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Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

• rochak 6y ago
  Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent? I read that Google automates the flagging and disabling of accounts but given how many people have their livelihood linked to these accounts, Google must have done something. It makes me scared how deep I have dived into the Google ecosystem. Time and time again I think about transitioning to someplace else but don’t know how to. It seems too daunting.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • marcus_holmes 6y ago
    At least stop signing up for new things so you don't make the problem worse. It is a risk. I had a problem with my Google account, and while I was able to find a human to email about it, they were completely unable to help. It was literally "you have to do the thing, even though it makes no sense, because that's what our algorithm requires" (in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to prove that I owned it, so they could cancel the account associated with that domain. Literally makes no sense, but it was the only way their process could work). That was my "ruh-oh" moment when I realised their products are basically unsupported and therefore shouldn't be used in production.
    • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      > in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to prove that I owned it What happens if the domain-name is repurchased by someone else or claimed by Sedo, etc?
      • xeromal 6y ago
        He's fucked and has to hope the nice new domain owner will help him out.
        • rochak 6y ago
          That doesn't seem likely.
          • marcus_holmes 6y ago
            Yeah, exactly. I pointed out to them that I might be an attacker and my purchase of the domain didn't prove that I was who I said I was. They accepted that I was the person paying the bills, but said they couldn't do anything unless I was also the owner of the domain. I figure that they either never thought through this process, or it was deliberately designed to make the cancelling process as awkward as possible. They're smart people, I think the latter. So if they're going out of their way to be inconvenient to me, I'm going to go out of my way to never use their stuff.
    • BlueTemplar 6y ago
      A few comments before, I've seen someone recommending to sign up for an (advanced!) (Microsoft's) LinkedIn account to solve an issue like this one. Then I guess to solve a problem with LinkedIn you'll have to sign up for a Twitter account, and so on and so forth..?
  • miyuru 6y ago
    Disabling google accounts is whats stopping me from using GCP fully. what if the credit card got declined on GCP and the google bots decide to ban me from the whole eco system.
    • matkoniecz 6y ago
      When I was buying domain I immediately blacklisted Google Domains. I was scared about tripping something and getting Gmail account banned. (yes, loss from not handling a single .com domain is minuscule for Google - but I wonder how common is to run away from any Google service due to risk to entire account)
    • rochak 6y ago
      I usually keep a separate email for these critical things. That is why I have 4 GMail accounts.
  • thow-01187 6y ago
    No, this is a problem inherent to the business model Google/Facebook run. Stating a truism - to make a billion dollars, you either have to get $10 from 100M sales, $10k from 100k sales or $10M from 100 sales. Although each option leads to the same revenue, there are major implications as for the amount of support and attention you can spend on each customer. Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
    • sdenton4 6y ago
      Well, TBH, it's really "$10 from 100M sales + $0 from O(7 billion) sales."
    • nmfisher 6y ago
      These are literally some of the most profitable companies in the world. Are you honestly saying they would cease to be profitable if they hired a few hundred people to staff a customer service team?
      • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        I think they would require a customer service team at least an order of magnitude larger than that to properly deal with things.
        • pishpash 6y ago
          Baby steps. It's not the magnitude but the attitude.
    • DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      > Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong. That isn't necessary though - other companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP also have tens of millions - to billions - of customers all with their own support requirements: the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human. Microsoft charges $500 for a single business-class support ticket with ~8 hour return time[1] - and you get the money back if the ticket was not a PEBCAK issue. If you're a company that depends on Azure or Visual Studio or Windows Server then keeping $500 around just makes sense. I just don't understand why Google and other companies that deal with long-tail customers don't provide this as an option. [1] In practice, if you have an Enterprise support contract, the effective cost is much lower AND you get a much quicker response time - but there's more paperwork involved.
  • moritonal 6y ago
    You don't have to move everything, just bits (like how you diversify stocks or singe points of failure). Try move away from Chrome, or swap Drive for Dropbox. Moving an email is admitably much harder, but after five years I've managed to do all the major ones.
  • zxcvbn4038 6y ago
    Google only takes calls for ad sales and gsuite support as far as I know. Beyond that shaming them on social media is the only way to get their attention. I used to work for a top five web site and even we couldn’t get ahold of anyone - one day Google decided to start crawling us at a rate of 120k rps and it was killing the site by pulling ancient content that was 100% cache miss. No way for us to get in touch with Google officially, our billionaire CEO hadn’t traded numbers with their billionaire CEO so no help there, one of the developers had a college buddy that landed at Google and that guy was able to use some sort of internal mailing list to get them to drop the crawl rate down to 20k rps. (Microsoft is just as bad - their sales people can’t be bothered to talk to anyone who isn’t a partner, but that worked out great for me, I wasn’t really feeling azure and it made a great excuse to not consider them. One of their sales people did leave me a VM three or four months later but we had already chosen another vendor by then).
    • saddlerustle 6y ago
      Google One comes with phone support
    • vidarh 6y ago
      Spend ~$5 of Google Adwords, and chances are you'll have someone calling you regularly trying to talk you into using it more - at least that's my experience. In the past it's been a pain to get them to stop bothering me. If I have an issue with Google, I might try starting an adwords campaign and ask to speak to supervisors when their sales calls comes through, and see if there's an in along the way of "we would spend more, but you see you've done X that needs to be resolved first". My other approach - not tried it on Google, but it worked very well on DHL and Uber so far - is to sign up for LinkedIn's premium subscription and use that to Inmail a bunch of VPs/SVPs and set out my grievance. My experience so far is that you need to find someone high enough up to be under the illusion - from lack of customer contact - that everything is well. They often seem to be shocked to hear that customers hit the wall, and get approached rarely enough that it's a novelty for them to help out (as such, it'll probably stop working if everyone starts doing this...) With DHL in particular I got an SVP to get his assistant to light a fire under the customer service operation by telling them said SVP wanted to be kept up to date on how it went, and Cc'ing said SVP and me on the e-mails. A package they "could do nothing about" because it was supposedly on a boat back to the US, magically appeared in my office one business day later after it was located in a depot 5 minutes from my office (I wish I could say that was the first time DHL has told me a package was somewhere completely different to where it actually was)
  • deanclatworthy 6y ago
    Nope. My Adsense account was banned almost 9 years ago. I followed their appeals process, gave all the information required, and received automated responses every time. I repeatedly appealed over the last 9 years, receiving the automated rejections every time, until finally a few weeks ago for some reason they approved the appeal and my account was reinstated :shrugs:
    • Judgmentality 6y ago
      So a happy ending!
    • perryizgr8 6y ago
      The system works! Just takes about a decade.
      • arkitaip 6y ago
        That's how long it takes to train the machine learning model.
  • mschuster91 6y ago
    > Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent? File for a C&D and then, if that does not help, a court-issued injunction order ("Abmahnung" followed by "Antrag auf Erlass einer einstweiligen Verfügung"), if you're German. This works somewhat reasonable for Twitter, Facebook and Google.
    • kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      You would need legal standing. A free account isn't your property.
      • lima 6y ago
        In Europe, GDPR has provisions about algorithmic decision-making, including a "Right to explanation": https://turkishlawblog.com/read/article/221/algorithms-meet-transparency-why-there-is-a-gdpr-right-to-explanationg https://turkishlawblog.com/read/article/221/algorithms-meet-... I look forward to this getting used against Google and everyone else banning customers without explanation and/or recourse.
      • mschuster91 6y ago
        Even for a free account, there is a contract in place between you and Twitter, which Twitter can't unilaterally terminate without reason, especially if the "code of conduct" collides with the right of free speech (https://www.ratgeberrecht.eu/internetrecht-aktuell/meinungsfreiheit-auf-twitter-account-sperrung-unzulaessig.html https://www.ratgeberrecht.eu/internetrecht-aktuell/meinungsf...)
      • grumple 6y ago
        Property might be the wrong word here. I suspect that you do have a contract of sorts with any company with whom you have a free account. The consideration is sharing your data in exchange for the account.
    • rochak 6y ago
      I’m an Indian staying in US, but probably not for long. Given how many of us are there, I don’t think Google India would have the capacity or care to hear our pleas. The only way to force them to build something useful is through government interference but I hardly feel that Indian government would do so.
  • izacus 6y ago
    A few months ago I've seen a Googler pissed on Twitter about how their spouses GMail account got suspended and he got completely stonewalled internally as well. It seems that even Googlers themselves cannot get any human contact for account support. (Sadly I can't find that Twitter thread anymore.) EDIT: Found it - https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981 https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981
    • mmc4444 6y ago
      How do you manage to get totally locked out of your account though: if I have backup codes, a backup email address, the backup code for my 2FA app... surely I am protected from this, right? Assuming my account doesn't get hacked and turned into a spambot. I am sitting here thinking of what would happen if my Gmail account got blocked. The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
      • izacus 6y ago
        It's not you, it's Google that locks you out of the account for vague "term of service violation" and nothing you do will help.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • detaro 6y ago
        Why would backup codes etc help you against an account suspension because some random algorithm decided your usage pattern is suspect?
      • toyg 6y ago
        What is being discussed here is not "I lost the password", is "Google disabled my account because they have reasons". In the latter case, you could have the right password and the account would still not work. > surely I am protected from this, right? Nope. Google can disable you account at any time, without telling you why, and without giving you any appeal process whatsoever. No free-gmail user is in any way protected against this. People paying for Google Suite accounts are ever-so-slightly more likely to receive some support if anything happens, but that's it. > The disruption it would cause to me is enormous. This is why I'm slowly moving away from it (and everything Google, really). The service is extremely reliable, it raised the bar for email services and web UI, what they've done to spam is fantastic, but the possibility of losing such a key account and not have any recourse is now too terrifying to contemplate.
  • chapium 6y ago
    After filling out a fairly lengthy questionnaire, google mentions they will have someone review the issue and get back with you. I am on year 2 of waiting for a return call.
• aritmo 6y ago
  We only hear the celebs that got their accounts suspended. Imagine how many others are stuck and have nowhere to talk to.
  • ycombigator 6y ago
    purge intensifies
  • nobodyshere 6y ago
    I'd easily pay for a personal gmail account which has all the privacy protections on and also 24/7 access to customer support via chat and phone. Sadly most of that is only provided for business accounts.
    • p410n3 6y ago
      Google one gives you support it says. I had an issue with gpay once and the support chat was available and seemingly working. But when your account is suspended that doesn't really help you eh
      • rexf 6y ago
        Yeah I wonder if there would be a tier of Google One that comes with "we won't ban your account". Assuming users/customers are operating in good faith, they cannot get banned even if an automated check flags them. For example, someone got banned from Ads for paying with Apple Credit Card https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841586 I'm obviously not a fan of paying for protection, but peace of mind for your online identity is worth $X/month. Not to mention search, email, maps, etc. has way more than $0/mo. utility.
        • tempest_ 6y ago
          Yeah nothing says we value our customers(product) like a good ol protection racket
    • curiousgal 6y ago
• arnaudsm 6y ago
  As usual, some Googler browsing HN will reactivate his account, everyone will forget and Google won't change a thing to his unbanning process.
  • Svip 6y ago
    Makes you wonder whether that is their unbanning process.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • pedrogpimenta 6y ago
    Hopefully, more devs will do what this dev is (said to be) doing. > Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward. Of course, it's very difficult for small devs to do this. It takes an already solid business to be able to stand up like this. As always, I think this is the only way for Google to change, but I don't think it can happen.
    • 3327 6y ago
      Good on him. Takes courage and an established product to do this. Good example of standing up.
      • WA 6y ago
        > Good example of standing up. But he won't pull Terraria from the Play Store I guess. Because he has no choice unless he wants to wreck his business.
        • TonyTrapp 6y ago
          That's actually an interesting point. If it is tied to the same Google account, will he still get money from apps sold through the play store? Can he pull an app from the play store if he cannot even log in?
• p410n3 6y ago
  This happens again and again. I have had that happen to my twitter account. I see this regulary on HN. My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people. Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high. So I get why they would try to automate bans. But after years and years of regular high profile news of false positives, one would think they eventually would change something. I mean the guy had direct business with Google going on.... Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
  • apexalpha 6y ago
    My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people Most likely yes. And the annoying thing is that they don't take into account different languages. The AI can recognize words, but not meaning. A while ago some Dutch person tweeted: "Die Bernie Sanders toch." Die = that, in Dutch. But the AI obviously recognized the word (to) 'die' in English along with Bernie Sanders and just instantly drops the ban hammer. And it takes days,if not weeks to get an actual human to look at your case.
    • p410n3 6y ago
      These are exactly the cases that worry me. ML / AI is not ready to be used like that. IDK if it ever will be, but they are already using it in production anyways.
      • jjbinx007 6y ago
        It reminds me of when powerful institutions treat lie detectors or facial recognition systems as infallible.
      • TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Worse than that, these systems are perfect for decision laundering. You can make the system do arbitrary judgements, and blame negative consequences on "bias in the training data" or such.
• muratsu 6y ago
  We keep hearing horror stories like this on HN and yet Google Cloud revenue jumps to $13.06 billion in 2020, up 47% year-over-year from $8.92 billion in 2019. Either HN bias towards google is making sure these posts hit front page frequently (frequent enough for me to notice at least) or certain tiers of customers are treated differently.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    Google Cloud at least has a contact page with a contact form. https://cloud.google.com/contact https://cloud.google.com/contact It may not be the right human, but it will be a human you get in touch with.
    • muratsu 6y ago
      On revenue reports, the term Google Cloud includes Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite). Sorry for the confusion.
      • MattGaiser 6y ago
        Try the form anyway :)
    • Clewza313 6y ago
      You probably want support, not a salesperson: https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://cloud.google.com/support/ Basic billing support (including account suspensions etc) is available to all GCP users for free via ticket, chat or phone.
  • matkoniecz 6y ago
    Note that many people have Google accounts. 30 000 random bans per year without justification are entirely consistent with Google Cloud revenue in billions. In similar way as people keep doing things despite (sometimes tiny!) potential for death, mutilation or bankruptcy.
• euph0ria 6y ago
  The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.
  • amirhirsch 6y ago
    Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.
    • chii 6y ago
      i suspect that google's cloud infrastructure's first customer is google themselves, and they don't care that nobody else is buying it.
    • danpalmer 6y ago
      I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account. There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn't there for the former, but there's plenty of it for the latter.
      • georgebarnett 6y ago
        I can sign up to AWS and get world class service on day one with just a credit card. That’s the bar.
        • p_l 6y ago
          And that absolutely works on GCP too. In similar way, even. You just add "support contract" on that credit card (without it, AWS is just as likely to ignore you too)
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  What would happen if you mailed Google a physical letter about this/faxed them something? YouTube has a mailing address and a fax number. https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us That seems to be what they want...
  • 88840-8855 6y ago
    When my outlook.com account was banned by Microsoft, i wrote a letter to ms in Germany. got a reply 4 weeks later without any solution. account was never unblocked. since then i am not trusting Microsoft and not purchasing any of their products.
    • MattGaiser 6y ago
      What did they say in the letter?
      • andrewshadura 6y ago
        Du bist verboten.
      • 88840-8855 6y ago
        The letter said that my account was banned because of violation of their terms. no further details. no options for the solution of the problem. until today i don't know what the issue was. i only can assume that some nude pictures of my ex gf were uploaded to skydrive a few days/weeks before the account was banned.
• newbie578 6y ago
  I just don’t understand Google leadership, how can you allow stuff like this to happen and just ignore it? Your brand keeps getting more and more tainted, people make jokes out of your strategy and tendency to give up like a little child... I didn’t think I would ever say it, but I miss Eric Schmidt... Sundar has been an absolute disaster. Has Google even accomplished anything during his reign? And if they did, did they accomplish because of him OR despite him being there?
  • SXX 6y ago
    What Eric Schmidt would do to help with Google Account bans? Bans without any appeal process were a problem since foundation of Google and it's exactly how Schmidt built that company. The only people who ever got their accounts recovered at all were celebrities or people who go HN / reddit frontpage.
    • berdario 6y ago
      > were a problem since foundation of Google You might be right, but Google changed as a company. They started selling phones (ok, even if your account gets locked... you can still use your phone and/or create a new account to install free apps from what was the android market) They started to sell storage (ok, even if your account gets locked, as long as you can retrieve your contents with Takeout, you just lost access to Google Drive, and not something of lasting value) And they've been selling music (not anymore), movies, books, games (both on Play store and Stadia)... and more hardware that ties into their services (e.g. Nest Hub is useful precisely because you can have it automatically show your pictures from Google Photos, and you can have calls with other people on Duo) The more new commercial products they offer, the more they should be careful about account bans. At the very least you want to segment access to them (as an extreme* example: even if you uploaded child pornography on Google Drive, after you'll have paid your debt to society, you ought still be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 that you purchased on Stadia) (* extreme both because of the heinousness of the crime, and also how trivial/unimportant a videogame is on the grand scheme of things... but I think there's an easier case to be made for someone to retain access to the game that they purchased, vs retaining access to their Google contacts, which might not even be backed by any payment for the service)
• stepri 6y ago
  This is the reason why I have offsite backups of my Google account as everyone has a chance of getting banned. It really feels like Russian roulette.
  • sschueller 6y ago
    What method do you use? I want something automated, I don't have time to trigger google take out every so often and then manual click 100s of links and download them.
    • bronikowski 6y ago
      For whatever it is worth, you can setup Takeout to make a copy every X months for a year or something like that. Far cry from automated solution, but better than nothing. I need to find Photos alternative because that's the last Google service that gets any real use.
    • stepri 6y ago
      Within Google Takeout, you can setup monthly backup to another service (I chose OneDrive with 1TB storage)
• kristiandupont 6y ago
  Every time these stories come out I get terrified. And, angry, because just like all the carelessly built services that get breached because of poor-to-nonexistent security, this taints all SaaS companies a bit.
• sparkling 6y ago
  Having core parts of your personal computing or business computing rely on Google or AWS infrastructure is a systematic risk. Unless you are are racking up a $50k bill every month, you are simply too small that anyone there would care.
  • scrollaway 6y ago
    Utterly untrue. AWS is not a 'systematic risk', that's absolutely ridiculous and I can't even begin to address that statement.
    • sparkling 6y ago
      The recent Parler incident is proof otherwise. If you happen to cause any inconvenience for them, you are at risk of being cut off.
      • Jonnax 6y ago
        AWS has a terms of service. They'd warned Parler for months about their lack of moderation [0] "Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all."" " Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama." Their CEO was recently fired for apparently wanting to have stricter content moderation [1] Parler isn't entitled to be their customer after violating AWS's term of service. AWS had a dialogue with them over multiple months. It's not equivalent to someone losing their Google account for no reason and having no recourse. People trying to make Parler some martyr is so silly. They could have hosted their platform co-located in a data centre in Alabama. Or hosted it in a friendlier to their content country like Russia. [0]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-warned-parler-for-months-about-more-than-100-violent-threats/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa... [1] https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/131526/parler-ceo-fired-over-content-moderation-push https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/131526/parler-ceo-fired-ov...
• dsissitka 6y ago
  Some context: > However, they were hit with a Terms of Service violation via email. They assumed it was issued accidentally, but three days later, their entire Google account was disabled without any warning or recourse. https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/terraria-studio-re-logic-suspended-from-youtube https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/terraria-studio-re-logic-...
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    > They assumed it was issued accidentally That seems like a dangerous assumption to make.
    • JimDabell 6y ago
      Three days from initial warning to disabling their account is ridiculous though. What if the person behind that mailbox was off sick or on holiday?
      • Rexxar 6y ago
        And why disabling all other related account ?
        • pishpash 6y ago
          That's the abuse of monopoly part.
          • ashtonkem 6y ago
            Chances are they simply can’t get their internal teams/systems in line to enable partial bans, and nobody with the political clout to get it done cares.
    • chmod775 6y ago
      Given it's the Terraria YouTube account it has to be either stupidity or accidental, both on Google's part. My imagination fails trying to picture a scenario where you could justify suspending that account.
• iamdual 6y ago
  This is why I avoid using important services (i.e. e-mail accounts, your backups, any digital products) in the one place. Just a little violate and then lose access to all of them. It can happen anytime, shouldn't be left to chance.
• spicyramen 6y ago
  Hey Google here is a feature: account reputation, anyone doing business with you, has that flag enabled and human reviewers will be supporting them
  • DesiLurker 6y ago
    and pretty soon google is charging 'protection money' to all the victims of a hack.
  • deadmutex 6y ago
    > anyone doing business with you If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or something like that? Disclaimer: Work at Google (far from this space); opinions are my own.
    • PixyMisa 6y ago
      It's SUPPOSED TO BE pay-to-play. Google is a business. That's how businesses work. That's the entire point.
      • lima 6y ago
        Exactly. I pay for internet, water and power - I happily pay for my Google account if that means I'm treated as a customer. In fact, you can pay for your Google account with Google One, and I do, but it may or may not stop The Machine from accidentally banning my account.
        • sundvor 6y ago
          Good point! I also subscribe to Google One; does that in any kind of fashion lower the chances of being hit by an auto ban?
          • lima 6y ago
            I would hope so, it would certainly be a "probably legit" signal. I'm annoyed I have to consider the possibility at all.
• jug 6y ago
  This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replace, but just a bother to inform some people and update account details.
  • 2malaq 6y ago
    Yes, the good old Don't Be Evil days. I've asked so many people if they can remember Google's old slogan. Nobody does.
    • romwell 6y ago
      Their new slogan is hilarious. It's not even one slogan, it's three: * Respect the user * Respect the opportunity * Respect each other The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features. The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn't it the baseline expectation? It's somewhere on the level of "Don't steal your colleague's belongings" as far as slogans go. But it's the second one that is absolutely the best, and by that, I mean the worst. Orwell would've had a lot to say about it. The thing is, it has absolutely no meaning in the English language. What's next? Say hi to agility? Don't offend capital gains? Console excellence? Of course, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing has a mafia vibe, as Google's slogans and culture are drifting towards loyalty rather than standing up for what's right. -------- If you want to have more fun, look at Google's Community Guidelines[1] Compare to The Mafia Code: * Be loyal to members of the organization. Do not interfere with each other's interest. Do not be an informer. --[Google: Treat our data with care. Don't disseminate NTK information.] * Be rational. Be a member of the team. Don't engage in battle if you can't win. --[Google: follow Three Values, in particular: Respect the opportunity.] * Be a man of honor. Respect womanhood and your elders. Don't rock the boat. --[Google: Do your part to keep Google a safe, productive, and inclusive environment for everyone.] * Be a stand-up guy. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut. --[Google: Discussions that make other Googlers feel like they don't belong have no place here.] * Have class. Be independent. Know your way around the world. --[Google: You are responsible for your words and your reach.] [1]https://about.google/community-guidelines/ https://about.google/community-guidelines/
• turbinerneiter 6y ago
  As long as the cost of false-positives is lower than the cost of human support staff, they will keep doing this stuff. Millions of pages of EULA, but not a single line in there to protect the user? No right to get your data once banned? No right to appeal or even be informed about the reasons? Just imagine if Google ran the Justice system! They would suspend peoples drivers licenses without their knowledge and then throw them in jail because of a two strike rule when they get caught driving with a suspended license. ...
  • pnt12 6y ago
    The cost/loss idea is bad enough, but that person is a business partner and this situation might be the final nail on stadia's coffin. Would be interesting if this stadia fiasco would lead to Google rethinking their customer support (ie actually start treating their users as customers).
    • turbinerneiter 6y ago
      I think Google is so used to trying projects and cancel the stuff that fails, that they are not really good to _make_ things not fail anymore. They fail in stupid ways (like this) and then cancel Stadia and then celebrate their "failure culture".
  • sudomakeup 6y ago
    Funny how google's attitude on false positives is the complete opposite of what it is for interviews
• croes 6y ago
  I guess that's the AI we should really fear. I hope nothing really important ever relies on a FB, MS or Google account. But I guess it's too late.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• TavsiE9s 6y ago
  Do not rely on Google for anything but search. Even for that there are alternatives.
• tiborsaas 6y ago
  Banning your account is one thing and understandable that they want some kind of protection from bad actors. But on the other hand locking your data is simply theft and digital havoc. Just consider the amount of work that can get vaporised. Imagine if your landlord would kick you out and burn your assets. At the very least they should provide access to the export tool.
• Mizza 6y ago
  Man, some of those replies on Twitter are unreasonably harsh to this guy. Being a game developer seems like a really thankless task. Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?
  • RL_Quine 6y ago
    I was pretty taken aback by that, they go way further than disappointing about not having the game on their platform of choice, to just outright yelling at the developer for somehow this being their fault?
    • me_me_me 6y ago
      Most of those people are children, or adult-children. Anyone else just doesn't care. I think this is just a case of very vocal minority. Who reasonable is exited about Stadia anyways? I don't think it will last till next year without being slashed by google.
      • RL_Quine 6y ago
        Definitely need to make a betting site based on the death date of google products. I wager 18 months.
        • me_me_me 6y ago
          Apparently they killed the Stadia Game studio after a year. As if you could create a big impact game from (or near) scratch in a year xD
        • Tinyyy 6y ago
          I’ll take the other side of the bet, for $100, that the core product of Stadia (video game streaming) will still be playable 18 months from today.
  • toyg 6y ago
    > Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly? Probably because they are the biggest group out there. Games are now bigger than movies, after all. The bigger the group, the more likely it is to contain a well-populated minority of viciously hateful people, a bit like "the bigger the country, the more likely it is that it will contain a sizeable group of hardcore nazis".
• jacobp100 6y ago
  I was pretty disappointed by the EU’s big tech bill not addressing this. In the UK at least, the largest banks have to offer you at least a basic current account. A lot of these big tech companies have monopoly positions over certain areas. They should have to provide at least a minimum level of service, and have proper processes when there are conflicts.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts to require human review on such decisions, but apparently one of the richer companies in the world just can’t be bothered to hire a few extra people to avoid a PR problem. That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.
  • lima 6y ago
    > That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not. Knowing Google's engineering culture, you're probably spot-on. Ignoring long-tail events like this one is a common failure mode of this kind of relentless metrics-driven optimization (and they should know better).
  • retSava 6y ago
    On the other hand, I'd prefer they fix this process for everyone and not just those with X twitter followers. I'm completely uninterested in making waves on social media, but I still expect services (whether paid or free) to work as advertised considering I'm not misbehaving. If they don't want me as customer/user, then say so and I'll find another provider.
    • ashtonkem 6y ago
      As an end user, I agree. But Google clearly doesn’t care in the slightest about the end user; if they did we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’m thinking about this from Google’s own self interest only.
  • _qulr 6y ago
    > You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts What does high profile mean? I've heard of Leon Spinks, the boxer, but I've never heard of Andrew Spinks in my life until today. People with 5 digit Twitter follower counts are actually a dime a dozen. Even people who were obscure can become "high profile" for a day. That's how going viral works.
• villgax 6y ago
  Gives me a chuckle for every high profile case such as this. Just get a domain & link it with a Zoho Mail account or any other paid one, for everything else use self-hosted storage
  • oauea 6y ago
    How you going to use that to host on Stadia?
  • kevingadd 6y ago
    Does Zoho Mail offer Youtube accounts now? Any serious game ends up needing promotion on YT.
• henriquez 6y ago
  That thread reads like someone put the Stadia shill bots on maximum overdrive.
• dandare 6y ago
  I am not fan of regulation, but apparently not every abuse of the market can be solved by courts in a practical way. Like in this case, a mere mortal can not possibly sue Google. I can imagine the EU will step in soon. There are multiple different aspects of being locked out of a "free" service provider like Google: - Losing your email addresses - even if it was provided for free, will cause an immense harm. Email addresses will soon be transferable between companies like mobile numbers are today. - Losing your own data - GDPR was a first step, user should have a right to his own data even if he was locked out of a platform. - Losing digital goods like apps or ebooks. With a transferable email address these will become transferable too.
  • Tom4hawk 6y ago
    How do you want to transfer your apps from Google Store? Is there any other service with those apps?
    • dandare 6y ago
      Not away from Google Store, just under a different account. But you are right, I did not think it through.
  • motogpjimbo 6y ago
    I'm not sure how a foo@gmail.com email address could realistically be transferred to another provider. At the very least, I wish there was a regulation that forced platforms to provide users with an explicit reason why their account was suspended. No vague "please read our T&Cs" statements. Instead, something along the lines of "We have suspended your YouTube account because in video A you made statement B at time index C which violates our rule D". No doubt it would be burdensome for the likes of Google to implement, but that's what you get when you become so large that you can destroy your users' livelihoods on a whim.
• krajzeg 6y ago
  I just wish that regulation would step in and make behavior like this illegal for the corporate giants. It is definitely possible to limit the power of the TOS, and it's already done in some cases in Europe (certain common TOS clauses are just void and do nothing). One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination. But right now, we're in the middle ages with this. "You're in jail, no we won't tell you why, no, there is nobody you can ask why and no process to revert it".
  • sofixa 6y ago
    > One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. If you want to get in the details ( action X on date Y violates ToS section Z), that might be pretty useful to bots and spam accounts ( know which actions get caught and what to avoid), which are probably the vast majority of what is getting banned.
    • cf0ed2aa-bdf5 6y ago
      > In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. When the ToS are 15 pages long this is about as useful as hearing "You're being arrested for breaking the law" when you're in the back of a cop car. Doesn't really narrow it down and provides you no way of actually defending yourself. I agree that being too specific can help bots but the current way of handling these things is obviously flawed.
      • Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
        > When the ToS are 15 pages long You're off by at least 1 order of magnitude.
• sadmann1 6y ago
  The only thing scarier than the thought that Google has algorithms that track your every move is that these algorithms are fundamentally faulty and furthermore they take decisions based on these algorithms. Case in point Google ads thinks I'm 70 years old and married
• abrookewood 6y ago
  Google, Google, Google! When will you guys learn that you simply can't do this? You want me to use Google Cloud Platform but you keep killing off apps and locking people's accounts. Why would I trust you with my livelihood? The PR fallout from stories like this is killing your chances.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• RivieraKid 6y ago
  Abandoning Google services will not work because only a negligible number of people will actually do it. Here's what may actually work: - Make a website documenting cases like this and strongly encourage visitors to install an ad-blocker and tell friends and family and social media followers to do the same. - Whenever there's a high-profile case like this, ask people to install an ad-blocker and share a link to this website.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • toyg 6y ago
    > Abandoning Google services will not work That depends on the definition of "working". Will it change Google's practices? No, but it will ensure I don't have to endure them anymore, hence "it will work" for me just fine.
• 42droids 6y ago
  As a small business we use Google Suite. We would need a single solution which provides all these: - Email (unlimited domains, unlimited addresses) - Drive (Docs, sheets, forms) - Photos (this is where we also store out private photos 2Tb+; also, auto-sync is a lifesaver) - Calendar Any alternative which is as affordable as Google? How about Zoho?
  • lexs 6y ago
    A hosted Nextcloud with OnlyOffice/Collabora and a Mail Server? There's quite a few providers for that.
    • 42droids 6y ago
      Yes, I did consider this option. The only issue is the Mail Server. It has to be secure & maintained. + SSO for all services would be ideal.
      • miedpo 6y ago
        Consider cloudron if you want an easy to maintain mail server. It works really well.
  • Lutzb 6y ago
    We are also on GSuite (Workspace now?). I am currently considering moving everything to Office 365. However I am not sure about the photos part.
    • 42droids 6y ago
      Honestly, Office 365 sounds good, but we are a Linux & Mac only business. Can't imagine using MS products... Or will that not matter at all? :)
      • toyg 6y ago
        MS software for the mac is pretty decent - Excel alone is likely worth it to any org. Linux users can access the web versions, which are now pretty powerful. And if you are a Slack user you can move to Teams (which is now fairly good) and drop that subscription. I hate to say this, but MS really have their act together on "office in the web age".
• ur-whale 6y ago
  Google takeout ftw!
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• can16358p 6y ago
  The more Google doesn't care about its users, the better more people move away from anything Google.
• smartties 6y ago
  Thanks for this reminder that google is never to be trusted. I just bought a proton mail, I can't risk to lose access to my mails.
  • tzfld 6y ago
    What does ensure that Protonmail will not have the same business model and the same behavior 10 yers from now as Google?
    • periheli0n 6y ago
      For starters, users pay for that email service with money. This only works if users are willing to pay.
      • SquareWheel 6y ago
        Google and Proton both offer free and business plans.
    • Liquid_Fire 6y ago
      Worst case for your Protonmail account is losing access to your email (which you can almost fully mitigate by using your own domain and having backups). Worst case for your Google account is losing access to hundreds of Google services and anything you paid for, like apps or movies. And Gmail doesn't even allow you to use your own domain, other than by paying for G Suite which is clearly not targeted at individuals and doesn't work well if you try to use it as an individual. If in the future Protonmail extends into other areas like Google does, and you start using these new services, it would absolutely have the same risks.
• KingMachiavelli 6y ago
  Google needs a read only account mode that can be used instead of disabling/deleting accounts. Even if a user violated ToS, its pretty harmless to just let them export data which at least would mitigate the worse parts of this & free up energy from data recovery to time spend getting the account unlocked. I mean what's the harm if a bot has a read only account? Or an account than can send 1 email per hour - just enough you could tell your contacts that you have to migrate to another provider. Even if the machine is AI driven - the actions taken could be more nuanced in order to stop the ToS violation but provide limited account functionality.
  • cutemonster 6y ago
    Or if you could only email those who have emailed you already, or replied to you
• _qulr 6y ago
  It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies. At the very least, companies must be legally required to present you in writing with the so-called violation of terms they're accusing you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone # or other immediate contact so that you can dispute the accusations. It's insane that these basic legal rights don't even exist. You could of course sue Google, but that's an extremely expensive and time-consuming option, rarely worth it for a mere consumer. Going to court certainly won't make your suspended account become unsuspended any quicker.
  • Hamuko 6y ago
    >You could of course sue Google Unless you've waived that right when you agreed to the Terms of Service.
    • Semaphor 6y ago
      > Unless you've waived that right when you agreed to the Terms of Service. Which would be meaningless in the EU (I think. Possibly just Germany) as you can’t waive that right.
      • greatpatton 6y ago
        It's the same in France and I think most of EU as the highest french court ruled that forced arbitration was against EU law.
        • vaduz 6y ago
          > It's the same in France and I think most of EU as the highest french court ruled that forced arbitration was against EU law. For consumers or businesses? Not being nitpicky here: I am not familiar with the French ruling, so I would genuinely want to know - as regulations tend to differ (businesses, even single sole trader ones, do not enjoy consumer protections). Not really relevant for the Terraria dev as it is his personal account that is banned, from the sound of it - but important.
• williamonill 6y ago
  Simple rule: Do not use Google services for business-critical areas. Expect that you can lose access to Gmail, Google Workspace, Google One at any time without doing anything wrong.
• richliss 6y ago
  I know everyone loves to give Microsoft a kicking but they have amazing customer support compared to Google. I've known people buy dodgy keys from eBay that haven't worked and have gone through MS support and had the key activated. A hotmail account may not be cool anymore but at least you're likely to be able to talk to someone if you have a problem.
• danielrpa 6y ago
  That's unfortunate. The silver lining is that there will be more people talking about this here on HN than actually affected by not bringing some game to Stadia.
• OliverJones 6y ago
  A tech challenges in machine learning these days is teaching the machines to explain why they made their decisions. With Google's commitment to 100% lights-off handling of terms-of-service violations, it seems unlikely that non-Google entities will get any decent explanations unless there are revenue implications for Google. Big fines for violations? Maybe. But they have more lobbyists than that rest of us to resist legislation. Won't happen without a mass political movement (in the US at any rate). How about a review department at Google? We could pay US$200 for a human review of the situation, with a reasonable SLA (maybe two working days), with a promise of a refund if they determine the error was theirs. Possibly a larger fee for a more aggressive SLA? Possibly a subscription-style fee for publishers of mission-critical stuff? (Meaning, critical to the publisher's mission, not Google's mission.)
• mabbo 6y ago
  Always remember: if you aren't paying a company to use their services, you aren't a customer- you're the product. Google does not care about non-paying customers individually. They have literally billions of them. They're easily replaceable and provide roughly the same amount of value each- not much, but worth lots in aggregate. If Google were to have a human review all the complaints from the non-paying customers, then they would become a small cost each rather than a small profit each. Google's only option is to start assessing which people are dangerous to offend and then provide just those people additional customer support. I'm sure there won't be any social consequences of that though.
  • delecti 6y ago
    He mentions having purchased thousands of dollars of apps on the play store. You're not wrong about nonpaying customers being the product, it's just not relevant to this story.
    • kevingadd 6y ago
      The catch is that having a Google Account is free. Whether or not you made Play Store purchases isn't relevant to the people who handle accounts or (for example) automated gmail bans. And as it happens, if the gmail team decides to ban you, it cascades to the services where you spent money.
      • delecti 6y ago
        That's conjecture though. You don't know which team decided to ban him. You don't know whether he pays for a G Suites, or expanded Drive storage.
        • kevingadd 6y ago
          We can't possibly know, but the point is there are a bunch of free services and bans generally cascade. If Google provides an explanation we can conclusively answer this, but as is anyone using Google services is probably getting some of it for free.
• detritus 6y ago
  As an aside - what benefit is there to having a game such as Terraria on Stadia in the first place? It has fairly low system requirements, and given how much energy is eaten up by server-side rendering and streaming, it seems wasteful in this context.
  • suction 6y ago
    I agree. Also, I don't want Stadia to become flooded with cheap indie games, at least not for now. Because the storefront is so bad (no search), it would make it very hard to find the things you want. Google should concentrate Stadia's efforts to make AAA-games available to people who don't want a console or gaming PC, because that's a real niche. I personally know 5 people who would never buy dedicated gaming hardware, but will get Stadia to play the latest FIFA in great quality on their work laptop or TV (with Chromecast). Indie gamers won't come to Stadia anyway.
    • kevingadd 6y ago
      Not sure how "cheap indie games" comes into the picture here, Terraria is a wildly successful and sophisticated game that's sold over 30m copies lifetime and is available on a bunch of platforms. We're not talking about a Flappy Bird clone.
  • kevingadd 6y ago
    Typically deals like this are about a mixture of cash and access. The platform holder will often partially or fully fund development, sometimes they pay an advance on sales up-front. For one project I worked on Sony provided an up-front advance that fully covered the port in addition to some sales (and it took a while to recoup for reasons mostly under their control.) My guess for this is that given Terraria's large fanbase and high profile, Google probably handed them an advance for this and promised some promotion once the title launched on Stadia. Stadia also potentially provides access to users who can't play it on PC (it has a client for phones and some TVs, etc)
  • bogwog 6y ago
    Gamers don't care about the tech that's being used, they only care about playing good games. If you're a Stadia user, why wouldn't you want to play Terraria? Because it's not a good use of streaming? But it's an awesome game!
• phreack 6y ago
  I know the usual explanation is that they're too big to respond, but at this point I've become of the mind that if you can't handle the most basic explanation as to why lock out a user from your service, and at least one way to appeal and get a response from someone able to make a decision, then you shouldn't be allowed to scale at all. Even if it would become a bottleneck, this can't keep happening.
• grumple 6y ago
  Number one step to leaving google: get your own email service. One that you pay for, from a company whose primary business is email. Then gradually move your important accounts off. This doesn't help much if you have to publish things on the play store. But you can distribute android apps directly.
• suction 6y ago
  I just can't imagine that this has happened completely "without reason" as he states. The reason might be silly, erroneous (whether human or AI), or dumb, but it exists. If Google has no procedure in place to investigate these bans on request, then Google is evil. But by the sound of this I get the feeling that this guy is leaving out some facts.
  • kevingadd 6y ago
    Not hard to do some Google searches to find lots of examples where people were banned by Google without reason or explanation. Sure, a reason might exist, but if it's impossible to get anyone to tell you what it is, then how can you tell? In at least one high profile case a Google employee's spouse was banned and it was still impossible to get an explanation or reversal! You can assume that a high-profile game developer in a business partnership with Google is evil and got up to some sort of large scale malfeasance with their gmail account (why??? for what purpose? why would you risk a business deal to do this? what's the upside?) and then Google decided to ban them but not expose them for their misconduct. Or you can go "huh it sure seems like something bad happened to this person and he's not getting an explanation for it."
  • ReflectedImage 6y ago
    Let's be honest, he's been banned in error by some google bot.
• time0ut 6y ago
  I keep seeing high profile cases of this pop up every month or two. If it happens to this many high profile people, imagine how many people it happens to that don't have a voice.
• vultour 6y ago
  It blows my mind that technically literate people still use gmail after countless horror stories of people losing their accounts.
• bnewton149 6y ago
  I’m surprised an algorithm would be allowed to block someone who spends so much money on Google apps and movies
• softwhale 6y ago
  I'd rather pay a (small) fee and get some support than deal with this nonsense. Come on Google...
• thesuperbigfrog 6y ago
  The focus on customer service and customer care is what sets Amazon apart from Google. Amazon will bend over backwards to ensure that the customer is taken care of and will even eat some costs or make concessions to make sure that the customer experience is top-notch. By comparison, Google's customer service is absent. Google has plenty of money that they could spend to hire customer support teams and boost the customer experience so that incidents like these do not happen or at least get resolved quickly, but that does not appear to be a priority for them.
  • AlexandrB 6y ago
    > Amazon will bend over backwards to ensure that the customer is taken care of and will even eat some costs or make concessions to make sure that the customer experience is top-notch. I think this narrative is false. Amazon will certainly refund money or eat costs but they have seemingly done little to stop scams, review bribes, or counterfeit products. Their UX is also increasingly user hostile (try cancelling Prime). I would put them on par with WalMart, which also has a very liberal return policy.
    • BlueTemplar 6y ago
      Yeah, and it would seem that Amazon has recently destroyed one million worth of clothing from a business owner on (allegedly) spurious counterfeiting claims, and an inability to get into touch with support.
• mchusma 6y ago
  My list to improve the play store process that requires $0 additional dollars from google and would fix 99% of issues: 1) give developers a period to respond to the complaint before takedown (maybe 1 week) 2) if they respond, make a decision within 1 week. 3) show all this information in a portal to see basic information like your app is facing a review, pending google response, etc. Really basic stuff. 4) allowing you to attach information in responses (one situation I have been in, the trademark office had ruled in my favor but I literally didn't have a way to provide that ruling in the appeal). 5) having a premium developer support program that provides good support. I think most serious devs would prefer to pay $300/yr to have good support vs what they have now (zero support).
• mrmattyboy 6y ago
  The link is actually a reply to his first message... The start of his thread is: https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661841220730882 https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661841220730882 The message reads: My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay . I had just bought LOTR 4K and can't finish it. My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
• Jkvngt 6y ago
  OK OK OK, hear me out. How do we know this individual didn't use the N word?
• blunte 6y ago
  Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue. But Google (and Facebook, and probably some other companies) don't have reasonable processes for disputing or resolving these situations. Some have said that we should consider Google's challenge: lots of users/activities that need to be monitored and policed. The assumption is that Google could not afford to do this "reasonably" with humans instead of automated systems because the volume is high. But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit. In the unlikely event that involving more humans would be too expensive, then Google should raise their prices (or stop giving so much away for free). To summarize, there is no excuse for Google to operate this way. They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.
  • technofiend 6y ago
    There needs to be a raft of community managers @ Google handling these sort of failures, including some senior ones to deal with escalations of this kind. They need this to counter the phalanx of people who enjoy spending their time trashing google. Just check reddit's ProjectFi or Stadia subgroups to see people who've made it their life's work to downvote every thread and response in those forums and spew vitriol at every opportunity. Edit: I'm not defending Google's actions in the case of the Terraria developer's account or any other. I'm saying there are some people who have an axe to grind and right now they are the loudest voices. IMHO Google needs to counteract that by taking real action at a broad scale. At some point the trolls will win for no other reason than inaction on Google's part.
    • sitkack 6y ago
      I am not trying to write a post for ABoringDystopia, but I would wager that the vast majority of folks with banned accounts that actually want them back would just pay, either for the review or just to get unblocked. Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
• gcatalfamo 6y ago
  I honestly cannot believe these incidents (plural) never reach top management. It’s just not possible.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• danso 6y ago
  Bad time for an automated response: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1358666067325968385 https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1358666067325968385
• kgersen 6y ago
  so the guy filled the Stadia dev form: https://stadia.dev/intl/en_us/apply/ https://stadia.dev/intl/en_us/apply/ but used a gmail account instead of pro email account (that's not a good move on his part here). and then he still can't get help from Stadia ? Possible but very hard to believe.
• tcfunk 6y ago
  Eye-opener for me that I really need to set up a fallback email address
• avesi 6y ago
  Google makes ~$90 billion in profit a year, they can shave off a little to open up a few call centers to deal with issues like this. It's seriously shameful at this point.
• nvarsj 6y ago
  I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement. We see this again and again. The cynic in me sees Stadia as yet another internal promotion scheme, masquerading as a product. I doubt this will ever change. The internal momentum of the company culture will make it so. What does it mean for investors? Google has enough money they can just buy their way into markets indefinitely. It will probably keep them going, but I don't expect huge growth. I'd probably be putting my money into other stocks if I had to choose. I honestly don't think people would miss Google much if it was gone.
  • engineeringwoke 6y ago
    Brilliant comment
  • brundolf 6y ago
    Stadia, from day one, has seemed like an engineering-oriented project. It's a cool tech that nobody asked for and not many people actually want (and has been atrociously packaged as an actual product). I can just hear the kickoff meeting: "We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we could!" That part is true! But then: "Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part." ...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.
    • moksly 6y ago
      Are you sure people don’t want it? I think it’s one of the biggest market potentials in gaming right now. I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life. That’s anecdotal or course, but there’s quite a lot of us.
• jszymborski 6y ago
  Google is evil, etc..., but just a PSA: people often overlook emails in their backups. Don't trust your provider to not fumble the ball and lose them (or lock you out of them). If you're ready to add another layer of tin foil, don't store emails long term on an IMAP server if your emails leaking would be a problem for you (a la Sony or Clinton).
• cableshaft 6y ago
  Well, considering Google announced they're shutting down all internal development on Google Stadia games, and now they're locking people out of developer accounts, guess it's safe to say that once again, Google can't be trusted to follow through with their products and need to be taken with extreme skepticism on any and all future endeavors. I didn't think for a moment this might be successful, especially when it stumbled out of the gate, because Google is so bad at sticking with projects that don't immediately do gangbusters. Even still, it looks like the plug is being pulled faster than I anticipated. https://kotaku.com/google-stadia-shuts-down-internal-studios-changing-bus-1846146761 https://kotaku.com/google-stadia-shuts-down-internal-studios...
• Ansil849 6y ago
  Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time. It doesn't matter if you host your own domain/mailer daemon, the host and/or registrar can choose to suspend your account as well. So really, there is no solution. Other than the realization that our communications channels are not ours, they are always someone else's, and we are forever at their mercy.
  • foobarian 6y ago
    The PGP trust graph is the ultimate fallback here. As long as your public key is out there you can even not have DNS and change your IP address and still be able to prove the identity.
    • lxgr 6y ago
      Self-custody has risks too, most notably theft or loss of the private key. It's tradeoffs all the way down.
  • thekyle 6y ago
    Yes, in practice you always have to rely on someone. Even before the internet you'd have to rely on the USPS to carry your letters. Unless you are physically speaking to someone in person, then there is always a middleman.
    • umvi 6y ago
      Well you can always just create your own courier. If you want true free speech these days you need to build your own stack from the ground up anyway.
      • arbitrage 6y ago
        Oh? Is the government interfering in your ability to say what you would like to say in an online space?
• tarruda 6y ago
  > The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years. I've read quite a few of these stories over the years, and it is really bad if all your digital life is tied to the Google account. A couple of months ago I took the courage and started migrating to a new email (using mailbox.org) with my own domain purchased via namecheap. Took a few days to migrate most of my accounts to the new e-mail, but I highly recommend for anyone in a similar situation looking for some peace of mind.
• tpl 6y ago
  Move your email off Gmail immediately is all I can say. Google cannot be trusted to provide continuous access to something as important as email.
• accounted 6y ago
  Going against popular sentiment, I dont know how people can't get in touch with a human at Google. Whenever I have needed something that required human support, such as resolving a false DMCA claim against my content or help with my G Suite account, I had no trouble getting email and phone support. I'm not a big company or influence of any kind either.
• benlivengood 6y ago
  There are some pretty straightforward solutions for this; 1. Don't use personal gmail accounts for your business. 2. Don't mix different business units on the same account. (Your 5-year old adsense page you forgot about probably isn't compliant anymore). 3. If your personal account gets banned, hire someone whose job it is to manage your business google accounts and don't touch them.
  • Strom 6y ago
    > 1. Don't use personal gmail accounts for your business. A good practice but won't help with this issue. Google has a history of banning business (admin/paying) accounts when it thinks that some user (under that business domain) has an unrelated personal account that was banned. There have been stories here on HN describing how a small startup lost its Google Play account because one of their employees had their personal account banned for a terms of service violation. Then Google viewed that same person having an user account underneath the business account as ban evasion. In a puzzling move Google then proceeded to close the whole business account, so lots of collateral damage. It's pretty crazy stuff.
    • molszanski 6y ago
      They banned the whole 150+ organization google suite account. Someone had a private, secondary email in the profile. A private gmail account was suspended. They suspected that he has sent a "virus" in `*.apk` file as a gmail attachment.
• myko 6y ago
  Google should have fixed this years ago.
• dsr_ 6y ago
  Does anyone not working for Google have an opinion which isn't a variant on "Serves Google right"? I assume that many Googlies also have that opinion, and a few others are sure that this can be fixed, because they don't recognize that this is a systemic cultural problem. There's only been one Abcedarian unit that ever understood customer service, and they (Google Fi) dropped it on the floor and beat it to death within 3 years.
• SubiculumCode 6y ago
  Monopoly abusing monopoly.
• g_p 6y ago
  EU regulation 2019/1150 would seem to be the first real attempt I'm aware of at addressing this issue. Article 4 covers suspension and termination, with intermediary platforms (i.e. Google, Facebook et al) "the opportunity to clarify the facts and circumstances in the framework of the internal complaint-handling process referred to in Article 11". It also introduces a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable grounds for that decision". It seems these automated processes fall foul of several hurdles in Article 4.
  • BitwiseFool 6y ago
    As a patriotic redblooded 'murican it really upsets me that I have to rely on the EU to police big-tech and fight for civil liberties.
• g_p 6y ago
  From a European perspective, EU regulation 2019/1150 covers protections for business users of online intermediation platforms [1]. Article 4 sets out a range of protections for business users, including a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable grounds for that decision" This would seem to point towards a gradual start of the change in this way, although it will be interesting to see if anyone from Europe is ever able to use this against Google and others successfully. On the whole, the legislation seems to be sufficient, and it will come down to the usual issues of national regulators and their willingness to aid in enforcement action. [1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32019R1150&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
• seankimdesign 6y ago
  I found My old gmail account placed under a flagged status one day. It would not allow me to purchase anything on the play store. Turns out, it was because I used an old Google service called Google Checkout(?) or something more than a decade ago to purchase a few hundred dollars worth of clothes overseas. The clothes were purchased from an H&M equivalent, legally operating stores of course, and no payments were deferred or anything - they just simply said something about my account being associated with possible fraud and disabled all Google Wallet features suddenly many years after, citing my purchase history. Wanting to purchase a $2 game on my phone, I inquired about removing the restrictions placed on my account, but the response I received were quite haphazard and they finally stated that they would not accept anything short of physical copies of my IDs before removing any restrictions. No, fuck off. I guess it's easier to throw out blocks and bans, placing the burden of proof on their customers rather than to have people looking into why completely innocent accounts were getting flagged in the first place. I've made my peace with it and I'm happy not spending a cent on your damn play store for the rest of my life.
• _ink_ 6y ago
  When Stadia was announced I wanted to buy one. I pre ordered it in the Google Store. A couple of weeks later I received an email that they were not able to process my credit card. That never happened anywhere else. They also said that pre ordering would not be possible anymore and therefore I would not be able to purchase the limited pre ordering offer. They would be sorry, but stated that I could buy Stadia as soon as it gets released. This is why I have no Stadia.
• Aissen 6y ago
  If Google's goal is to make sure that future regulation forbids them from ever banning an account of real person or company, they're on the right path for that. In a few years we'll have spammers with legit companies able to legally force Google to deliver emails to their "customers" inbox, to abuse compute resource, etc. Just because Google decided not to act on its kafka-esque banning process.
• benjohnson 6y ago
  The quote I'm going to remember: "Doing business with Google is a liability"
• peeters 6y ago
  Ah Google, where the first rule is "don't be evil", and the first axiom is "machines cannot be evil".
• kweinber 6y ago
  Isn’t Stadia effectively dead in the water anyway? The idea was based on universal infinite low-latency bandwidth which is wasteful and incongruent with the laws of physics. There are articles elsewhere showing Google abandoning its own development on the platform. This was a mainframe play for gaming. Think this platform will be around in 2023?
• runamok 6y ago
  It's also bananas that they ban your entire google existence. If you violate some Developer TOS then ban you in the app store not in google drive, gmail, etc. That kind of collatoral damage begs for them to be broken up IMO.
• indigochill 6y ago
  This incident seems pretty damning of Stadia in particular. What partner in their right mind would work with Stadia when that work can be arbitrarily canned for no reason and with no reasonable recourse (of course, I feel similarly about western game developers publishing in China given their review board and capricious past actions like banning Animal Crossing there because of players voicing support for Hong Kong in-game, yet major western developers continue to court China, so what do I know)? There also seems to be some interesting correlation of megacorps being terrible at games, between Google doing their utmost to shoot Stadia in every foot it has, and Amazon execs having no idea how to produce games people actually want to play.
• steveBK123 6y ago
  Unsurprising level of arrogance from Google. They are a monopoly. I am currently reading through Google’s SRE book and there’s a similar arrogance to it. It should be read as “here’s a bunch of practices that we can get away with because we are a monopoly & our end users are mostly non-paying/our real users are companies running ads”. So many practices in that book would get me and my entire team fired it’s hilarious. There US government has changed our treatment of monopolies over the last 60 years such that we allow those that lower costs, so most of our current tech behemoths are able to continue... they are “free”.
  • galgalesh 6y ago
    > So many practices in that book would get me and my entire team fired it’s hilarious. Such as?
    • steveBK123 6y ago
      Induced outages when you are under your error budget because no one should build dependencies on your system assuming higher uptime than advertised. Imagine.. Your home internet being cut for a day because it’s been up for 365 days and that’s better than the SLO. Your iPhone sending 1 out of 1000 emails into the ether because you shouldn’t expect better than 99.9% service. Bank losing some of your money because too many of their transfers went well this month. Boeing crashing a plane because they didn’t do enough this year. Very cool stuff.
• randyrand 6y ago
  I regularly export my Gmail emails every year. Gmail makes it fairly simple to do. I highly recommend it.
• suddenexample 6y ago
  Each day I become more convinced that Google at the end of this decade will be nearly irrelevant. It's a company with MBA leaders who don't care about the product, which values engineers that have technical prowess and often don't care about the product.
• mullingitover 6y ago
  This is a great case for Google to decouple, either voluntarily or by court order. YouTube's faulty algorithm erroneously locking your account should never result in you losing your access to your Drive, email, Android, media purchases, or anything else unrelated to YouTube (it shouldn't erroneously lock your YouTube account either, but limiting the blast radius is a no-brainer).
• newbie578 6y ago
  I just want to know why is no one willing to hold Google and Apple accountable? Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?
  • teddyh 6y ago
    If journalists are bothersome, they lose their access. How would journalists “confront” anyone if they can’t get a foot in the door?
  • syshum 6y ago
    Because they are not really Journalists, they are extensions of the PR Dept. This is dubbed as "Access Journalism" but it is not really Journalism at all.
  • WillPostForFood 6y ago
    https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censorship https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale...
  • Terretta 6y ago
    I’ve never been unable to chat with an Apple rep. Have had no problems reaching people about dev accounts, but also no problem even about consumer subscription services with unusual challenges, such as wanting to merge music or app libraries belonging to two different Apple IDs. (Can be done, an self-serve easy way and an Apple-performed hard way.) In earlier HN thread, someone said “Devs would be more than happy to pay $300/yr to be able to talk to someone!” My guess is an HN survey would suggest devs prefer to be outraged at Apple’s $100/yr — despite it being a price point at which you get to talk to people.
    • merb 6y ago
      apple support is shit, even if you can talk with an rep. their first level basically tries to stop you going down the levels, the second level basically just forwards you. most of the time it's not even the people, it's basically their stupid system where you have your dedicated rep, but the only way to contact him is by using a stupid form/voice which sometimes prints stupid error message and you have no idea if it gone trough. also if there is a mistake in the system and they have no clue about it you are lost or you need to pay tons of money.
• jjcon 6y ago
  I also got locked out of my google account - not because of a violation (automated flag or otherwise) but because google decided my login location was too different. I know my password and have access to my recovery email but I am put into and endless login loop of ‘unable to verify’. I contacted support which had me fill out a form and that was maybe 6 months ago. I’ve moved on now but I’ll never use a google product seriously ever again.
  • Nacdor 6y ago
    I'm always afraid this will happen when I use a VPN or TOR. The internet in general is pretty hostile to any sort of privacy protecting measures, which they justify by saying your activity looks "suspicious". I've already been locked out of my Facebook account once because I forgot to turn my VPN off. The last time I used TOR it was almost impossible to do anything on the internet. Every Google search was met with "We detected you are a bot" and every website interaction was blocked by never-ending CAPTCHAs.
    • shadowgovt 6y ago
      Unfortunately, enabling TOR basically makes your traffic "malicious-shaped" these days. One of the largest users of privacy services are users (bot or human) who don't want their traffic easily traced because they're doing something malicious. It's definitely not the only use case for such services, but if a service provider sees that 90% of traffic shaped a certain way is malicious traffic, it's understandable they will take steps to mitigate that traffic. ETA: I'm not happy about it because I believe in the value of anonymity, but it is what it is. Here's a Cloudflare blog post talking about the challenges handling Tor traffic, which to their estimate is (a) 94% malicious "per se," so any tooling you do that tries to estimate intent based on origin IP address is gummed up by the malicious signal emanating from the same Tor exit node as your legit traffic and (b) anonymized by design, therefore any attempts you might make to build a reptutation signal for a given client are intended to be thwarted. The result is that a Tor user's traffic looks reputationless to a service like Cloudflare, and you can't just assume reputationless signal is benign (so, CAPTACHAs and "bot-like behavior suspected" walls). https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/
• jennyyang 6y ago
  We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies. Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to politicize this issue. Facebook is exactly the same way. When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al., then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now, which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not spending any money on customer support.
  • robotresearcher 6y ago
    For counterpoint, they provide products like Gmail for free at point of use because the support costs are very low (amongst other factors). Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want? Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad experiences see public light so people's choices are informed.
    • bluefirebrand 6y ago
      Counter-counterpoint They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.
      • robotresearcher 6y ago
        Sure, that's absolutely true. But the margin would be eroded if they provided much better customer service for unpaid Gmail. At some service level, the margin would be negative.
• karmakaze 6y ago
  Maybe the timing's good for Microsoft to open an Android App store and other degoogly APIs. Should get better traction than Amazon's.
• javagram 6y ago
  I use G Suite and regularly export all my data using google takeout in case something like this happens. Plus since I have my own domain I can move my email address to another provider. Way too many google horror stories to keep using my @gmail.com account. Although admittedly the actual odds are probably 99.99% that this frustrating issue doesn’t happen to any individual.
  • tkinom 6y ago
    For the folks that loss the access, it is 100%.
• tschellenbach 6y ago
  It does seem like there should be some laws around the appeal process. Right now the only hope some of these devs have is to make it to the frontpage of some newspapers/hnews etc
  • judge2020 6y ago
    Which it always does for name-brand businesses since it's basically free clicks for news publications.
• Chazprime 6y ago
  We really need regulation for the large tech monopolies like Google. There’s no recourse if you’re suddenly locked out of your account short of making the news or attracting attention on social media.
  • edejong 6y ago
    From which legislation? The faltering nation-states?
• remus 6y ago
  While I agree with the broader point that there should be avenues for someone who's account is incorrectly closed this article is pretty vapid. There are a lot of examples of individuals who have lost access to their accounts but no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users. If I've got a 1 in 10 million chance of incorrectly losing access to my account that is very different to if there is a 1 in 1000 chance of losing access to my account. Without that context, you're basically just saying "losing access is a crap experience for the person involved" which is obvious from the outset.
  • dv_dt 6y ago
    When assessing risks one way to look at them is to consider both the chance of occurrence as well as impact if it occurs. With many google services (esp email), the impact if it occurs is high. So the risk is still serious even if odds are low.
  • falcolas 6y ago
    > no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users Who cares? No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc).
    • remus 6y ago
      I agree with the principle, but in a world of finite resources you've got to pick your battles. The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it. It is, unfortunately, the same in many aspects of life, including many criminal justice systems. For example, if you are wrongly convicted in the UK it is incredibly hard to get that conviction overturned. It's literally life destroying for the people affected (definitely a lot worse than losing access to your gmail account!) but apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
• MikeDelta 6y ago
  Do no evil was it? They have to fight a lot of fraudsters and scammers, and do so successfully every day. It is easy to say that they cannot possibly monitor everything properly because they are so big, but they earn billions because they are so big. This shouldn't come for free, every company has costs and proper customer care and monitoring is a cost for these kind of businesses. The other argument is that you shouldn't use these services if you don't like them, but these companies are simply too big to avoid.
• c7DJTLrn 6y ago
  Maybe unrelated but I was pretty much banned from using Amazon for over two years through no fault of my own. I even asked here for suggestions on what I could do. Alt accounts just got immediately locked too. In the end, the only way I managed to get my original account unlocked again was by collecting a huge list of @amazon.com support addresses and writing a bot to spam hundreds of emails until someone competent picked up and realised my account had been mistakenly locked. I made dozens of calls but they hung up the phone most of the time (literally). FAANG seriously needs to step up their support game. And not with "AI" chatbots or outsourced support teams with a few buttons in front of them.
  • gambiting 6y ago
    They are posting billion dollar profits year on year on year. There is literally no incentive to do this at all. For every customer wronged this way there are hundreds if not thousands who are extremely happy with the service.
    • c7DJTLrn 6y ago
      That's what made it so daunting. I was completely powerless to argue against this massive, faceless corporation. I imagine for those who store their whole lives on Google, this feeling is amplified 100x.
  • falcolas 6y ago
    What's just as bad is the public resistance to these kinds of social media pleas (I'd say astroturfed, but the public response to COVID has jaded me). "Oh, they must have had child porn in their drive." "I bet they were spamming." "Return fraud, totally sounds like return fraud."
• djrogers 6y ago
  Personal Anecdote Time(tm). I have (had?) a Google Voice number that I started using for work stuff about a dozen years ago. One day 8-9 years ago, it just disappeared from my google account. Like gone. I go to google voice settings, and it's telling me to sign up for google voice. Nothing I do can get this back - my voice number is now just anchorless, floating in the digital sea. The crazy thing is, it still forwards to my cell number to this day. I can't change most settings for it, so I stopped handing that number out, but every once in a while I'll get an email notification of a new voicemail or text message to that number...
• lalalandland 6y ago
  Anyone know of a good way to back-up google account content ?
  • progval 6y ago
    https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/
  • johnyzee 6y ago
    To Google's credit, it's pretty easy. Go to your account (from GMail choose 'manage my account'), then go to 'data & personalization', find the 'download your data' option. They'll zip up all your data for you to download.
• duxup 6y ago
  I had an old blogger account with a domain registered through the blogger site. It expired and I got repeated emails about signing into my G Suite account to address it. But I didn't register it and I don't have a G Suite account... and the only support is, step 1, sign into G Suite. I finally tracked down the registrar they used and I contacted them directly and they helped me re-register the domain.
• gumby 6y ago
  As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the nature of things). For Google, users are necessary as they are product to be sold. Next are various small customers (developers) as they help bring in more users, or user interactions to be monetized. Android, nest, even google cloud (lost $5B last year) are either ways to bring in more user interactions and/or ways to try to diversify the revenue stream slightly to try to convince Wall Street that they don't have all their eggs in one basket (which they do) But there's a risk: every new user is a potential source of inappropriate content (basically: anything that might disturb the customers, who would complain about their ads being associated with something or other). Their volume is high (so there are lots of opportunities for bad actors) but also their volume is high (so false positives aren't a big deal). So it's natural to have an immune system that just boots out perceived risks and also natural not to do an expensive thing like trying to follow up and see if it was a mistake. There's no malice involved, any more than there is in a tiger that eats someone. The only real defense for any individual or smaller organization is to reduce your risk envelope. 1: don't put all your eggs in a google basket, and 2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully unconnected accounts for each project. This sounds like work, and it is, but you have to do your own backups, brush your teeth, and call your friends sometimes. That's life.
  • sneak 6y ago
    > 2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully unconnected accounts for each project. How can one make this advice actionable? Creating new Google accounts requires providing a phone number to which one has long-term access (as they will sometimes require you to do SMS 2FA, even with 2FA off, when logging in). Using one on a different Google account links them (and could cause multiple accounts to get nuked), and you can't use a Google Voice number. For some things I've taken to buying "aged" Google accounts on forums when I need true non-linkability, but in general this is an unsolved problem. I'd lose several accounts simultaneously if I hit the big G's antispam, as I've had to reuse some phone numbers several times.
• AceJohnny2 6y ago
  If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives. At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB". You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent the bad actors from abusing the appeal process while leaving your more clueless legitimate users lost in the dust? (As the joke goes: "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" [1]) Can you build any vetting process, and associated appeal process, that successfully keeps all the bad actors out, and doesn't exclude your good users? What about those on the edge? Or those that switch? Or those who are busy, or wary? There's a lot of money riding on that. [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a...
  • nightcracker 6y ago
    > But 0.001% of billions or users is still millions of accounts... Not that I disagree with your point, but even if we assume 50 billion accounts (6+ for every human on earth), 0.001% of that would still be 'just' 100k, not millions.
    • AceJohnny2 6y ago
      Oops, quite right. I multiplied by 0.001 when it should've been 0.00001 (because percent) >_< Fixed
  • esja 6y ago
    The lesson here is: you are too big. If you were smaller, you could manage these issues. But you choose to be big instead.
    • judge2020 6y ago
      You can't choose to stay small unless you're someone like clubhouse which still has a long waitlist for sign-ups, and even then they're trying to build their infrastructure wide enough to accompany everyone. Not offering service to all/99.9% of potential customers is effectively lost value and goes against shareholders' expectations.
• jVinc 6y ago
  People complaining they they want the game on stadia and blaming the creator are really just being assholes. Imagine if you spent 3 full weeks figthing some extremely obvious extremely silly but on some system, like adding two integers causing a runtime error. Would you really continue to work even harder trying to support that platform? The guy lost access to his primary email for nearly a month... I think he's exhibiting a metric ton more constraint that is reasonable in this situation and google needs to get their damn shit together.
• rabboRubble 6y ago
  Perfect time to advertise Google's Takeout Services: https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/ This service permits the export of (nearly?) all Google services data on both a scheduled and unscheduled on-demand basis. I have my Google account configure to automatically export all service data every 2 months and upload ZIP files to MS OneDrive. This process completely bypasses me and my local computer. I just have to remember to check that the data transferred to OneDrive as expected. The only constructive criticism I have of the Takeout Services scheduled process is that the scheduled exports are limited to a one year duration. I have to remember to reconfigure the next year's scheduled exports. Ideally I'd be permitted to set and forget, with a periodic reminder that the export is still happening and a "Good" / "Not Good" confirmation that the process ought continue. Takeout Services won't restore function and applications, but at least a great part of my data won't be irretrievably lost.
  • airpoint 6y ago
    I just learned about Takeout today. The question I still have though is, how do you import those exports back into some usable state/service?
    • rabboRubble 6y ago
      good question, not exactly sure, need to download and look at contents... (queue Jeopardy thinking music) ... Okay, so my account generates five 2GB zip files. I randomly picked file #4 and unzipped to inspect the contents. The structure of the zip file included the following: * Google Photos * Contacts * Drive * YouTube and YouTube Music Interestingly, while the general structure looks okay, the content under the directories is incomplete. I'm not sure why this is. Like for example, "Contacts" has only one person's recently added Contact and only a JPG of an emoji face at that. That definitely isn't a complete data set, and makes me wonder if Takeout Services is not a cumulative back up, rather only a delta. I downloaded a second file, to see how it was formatted. The second file also had Contacts data. It generally followed the contact groupings I have in place (ex. family, friends, medical, shopping, etc.). It had a smattering of .vcf files with profile pictures for some, but not all, people. YouTube directory had what looked to be a complete download of all videos I've ever uploaded, plus various other historical record of my YouTube activity. Basically, it looks like recovery of a single service is only possible with a full set of recovery files (in my case, all 5 files). The content of each recovered service depends in great part on the nature of the service. There is a lot of garbage in the back up files for the unused / lightly used services. What's happening with the Contacts is a bit concerning since the the data is split between (apparently) all 5 back up files. Same thing for Drive, and maybe Mail. Recovery of the data and service would be service by service, and dependent on the type of service, and the data provided in each service type.
• mullingitover 6y ago
  Google has a serious problem with their tightly coupled identities. They need to be forced to decouple their business so losing your YouTube account doesn't have an effect on your email service or literally any other service. Clearly they're not going to do it voluntarily, so it's time for courts to step in and start taking care of consumers.
  • grishka 6y ago
    They have to at least provide the ability to download all your data in case they ban you. Otherwise it's a hostage situation. IIRC even Facebook does that.
• ummonk 6y ago
  Good reminder that I need to prioritize making the switch from Gmail to iCloud mail.
• dang 6y ago
  Threads are paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working on it), so to see the rest of the comments you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=4 (If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)
• Ninjinka 6y ago
  This is what terrifies me about Google, specifically losing access to all accounts that I signed up for using my Gmail. I started transitioning to a custom domain that I can redirect to any email, but I just realized I bought that domain using Google Domains...I'm **ed if Google decides to ban me.
• Bjorkbat 6y ago
  Some of the flak this guy is getting in his comments is pretty ridiculous. He's the one getting stiffed by Google, but "gamers" always love playing the victim, especially when a game developer draws a line of any kind.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• chrischen 6y ago
  Google’s product philosophy is more like they are providing the technology, not the product. If the product fails, then it is your problem because they only offer up until what their tech actually does. Had a similar experience with Google Ads where their automated systems shut off our paid ads just before Black Friday due to a technical error, and despite having constant human sales contacts none of them could do anything useful.
• tlogan 6y ago
  Terraria is very very popular game so I wonder what is going on inside Stadia team... could it be that they are just incompetent and they do not even monitor Twitter feeds of popular game developers? Or maybe Stadia team actually wants to help but they are ignored inside Google? Or they just know the project will be canceled so they don’t care? Or maybe they really do not want terraria on their platform so they are willing ignore this?
• RachelF 6y ago
  Never forget "the cloud" is someone else's computer. Especially if you're using a free-tier service. On a practical level at least backup your email with Thunderbird and your Google Drive with Syncdocs.
• Pawka 6y ago
  I've been thinking about migration out of G* for a while already and this post was a breaking point to start the migration. Thank you! I've purchased personal domain with my country code and picked Fastmail as provided for now (since many folks here gave good feedback).