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Google users locked out after 15 years' use
- rusticpenn 6y agoAt what point does it make sense to take this to court?
- dmitriid 6y agoWhen you have a trillion dollars stashed away. Then you wouldn't care about lawyer costs. That's the main reason big corps get away with doing what they are doing.
- hilbert42 6y agoYou would if laws demanded you always had to hand back users' data if you locked them out. That's the problem we don't have a proper legal framework to manage Google and other Big Tech.
- g_p 6y agoIn Europe there's no provision for GDPR rights to access to data to be removed on these non-grounds, so users would have the right to get access to their takeout. Since Google's processes don't seem to give access to that, you might have to sue them. If they failed to show though, you should be able to get a default judgement eventually. (note - GDPR is in some cases privately litigable, so you don't need to wait around for a snail's pace regulator - you can indeed sue for relief and get your legal costs back in the award. I'd expect a lawyer would take this case on a contingent basis given how clear-cut the GDPR is about your right to access your own data).
- dmitriid 6y agoEurope has been really slow giving out fines. And even those fines are often less than a slap on the wrist. In France Google got fined $57mln for breach of GDPR. That's what Google makes in 3 hours.
- g_p 6y agoThat is why it is important to note that certain GDPR rights can be enforced yourself, without waiting on a regulator. Waiting on a regulator to bring the case is not your only option, since these are data subject rights, and the data subject (i.e. you) an sue directly. Certain approved consumer groups are also able to do this as well - the regulators are too slow right now, but others are gearing up to start taking cases themselves.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dannyw 6y agoYou signed a binding arbitration agreement, didn’t you?
- strombofulous 6y agoI thought agreements like that weren't binding if the person signing them didn't realize they were entering that agreement.
- ilikepi 6y agoYou don't remember that checkbox you clicked when registering for your account affirming that you definitely 100% read, understood, and agreed to be bound by Google's Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy?
- Vespasian 6y agoIn many jurisdictions arbitration clauses for consumers cannot be binding and can neither prevent them to sue in court. Check your local laws.
- manigandham 6y agoWhen you have millions of dollars or millions of users to back you up.
- jart 6y agoYou are not helpless as an individual. If the company wrongly disables your account and leaves you no other option, you are well within your power to fill out some paperwork and file a lawsuit. It should cost you <$1k but will cost a big company >$10k just to respond.
- reificator 6y ago> It should cost you <$1k but will cost a big company >$10k just to respond. And... let's just compare my personal finances to Google's finances.... carry the 1...
- manigandham 6y agoAnd then what? You cost them effectively nothing while you're out $1k. Are you prepared to keep spending to continue the lawsuit?
- hilbert42 6y agoThe point is you should never need to do this. The law should automatically ensure that you always have access to your data. Today, denial of access to one's data ought to be a human rights matter.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoDoes it change things if you aren't paying the provider for the service?
- TheChaplain 6y agoTip: Get your own domain from a non-google registrar, then connect to Gmail if you prefer. If you ever are locked out, you can just move the address to another email-provider. Another trick is to use always have forwarding enabled in Gmail, to Outlook.com or another provider. All email will be forwarded despite your account being locked, so you will not miss out on important info. And use Google Takeout for backing up your data, at least once a year.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rexf 6y agoWould forwarding continue to work if your account is disabled or terminated? That doesn't seem likely? I wish there was a way to pay for Google (such as Google One) and it meant Google wouldn't ban your Gmail account. Period. However from reading HN anecdotes, it seems like they don't care about you (even if you're a paying customer). I realize this could feel like extortion, but it would be well worth the peace of mind.
- merijnv 6y ago> Would forwarding continue to work if your account is disabled or terminated? That doesn't seem likely? No, but the idea is that you can point the domain at a new host and at least keep receiving future email, so that you don't lose the ability to password reset accounts, etc. As for > I wish there was a way to pay for Google (such as Google One) and it meant Google wouldn't ban your Gmail account There's a reason I pay, like, €50 a year for my email hosting instead of gmail's free mail. I want to be able to actually reach a human when it comes to problems with my email instead of Google's customer service void.
- names_are_hard 6y agoThat's why you need to own your domain. When they lock you out, you setup a new mailbox elsewhere and point your domain to it. That covers new mail. And the archives are still accessible because you've been forwarding mail all along.
- tedk-42 6y agoPro-tip Only use Google SSO for things you don't care about. While in would be a pain if I lost my google account, I can still access Twitter, Discord, GitHub, Bitbucket, stack overflow etc as they aren't bound to Google. My emails/hangouts chats however would be lost unless I took a backup (I haven't but I might one day when I decide to go ad-free)
- quickthrower2 6y agoLookup Google takeout
- dzhiurgis 6y agoGoogle SSO is the best option to login into my country's e-government portal. The other options are: - Bank (requires subscription) - SIM card (requires subscription) - National ID card (requires reader plus a maze of Java applets) All of them suck badly. At least national ID has NFC so technically in future can be a bit easier.
- ffpip 6y agoWhich country is this? Who uses Google SSO to login to a e-gov portal?
- goatinaboat 6y agoGoogle SSO is the best option to login into my country's e-government portal If this is true, then as in my other comment, your government really ought to be regulating Google as a public utility.
- goatinaboat 6y agoIt’s long past time that Google, Twitter, Facebook etc were legally declared to be public utilities and regulated as such.
- adventured 6y agoDon't do that. Do almost anything other than that. If you make them public utilities, they'll get even worse, become more politically tangled, become even more entrenched, impossible to remove and impossible to compete with. You'll put the government directly into the business of preventing competition against them via intense regulation and government-lobby protection. There are a lot of ways to restrain big tech before you get to the public uiltity option.
- goatinaboat 6y agoIf you make them public utilities, they'll get even worse, become more politically tangled, become even more entrenched, impossible to remove and impossible to compete with. You'll put the government directly into the business of preventing competition against them via intense regulation and government-lobby protection. I think your fears are overblown, when was the last time the power company, the phone company, the sewer company, the train operator, the postal service decided on a whim to un-person someone? Sure those organisations aren't perfect by a long shot but by and large they are trustworthy and accountable.
- doctor_eval 6y agoYeah but it's a short step from that to being forced to exclusively use the state-mandated email provider in order to be able to communicate with the government or big businesses... at a cost.
- perryizgr8 6y ago> impossible to compete with. That's already true. Look at how Google is banning accounts without recourse. Or how Twitter and Facebook are censoring personal and public discourse to push their political agenda. Why are they able to do so? Because it is already impossible to compete with them. I second the idea of declaring them as public utilities.
- szszrk 6y agoBeing locked out from google account is one of my biggest fears in practical computer usage. Over the years I can't even tell how much I'm sunk into using tiny pieces of google's services, even though for most crucial things I tend to omit google and look for alternatives that are easier to handle in problematic situation. Mail is one of the things I'm most worried about.
- quickthrower2 6y agoDo a google takeout ASAP if you haven’t done so already. This mitigates against data loss through being banned. You then just need to change your email in myriad places!
- viraptor 6y agoI went through this recently and... It's not actually as many as I thought. I've got 454 entries in bitwarden, but anything past 20 or so most common entries, I can completely ignore / wouldn't care if they disappeared.
- tjoff 6y agoYou often need to have access to your email to be able to change email. And many services will be like, oh, haven't seen you in a while so we sent you this code to your email to verify it really is you. Do it now.
- avh02 6y agoebay's stupid about this. you can reset your password but then they'll still send you an SMS(!) to verify it's you when you try to use your successfully reset password. I no longer have access to that old number, i ditched that particular account cos it didn't mean much to me and opened a new one, wasn't worth the hassle.
- grishka 6y ago> Mail is one of the things I'm most worried about. Use an IMAP client. It would keep all your mail on your device, so at least you don't have to rely on having uninterrupted access to your account for your old conversations. Actually, I'm surprised just how many people use email through web interfaces for some reason.
- hilbert42 6y agoIf you don't use Google then you can't get locked out. I don't. I've never understood why people would actually trust their data to Google or any Big Tech company when there's no guarantee one will always have access to it. That said, we need laws to guarantee people can always reclaim their data even if their account is closed or the company goes bust.
- mnahkies 6y agoI think it's a matter of convenience - running your own gsuite like application (eg nextcloud) safely and securely is out of reach for most users, either for want of education or time
- cbozeman 6y agoLOL, that is enormously out of the reach of most users... What you mean to say is that it isn't out of the reach for anyone visiting YCombinator. Most "users" have less understanding now, many of them having lived with this technology their entire lives, than I did at 14 when I got my first computer... A Pentium 75 with 8 MB of RAM and a 540 MB hard drive.
- thdrdt 6y agoFor me it was a free email account when you had to be invited for gmail. Then I got an Android phone and used the account for it. Then I used the calendar app which used the same account. So it vendor lock-in all the way. But I already migrated my email to a VPS and will migrate my calendar and contacts as well. But this is not something everybody knows how to do.
- cvbcvbcvbcvbc 6y agoGood alternatives to Keep that can be hosted privately? I hope contacts would still be on my phone if I lost access, or is that hoping too much?
- thendrill 6y agoBoth Owncloud and nextcloud are good alternatives. Both have support contact sync with Android
- Symbiote 6y agoThe second person lives in Britain. I wonder if he tried submitting a GDPR request, and if Google has any obligation to keep the data, or if they delete it immediately?
- wegs 6y agoI wonder how Brexit fits into EU regulations.
- hilbert42 6y agoIt probably won't if Big Tech gets its way with government. Remember, GDPR isn't in their best interests. Brexit allows them to start again on that side of the Atlantic, albeit on a smaller scale.
- speedgoose 6y agoIf they want a full access to the EU market they will have to use the EU regulations like Norway does. However they may prefer a hard brexit for some reasons.
- Symbiote 6y agoThe GDPR regulation is implemented into British law as the Data Protection Act 2018 [1]. It must remain until the end of the year. If there's "no deal" then, next year, the UK Parliament may repeal or modify it as it wishes. However, there were data protection acts in 1998 and 1984, and it seems unlikely the general principle of access to personal data -- which was there before GDPR -- would be removed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_2018
- Nginx487 6y agoIs it possible to file a case for financial loss, which is absolutely huge for the unfortunate Google customer?
- g_p 6y agoUnder GDPR right to access your own data (in Europe), you could sue over Google's refusal to honour your data rights. Your request to use data rights can be made through any means, including social media message funnily enough! You can privately litigate breaches of GDPR, and I imagine the court would be keen to award you costs when the judge discovers the kafka-esque situation going down. Oh, and ensuring you receive your takeout as they are legally required to give. Not sure if there's grounds for loss, as the terms and conditions are pretty tightly wrapped to say they can block you at any time and you're fine with that... Not to say that should be allowed either!
- andylynch 6y agoGDPR article 22 (Automated decision-making and profiling) may also apply here - I would think for many people this kind of situation has the kind of ‘similarly significant effect‘ which would trigger a right for human intervention.
- g_p 6y agoAbsolutely. I suspect if this hit a court, Google would decline to say why the account was banned. A judge would then struggle to see this as not being an automated unaccountable decision. A good point well made. Several grounds here.
- klohto 6y agoI was thinking the exact same thing, but Google isn't stupid either. So far all of these lockouts have happening to US folks, but this one is from UK. I'm not sure if Google made a misstep in this case or they found a loophole and no longer care about GDPR.
- 6y ago
- aaron695 6y agoI liked this one about a women who lost her account searching for a local restaurant (called Lolita). https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/gold-coast-womans-facebook-ban-after-simple-search/news-story/ca4b809a537257c49fa2972d7e45c038 https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/gold-coast-...
- stiray 6y agoWelcome to vendor locked-in world where you have willing-fully decided to become prisoners in exchange for few sweets that you dont really need. I hope you dont also own some google router or even better, "home security" device. This would make it a real pain. I am explaining this to people since the birth of gmail, but no one listens. Let me think for a moment, what would happen if google does this to me... [x] No google email (I have my own mail server - it is just a $90 motherboard with onboard cpu with disks) [x] Modified ROM, no google on android [x] No google cloud (Nextcloud is just fine, for virtualization I have bhyve. They are both just great) [x] No applications bought from google play (If application doesnt provide "off google" licensing, I am not buying it - voting with my money) [x] No content served by google (If I want to share video, I just upload it to my server. No annoyances about copyrights or anything else. It just works.) [x] No data whatsoever stored in google ecosystem (actually actively fighting against them storing any information about me) Hm, looks like - nothing?
- WanderPanda 6y agoDa rise of da preppers :D
- SiVal 6y agoFor video off your own server, do you have a good streaming solution or is it a download?
- ajnin 6y agoHTML5 <video> tag works just fine if you want to put a video up somewhere.
- mellow-lake-day 6y agoNot the person you are responding to but for the HTML5 video tag to work how does server have to be set up? What are you serving the video over? What protocol are you using? New to this so curious about your implementation.
- simion314 6y agoThis is the issue with this giants, say you get banned because something weird happened on your console now your entire life is destroyed. I own a PlayStation and I am concerned that if my kid does something stupid I will lose access to all the games now imagine if you ownede a Google or Microsoft console , you could lose not only the games but access to everything else.
- soco 6y agoAny usable suggestions on (1) what to do to get out of a Gmail account with many years of history unscathed and (2) how to prepare for disaster with an Android phone?
- eloisant 6y ago1. There are several alternatives, but usually not free. One example is protonmail, that I use with a custom domain so I can still switch provider without having to get everyone to change the address they use to contact me. - You can import your emails, but it might not be realistic to import all your history. It's going to take ages and fill up your new account quota. So what I did is first do a cleanup of my gmail history (remove things like mailing lists, promotion emails, etc) then export only the last year. I can still log to gmail if I need to access an older email. - You can't expect everyone who has your old gmail address to know your new email address, so you need to accept to live with a forward from gmail potentially forever - Most services will let you change your login email address, some won't. In this case you can either create a new account or accept to keep the gmail account as login. 2. I really want to know more about that too!
- hilbert42 6y ago"You can't expect everyone who has your old gmail address to know your new email address, so you need to accept to live with a forward from gmail potentially forever" You wouldn't if there were an international telephone-like directory. We seem to have forgotten that this was the actual function of old fashioned paper based telephone books. As I see it, it's imperative that something like this be established as it's the first step in unshackling ourselves from being permanently locked in to Big Tech. Similarly, we need portable email addresses and portable IDs that we can use anywhere and with any service. As this HN news story illustrates, we need these more than ever and we need them soon. These won't be easy to implement as Big Tech will oppose them every inch of the way. For starters, we'd need legislation that would enforce Big Tech to compulsorily use these IDs. As Big Tech is in the pocket of governments, this won't be easy.
- soco 6y agoThank you! I'm aware most alternatives are paid, also aware that I'm paying Google in other ways for their free service. I became honestly a bit vary about any provider - including ProtonMail - but I guess I can only choose from what is being offered :)
- chinathrow 6y ago> He received a response the next day: Google had determined he had broken their terms of service, though they didn't explain exactly what had happened, and his account wouldn't be reinstated. This is such a shitty behaviour, it makes me angry. I hope he'll follow up with a court case.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- locusm 6y agoIf you need to migrate out of Google Apps or for that matter from any IMAP server I highly recommend IMAPSync. It has a number of features built in when having to go in/out of Google. https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ https://imapsync.lamiral.info/
- arkitaip 6y agoThis is an amazing service that has saved my ass on several occasions. It's actually surprising how well and easy it works.
- acd10j 6y agoAll of the advice after fact would not help a person who actually lost his account. Nor if you are among 99.9 % of population who don’t know how to setup your own mailserver etc. Lots of advice here seems like victim blaming. If you have lost your google account then somehow it’s your fault. For me it seems a nightmare if it does happen to me as well. Can we discuss solutions that can help general public in these situations.
- SiVal 6y agoIt's not victim blaming to recommend that people who know how ought to switch to more self-managed solutions, but I agree with you that doing so is not an option for the vast majority of people. I've always promoted the idea that anti-monopoly laws should be upgraded to be especially sensitive to network effects, now that so much of the economy is becoming networked. The bigger a tech company gets, the less power they should have to decide whose account gets suspended, what you can say, what videos you can show, etc. "We're a private company" is no defense against traditional anti-monopoly enforcement. New powers that make Big Tech so big should be explicitly added to the dangers anti-monopoly regulation was created to defend against. If Google wants to lure you in, they should end up being as stuck with you as you are with them.
- eloisant 6y agoEven if you don't know how to setup your own mailserver, you can still decide to pay for your email (protonmail, fastmail, etc.) to have it managed by a smaller company who makes money directly from their users hence have an incentive to treat them well. Also not putting all your eggs in one bag is a good idea. The real problem is that most users don't understand why they should pay for a service that Google provides them for free.
- newhotelowner 6y agoIt seems more like a reminder that watch-out - it may happen to you too. I use personal domain that I prepay for 5 years in advance. I recently started using gmail account more and more, but this is another reminder that I may lose access to important business emails if I continue to rely on Google.
- mindfulplay 6y agoThis is genuinely scary. Photos, Yale locks, Fi, WiFi and Nest thermostat can all be poof gone because I made a silly YouTube comment? How is this not regulated? Google photos also 'helpfully' offers to delete your uploaded photos with 'some guarantee'!!! If this isn't an indication of a giant shitty monopoly that doesn't care about its customers at all, I don't what is. They have some AI ML fucking crap but can't figure basic user trust because that won't get anyone promoted nor grow some Director-level person's headcount. Large promo-manufacturing teams that casually handle all your data. Pray to God that some L4 didn't get promoted doing some impactful work because they sure ain't gonna do maintenance work protecting your shit. Their motivations are not users, product nor team: manipulate some metrics to get promoted and move out. Horrible.
- ben_w 6y agoI agree; from my non-lawyer perspective, it is this sort of thing (rather than search results or Android App Store policies) which harms consumers.
- roenxi 6y agoI'm trying to not make this sound harsh; but you really don't need a government regulator to tell you that centralising all your data with Google, who are providing largely free services, is risky. It is like building a house on the edge of a cliff then falling off the cliff one day. It was always a real possibility. Being locked out of your stuff is quite a likely end of the story with Google.
- 411111111111111 6y agoI disagree actually. The issue seems to me that it's a global ban. If Google only locked you out of the functionality you seem to have violated somehow, it would still be a viable strategy to use their services. Imagine losing the ability to comment or upload videos on YouTube because you wrote something offensive or published a video with copyrighted materials. Potentially bad for YouTube creators, but definitely not dangerous for normal users which also use other services. Reports like this were the reason why I removed almost all Google services from my life a few years ago, but I wouldn't have done it if the bans had been granular.
- ffpip 6y agoWhen banned, do they allow you to download all your data alteast? If anybody has not downloaded their data - https://takeout.google.com https://takeout.google.com
- submeta 6y agoMoved to Fastmail years ago, because my spider sensors were telling me for years that I need to fear companies where I can’t reach a human to resolve conflicts / problems. - They have an excellent Email service, calendar and contacts management. Most important: At fastmail I get a very quick response from a human who will always help me very quickly. Also I use my own domain name so that I can move my Emails to a new service provider whenever I want. And while I was at it, I replaced Chrome with Firefox on my Mac and never looked back. Finally I moved all my photos to iCloud, replaced my Android phone with an iPhone, got a paid account at Dropbox, started doing backups like there won‘t be cloud services tomorrow (Carbon Copy Cloner ftw!) I have a google account, only for using Youtube (paid). And I like their search results. Even that is too much google for my taste. Edit: Ahh, Gsuite. I migrated to office365 (microsoft). But I use it mostly offline (Word, Excel). Actually for legacy stuff. Because I started writing my documents with Emacs + Org and export to whatever format my recipient needs, doc, html, markdown (using pandoc extensively).
- realusername 6y agoI've also moved to Fastmail years ago for the exact same reason, I've setup Gmail autoforwarding to my new email address. Ironically I'm now permanently locked out of my old Gmail address despite knowing the password, sounds like I've made the right choice.
- doctor_eval 6y agoThat's not irony, that's vindication :)
- doctor_eval 6y agoI had a bit of an argument with a good guy who just couldn't understand why I wasn't willing to put all our new company's documents on Google. I convinced him (grudgingly) to use a setup much like this (we ended up with Box instead of Dropbox because I got sick of Dropbox trying to grab all my data). Seeing things from his perspective, I was amazed at how successful Google has been in convincing other businesses to take on Gmail, Google Docs, etc. When I think about the enterprise focus of Google, as well as the continuous rebranding, product EOLs, and crappy user interfaces, it's hard for me not to see Google as the new Microsoft. As a former Linux desktop user who lived through the whole MS antitrust thing, I find it absolutely bizarre that today, I'm much happier with Office 365 on the web, than I was with Google Docs. I still worry about all my photos being in iCloud, but it seems like less of a risk since I'm a customer of Apple, rather than a product of Google.
- PopGreene 6y agoYup. They suspend users and cancel services like the rss reader. Google giveth, and google taketh away. Capricious be the name of google. Incidentally, you can download your google data: https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/ Set a reminder and do it on a regular basis. It will give you some protection from the Google Yank. (Until they yank this.) BTW, does anyone know if this can be automated?
- fiftyacorn 6y agoDoesn't takeout automate this for a monthly or quarterly download?
- okanesen 6y agoYeah, you can chose between once per year or every two months to the following endpoints: * Mail * Google Drive * Dropbox * OneDrive * Box
- mippenhappen 6y agoMan these kind of stories are scary as fuck. Great for Halloween!
- KanyeEast 6y agoI always use cloud services as a secondary fallback in case of data backup. The more you entrust your operations to external agents, the more you are at risk when they fail to deliver. I hope to eventually shift away from their e-mail services too.
- rainingcatndogs 6y ago> They don't know why they've been banned. The absence of reason makes me wonder a lot of possibilities. Maybe google bans people who use ad-blockers, maybe they didn't explicitly set that way but some of their algorithms must have figured out these users should go. I know, it is extremely unlikely but we're free to come up with reasons if google doesn't give one. Don't sit there thinking it won't happen to you(I was like that up until recently), get a domain name and transfer all important accounts to it. And do a Google takeout.
- iRomain 6y agoI imagine a "social dilemma" scene with the little guys inside the computers: > His actions over the past 15 years lead to a 76.9% chance that he will break our ToS. Furthermore,he has clicked only on 0.000001% of the ads. Terminating him now will increase the average profit per user by 0.00000000000000000291%.
- mikemac 6y agoMy twitter account was banned in March without warning (the reason they provided was "due to multiple or severe violations of our platform manipulation rules). Frankly, I'm way too boring on the site for me to be guilty of this so I appealed 5 times over ~4 months. I must have gotten through to a person eventually because I was unsuspended with the message: > We’re writing to let you know that we've unsuspended your account. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and hope to see you back on Twitter soon. > A little background: we have systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk, and yours was flagged as spam by mistake. Please note that it may take an hour or so for your follower and following numbers to return to normal.
- classics2 6y agoJust don’t do it. Run your own domain and inbound email server. It’s so cheap it basically costs nothing at this point.
- doctor_eval 6y agoWell, only if you set aside the cost of the education you went through in order to be able to do all that stuff... while your advice is fine for the HN crowd, unfortunately this problem affects everybody. Better advice IMO is to tell people to use a smaller provider, like Fastmail.
- jmnicolas 6y agoThis HN crowd member don't want to bother with the trouble. I see email as postcards (everybody can read them) and act accordingly. Since I never trusted Google, I use a well known mail provider that I pay for.
- mmkos 6y agoIt makes me think that it wouldn't be unreasonable to have regulation around blocking access to email. Google provides a number of services and seemingly, if you break the T&Cs on one of them, your entire account is disabled and you no longer have access to other Google services (including email). I can't imagine not having access to my email - at this point I'm kind of locked in. Google keeps a lot of my passwords and I register all of my important accounts to my main gmail account. If Google were to close my account suddenly, it would certainly disrupt my life quite a bit. Email grew into an essential part of modern life. Taking away access willy-nilly would distress most people. I understand that this is a free service and we're the product, but I believe companies should only offer email accounts knowing that access can be denied only in exceptional circumstances (e.g. abusing the email service directly).
- hilbert42 6y ago"I can't imagine not having access to my email - at this point I'm kind of locked in. Google keeps a lot of my passwords..." That would worry me beyond belief. This is one of the reasons why I don't understand why people actually do it. To me, it's such an obvious problem and it's easily avoided. (I use many of these services but they're outside Big Tech and I've no problem. For example, I use POP and IMAP email that's been around since the beginning of the internet.)
- wegs 6y agoGoogle is being investigated for antitrust. If this investigation moves forward -- unlikely under a democratic government as we'll probably have -- one of the potential outcomes are better corporate firewalls. If Google were broken up, a la baby bells, unusual activity on Youtube might no longer result in loss of email and phone service.
- numpad0 6y agoMore like denying an identity. Online account services provide identity and freezing account for "abuse" is destroying part of it, with real world consequences. It is true that horrible abusive people exist in real world, and maybe it is justifiable to flat out deny them, but account ban coming up on news stories aren't like that.
- omnifischer 6y agoWhy is no one suggesting iCloud as a replacement? Never heard of Apple locking out devs? Do they?
- klohto 6y agoAs much as I like Apple, you wouldn't gain much by switching. In case you do get locked out, it will be the same faceless corporation as Google. Your best bet is own domain and bigger provider with a human support. Fastmail, protonmail or even 365 would work.
- fareesh 6y agoSelf-hosted email seems to elicit conflicting reports of experiences - I think the takeaway I've seen cited most often is that it is incredibly difficult to get your emails delivered to users because you will be randomly blocked one day. I feel like there ought to be some kind of "let's encrypt for email" type solution to create trust but I'm not sure how it could be done.
- donmcronald 6y agoGoogle filters their own email sometimes. I’ve seen them filter facebookmail.com too. Microsoft is just as bad. It’s incompetence. The only difference with using a huge provider is they can probably contact someone to get it resolved. As the little guy you can’t.
- seraffin2020 6y agoYeah, but have you seen them reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mhasbini 6y agoGetting locked out of Google is a legit risk that I have: I'll loose most of my personal & professional data because of it: Emails (Gmail), Files & Photos (Drive), Contacts, Calendar... Google already offer a way to download backups from Google Takeout. But this isn't enough because: 1- I have to remember to download an up-to-date backup myself. 2- I have to store the backup somewhere. 3- Retrieving the data is cumbersome: e.g. if I need to access my emails after a lock down I'll have to first get a recent backup that I stored somewhere then try to find a program that work on my machine that'll read the email format then import it. This approach is open to flaws that is why I'm working on the side on a product that address these pain-points: you'll be able to automatically get backups to the service servers and it'll do all the parsing so that you can have a similar services UI (read-only) to the ones from Google. Shoot me an email if you want to keep updated.
- hilbert42 6y agoGood one, automatic backups that avoid the user having to do it are an excellent idea.
- donmcronald 6y agoTry exporting data from a whole GSuite account. They make it as difficult as possible. IMO it’s intentional, but maybe Google just sucks.
- mhasbini 6y agoSupporting GSuite/workplace accounts is on my list for things to look at once an MVP is ready. Did you try to process listed here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/100458?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/100458?hl=en ?
- donmcronald 6y agoThat actually worked for me. I couldn't get it to work last year. It was still a PITA to download the bucket it makes, but at least it's one big bulk operation.
- knbknb 6y agofellow chromebook users: If you had a Chromebook, and Google locked your account. Does the scenario described in the article imply that you can no longer can log into your own laptop?
- spc476 6y agoYou could possibly log in as a guest (or "browse as a guest" at it says on the login screen) but there isn't much you can do by browse the web as a guest. Go figure.
- wegs 6y agoA Chromebook isn't your own laptop. It's a lease from Google for 0-6 years, after which they effectively disable it. You can look up when your lease ends here: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en If this scenario happens, you can think of it as Google terminating the lease early. No biggie.
- lima 6y agoYou can unlock the bootloader on any Chromebook and install a regular Linux distribution on it.
- wegs 6y agoYou can do this on SOME Chromebooks. It'd be great if you could do this on any Chromebook! There's a whole pile of AC700 Chromebooks around, with no upgrade path as far as I know, at least if you don't want to be p4wn3d.
- lima 6y agoI thought developer mode was a hard requirement? Including AC700: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome-os-devices/acer-ac700-chromebook https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vaccinator 6y agoI got locked out of one of my Google account because Google didnt recognize the device I was login in with (I had the correct password and I never enabled 2FA). I almost wasn't able to recover it.
- nathias 6y agoconvenience reduces immediate risk and increases catastrophic risk
- grandpoobah 6y agoThis article finally prompted me to do what I should've done a long time ago, which is to create a Fastmail account and begin importing my Gmail into it. I've seen this story far too many times, and no longer will I say "yeah but it'll never happen to me". Setting up the import was insanely easy, and my Fastmail account is now configured to enable me to send using my Gmail address from directly within Fastmail. Plus after the import is finished, it will still periodically bring over any new emails received to the Gmail account. Fuck you Google.
- Daniel_sk 6y agoYes, the import is actually extremely easy - basically one click where you authorize Fastmail to connect to your Gmail account.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoBut even then you have to trust FastMail not to lock you out. Sure it's a paid service so less likely and I'm sure their customer service is better. But it doesn't fix the root issue of being dependent on one party.
- Daniel_sk 6y agoIf you combine it with a paid domain, then you can transfer your email provider even when locked out. Of course you risk loosing your emails, but you can setup a desktop client to always download all your emails or do periodic backups.
- harha 6y agoI've had trouble with e-mails from my own domain frequently landing in spam folders. I do agree on the control though.
- Daniel_sk 6y agoI don't have these issues with Fastmail + custom domain, but you need to make sure that DKIM and SPF is set up correctly. Fastmail helps you to check and fix this.
- grumple 6y agoThanks for the reminder to finish switching my accounts over to Fastmail. There are too many of these stories to trust google. There’s also something nice about having a financial relationship with a company providing you a service, rather than having them mining your data to sell things to you or about you.
- mbeex 6y agoMany commentators mention e-mail here: I'm a conservative oldtimer with my own domain (since the Ninetees) and associated e-mail, of course. The problem is that it happens to me more and more often that especially with my business contacts in larger companies my e-mail is filtered out / ends up in their junk folders / disappears for other, unspecified reasons. Simple public black lists do not show anything. I am more the developer and not the infrastructure type, but the company policies seem to contain more and more features of downgrading private domains. And in my opinion this is supported by some kind of dirty game of global IT players at technical and other levels.
- blunte 6y agoThe bias against major player-hosted email was probably rooted in spam prevention, but there's little doubt in my mind that they (the few big players) recognize the value of attempting to force users to use their service, and then to trap them.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoI doubt they really care that much. Everyone migrated to GMail from a world with Hotmail and Yahoo email accounts. They truly don't need to lose sleep over other competitors with far less capitalization.
- TheChaplain 6y agoThat is a hassle indeed, you need to set up SPF, DMARC and DKIM to at least have a chance to reach the inbox on gmail or outlook.
- progx 6y agoAnd what have we learned from this? Do not use everything from one source. Do not become dependent on a supplier, especially if you do not have any contact possibilities.
- TheBobinator 6y agoCloud is giving a service provider all of the benefits of a utility with none of the responsabilities. If Compute was really a utility, then like water, sewer, and internet, it'd be highly regulated. BTW, Mailstore free can backup your google e-mails handidly and is the best such client for doing so.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoYeah I'm always worried about this. I have a paid Microsoft office 365 account with all my email and a lot of data on it. I backup my OneDrive regularly using an rsync-style tool. But the email is more difficult now that it's all in exchange format. I could use IMAP die the backup but Microsoft is going to block basic authentication soon.
- arkitaip 6y agoAt least Microsoft has an infinitely better reputation for customer service and product retention. I mean , when was the last time they shut down a major product?
- seraffin2020 6y ago...or blocked someone due to SJW?
- donmcronald 6y agoI think VEEAM has a community edition of their MS365 backup product that can do up to 10 accounts for free. The software is pretty bloated, but it’s reliable and gives you a PST file to work with.
- fart32 6y agoI do the same (well, I don't use OneDrive all that much). I use my e-mail with Outlook exclusively and what I did was creating a new local Outlook account, in which I move all my e-mails from time to time. That way, there's an offline mailbox you cannot loose in case of a ban or anything like that. Just make sure you set your Outlook to download everything, not just last year or so. My motivation was a bit different, I didn't like the idea that someone could make it to my account and see literally all my e-mails sent and received in last 15 years. I mean I do have 2FA setup, but I don't trust MS over my offline backup stored on an encrypted device.
- cannedslime 6y agoBut they are a private company and can do whatever they want! This is always the reply when someone gets deplatformed for political reasons, why not when its for completely arbitray and unknown reasons too?
- baq 6y agothis would be easily solved if google was disallowed to provide email service for $0. as is, the gap between $0 and even $1/yr is so large that you really need to know how to price risk correctly (most people don't know or don't care).
- blunte 6y agoImagine if it were somehow possible to require a company (G in this case) to expliticly tell you which part of their terms of service you broke and provide the evidence or justification to prove you did break the ToS... I frankly cannot fathom how it's legal to say someone has broken an agreement without justifying what they did which broke the agreement.
- ekns 6y agoCurrently I'm using namesilo as a registrar, and my own domain for email, albeit with G Suite. I hope that with G Suite you won't get kicked out arbitrarily, but I think I could still recover from that. Hopefully the registrar will never need email confirmation to log in (assuming my DNS setup is there). Still, I'm worried that could get me kicked out of my registrar illegitimately. Is there anything that can be done to mitigate this aside from using something super expensive like MarkMonitor? Earlier my account at namesilo got disabled silently when they decided by themselves that my corporate credit card was somehow fraudulently used by me. I got it resolved eventually, but I fear something similar could eventually lock me out completely.
- blunte 6y agoThe only Google service I still depend on is gdocs. I am not aware yet of any collaborative document/spreadsheet tool of similar quality. Even without the collaboration benefits, google docs or sheets is just so much faster than native Office apps on my otherwise fast Macbook Pro.
- plif 6y agoThis terrifies me. I recently signed up for Google One just to mitigate the lack of support if I were to lose access to my account. Perhaps the other thing to do is not comment using my account, which feels very wrong. All of the other options have drawbacks too. With Fastmail or another provider, you're trusting another corp. Setting up your own involves a bunch of work and difficult to solve drawbacks like spam filtering. I'm also not sure that it's harder to compromise in the grand scheme of things. There are horror stories of people losing domains too. I think this is a prime case of out of touch governments failing to keep up with regulations. My email is part of my identity at this point and more valuable than any of the plastic that has been assigned to me by the govt. I can't think of much in my life that would be more painful to lose than that email address. Yet, we are all so powerless...
- hedberg10 6y ago> With Fastmail or another provider, you're trusting another corp. You're trusting another corp that only handles your email. Not your photos, videos, notes, phones, thermostats, doorbells(?), security cameras, speakers, TVs, youtube income/career... China has a state issued social credit score. We have a social credit score via megacorps.
- plif 6y agoThe email address itself is what's irreplaceable for me because it's tied into my identity at this point. The other soft stuff is fairly trivially backed up and not locked in to any vendor. The devices would need to be replaced, which would be annoying mainly due to cost but would have no long term impact beyond that. I get your point, but losing my email address would be orders of magnitude more painful for me than those other things.
- berdario 6y agoBe mindful that there's lots of misinformation regarding the "social credit": https://www.wired.com/story/china-social-credit-score-system/ https://www.wired.com/story/china-social-credit-score-system... I'm not sure that drawing a parallel here is actually helping the discussion. Anyhow yeah: megacorps control is dangerous and frustrating. Unfortunately, splitting all services across several different providers is something that requires lots of conscious effort from all users. And even after you split out everything that you use, you might suddenly realize that there is now a new service provided by one of these megacorps, which you started to use without realizing that it's linked to your main account.
- johnchristopher 6y agoA lot of comments about setting up your own domain but the cost is prohibitive to a lot a people: - 1 to $5 a month, sometimes per address. It does pile up. - no office suite of the level of google docs/office365 - need some basic know-how to do it - price could go down but then you have to learn about dkim, spf, etc. not your regular customers/consumers thing. Not even your regular HN reader/participant thing. edit: - gmail to gmail works, no brainer and the UX is the same for everyone ; your own UX/provider will introduce hiccups
- mxuribe 6y agoYou are not wrong on some of your comments...which is why some time ago i set up a single-person account (with my own test domain) with zoho...to see if they're a viable replacement. I had used (and abandoned) a free zoho account like almost 10 year ago...but then read the following post, which re-interested me in zoho (though now via a paid account): https://kevq.uk/reasons-why-zoho-mail-is-better-than-gmail/ https://kevq.uk/reasons-why-zoho-mail-is-better-than-gmail/ So far, a few months into my experiment, zoho is really working great! For a single-person approach, zoho's cost is really difficult to compete with; you're looking at $1/month, plus the annual cost of a domain name...which of course is not free, and to your point could add up if need more accounts (for family members, etc.)...But considering other options, it could be something worth considering.
- Tepix 6y agoYou should find an affordable TLD option at https://tld-list.com/ https://tld-list.com/ Looks like .cyou is currently the cheapest TLD at $0.65 per year for renewals. There are a lot of other options for just a little bit more. If you can afford it, pay for 10 years in advance. One domain can be used by an unlimited amount of mailboxes. Regarding DKIM etc, most email providers will help you with that. GMail is only a "no brainer" if you don't care about privacy or until Google locks you out.
- johnchristopher 6y ago> One domain can be used by an unlimited amount of mailboxes. Not really, most mail only provider I looked at charge you one dollar or more per month per mailboxes (and/or even aliases which is unfortunate) > Regarding DKIM etc, most email providers will help you with that. I don't understand: why would they since they are in charge of their infrastructure ?
- kioleanu 6y agoI've said and I will say it again: email providers should be treated as public utility services, like telephone services and you should be able to port your e-mail address to another provider, if you'd like: https://viorel.me/2020/2020-09-25-you-should-be-able-to-legally-port-your-email-address/ https://viorel.me/2020/2020-09-25-you-should-be-able-to-lega... I've started this process a few months ago after 14 years of gmail and it's incredibly tedious and I'm not half done yet. I am trying to move my accounts on my new e-mail address. I'm lucky I have a password manager that lists most of my accounts
- stareatgoats 6y agoIt should be illegal. Companies that provide public utility type services should be obliged to follow certain laws, one of them being that they are not allowed to shut people out from their own data. They could provide the service as read-only on alleged breach of terms (allowing the user to migrate) for example. Shutting them out completely: just no.
- btown 6y agoWe got this protection with phone number porting eventually. So there’s hope, when government becomes sane again.
- g_p 6y agoAn interesting point here actually - number porting was viewed to be core to a telecoms service operator. They have to provide it free of charge as a cost of doing business. Perhaps we need similar for email forwarding - it's clear that the major email platforms (Google, Microsoft) can already handle mail that is simply deferred to another mail server (see partial cloud email transitions). Perhaps we need the same for email? So a user can have a Gmail address, but receive their email elsewhere. Would still require an authenticated backend to let the user control the end destination email server, but that's the same for number portability. Telecoms operators handle that part, and each provider is regulated. For email it could be a basic login ability for the old account to enable picking the destination mail server.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoIt's easy to forward from gmail to any address if you want that.
- howlgarnish 6y agoDoes that continue to work if you get locked out though?
- 6y ago
- cute_boi 6y agothis is reason why I want to own everything. Silicon valley wants everything to be subscription based which many people are fine . But the day they lose the account they realized the problem created due to subscription model. Own More Rent Less should be encouraged.
- hilbert42 6y agoAs soon as the internet came along out came that damn let's rent everything mentality. The internet allowed vendors to lock users in to renal agreements as they're a much more profitable business models. Never mind the fact that the rental model doesn't guarantee you better software - in value for money terms, you'd be better off having stuck with traditional upgrades. Remember, this model has been around for yonks. Go away on holidays and you've turned the power and gas off beforehand and you still have to pay a connection fee even though you've used nothing - and despite the fact that the wires and pipes to you house were fully amortized many decades ago. Same goes for phone and internet services. Right, it's a ripoff, that's why I use open software whenever and wherever possible.
- haunter 6y ago"They are a private company so they can do whatever they want!" - HN every single time someone banned for political reasons on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc. Most likely something like that happened here too. Considering Reddit now bans people for upvoting the "wrong political ideas" I can see Google banning people for a Youtube like or comment. But they are a private company and they can do whatever they want!
- novia 6y ago> Reddit now bans people for upvoting the "wrong political ideas" Have you got a source on that?
- haunter 6y agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/spring_forward_into_reddits_2019_transparency/ https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/f8y9nx/sprin... https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hddnml/the_warnings_have_changed_into_bannings/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/hddnml/the_... https://old.reddit.com/r/DeclineIntoCensorship/comments/ifoo4s/so_theyre_handling_out_bans_for_voting_for_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DeclineIntoCensorship/comments/ifoo... Talked here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23601595
- mrjin 6y agoI'm one of the early Gmail testers who registered for the beta program and got invitation from Gmail directly. Unluckily or maybe luckily from the first date after registration, I started to receive spams which I have no idea why. Contacted their support team quite a few times asking for sender blocking feature and the answer was always some arrogant bs like "Nah, we have the best spam filter and thus sender blocking is unnecessary... blah blah...". As a result, I felt it might be a mistake to use Gmail as my primary email account. So I narrowly avoided Gmail but again, I've no confidence that other providers will not do something similar to this. Maybe it's time to do self-hosting now.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoContrary to most comments here, I don't think self hosting is the solution, but only regular backup to your device can help with the problem. I can bet that all the hosting providers have more algorithm based lock of account than gmail has. I have myself been locked out of digitalocean once and the support won't tell me the reason. I know one other person at least who has been locked out of AWS. Almost everyone I know uses Google account and I don't know anyone who has been locked out. So I think unless you own all the data in a server you physically control(not feasible for most), you are more safe with Google than hosting it with another provider. Also Google's server is more secure than you can ever achieve.
- gmanis 6y agoWhy don’t Google and the others give an option to at least download user data once they identify the account to have violated some obscure TOS by some equally obscure algorithm? Like a one time download option for the user to take his data and manage it outside Google property (gmail in this case). I think this should be mandatory and perhaps it’s high time that it’s put in some regulation.
- TomSwirly 6y agoWhen I was working at Google, I got locked out of an account, luckily one I had used for a band that wasn't active anymore. I had barely used the account for months, and all of it was, "Thanks for your interest, here's our music, we don't play anymore." Even working there, I wasn't able to get it turned back on or get any explanation as to what had happened. I didn't really care. If it had been my prime email account, I would have cared. I see this as theft. It's not like Google ever throws anything away, so if they cancel your account, they are literally stealing your data from you. We can't force Google to give service to people they don't want to, but they should be transparent about it, and at the very, very least, there needs to be a way for you to retrieve all of your information if they close your account. In a government of laws that tried to protect the average person, this would have been a given. Unfortunately, America has never had that.
- googleuser996 6y agoDoes anyone know if getting the $10 a month subscription to Google One helps with getting locked out? Is there a way of recourse through the "Premium support" or do you get locked out of that too?
- edwinyzh 6y agoMy Gmail has important data, fear of losing the email data is why I have developed GmailKeeper (now become: https://OwnMyCopy.com https://OwnMyCopy.com). It was the 2nd Gmail backup software in the world when it's first released in 2006.
- ipi 6y agoWhat is the first step to de-googlify your life ?
- tiborsaas 6y agoBuy a domain name.
- davidsonmohanty 6y agoThis feels like a push by Google to make people start using Google One. Google One has a feature "access to experts/support". Google is trying to create a problem while selling a solution.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoOne of the issues with Google, is that it's a "one-stop shop." There's a lot more than just email. A Google account ties together Web services (like their various APIs and analytics), data storage, and also applications. Some are "business-ending" serious, while others may be relatively frivolous and replaceable (like Calendar). That said, some of the linkages can make "frivolous" services more important (like using Calendar to link business appointments, documents, and emails). So, when a Google account gets nuked for a problem in one of the services, they all go into the toilet.
- cl3misch 6y agoI always wonder if a paid Google One account is also under the risk of arbitrary deletion. Even though the prices are pretty cheap, I suspect the liability of Google is different once I pay for their service.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tomxor 6y ago> The music he purchased through Google Music has also disappeared. "The app took it upon itself to delete all the downloaded music I had on my phone." If they are selling access to stuff via the account, surely revoking access without reason will have legal consequences. Couldn't it be viewed as consumer discrimination?
- damontal 6y agoYou didn't buy the music. You bought a license to use it and they revoked the license. At least that's how I've been made to understand how "buying" digital content works.
- tomxor 6y agoTrue, but isn't that still consumer discrimination. (They can turn around and say you violated copyright or something more specific, but they are not).
- everdrive 6y agoAlways download MP3s (or whatever format you like) and never trust a cloud account.
- MilaM 6y agoI really want to hedge against the loss of my Gmail account and numerous Google Apss/Suite/Whatever setups. But what if my custom backup script to download all the data actually will be what triggers Google's algorithms for suspicious activity?
- garbagetime 6y agoUrbit solves this
- Borkdude 6y agoI moved to mailbox.org.
- lol636363 6y agoThis is the post I needed to start cutting out Google as much as possible. Not because I want to go 100% Google free but having too many Google services means that you are more likely to inadvertently violate one of their terms. 1. Remove Google Analytics and Adsense. Especially Adsense seems high risk. 2. Remove free apps from Play Store 3. Stop uploading public videos on YouTube 4. Stop sharing files through Google Drive 5. Use only my own domain for emails that are forwarded to Gmail. 6 Stop storing passwords in Chrome. Only reason I want to keep Google is for Gmail, calendar, Nest Thermostats, Nest Doorbell. Photos are already backed up in Apple Photos in addition to Google Photos.
- thomasahle 6y agoI had this happen to me once, though at a smaller scale. I solved it by signing up to one of the bigger paid Google services (just a free trial) and using the phone contact they gave me to have my account restored. I don't know if they would work if you're completely shut down like in this case, or if things have changed over the last years.
- kemonocode 6y agoA good start would be to require by law from Google and similar other companies to actually give a reason for an account suspension, having to potentially put a real human on the line ought to bring them pause and ensure there are less frivolous suspensions. That said, the real answer is, of course, to migrate to a domain name you do own and a provider that's not known for suspending accounts willy-nilly, I'd stop just short of being your own provider, given how difficult it may be to get things right.
- ohnoesjmr 6y agoWhat do you do when you already have history with Google? I use their OAuth whenever I can, all my accounts on the internet use the gmail address, most of my life is in gmail. Losing emails is not a bug deal, I can back them up, but losing Oauth accounts and ability to reset passwords for accounts I don't have a password saved in my manager is a bigger concern. Does anyone have any suggestions?
- liveoneggs 6y agouse multiple non-linked google accounts never use an android device
- RonanTheGrey 6y agoI'm really struggling with this one. I'm increasingly unhappy with Apple's bullying and the only other option I have is a company that may brick my device at any moment because "machine learning". There's seriously got to be a better way. I want to get a Pine Phone but they don't sell them with service where I live yet..
- 7786655 6y agoI've had good results with LineageOS-microg. Obviously I would prefer a 100% free OS, but you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Make sure you back up the stock rom first, you might need it later.
- sigmaprimus 6y agoAre these people's accounts being banned, due to Youtube posts? Spamming? Account sharing? Piracy? Something else? Does anyone have a verifiable example of being banned, unlike this anonymous one? I've seen many stories but wonder if these are more of thought experiments than examples of real world occurrences.
- julianmarq 6y agoWell, since whenever free speech is discussed, the discourse in HN tends to be towards arguing in favor of large corporations and telling the people defending the idea that "free speech is only from the government and the corporations are not forced to do business with you", I'll echo that sentiment and say that google is free to do this since they shouldn't be forced to do business with anyone. That said, I'll be careful to have backups of all my stuff outside google services.
- _wldu 6y agoFor people who have migrated from Google, but still have an Android phone. Any tips? I'd like to stay on Android (way less expensive than Apple).
- ystad 6y agoTake ownership of your data. Was always thinking of looking at perkeep https://perkeep.org/ https://perkeep.org/ maybe if is time
- jl6 6y agoI accept that big tech services will occasionally have to ban people for rules violations. But to be banned and not told why is absolutely inexcusable.
- Tepix 6y agoTheir excuse is not to give away their anti-fraud measures.
- subliminalpanda 6y agoI've had a similar thing occur to me with Doordash. Went to Vancouver for a holiday, tried to order, got locked out of my account. Multiple calls/chats to customer service said I violated their terms or service and would not tell me which term and the account remains unrecoverable. Fuck Doordash.
- etimberg 6y agoAn article a few years ago triggered me to do this. I switched to Migadu based on a recommendation I found here on HN. It works reasonably well and my only complaint is that the spam filter is overzealous at times. Another pain point has been services where I cannot switch my email and those are stuck on gmail for now.
- Anarch157a 6y agoEveryone saying "I would lose all my e-mail" apparently doesn't know about fetchmail, getmail or even Thunderbird. Just download your mail using IMAP or POP3 and archive it locally. I recently deleted my last Gmail account (that I had since 2001). Before doing it, I tried Google's Checkout to get the data, but it was adking me for "verification" (i.e. more info about me) to finish the download. I just fired up Thunderbird, configured a IMAP account and... done. Almost 20 years of e-mais are now backed up at home and on a Nextcloud instance I keep on a Linode VPS. Web is not the only way to read e-mails, friends. Use a proper client and back it up.
- snazz 6y agoYou can also schedule Google Takeout, which gives you a nice .zip or .tgz with mbox files, in addition to all of your other Google information. I have it set to deliver one of these backups every two months automatically.
- silicon2401 6y agodoes this include absolutely everything from your Google account, like all emails with attachments, google photos with album data, youtube videos from your channel, etc? If not, does someone know of a guide out there on how to export all of one's data from Google?
- snazz 6y agoYes. I can verify that it contains email attachments, Google Photos files (along with metadata in JSON format), and YouTube videos. There is quite a bit of other information included as well, some of which I didn't even know I had created.
- silicon2401 6y agoThat's actually amazing. thanks for your response! I've been slowly working on detaching from google this year due to stories like this, but the thought of manually downloading all my data was rather overwhelming. Glad to know they at least offer this feature
- osax 6y agoMaybe those are just PR banns? What if they push bad code to production and compromise the data of some users? I wouldn't be surprised if they do not have "classical" backups at that scale So they end up with the choice of "google lost data" or "customer did something wrong"
- ubermonkey 6y agoI've been yelling about this for years. In every single case, if you are not paying for a service, be aware you'll eventually get screwed. In every single case, if you put too many eggs in one basket -- one computer, one hard drive, one vendor -- you'll eventually get screwed. Google has made it very very very easy to get deeply enmeshed with their ecosystem of "free" offerings, and those offerings can become very very important to people. That's a TRAP.
- bleepblorp 6y agoAgain, there's no evidence that paying for service results in better customer service. There are many, many stories of Google arbitrarily killing paid and/or B2B accounts, including Gsuite, Adsense, Play Store consumer (paid apps), Play Store publisher accounts, and so on. If you use Google accounts at all, you're putting yourself at undue risk of getting screwed and paying for the privilege.
- winter_blue 6y agoThis is horrific beyond measure. There should be a lawsuit over this. There should also be legislation that mandates that companies like Google (or Apple) that hold critical amounts of user data, need to have a reasonable process for customers to restore their accounts, or take out their data. At the very least, Google should allow him to take his data out of their system.
- _imba_ 6y agoNot completely related to personal accounts being banned, but something that happened to me recently: I started a side business with some friends during lockdown. We created an online store selling some hard-to-get long tail items, and almost instantly got some traction and growth thanks to Google Shopping. A month ago we received one of these generic automated mails that our account is banned and we were misrepresenting ourselves or a product with no details on what we did wrong. We went through the T&C's in some detail and we think we did everything they asked, and we have no idea what we didn't do well enough. We also checked in with every single client and we had near perfect scores on trust pilot, I can't recall a single incident with a client. We've been contacting Google almost daily but almost never been able to find a human to talk to. Through unofficial channels we've found a few people in Goolge but whenever they gave us any advice on what to do it's always "off the record" or "you didn't hear it from me". Something is very rotten. There are always replies on here about not betting your entire business on Google. Google shopping gives 2 orders of mag better conversion than any other channel we tried. For search-to-buy there really just aren't any alternatives and if Google decides to lock you out your business is basically dead. Lucky for us it was a side hustle. Here in Africa e-bay and Amazon aren't options. More scary, since then we've found TONS of businesses in our country who have suffered the same fate in the last month, and many are well-established, popular businesses now facing existential threat. It's incredibly scary that Google's moderation bots can be a single point of failure for a business employing 20+ people.
- varispeed 6y agoI had a great blog that started getting me over $2000 per month from Google Ads (several million views), then suddenly after 3 months it dropped to $300 with the same amount of views and never gone up. No matter how much promo I did I would never get past $300. It seems like Google somehow put restriction on my account without any explanation. Eventually my blog died (also because Facebook capped organic reach of my posts after I stopped buying ads. I had tens of thousands of followers but content they shared would never reach their friends after I was no longer a paying customer. Pretty shady stuff). I decided to not contact neither Google nor Facebook about this, because I was worried they will ban me and I needed access to GMail and Facebook (to talk with family). I really hope these companies get properly investigated, because they have unregulated power of altering the markets to their favour. This power should only be reserved to governments and if Google or Facebook are so big, they need to be divided and their business space heavily regulated.
- joduplessis 6y agoOooof. I've read a few of these now.
- Mikho 6y agoHappened to me too after 10 years of Gmail use. Exactly the same story. No explanation. As I remember at that time I checked Google servers data as to uptime—the data was public, not sure about now—and it appeared that there was a serious problem with servers right before I was blocked. It looked like Google just completely lost data in some server cluster. Anyway, there was no way to get any response from Google or at least my gmail address reactivated even with data lost for me to be able to access other services that I used the email to access. I think it was Google's fault. The company lost data, but didn't want to admit it and blamed me for breaking some policy without any further details to explain absence of access to my data. Since then I use my own domain for email, could easily switch email provider while keeping the address in case there is a problem, and I'd still control access via the email to other services. Also I never rely on Google as to files, photos, or videos. I mean yeah I use Google, YouTube etc., but everything is first of all backed up on MS OneDrive. Even on my Android phone there is automatic upload of all new photos to OneDrive. Google Photos is more like for easy viewing, sharing and presentation. Not backup. Not to mention that MS Office + OneDrive storage subscription provides much more value that Google G Suite.
- juskrey 6y agoHow is OneDrive different in this sense?
- lordnacho 6y agoIt's similar, but chances are you won't lose both accounts at once.
- FirstLvR 6y agoOffice 365 is overall better plus, never seen anyone complaining about getting their officce account deleted into void
- kashura 6y agoThat's a pretty broad statement. I suppose that depends on your use case?
- Justsignedup 6y agoUnfortunately I've tried to find replacements for Google services. It's not easy or cheap. Sure I can pay and have my own replacements but most cannot afford this. Google is a landmine. You don't know what will get you locked out. The worst is when your card payment fails and they lock you. Now you can't pay and nobody can help you till you pay.
- everdrive 6y agoGmail isn't actually cheap either, the costs are just offset to different places.
- superkuh 6y agoHere is a mirror for anyone like me that's locked out of sites which require Javascript to display text: https://write.as/973dqv6dgoqyb.md https://write.as/973dqv6dgoqyb.md
- tehwebguy 6y agoLots and lots of shame needed to fix this situation. Bother your Google employee friends, send this to them, upvote it and keep discussing. YouTube doesn’t really listen to the content creators or fans but they will make policy changes within a week of a hyper critical article in traditional media. BI isn’t big enough probably, need this to get picked up by a bigger paper for a major Gmail policy fix.
- petr25102018 6y agoI recently tried to sign up for Google AdSense and received an automatic reply that I already have an account They even sent me an email address of that account. That email address and account is not mine, it belongs to my brother. We connect to the accounts from the same location, have the same surname but we are different people. Google sucks big time and I will definitely try to avoid building a business on Google products. Seriously, NO SUPPORT is a scary thing.
- bhartzer 6y agoYet another reason to buy your own domain name (and use it for email) rather than rely on a gmail account for email.
- est 6y agoSeparate your gmail, photos, youtube, play and adscense account. For me, I use a dedicated account for photo backups, and no interactions with any other google service. One gmail for interweb, one for IRL activities, one youtube acount for raging and one for my android with G Play. I don't have an adscense account yet but I've read many articles how linked adscense violations destroys your personal gmails.
- gabrielrdz 6y agoDo you really think that they have no way to tell that it's you between all those accounts? I mean, there's no really a concept of account linking between Google Accounts, but between your IP being on all the accounts, and browser or device fingerprinting, I'm not sure this is really a reliable fail safe. It should be, but I doubt it.
- est 6y agoYes there is no guarantee, but it's better than putting all your eggs in one basket.
- psykus 6y agoI'm starting to wonder if the random Google account lockouts are caused by account hacks, where the account proceeds to be used by spammers and other nefarious people. Has anyone here that has been randomly locked out of their Google account like this been using 2FA? It still sucks that Google has no real appeal process for this.
- chkaloon 6y agoAfter a bit of a scare a few weeks ago, I've started doing regular Google Takeout data downloads of email in addition to my normal backup procedures. I also verify that I can load the resulting mbox files into Thunderbird or another client. I don't use Google Photos, I have my own local storage, backed up in triplicate by three different processes. Finally, I'm a heavy user of Google Drive, but that is synced locally on several machines, and backed up in triplicate using the same processes as the photos. Never rely solely on a 3rd party for your critical data. Always have an exit plan. And test it regularly.
- FeistySkink 6y agoWhelp, I cannot access my Gmail today with: We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. I hope that's just a temporary coincidence.
- buildbuildbuild 6y agoThis happened to me. I tried for years to contact Google including via back channels. I received no responses. They contacted me recently only to notify me that my data was purged from their archives. I bought into the dream of the cloud early as a GMail beta user. I used Drive extensively and imported other email accounts into GMail. Now I don’t have decades of important messages and records. Don’t trust centralization. Hold backups on storage you fully control.
- LorenPechtel 6y agoI'd really like to see the law changed so that companies that keep your personal data have a legal requirement to make that data available for a period of time if they disconnect you. I'd also like to see long term users have to be presented with exact details of what wrongdoing got them banned and some reasonable way to contest it. This would only apply to the big boys, not to the average website out there.
- tarruda 6y agoI've saw quite a few similar stories over the past years and this left me very scared. I've been a heavy user of google services for more than 15 years. For some months now (maybe a year?) I've been trying to reduce dependency on google services and apps. It is a slow process, but I hope to get it done in the next year or so. Meanwhile I try to use google takeout as much as possible to keep up to date backups of my data. My next step will be moving away from Gmail. Will probably register a domain so that I can have an address that is not tied to a specific cloud provider domain. Does anyone have a suggestion of an email provider I can use with custom domain?
- joobus 6y agoFastmail.
- bdcravens 6y agoHey will be providing custom domain support soonish: https://hey.com/custom-domains/ https://hey.com/custom-domains/ Microsoft 365 Business Basic has support for custom domains starting at $5/month.
- benhurmarcel 6y agoFastmail is good, Mailbox.org is reputable and a bit cheaper.
- mbirth 6y ago> Does anyone have a suggestion of an email provider I can use with custom domain? I’ve set it up the other way around. All mail gets sent to a cheap VPS that has qmail rules to accept all aliases from a text file. This way, whenever I sign up for a new service, I just add the service’s name to the text file and suddenly have “servicename@mydomain” as an email address. Same for compromised mail - just remove the entry from the file and add another one, change email address with the compromised service (or cancel the account) and you won’t be bothered by spam anymore. All addresses not in that text file go to some local CatchAll folder I only check occasionally. All mail that’s passing this filter is getting a DKIM and/or DMARC signature and forwarded to my GMail account. But I can easily have it sent to a completely different account in a matter of minutes. And the email provider doesn’t have to support custom domains.
- frankzen 6y agoThe cloud is basically a loser so long as some one outside is controlling it. Not your cloud, not your data.
- gabrielrdz 6y agoAre there cases where users have taken Google to court to get their data back in this case? I've had my Gmail account since 2004 and I am also terrified about this. I ended up re-registering my custom domain and putting it on M365 but still... it feels like, as another commenter suggested, there should be laws to allow any customers that were banned or terminated from at least getting their data via Takeout
- luord 6y agoI see that it's time to start using my domain email more consistently, and change existing accounts into using it too. I don't have a lot, but still, better safe than sorry.
- tutajprywatnie 6y agoI’ve started to look for alternatives to gmail. It seems that most people recommend using ProtonMail. What about outlook. Is it a viable alternative to gmail?
- rdlecler1 6y agoWe had something similar happen with our corporate twitter account that we’ve had for eight years. Our news site, agfundernews.com is the sites of record for foodtech and agtech innovation/investment and Twitter inexplicably locked us out with no recourse.
- rsaxvc 6y agoThis makes me scared to report security bugs to Google.
- darrmit 6y agoI've bounced around Google, Microsoft, and Fastmail for the last 4-5 years trying to find a sort of "holy grail" solution but I've learned there really isn't one. Google comes closest (for me personally), but the privacy implications and vendor lock-in always end up scaring me away. Fastmail has really outstanding mail support, but their calendar service definitely leaves a lot to be desired (i.e. if you want to share a calendar with a spouse with any sort of authentication, spouse needs an account too), and their file support is minimal. I think the answer is diversification and make sure you're a paying customer for whatever service you use. Use your own domain, spread your data around, use standard formats (text, etc.), and keep backups. Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble.
- Micheal_McL 6y agoAre there any tools that could use to back everything up on another Google account? (May cost twice the price)
- carapace 6y agoA few comments in this thread rub me the wrong way. E.g.: > It should be illegal. > How is this not regulated? No one forces you to use these services. They're voluntary. Imagine you're looking for storage for some stuff. One company advertises a storage service, which is free, but there's a clause in the contract that says, "We can take your stuff at any time, for any reason, no backsies." Would you trust your stuff to that storage company? No, you wouldn't. That's insane. But somehow you rub a computer on it and everybody loses their common sense. - - - - Folks are naive (in re: computers) so you can either: 1) educate them, or 2) exploit them. FAANG et. al. choose to exploit their users, quite ruthlessly too IMO. A few companies actually try to educate their users (a very few. Adafruit, Wolfram, ... who else? I'm sure there are more but I'm drawing a blank right now. Basically any company that's built around teaching people what computers are and how to use computers, rather than farming "lusers".) - - - - To me the weird thing is how many people choose to be exploited peasants rather than educated Users. It's extra-weird to me when the peasants start jumping up and down shouting "Rabble rabble!" instead of just using some other non-exploitative system. (But then most folks' behaviour has never made sense to me, come to think of it. So what do I know? "Nationalize FAANG!" "Rabble rabble!")
- bojo 6y agoSorry, but this is a terrible analogy. Your storage service isn't used for your primary identity/access management to your house, bank account, or utilities, and this is where your argument breaks down. Much like internet should be a regulated utility (in the US at least) due to how integrated with modern day society it is, the right to an unalterable email address should also be considered, especially due to the fact that it is used for identity management across numerous services. The vast majority of users out in the world use these free services because they don't know anything else, and nor would I expect them to. As pioneers we the technical community herded them at these push button solutions decades ago, and now it's up to us to realize we've somehow failed them at this point by locking them into monopolistic companies that don't have their best interests at heart. 1. We educate them and start promoting services which won't pull the carpet out from under them on a whim 2. We start advocating for regulation on the existing services and force them to comply
- kyledrake 6y agoJust to add to the giant pile of anecdotal stories here, Google has been on Gmail labeling all links to the 350,000 Neocities sites as "potentially malware" for a while now, despite the fact that we don't allow uploads of executable files so that's basically impossible. We've only had one valid malware report in our 7 years of operation (zip embedded in a gif file, which I now know how to detect so it's fixed). There's nobody at Google to contact, so I have no idea how to fix it. I used to have a friend at google I could ask for special help from (this made me feel awful), but they no longer work there, so I guess I'm just screwed until they actually get some sort of official support channel, or somebody at the company that sees this message (hi!) fixes it somehow (thanks!).
- upofadown 6y agoMeh, what do you want for nothing?
- bdcravens 6y agoMy gut feeling is that I feel Microsoft is more trustworthy than Google at this point. Is it just me? Also isn't it funny how we are willing to pay $100+ a month for an iPhone or premium Android with service, yet many balk at the idea of $5/month for a more trustworthy email option? (not saying MSFT is it necessary; there's multiple paid alternatives to Gmail)
- gitweb 6y agoIts just you. Also there is no such thing as paying for a more trustworthy email option. If people send mass emails or spam that violates the ToS you'll get blocked no matter who your provider is.
- ciarannolan 6y agoThat's not the issue here though. The issue is that people who _don't_ do those things still get permabanned by Google with zero recourse. When you pay for something like Fastmail, you get a human within hours to help solve the problem.
- gitweb 6y agoAnd when you pay for Gmail you get phone support too.
- gitweb 6y agoWho is getting permabanned without doing those things? I think you'd be surprised how many people play dumb and act upset knowing exactly why they got their account suspended, but rather than tell you they play the victim card thinking it'll somehow help them.
- snielson 6y agoI think Microsoft is better too. I subscribe to M365 (family plan) so I've been switching everything over to them. Email was easy (used outlook desktop app), but photos is hard. That and I have no alternative to Google voice
- scioto 6y agoI'd like to know how often other email services like iCloud and Yahoo Mail close accounts, since I have accounts on those as well. In the meantime I'm slowly moving off of Gmail, even though I give them money each year for additional storage.
- astatine 6y agoI have the best of two worlds - I think. My own domain (since 2000), and hosted on GSuite (the last 8-10 years). So I get the benefit of a robust email service but without the risk that I will get locked out. I access it using a desktop IMAP client and keep a copy of everything locally. And the icing is that I was an early user of GSuite when they used to offer free accounts. They no longer do that, but haven't (yet) killed off the ones that were created earlier, like mine. The primary data that's on Google without a copy are the photos backed up from my Android phone. Need to figure out a better solution there.
- exabrial 6y agoGood lord, it's stories like this that make me absolutely afraid to take their cloud offerings seriously. Yes I know it's a separate business arm, but it's the same people calling the shots and trying to stick an algorithm in where Customer Service should be. AWS / DigitalOcean / Linode all the way.
- phendrenad2 6y agoAgreed. I really wanted to try Google Cloud, but having my servers disappear overnight is a different ballpark from having my email history deleted.
- sunstone 6y agoWait til you get banned from your Android phone. That will suck.
- ycombonator 6y agoMove to paid accounts like iCloud email or fastmail, protonmail for critical use cases. iCloud email is free for all ios users and fastmail and protonmail cost pennies per day. Primary email has become something akin to having a phone number these days. Lots of consumer services use email for authorization.
- zalkota 6y agoDo not create a business that relies on one point of failure. IE. selling goods only on Amazon.
- hedora 6y agoHas anyone set up a slick cron job to pull their data via imap to a local backup? This seems really easy to do, but also sort of niche (who remembers to backup their email?)
- durandal1 6y agoI may not be the greatest advice for the general public, but for readers of this website, if you’re not owning the domain for your email and hosting it with a customer-oriented service provider (fastmail, protonmail etc), you’re not only exposing yourself to the whims of Google et al, you’re also contributing to email monoculture, which is bad all around.
- einpoklum 6y agoWhen you can't just "go across the street" from Google that means this is now essentially public infrastructure under private control. Analogy: Railway ticket vending machine won't charge your card with a ride, gives a generic message saying you're banned due to violations of the ridership agreement. So, you can maybe take a bus that arrives once a day and takes thrice as much time due to detours, and that's if you're lucky. But if the railway operator is just a private business, then you're basically out of luck. accept sell you a ticket, say you banned for some obscure reason,
- Sodman 6y agoI wonder what happens if this occurs when you're a regular paying customer for one of the few Google products that has actual customer support? The example that comes to mind is Project Fi, their google-as-a-phone-carrier product. If my Google account was ever banned, what happens when I call up Project Fi, to whom I regularly pay $80 / month? Would they tell me to create a new Google account? Would my phone service automatically stop working?
- dehrmann 6y agoThis is why I avoid single sign on like the plague. It's one thing to lose access to everything, it's another to lose it to everything else.
- gtirloni 6y agoGmail should have a paid personal plan with support. Simple as that.
- app4soft 6y ago> Google users locked out after 15 years' use Title should be: “Users banned on Google after 15 years' use”
- smdz 6y agoA string of such stories have me concerned. What happens after you are locked out? Can one have access to the data? I have a lot of important personal and business related stuff in GMail and GDrive - do they revoke read access too? EDIT: I know about email clients setup to backup data, but there are other reasons I do not like to use those - unless of course that is the only way to protect data
- vffhfhf 6y agoTech has "winner takes all" thing going. Either regulate them as public service if you think "winner takes all" is valid. OR Make concrete rule to make sure winner doesnot take >50% of market. This is the only solution I can think of.
- nicetryguy 6y agoStarting and using a Gmail seemed like a great move in 2008: I'm scared to death now.
- tim333 6y agoNot fitting very well with their old don't be evil motto. They could always have a paid service (maybe $20?) to have someone look up the problem and tell you what it was perhaps?
- perchard 6y agoA Synology NAS + https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/active_backup_g_suite https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/active_backup_g_s... is an easy way to back up mail and drive.
- mlindner 6y agoThis is one reason Apple is better, they can't delete all your content because it's actually stored on the device instead of some amorphous cloud.
- kodah 6y agoCompanies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit are becoming the gatekeepers of the internet but I think that's a byproduct of the endless list of people who keep trying to fit moralistic arguments ("the way things should be" that is specific to their community) onto a platform where "one size also fits all". This platform is in constant competition with it's own capitalistic and identity-less values. I say they're identity-less because let's face it, it's almost guaranteed that Google/Facebook/Twitter/Reddit don't have enough people that are like you and your community on every team that touches stuff that you and your community interact with to give a proper shit about your values or how you will perceive something. I might even take this a step further and say they've developed their own culture for the internet and you either adhere or die. You can swap in and extrapolate any group that has some measure of depth to it in that statement and it'll still be true. That's why, in my mind, there's this desperate race for diversity and to reflect all things at all times. Don't get me wrong, I love to have a diverse workforce, and in my experience the teams that weren't all predominately one characteristic have always been more productive and fun. I'm just extrapolating why these things suddenly matter, almost ten fold, to companies that run platforms. I've seen people here suggest that developing more tools will help suppression, faulty-auto-moderation, deplatforming, etc... but let's be real. It won't. Maybe you'll more accurately identify people who are violating your terms of service and can vomit up some reason as to why with explainable AI. I don't really view that as a win though and here's why: Americans ran from King Henry because he was willing to chop peoples heads off and imprison them without having to answer to the public that he ruled over. We created The Boston Tea Party because of a relatively small tax. Some people laugh at that event, but it goes to show you that when you have the haunting memory of a tyrant in your past, the latest cut feels like open heart surgery without anesthesia. In the end Americans decided that if even one person were sent to the guillotine without a fair trial it was one too many. Our laws have reflected that since, but we have also stripped many of those ideals away in favor of racist ones or convenient ones (at times). Now Mega Corporations are your new King Henry, and all the smaller corporations who buy services from them are their Dukes. They'll either do as the King says or as the saying goes, "Off with their heads!".
- gerash 6y agoThere has to be regulation with regards to account closure in this day and age. I'm sure large companies don't want to screw their users over and have to shut down accounts to follow some other regulation but at their scale Google does not care enough about any individual account. That's why there has to be some set of laws ensuring people can always take their data out with them. IANAL but exporting and importing all your data to/from Google must be just a button click away even after account closure unless there's a court order.
- deepender99 6y agohttps://console.developers.google.com/tos?id=androidpublisher https://console.developers.google.com/tos?id=androidpublishe... Google Updated it's Terms of Service. On 3 Nov 2020 Please read terms of Api.
- temp667 6y agoAntitrust lawsuit seems like a joke. We're going after google for search? Which has literally the lowest switching costs out there and is offered for free - and this is what the govt is calling consumer harm? Meanwhile, I can think of a BUNCH of things that result in actual consumer harm by google - this included. And no, I don't give to craps about other businesses making money or not - so that whole part of the anti-trust thing seems dumb to me - yes, spammers and auto-review websites are downranked I'm sure, and I don't care. How is stuff like this at least a bit higher on the things to think about from a govt regulation standpoint.
- the-angry-dome 6y agoI had my entire Google ads account shut off with zero explanation after getting what had been a healthy influx of traffic to a new project. Months of contact, even hired a lawyer at one point, and still could not get Google to say anything, and hell I used to work for Google as a SWE! It's gotten ridiculous enough to the point that we should all be filing class action against them, and Washington should break them apart in such a way as to separate search and ads. It's stifling competition.
- someonehere 6y agoAre we sure this isn’t just a username someone wanted and knew someone with power at Google to hand it over? 15 years ago the author may have had a hard to get Google name. I have one that’s constantly being spammed by people who want it. Wasn’t there a story posted here a couple of months ago where FB or IG employees were stealing usernames for friends and FB/IG refused to respond to use demands ? I almost feel like the author had this happen.
- audience_mem 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
- alphaddx 6y agoOnce upon a time a Googler would respond, now nothing. Says everything.
- febed 6y agoI'm scarily dependent on my Gmail account. That's why I backup my emails locally and to the Backblaze every day.