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I'm honestly not sure where we went so wrong as a society so as to reach this point. Whether it's overzealous AI or the AMPification of the web. Google act with

I'm honestly not sure where we went so wrong as a society so as to reach this point. Whether it's overzealous AI or the AMPification of the web. Google act with impunity and without remorse, every action designed to further their goals and agendas without respect to humans caught in the crossfire. If Google can, without due process and fair warning, remove your existence then this is a power that should be delegated to the relevant authority, namely the "justice" system to make such considerations. If your house could be removed at a whim because a bot decided you were a bad person it would likely cause an uproar, it wouldn't be tolerated. Yet here it is. Google can offer their services and the legal system seemingly doesn't want to be involved. Why?

ThreeFx 6y ago
Because there is no clear jurisdiction for the web. That's it.
- riedel 6y ago
  It is already bad, that we need jurisdiction for such things in the web. I think we actually need such things to happen more often, so ppl can finally vote with their fest a long time ago for some freedom against a tiny bit of convenience. I think what we lack is a decent amount of social pressure.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    What we need is the largest tech companies broken into smaller pieces. The de facto monopoly of most of these players exists in their cross-border market share, making enforcement under traditional antitrust law in any one country difficult. Unfortunately, it's also something of an international zero sum game due to efficiences of scale -- if the US breaks up Amazon, Alibaba gains world market share, and we're back in the same place. The most effective remedy I can think of offhand is government involvement in a special, independent branch of the company, dedicated to increasing interoperability and exposing services, empowered by legislation. If we're going to have monopolies, at least they can be open ones. E.g. 18F + Google Takeout, backed up by regulation
Ace777 6y ago
It's not removing your existence. It's removing your access to all of their services. At every point, google users are asked to acknowledge the EULA and TOS. They're being told that google can stop their service for any reason, including that service not being comercially viable. ( I.E. Any Reason ) Access to google services isn't a right. It never was, unlike the property rights you're drawing a false equivalency with.
- aboringusername 6y ago
  Do you not see this as a problem? With the amount of services Google offer, losing them can be devastating; photos, emails, Android backups, contacts and so so much more. This pandemic has been reliant on emails to access services; it's how I get my payslips, talk to my employer, get current information, engage with legal services, and essentially maintain my access to society. Losing my emails would be devastating (hence why I don't use a "major" provider, at least less risk that way). We need to define what "rights" are and weigh that interest in society. If Google wants to be a "one stop shop" it cannot, and must not, be immune to laws and the rights of individuals to challenge decisions. Isn't that the foundation of a society?
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    No, it's not a problem. It's your problem if you become entrenched in their (or Apple's / FB / whatever) services. I have a google account to test my devices / emulators. Never logged in gmail with that account, never will. If they cut it off, I can make another. Same with Apple. I have an Apple free ID for running virtual machines with MacOS / iOS and that's all. I tell my customers to create their own Apple ID and I deliver them the sources + dev environment and they make their own binaries and publish on Apple store. My job is done once I make the app run on emulators and I tell them from the start of the project this. I have a FB account to talk on FB mess with parents from school and that's all. I don't even have them as friends there, I am just in 3 lists and that's all. Also i use protonmail currently as I've started migrating from yahoo 2 years ago (old e-mails still there, I open that e-mail like once per month). Do the same, you'll be free. Also you can use an e-mail account outside of google domain to actually create a google account, if you really need one.
GavinMcG 6y ago
Legal services can get involved just fine if you file suit. You'll just have to establish that Google owed a duty to you (by contract or otherwise) and that you were harmed by their breach of that duty. (Roughly. I am not a lawyer.)
- rattray 6y ago
  Has this ever been done successfully in this situation?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- nstj 6y ago
  The point of the comments here is that $BIGCO is outside of the law from a risk measured standpoint (ie: they’ll bankrupt you if you fight them given their bigger bankroll).
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    I think that's likely mythical thinking, and not something based in data. It's fairly common for plaintiff-side lawyers to work on contingency when they believe you have a case. Less likely here, given the somewhat unexplored territory, but still, the history of class-action litigation evolution is largely of lawyers/firms taking a chance such as this.
- RonanTheGrey 6y ago
  "It's technically possible for you 30 Spartans to defeat 100,000 Persians so go ahead, good luck" doesn't sound like a winning strategy. I think the overall point here is to have the support of law that says they DO have a duty to you, by benefit of their hosting your account and authenticating you elsewhere. Then, WHEN someone goes to sue them, the person has much stronger legs in court rather than lone Peggy Sue trying to defeat Google's 300-strong team of lawyers who exist just to eat little guys for breakfast.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
One aspect might be that the part of the legal system that would deal with this is assuming that the parts that deal with fighting with monopolies, lobbying and regulatory capture are working just fine ?
anvandare 6y ago
The speed of technological development is faster than the speed of societal or legal development. So yes, right now we've woken up in a world that is not so much cyberpunk as it is techno-feudalism: more and more do you need a presence on the Internet to do things in meatspace... And that presence is by the grace of several feudal lords (Google foremost) - woe betide you should you ever displease them. You do not really own your email adres, your phone (number) or (pretty soon) even your computer. You're merely a serf. On the plus side, the momentum for legal measurements seems to be increasing. Let's hope they do get broken up. Power, like plutonium, is dangerous if too concentrated. Regardless of where that concentration lies.
- giobox 6y ago
  I like the term "techno-feudalism" - captures the increasing nationalism over things like technology sales to China by the US etc too, the Tik Tok situation...
- bookofjoe 6y ago
  See also: Kindle books; movies "purchased" from Amazon, Apple, et al; Tesla upgrades you paid extra for; I could go on....
  - twirlock 6y ago
    No actually none of that is remotely comparable to the influence Google wields over our lives.
  - NetOpWibby 6y ago
    This is precisely why I buy vinyl or music from Bandcamp, and choose the disc version of the PS5. I view my digital purchases as things I am forever renting.
    - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
      ... You can't store MP3 files why? You're renting your hard drives, too?
black_puppydog 6y ago
It's not quite your scenario yet but we're pretty darn close: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/duplex-demolition-google-maps/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/duplex-demolition-google-maps...
- mmcconnell1618 6y ago
  That incident looks like incorrect data in Google Maps but also incorrect behavior by the company tearing down the house. It also was complicated by the fact that this was post-tornado and normal signage was likely not present or reliable.
Spooky23 6y ago
US national politics. One party is in bed with the copyright owners, the other doesn’t believe that the government should govern. Google fills the gap.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > One party is in bed with the copyright owners, the other doesn’t believe that the government should govern This political model is dated. Republicans are no longer conservative. And Democrats have an ascendant progressive wing that rejects corporate influence wholesale.
  - cmmeur01 6y ago
    An ascendant wing the party is doing everything in its power to stomp out.
  - wolco2 6y ago
    They will milk you for your vote but when power is won you will be excluded. Look at what happened last week on the leaked conference call. Progressives were blamed for losing so many house/senate races.
    - hyperdimension 6y ago
      Can you provide a link/name for this leaked conference call? I'm interested in listening to it.
      - edoceo 6y ago
        Not op but hre's an article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-06/house-democrats-trade-blame-over-unexpected-losses-in-election https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-06/house-dem...
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    > Democrats have an ascendant progressive wing that rejects corporate influence wholesale Who mostly organise and communicate on giant social media platforms, who they campaign to fact-check things. Not exactly wholesale rejection.
ekianjo 6y ago
> Yet here it is. Google can offer their services and the legal system seemingly doesn't want to be involved. Why ? The real question is why do people use Google to sign in to other services? It never even crossed my mind no matter how long I have had a Google account.
- Kudos 6y ago
  For similar reasons that you and I use password managers, but add lower friction to the mix.
  - hunter2_ 6y ago
    One could even eliminate those same tasks (not wanting to remember a new password, and not wanting to use a password manager) by setting an unmemorable password and doing a password reset using a Gmail address every time they want to log in. "Log in using Google" basically does that same sort of thing but without the tedium of all the clicking/typing. The mechanism is much different but in terms of dependencies it's really the same.
    - dsego 6y ago
      Slack has this I think. You just sign in with a special link sent via email.
    - Kudos 6y ago
      That doesn't sound like lower friction to normal people.
- IanCal 6y ago
  I don't want more accounts and passwords. The security seems strictly worse than just authenticating against my email provider directly.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 6y ago
eznzt 6y ago
So what do you propose, make it impossible for Google to ban accounts?
- SteveNuts 6y ago
  Not OP but I think companies should have to inform you of the specific reason you were banned, and have a formal appeals process. The stakes are quite high for losing access to your primary email.
mtam 6y ago
Google is a profit seeking business entity just like many others and hence will do whatever they can to advance the interest of the company and its shareholders. It would be nice if companies had moral responsibility and societal accountability however that’s seldom the case in USA. The role of taking care of the people belongs to the government. Companies have choices but no obligation to do what’s best for you. If you are using a free e-mail service ran buy one the worlds largest and most powerful marketing companies as the identity / auth provider for your critical services and applications you should seriously reconsider your choice. To paraphrase your comment: I'm honestly not sure where we went so wrong as a society so as to reach a point that we get mad when a service we do not pay for, ran by a selfish company decides to shutdown our access.
- username90 6y ago
  When companies acts too amoral we create laws to stop them. Edit: The point is that it is usually in companies own interest that we don't create laws restricting them, so they typically don't act too amoral. You wont find many companies which goes after every single legal loophole they can abuse, as negative public sentiment builds up laws will form and the company will be much worse off than if they just did the slightly less amoral thing.
sigmaprimus 6y ago
If anyone honestly believes that Google can "remove their existence"...with or without due process, I think maybe they need to take a step back from the net. I read all the time the arguments over bitcoins value being real or not, but maybe the better discussion should be on wether or not social media and having a digital presence has any actual "real" value.
mrmonkeyman 6y ago
Your google account is not your house by any stretch of the imagination. Blown out of proportion.
crazygringo 6y ago
> I'm honestly not sure where we went so wrong as a society so as to reach this point... Why? The answer is actually very simple: spam. AFAIK pretty much all disabled Google accounts come from Google believing they are part of a spam-sending (or malware-spreading) network. The ability to sign up for free Google accounts means this is a prime target for spammers to use and abuse -- signing up for free Gmail/Drive accounts, as well as using stolen credit cars to sign up for paid ones. As to why the legal system doesn't want to be involved, it's because incorrectly disabled Google accounts are actually incredibly rare -- they make the news and cause uproar when they occur, but precisely because it's so unusual -- it's incredibly rare to personally know someone it happened to. So there isn't any kind of democratic movement against it because in the grand scheme of things it isn't common. It's like worrying about being struck by lightning. That's why.
- FpUser 6y ago
  >"It's like worrying about being struck by lightning." If lightning strikes there is not much to be done. Google however can and must have reasonable process to restore the status.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Yeah, the fact that it’s like being hit by lightning is exactly the issue.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Hm. Lawyers love lawsuits about folks struck by lightning? So I'm not sure that's the reason this issue is not a lawyer's forte. I'd suggest its because its hard to prove or prosecute. Because its technical and obscure. A single case, Google just has to say "Oh sorry; its turned back on". There's no money in them capitulating. And a class-action suit enters into the details of the issue, which are impenetrable to a judge?
- syshum 6y ago
  I think it more common than you believe, and certainly more common than the ones that make the news. The ones that make the news are people that are either well known, or have and active way to promote their problems through social media or news site I.e they are reporters, know a reporter, dev of a popular app, etc etc etc They are Jane/John Doe that has less than 50 twitter followers and a normal every day uninteresting person, for which there is no recourse at all not even social media
blfr 6y ago
Because a house is significantly more important than an email address. I get being extremely online but let's not be silly here. Plus that email/account is hardly even "yours" in a serious way. Anyone on the HN has a very simple fix for all these problems: get an email in your domain and a password manager for all the accounts. There, solved. You could even still use Gmail with their Google Apps, G Suite, Workplace or whatever it's called this month. Normies are way out of luck but sadly that is true almost everywhere and they are getting fleeced much worse by banks, employers, and even cable companies than Google ever could hope.
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  Put simply, one's house is literally on their own property, and one's Gmail account is literally on Google's property. If someone owned a vast amount of land, more than needed for everyone on earth to build a house, and the owner told people they could freely build structures but you lose it if you break the rules and the rules can change any time...
  - cle 6y ago
    Land is a weak analogy here, because land is scarce.
    - rm445 6y ago
      I've had a recruitment consultant suggest I use a gmail e-mail address on my CV, because it looks weird to have an address at a domain (my own, and not anything strange btw) that people haven't heard of. Sounds crazy. But try dictating an e-mail address over the phone to a hotel or whatever and see that if you say 'Fred Bloggs seventy six at gmail dot com' or whatever, you never have to repeat yourself, whereas anything less usual you'll be spelling it out all day. On the technical side, one hears about individuals' domains being marked (blamelessly) as possible-spammers by the big e-mail services, and finding it hard to get messages through. There is effectively some scarcity in legible, desirable gmail addresses.
      - 6y ago
syshum 6y ago
>>I'm honestly not sure where we went so wrong as a society so as to reach this point. As with all things, Education is where we went wrong as a society. in this case failing to teach people fully that there is no Free Lunch, and if you are getting something no cost to you, then you are no longer the customer, who ever is paying for the good or service is the customer (people should also pay attention to this truism in other area's of life) In the case of google, you are the product, you are being sold to advertisers, google gives you a very very very small piece of that revenue in the form of a "free service"
knuthsat 6y ago
I don’t see what’s lost if Google disabled my account. Yeah, photos, emails and similar but that is not really life changing. I’m not saying it’s an unworthy cause to advocate a change but I’m just not seeing the moral weight compared to factory farming, and other hard industries that have an effect on societies and the planet.
- gyom 6y ago
  You're setting a very high bar there, and then claiming that losing access to your gmail account isn't worse than that therefore it's not life changing. Email ends up being the form of online identity for a lot of people, myself included, so that almost every service that I sign for has my email address as ID. If that email address isn't the ID, it's the preferred way of resetting passwords. I wouldn't be super happy about Facebook being my online ID, nor my cell phone number (see SIM swapping problems). It's life changing in the same way that losing all your personal documents in a fire sets you up accounting nightmares. Moreover, you're making very light a situation about losing all your pictures. I'm not talking about food pictures, but there's plenty of "me" that's contained in being able to look at pictures of important events of my life (which is why I don't rely only on cloud backups for that). I don't know what's "life changing" to you, then.
  - knuthsat 6y ago
    I do have a lot of stuff that I’d be sad about if lost on Google. And yes, I would be inconvenienced to contact all the services for an email change. But when talking about how our society got to where it is now, I just can’t see the moral weight of these kinds of monopolies in the context of just losing access.
- kortex 6y ago
  I lose track of things easily. Gmail is my brain dump. Not only does it track all sorts of important email exchanges, but it also acts as a dump of scans of important documents. I have several gmail addresses so it's not completely single point of failure, but if my hub email was disabled, I am in a world of hurt until I sort things out. Should I diversify? Probably, but that's more things to secure and keep track of.
ravenstine 6y ago
Because we were making money. When I got started programming full time, tons of people in the software industry were getting their rocks off on how simple it is to install an Oauth library, making it easy as pie for people to sign in to a web service, thus encouraging more sign ups and making more money. Maybe we've forgotten just how much of a hard-on we and the entire world once had for the likes of Google. 8 years ago, we would have trusted Google with our entire future. Politicians were on board, too, and have made many deals with Silicon Valley which ended up giving these firms a certain level of immunity. We're all guilty.
- wolco2 6y ago
  Your generation might be guilty. But those that came before and after knew better. This is the generation who thought using their real names online was a good idea. That's where things went wrong. Never in my life did I see an Oauth libruary and think this is easy as pie. Overcomplicated perhaps.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - harrisonjackson 6y ago
    There is no generation that has a great track record with security.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dustingetz 6y ago
Why – "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value" https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-hate-your-family/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...
arendtio 6y ago
> If Google can, without due process and fair warning, remove your existence then... ... you have clearly not understood that you should not have trusted them in the first place. Yes, I have a Google account myself, but I try to use it as little as possible. My main reason for using it is the Play Store and I agree that it is unjust, that Google can remove my access to products I have paid for without really justifying for it in the sense of most people. So I agree that something should be done. I think the line should be where paid services are offered. So if you just use a free service, Google(or any Company) should be able to stop providing you with that service whenever they like (while still providing you with access to the data you have generated or used with the service). However, as soon as they have charged you, they should be forced to pay you back the whole amount (or offer some other kind of mediation that is more meaningful than receiving answers like 'Computer says no').
talkingtab 6y ago
The soul of the current internet is intrusive, tracking advertising. In Real Life we have fundamental structures such as identity that have not translated to the internet. In the world of advertising everything can be fake and there is no trust. We need a new soul. :-)
reaperducer 6y ago
If your house could be removed at a whim because a bot decided you were a bad person It can. it would likely cause an uproar, It doesn’t. it wouldn't be tolerated. It is. Big fat article in the New York Times some months ago about AI deciding that landlords shouldn’t rent to certain people, and the AI often being wrong. Very wrong. Like tagging someone as a convicted drug dealer, when the reality is that person has never been in trouble with the law, and never been to the state where the alleged offense supposedly happened. We have to stop calling this “artificial intelligence,” because it simply is not intelligent. Humans put faith in machines because were told they are intelligent. But all the evidence shows that at best “AI” is good at guessing. If we started calling these “artificial guessing” systems, people would treat them appropriately. But that doesn’t buy investors a boat.

ThreeFx 6y ago

Because there is no clear jurisdiction for the web. That's it.

riedel 6y ago
It is already bad, that we need jurisdiction for such things in the web. I think we actually need such things to happen more often, so ppl can finally vote with their fest a long time ago for some freedom against a tiny bit of convenience. I think what we lack is a decent amount of social pressure.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  What we need is the largest tech companies broken into smaller pieces. The de facto monopoly of most of these players exists in their cross-border market share, making enforcement under traditional antitrust law in any one country difficult. Unfortunately, it's also something of an international zero sum game due to efficiences of scale -- if the US breaks up Amazon, Alibaba gains world market share, and we're back in the same place. The most effective remedy I can think of offhand is government involvement in a special, independent branch of the company, dedicated to increasing interoperability and exposing services, empowered by legislation. If we're going to have monopolies, at least they can be open ones. E.g. 18F + Google Takeout, backed up by regulation

Ace777 6y ago

It's not removing your existence. It's removing your access to all of their services. At every point, google users are asked to acknowledge the EULA and TOS. They're being told that google can stop their service for any reason, including that service not being comercially viable. ( I.E. Any Reason ) Access to google services isn't a right. It never was, unlike the property rights you're drawing a false equivalency with.

aboringusername 6y ago
Do you not see this as a problem? With the amount of services Google offer, losing them can be devastating; photos, emails, Android backups, contacts and so so much more. This pandemic has been reliant on emails to access services; it's how I get my payslips, talk to my employer, get current information, engage with legal services, and essentially maintain my access to society. Losing my emails would be devastating (hence why I don't use a "major" provider, at least less risk that way). We need to define what "rights" are and weigh that interest in society. If Google wants to be a "one stop shop" it cannot, and must not, be immune to laws and the rights of individuals to challenge decisions. Isn't that the foundation of a society?
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  No, it's not a problem. It's your problem if you become entrenched in their (or Apple's / FB / whatever) services. I have a google account to test my devices / emulators. Never logged in gmail with that account, never will. If they cut it off, I can make another. Same with Apple. I have an Apple free ID for running virtual machines with MacOS / iOS and that's all. I tell my customers to create their own Apple ID and I deliver them the sources + dev environment and they make their own binaries and publish on Apple store. My job is done once I make the app run on emulators and I tell them from the start of the project this. I have a FB account to talk on FB mess with parents from school and that's all. I don't even have them as friends there, I am just in 3 lists and that's all. Also i use protonmail currently as I've started migrating from yahoo 2 years ago (old e-mails still there, I open that e-mail like once per month). Do the same, you'll be free. Also you can use an e-mail account outside of google domain to actually create a google account, if you really need one.

GavinMcG 6y ago

Legal services can get involved just fine if you file suit. You'll just have to establish that Google owed a duty to you (by contract or otherwise) and that you were harmed by their breach of that duty. (Roughly. I am not a lawyer.)

rattray 6y ago
Has this ever been done successfully in this situation?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nstj 6y ago
The point of the comments here is that $BIGCO is outside of the law from a risk measured standpoint (ie: they’ll bankrupt you if you fight them given their bigger bankroll).
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  I think that's likely mythical thinking, and not something based in data. It's fairly common for plaintiff-side lawyers to work on contingency when they believe you have a case. Less likely here, given the somewhat unexplored territory, but still, the history of class-action litigation evolution is largely of lawyers/firms taking a chance such as this.
RonanTheGrey 6y ago
"It's technically possible for you 30 Spartans to defeat 100,000 Persians so go ahead, good luck" doesn't sound like a winning strategy. I think the overall point here is to have the support of law that says they DO have a duty to you, by benefit of their hosting your account and authenticating you elsewhere. Then, WHEN someone goes to sue them, the person has much stronger legs in court rather than lone Peggy Sue trying to defeat Google's 300-strong team of lawyers who exist just to eat little guys for breakfast.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

One aspect might be that the part of the legal system that would deal with this is assuming that the parts that deal with fighting with monopolies, lobbying and regulatory capture are working just fine ?

anvandare 6y ago

The speed of technological development is faster than the speed of societal or legal development. So yes, right now we've woken up in a world that is not so much cyberpunk as it is techno-feudalism: more and more do you need a presence on the Internet to do things in meatspace... And that presence is by the grace of several feudal lords (Google foremost) - woe betide you should you ever displease them. You do not really own your email adres, your phone (number) or (pretty soon) even your computer. You're merely a serf. On the plus side, the momentum for legal measurements seems to be increasing. Let's hope they do get broken up. Power, like plutonium, is dangerous if too concentrated. Regardless of where that concentration lies.

giobox 6y ago
I like the term "techno-feudalism" - captures the increasing nationalism over things like technology sales to China by the US etc too, the Tik Tok situation...
bookofjoe 6y ago
See also: Kindle books; movies "purchased" from Amazon, Apple, et al; Tesla upgrades you paid extra for; I could go on....
- twirlock 6y ago
  No actually none of that is remotely comparable to the influence Google wields over our lives.
- NetOpWibby 6y ago
  This is precisely why I buy vinyl or music from Bandcamp, and choose the disc version of the PS5. I view my digital purchases as things I am forever renting.
  - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
    ... You can't store MP3 files why? You're renting your hard drives, too?

black_puppydog 6y ago

It's not quite your scenario yet but we're pretty darn close: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/duplex-demolition-google-maps/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/duplex-demolition-google-maps...

mmcconnell1618 6y ago
That incident looks like incorrect data in Google Maps but also incorrect behavior by the company tearing down the house. It also was complicated by the fact that this was post-tornado and normal signage was likely not present or reliable.

Spooky23 6y ago

US national politics. One party is in bed with the copyright owners, the other doesn’t believe that the government should govern. Google fills the gap.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> One party is in bed with the copyright owners, the other doesn’t believe that the government should govern This political model is dated. Republicans are no longer conservative. And Democrats have an ascendant progressive wing that rejects corporate influence wholesale.
- cmmeur01 6y ago
  An ascendant wing the party is doing everything in its power to stomp out.
- wolco2 6y ago
  They will milk you for your vote but when power is won you will be excluded. Look at what happened last week on the leaked conference call. Progressives were blamed for losing so many house/senate races.
  - hyperdimension 6y ago
    Can you provide a link/name for this leaked conference call? I'm interested in listening to it.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      Not op but hre's an article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-06/house-democrats-trade-blame-over-unexpected-losses-in-election https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-06/house-dem...
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  > Democrats have an ascendant progressive wing that rejects corporate influence wholesale Who mostly organise and communicate on giant social media platforms, who they campaign to fact-check things. Not exactly wholesale rejection.

ekianjo 6y ago

> Yet here it is. Google can offer their services and the legal system seemingly doesn't want to be involved. Why ? The real question is why do people use Google to sign in to other services? It never even crossed my mind no matter how long I have had a Google account.

Kudos 6y ago
For similar reasons that you and I use password managers, but add lower friction to the mix.
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  One could even eliminate those same tasks (not wanting to remember a new password, and not wanting to use a password manager) by setting an unmemorable password and doing a password reset using a Gmail address every time they want to log in. "Log in using Google" basically does that same sort of thing but without the tedium of all the clicking/typing. The mechanism is much different but in terms of dependencies it's really the same.
  - dsego 6y ago
    Slack has this I think. You just sign in with a special link sent via email.
  - Kudos 6y ago
    That doesn't sound like lower friction to normal people.
IanCal 6y ago
I don't want more accounts and passwords. The security seems strictly worse than just authenticating against my email provider directly.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 6y ago

eznzt 6y ago

So what do you propose, make it impossible for Google to ban accounts?

SteveNuts 6y ago
Not OP but I think companies should have to inform you of the specific reason you were banned, and have a formal appeals process. The stakes are quite high for losing access to your primary email.

mtam 6y ago

Google is a profit seeking business entity just like many others and hence will do whatever they can to advance the interest of the company and its shareholders. It would be nice if companies had moral responsibility and societal accountability however that’s seldom the case in USA. The role of taking care of the people belongs to the government. Companies have choices but no obligation to do what’s best for you. If you are using a free e-mail service ran buy one the worlds largest and most powerful marketing companies as the identity / auth provider for your critical services and applications you should seriously reconsider your choice. To paraphrase your comment: I'm honestly not sure where we went so wrong as a society so as to reach a point that we get mad when a service we do not pay for, ran by a selfish company decides to shutdown our access.

username90 6y ago
When companies acts too amoral we create laws to stop them. Edit: The point is that it is usually in companies own interest that we don't create laws restricting them, so they typically don't act too amoral. You wont find many companies which goes after every single legal loophole they can abuse, as negative public sentiment builds up laws will form and the company will be much worse off than if they just did the slightly less amoral thing.

sigmaprimus 6y ago

If anyone honestly believes that Google can "remove their existence"...with or without due process, I think maybe they need to take a step back from the net. I read all the time the arguments over bitcoins value being real or not, but maybe the better discussion should be on wether or not social media and having a digital presence has any actual "real" value.

mrmonkeyman 6y ago

Your google account is not your house by any stretch of the imagination. Blown out of proportion.

crazygringo 6y ago

> I'm honestly not sure where we went so wrong as a society so as to reach this point... Why? The answer is actually very simple: spam. AFAIK pretty much all disabled Google accounts come from Google believing they are part of a spam-sending (or malware-spreading) network. The ability to sign up for free Google accounts means this is a prime target for spammers to use and abuse -- signing up for free Gmail/Drive accounts, as well as using stolen credit cars to sign up for paid ones. As to why the legal system doesn't want to be involved, it's because incorrectly disabled Google accounts are actually incredibly rare -- they make the news and cause uproar when they occur, but precisely because it's so unusual -- it's incredibly rare to personally know someone it happened to. So there isn't any kind of democratic movement against it because in the grand scheme of things it isn't common. It's like worrying about being struck by lightning. That's why.

FpUser 6y ago
>"It's like worrying about being struck by lightning." If lightning strikes there is not much to be done. Google however can and must have reasonable process to restore the status.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Yeah, the fact that it’s like being hit by lightning is exactly the issue.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Hm. Lawyers love lawsuits about folks struck by lightning? So I'm not sure that's the reason this issue is not a lawyer's forte. I'd suggest its because its hard to prove or prosecute. Because its technical and obscure. A single case, Google just has to say "Oh sorry; its turned back on". There's no money in them capitulating. And a class-action suit enters into the details of the issue, which are impenetrable to a judge?
syshum 6y ago
I think it more common than you believe, and certainly more common than the ones that make the news. The ones that make the news are people that are either well known, or have and active way to promote their problems through social media or news site I.e they are reporters, know a reporter, dev of a popular app, etc etc etc They are Jane/John Doe that has less than 50 twitter followers and a normal every day uninteresting person, for which there is no recourse at all not even social media

blfr 6y ago

Because a house is significantly more important than an email address. I get being extremely online but let's not be silly here. Plus that email/account is hardly even "yours" in a serious way. Anyone on the HN has a very simple fix for all these problems: get an email in your domain and a password manager for all the accounts. There, solved. You could even still use Gmail with their Google Apps, G Suite, Workplace or whatever it's called this month. Normies are way out of luck but sadly that is true almost everywhere and they are getting fleeced much worse by banks, employers, and even cable companies than Google ever could hope.

hunter2_ 6y ago
Put simply, one's house is literally on their own property, and one's Gmail account is literally on Google's property. If someone owned a vast amount of land, more than needed for everyone on earth to build a house, and the owner told people they could freely build structures but you lose it if you break the rules and the rules can change any time...
- cle 6y ago
  Land is a weak analogy here, because land is scarce.
  - rm445 6y ago
    I've had a recruitment consultant suggest I use a gmail e-mail address on my CV, because it looks weird to have an address at a domain (my own, and not anything strange btw) that people haven't heard of. Sounds crazy. But try dictating an e-mail address over the phone to a hotel or whatever and see that if you say 'Fred Bloggs seventy six at gmail dot com' or whatever, you never have to repeat yourself, whereas anything less usual you'll be spelling it out all day. On the technical side, one hears about individuals' domains being marked (blamelessly) as possible-spammers by the big e-mail services, and finding it hard to get messages through. There is effectively some scarcity in legible, desirable gmail addresses.
    - 6y ago

syshum 6y ago

>>I'm honestly not sure where we went so wrong as a society so as to reach this point. As with all things, Education is where we went wrong as a society. in this case failing to teach people fully that there is no Free Lunch, and if you are getting something no cost to you, then you are no longer the customer, who ever is paying for the good or service is the customer (people should also pay attention to this truism in other area's of life) In the case of google, you are the product, you are being sold to advertisers, google gives you a very very very small piece of that revenue in the form of a "free service"

knuthsat 6y ago

I don’t see what’s lost if Google disabled my account. Yeah, photos, emails and similar but that is not really life changing. I’m not saying it’s an unworthy cause to advocate a change but I’m just not seeing the moral weight compared to factory farming, and other hard industries that have an effect on societies and the planet.

gyom 6y ago
You're setting a very high bar there, and then claiming that losing access to your gmail account isn't worse than that therefore it's not life changing. Email ends up being the form of online identity for a lot of people, myself included, so that almost every service that I sign for has my email address as ID. If that email address isn't the ID, it's the preferred way of resetting passwords. I wouldn't be super happy about Facebook being my online ID, nor my cell phone number (see SIM swapping problems). It's life changing in the same way that losing all your personal documents in a fire sets you up accounting nightmares. Moreover, you're making very light a situation about losing all your pictures. I'm not talking about food pictures, but there's plenty of "me" that's contained in being able to look at pictures of important events of my life (which is why I don't rely only on cloud backups for that). I don't know what's "life changing" to you, then.
- knuthsat 6y ago
  I do have a lot of stuff that I’d be sad about if lost on Google. And yes, I would be inconvenienced to contact all the services for an email change. But when talking about how our society got to where it is now, I just can’t see the moral weight of these kinds of monopolies in the context of just losing access.
kortex 6y ago
I lose track of things easily. Gmail is my brain dump. Not only does it track all sorts of important email exchanges, but it also acts as a dump of scans of important documents. I have several gmail addresses so it's not completely single point of failure, but if my hub email was disabled, I am in a world of hurt until I sort things out. Should I diversify? Probably, but that's more things to secure and keep track of.

ravenstine 6y ago

Because we were making money. When I got started programming full time, tons of people in the software industry were getting their rocks off on how simple it is to install an Oauth library, making it easy as pie for people to sign in to a web service, thus encouraging more sign ups and making more money. Maybe we've forgotten just how much of a hard-on we and the entire world once had for the likes of Google. 8 years ago, we would have trusted Google with our entire future. Politicians were on board, too, and have made many deals with Silicon Valley which ended up giving these firms a certain level of immunity. We're all guilty.

wolco2 6y ago
Your generation might be guilty. But those that came before and after knew better. This is the generation who thought using their real names online was a good idea. That's where things went wrong. Never in my life did I see an Oauth libruary and think this is easy as pie. Overcomplicated perhaps.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- harrisonjackson 6y ago
  There is no generation that has a great track record with security.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dustingetz 6y ago

Why – "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value" https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-hate-your-family/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...

arendtio 6y ago

> If Google can, without due process and fair warning, remove your existence then... ... you have clearly not understood that you should not have trusted them in the first place. Yes, I have a Google account myself, but I try to use it as little as possible. My main reason for using it is the Play Store and I agree that it is unjust, that Google can remove my access to products I have paid for without really justifying for it in the sense of most people. So I agree that something should be done. I think the line should be where paid services are offered. So if you just use a free service, Google(or any Company) should be able to stop providing you with that service whenever they like (while still providing you with access to the data you have generated or used with the service). However, as soon as they have charged you, they should be forced to pay you back the whole amount (or offer some other kind of mediation that is more meaningful than receiving answers like 'Computer says no').

talkingtab 6y ago

The soul of the current internet is intrusive, tracking advertising. In Real Life we have fundamental structures such as identity that have not translated to the internet. In the world of advertising everything can be fake and there is no trust. We need a new soul. :-)

reaperducer 6y ago

If your house could be removed at a whim because a bot decided you were a bad person It can. it would likely cause an uproar, It doesn’t. it wouldn't be tolerated. It is. Big fat article in the New York Times some months ago about AI deciding that landlords shouldn’t rent to certain people, and the AI often being wrong. Very wrong. Like tagging someone as a convicted drug dealer, when the reality is that person has never been in trouble with the law, and never been to the state where the alleged offense supposedly happened. We have to stop calling this “artificial intelligence,” because it simply is not intelligent. Humans put faith in machines because were told they are intelligent. But all the evidence shows that at best “AI” is good at guessing. If we started calling these “artificial guessing” systems, people would treat them appropriately. But that doesn’t buy investors a boat.