ~ 1.5 billion users. If something happens to 1 in 1000 people, then a) it won't happen to most people, b) most people won't know anybody it happened to, and c) maybe it happens to a friend of a friend. If they hear about it, they will likely say, "Oh, I'm sure there's a reason." A reporter might hear stories about people who lose their accounts. They might even find those people. But so what? Right here in this discussion we're hearing those stories. Could this be happening to a million people across the globe per year? Sure. Does anybody know the true number? Nope. So if you could discover the hard number (which you can't), maybe you could get a tech reporter to write about it. Then Google PR would go into action. They'd say correctly that it's a small fraction of their users, that keeping everyone safe is a difficult problem, and that they work hard to make sure everybody who should have access does, but sometimes people get swept up in Google's crime-fighting. All of which is true! Then they'll turn back on the accounts of the people the reporter actually talked to. PR will say that they've made process changes that have solved the problem, the reporter will include the happy endings, and that will be the end of it. Just for comparison, tobacco kills about a half-million people a year in the US. It's totally unnecessary, but it's profitable for the tobacco companies. As long as it's killing somebody else, people are basically fine with it. If they can be chill about that, they will certainly be chill about you losing your Google account. They'll think you probably did something.