8 ms·

I'm curious if "has locked my account" means just Google Drive, or if he also lost Gmail, Android functionality, Chrome profiles, Adwords, YouTube, YouTubeTV, p

by tyingq 5y ago

I'm curious if "has locked my account" means just Google Drive, or if he also lost Gmail, Android functionality, Chrome profiles, Adwords, YouTube, YouTubeTV, purchased movies and tv shows, Fitbit, Nest, sites where he used federated login (DoorDash, Uber, etc). I see, for example, his YouTube channel is up, but it's associated with 'team@armouredarchives.com', and not the personal gmail account he posted in the linked forum. If it was the entire account, something really needs to be done with Google to force them to make these kind of actions as narrow as possible. They can really disrupt your life with a broad account lock.

quantumBerry 5y ago
If google really thinks he is a terrorist, which apparently they did, why on earth would they allow him to use gmail or android? It makes sense they would lock him out of everything possible. What we really should be asking is why is google examining user data at all. They should not be in the position where they can even find out who is a terrorist.
- tyingq 5y ago
  I imagine Google takes business from lots of places and people that are unsavory to some. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
  - quantumBerry 5y ago
    Terrorism is usually only defined by your allegiance, yes. In this case google is a US company so in the case they know violent islamic extremists use their platform, their allegiance is with the Americans, even if it happens to be the Americans blow up innocent Arabs and the extremists may just be engaging in self defense.
- filoleg 5y ago
  > What we really should be asking is why is google examining user data at all. Without reading into the details, I don't think that google arbitrarily examines all user files on Google Drive (and please correct me if I am wrong, but that's what I remember since the last time this discussion was had). Google only examines files that were shared with other users or were made accessible to others through a shareable link. Which, sorta makes sense, because that's how a lot of people shared illegal content or streamed videofiles (sort of like a personal youtube). And if you don't share those files with anyone and just keep it as your personal cloud drive, I don't think they examine it. >why on earth would they allow him to use gmail or android? Google is essentially your mail service (gmail), video platform (youtube), cloud storage (gdrive), and tons of other completely separate services. In physical world, violation of terms of one of the services leads you to being banned only from that service, unless criminal law gets involved. If the law gets involved, then the law can get you banned from using quite a lot of services. But until the law makes the judgement, being banned from a grocery store cannot automatically and without any recourse get you banned from your bank, your car insurance, your mail service, and many other things. I guess my point on the latter is that no private business (but law) should be able to prevent a person from using multiple completely unrelated vital services. Here are a few scenarios I thought of that would illustrate how it would work: * An airline banning you for being an asshole on a flight by adding you to a denylist used by other airlines as well? That's congruent with my idea, because it is all within the same service (airlines), and it won't be done automatically. *A judge completely blocking you from flying by locking you up for participating in terrorist activities? Sure, because the law did it after an investigation and followed proper legal processes. *Wells Fargo closing down your account because you were an asshole at Kroger when shopping for groceries and got banned from that store? That would be crazy talk. The only difference between the google scenario and the kroger+Wells Fargo scenario is that kroger+WF are not a part of the same company. But would it be acceptable for WF to close down your account if WF and Kroger were a part of the same parent company? In my opinion, it wouldn't be ok.
  - Avicebron 5y ago
    I hope I'm not the only one who got a little squeamish at this...I understand the logic, "don't let people transfer/share things that are illegal". But it doesn't sit right that 1) A gigantic private company operating across most of the world/laws/jurisdictions/precedents etc...is in charge of determining (with little to no human oversight) what can and can't be shared between individuals. Who might even be in competing legal jurisdictions. Seems wonky. 2) that it's commonly accepted that they get to look into it period. It's similar to having every package/letter you ever send opened and looked through and judged (ik postal services sometimes scan) but I can't imagine they open every single envelope
    - filoleg 5y ago
      >But it doesn't sit right Your argument makes sense, and I share your feelings on an emotional level, but at this point, the whole argument can be reduced to "sharing video files streamed from google drive is an equivalent of hosting a video on youtube, so the same rules apply", and that's hard to beat. If you want to store whatever material you want for personal consumption, you are welcome to. But if you enable sharing, that's when all those extra rules start applying, because you are effectively turning it into a personal youtube that is still hosted by google, and DMCA strikes and other stuff will apply just the same. Similarly, you can make backup copies of a DVD movie for yourself by burning them onto writeable DVDs. The legality of it is dubious due to copyright law being plain awful at times, but you won't get prosecuted for that if you truly had it only for personal backup reasons. The second you start distributing those DVDs in massive amounts to people, you start inviting a pretty legal trouble to your doorstep. Mind you, I absolutely disagree with the ban of both the historical footage, as well as the whole google account just because of that footage. However, I do believe that making video public via a shareable link or otherwise puts it in the territory where content rules similar to youtube might get reasonably applied.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        >you are effectively turning it into a personal youtube that is still hosted by google Then logically, why should it be available ad free either?
bserge 5y ago
You lose access to everything, yes. Which is really fucking dumb.
mig39 5y ago
In the link, he says that he can't even use his account to post on the support forums, so is using an alternate account. So I assume it's the entire Google account.
whymauri 5y ago
In my anecdotal experience, a locked account == locked everything else. That's why they had to make the post from a different account than the locked one.
theodric 5y ago
The second line of his post indicates that he's unable to post using the email account in question, so I must assume that means that the account in its entirety has been blocked
lom 5y ago
He said it in his description that his email is locked as well.
jms703 5y ago
Another reason to not use Google/Facebook or similar identities to login to a service. You lose access to your Google account, you lose access to all those other services.
- Ansil849 5y ago
  This is such a crucial point that so many people overlook, even when being cognizant of the risk of storing data on the cloud, somehow SSO integration is many tech-literate users' blind spot.
  - harlanji 5y ago
    I had quite the interaction with Twitch about having lost my email domain. I can still stream to the channel but they said “that you believe to be yours”... quite funny because I believe nothing to be mine, but they came out and said that it’s not mine. They acted as though I were upset, and I’m sure many people that they deal with are. But it’s true, these accounts and phone numbers are not ours. The closest thing to ours is private keys for onion host routing which are addresssed as the public key derived from the private key tailed with dot-onion (https://pubkey.onion https://pubkey.onion). And most software works with Tor our of the box via torify. Tested with self-signed HTTPS and XMPP and others have with email. Tor may not be anonymous, but identity ownership is a killer use case. 2022 the year of the onion? I can commit to wrapping all my things going forward.
  - numpad0 5y ago
    It feels wrong that we all call it "data" as some sort of replaceable tangible volume, when what it represents are context.
- usr1106 5y ago
  I used to have many Google accounts (credentials in my password manager). One for gmail, one for every mailing list on goougle groups, one for Google+ etc. For a while they haven't let me use them whithout problems providing a phone number. They force me into some security check-up after logging in which seems to have no way to skip the phone number entry. Less Google for me, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
noisy_boy 5y ago
I have wondered what locked account actually means in context of the mail and its configuration being "active". E.g. I have setup email forwarding in my Gmail so that I always get a copy at another address. When my account is locked, I know I can't connect to Gmail but what happens to the above "workflow"? Does Gmail stop receiving messages / forwarding rules no longer work?
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Forwarding rules continue to work for 30 days. Then all emails are bounced as 'non existent user'
KorematsuFredt 5y ago
G employee. If you are using G to store anything important and if you do not have an offline backup or some other redundancy please reconsider.
- andromeduck 5y ago
  Agreed. Cloudsync is a car superior product and supports every cloud service ever and full encryption. https://cloudsync.bdrive.com/ https://cloudsync.bdrive.com/
  - ApolloRising 5y ago
    Its great tech but why charge per device to personal users?
    - andromeduck 5y ago
      if you want free there's always https://rclone.org/
    - Someone 5y ago
      Options: - to keep things affordable for those who can afford to buy only a few devices - to extract as much money as possible from those who can afford to buy multiple devices It’s a pricing strategy. That doesn’t have to reflect what it costs them at all, but ideally should match what it’s worth to the customer (if it doesn’t, they either leave money on the table or don’t get sales)
- numpad0 5y ago
  Do people lose data or lose proof of identity when they have had account(s) banned?
  - KorematsuFredt 5y ago
    The biggest hurdle would be actually finding someone to talk to if the account gets banned.
wodenokoto 5y ago
At least “lost gmail access” which is why the cry for help is not posted from the account owning the locked gdrive.
southerntofu 5y ago
What about starting/developing tech coops like those listed on libreho.st?
peakaboo 5y ago
Google could disappear tomorrow and it wouldnt affect my life whatsoever. Its beautiful.

by tyingq 5y ago

quantumBerry 5y ago

If google really thinks he is a terrorist, which apparently they did, why on earth would they allow him to use gmail or android? It makes sense they would lock him out of everything possible. What we really should be asking is why is google examining user data at all. They should not be in the position where they can even find out who is a terrorist.

tyingq 5y ago
I imagine Google takes business from lots of places and people that are unsavory to some. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
- quantumBerry 5y ago
  Terrorism is usually only defined by your allegiance, yes. In this case google is a US company so in the case they know violent islamic extremists use their platform, their allegiance is with the Americans, even if it happens to be the Americans blow up innocent Arabs and the extremists may just be engaging in self defense.
filoleg 5y ago
> What we really should be asking is why is google examining user data at all. Without reading into the details, I don't think that google arbitrarily examines all user files on Google Drive (and please correct me if I am wrong, but that's what I remember since the last time this discussion was had). Google only examines files that were shared with other users or were made accessible to others through a shareable link. Which, sorta makes sense, because that's how a lot of people shared illegal content or streamed videofiles (sort of like a personal youtube). And if you don't share those files with anyone and just keep it as your personal cloud drive, I don't think they examine it. >why on earth would they allow him to use gmail or android? Google is essentially your mail service (gmail), video platform (youtube), cloud storage (gdrive), and tons of other completely separate services. In physical world, violation of terms of one of the services leads you to being banned only from that service, unless criminal law gets involved. If the law gets involved, then the law can get you banned from using quite a lot of services. But until the law makes the judgement, being banned from a grocery store cannot automatically and without any recourse get you banned from your bank, your car insurance, your mail service, and many other things. I guess my point on the latter is that no private business (but law) should be able to prevent a person from using multiple completely unrelated vital services. Here are a few scenarios I thought of that would illustrate how it would work: * An airline banning you for being an asshole on a flight by adding you to a denylist used by other airlines as well? That's congruent with my idea, because it is all within the same service (airlines), and it won't be done automatically. *A judge completely blocking you from flying by locking you up for participating in terrorist activities? Sure, because the law did it after an investigation and followed proper legal processes. *Wells Fargo closing down your account because you were an asshole at Kroger when shopping for groceries and got banned from that store? That would be crazy talk. The only difference between the google scenario and the kroger+Wells Fargo scenario is that kroger+WF are not a part of the same company. But would it be acceptable for WF to close down your account if WF and Kroger were a part of the same parent company? In my opinion, it wouldn't be ok.
- Avicebron 5y ago
  I hope I'm not the only one who got a little squeamish at this...I understand the logic, "don't let people transfer/share things that are illegal". But it doesn't sit right that 1) A gigantic private company operating across most of the world/laws/jurisdictions/precedents etc...is in charge of determining (with little to no human oversight) what can and can't be shared between individuals. Who might even be in competing legal jurisdictions. Seems wonky. 2) that it's commonly accepted that they get to look into it period. It's similar to having every package/letter you ever send opened and looked through and judged (ik postal services sometimes scan) but I can't imagine they open every single envelope
  - filoleg 5y ago
    >But it doesn't sit right Your argument makes sense, and I share your feelings on an emotional level, but at this point, the whole argument can be reduced to "sharing video files streamed from google drive is an equivalent of hosting a video on youtube, so the same rules apply", and that's hard to beat. If you want to store whatever material you want for personal consumption, you are welcome to. But if you enable sharing, that's when all those extra rules start applying, because you are effectively turning it into a personal youtube that is still hosted by google, and DMCA strikes and other stuff will apply just the same. Similarly, you can make backup copies of a DVD movie for yourself by burning them onto writeable DVDs. The legality of it is dubious due to copyright law being plain awful at times, but you won't get prosecuted for that if you truly had it only for personal backup reasons. The second you start distributing those DVDs in massive amounts to people, you start inviting a pretty legal trouble to your doorstep. Mind you, I absolutely disagree with the ban of both the historical footage, as well as the whole google account just because of that footage. However, I do believe that making video public via a shareable link or otherwise puts it in the territory where content rules similar to youtube might get reasonably applied.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      >you are effectively turning it into a personal youtube that is still hosted by google Then logically, why should it be available ad free either?

bserge 5y ago

You lose access to everything, yes. Which is really fucking dumb.

mig39 5y ago

In the link, he says that he can't even use his account to post on the support forums, so is using an alternate account. So I assume it's the entire Google account.

whymauri 5y ago

In my anecdotal experience, a locked account == locked everything else. That's why they had to make the post from a different account than the locked one.

theodric 5y ago

The second line of his post indicates that he's unable to post using the email account in question, so I must assume that means that the account in its entirety has been blocked

lom 5y ago

He said it in his description that his email is locked as well.

jms703 5y ago

Another reason to not use Google/Facebook or similar identities to login to a service. You lose access to your Google account, you lose access to all those other services.

Ansil849 5y ago
This is such a crucial point that so many people overlook, even when being cognizant of the risk of storing data on the cloud, somehow SSO integration is many tech-literate users' blind spot.
- harlanji 5y ago
  I had quite the interaction with Twitch about having lost my email domain. I can still stream to the channel but they said “that you believe to be yours”... quite funny because I believe nothing to be mine, but they came out and said that it’s not mine. They acted as though I were upset, and I’m sure many people that they deal with are. But it’s true, these accounts and phone numbers are not ours. The closest thing to ours is private keys for onion host routing which are addresssed as the public key derived from the private key tailed with dot-onion (https://pubkey.onion https://pubkey.onion). And most software works with Tor our of the box via torify. Tested with self-signed HTTPS and XMPP and others have with email. Tor may not be anonymous, but identity ownership is a killer use case. 2022 the year of the onion? I can commit to wrapping all my things going forward.
- numpad0 5y ago
  It feels wrong that we all call it "data" as some sort of replaceable tangible volume, when what it represents are context.
usr1106 5y ago
I used to have many Google accounts (credentials in my password manager). One for gmail, one for every mailing list on goougle groups, one for Google+ etc. For a while they haven't let me use them whithout problems providing a phone number. They force me into some security check-up after logging in which seems to have no way to skip the phone number entry. Less Google for me, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

noisy_boy 5y ago

I have wondered what locked account actually means in context of the mail and its configuration being "active". E.g. I have setup email forwarding in my Gmail so that I always get a copy at another address. When my account is locked, I know I can't connect to Gmail but what happens to the above "workflow"? Does Gmail stop receiving messages / forwarding rules no longer work?

londons_explore 5y ago
Forwarding rules continue to work for 30 days. Then all emails are bounced as 'non existent user'

KorematsuFredt 5y ago

G employee. If you are using G to store anything important and if you do not have an offline backup or some other redundancy please reconsider.

andromeduck 5y ago
Agreed. Cloudsync is a car superior product and supports every cloud service ever and full encryption. https://cloudsync.bdrive.com/ https://cloudsync.bdrive.com/
- ApolloRising 5y ago
  Its great tech but why charge per device to personal users?
  - andromeduck 5y ago
    if you want free there's always https://rclone.org/
  - Someone 5y ago
    Options: - to keep things affordable for those who can afford to buy only a few devices - to extract as much money as possible from those who can afford to buy multiple devices It’s a pricing strategy. That doesn’t have to reflect what it costs them at all, but ideally should match what it’s worth to the customer (if it doesn’t, they either leave money on the table or don’t get sales)
numpad0 5y ago
Do people lose data or lose proof of identity when they have had account(s) banned?
- KorematsuFredt 5y ago
  The biggest hurdle would be actually finding someone to talk to if the account gets banned.

wodenokoto 5y ago

At least “lost gmail access” which is why the cry for help is not posted from the account owning the locked gdrive.

southerntofu 5y ago

What about starting/developing tech coops like those listed on libreho.st?

peakaboo 5y ago

Google could disappear tomorrow and it wouldnt affect my life whatsoever. Its beautiful.