I would understand it if they kicked the customers out of their webstores for physical products. Or if they forbade reselling via license, and had a contractual penalty (where permissible by law). But closing your email accounts? Google (the company that sells phones) and Google (the company that hosts all your digital life) are only incedentally the same entity. It's like your power company also sells toasters, and you resell a toaster on ebay, which they dont like, and then they cut your electricity in retalliation.
It's like if Alphabet bought a company running tollways, and they banned you from using their streets.
Also even if you have more than enough sufficient information to get a lost Gmail back. Send them your state issued drivers license and ID and birth certificate. It is still not enough to get my account back.
What do I honestly do in a situation like that? (After 2 years of failed recovery attempts, hunting down google employees on social media and their work or personal emails)
I got one single Google employee to respond to a help thread I posted on the Gmail help forums. He responded with a question that was already answered in the original post. And it took me 6 months to get there.
Sue them under wiretapping laws to release the information and redirect the emails to a domain you control. It is a federal crime to interfere with communications.
I'm considering suing Apple under the same laws for blocking messages sent from iPhones to my phone number (you can never truly deregister from iMessage. Apple still silently destroys group messages sent to you).
We need to get more serious about the idea that you can't legally withhold correspondence meant for someone else. These tech companies think they're immune from telecom laws but I am not sure the courts would agree.
I know the steps, the class-action was because even after doing all that iMessage would still not properly deregister numbers, and then a memo was leaked revealing that Apple purposefully didn't solve the problem because it lead to people returning to iPhones after trying Android devices
You can't have a mixed group chat between iMessage and SMS. If one person leaves the iMessage ecosystem there's no way to update the group chat to include you.
This is like saying "I was in an IRC channel with friends but I left for Slack and now I don't get their messages"
I tried everything x100 on steroids over the last 2 years. I was strictly ignored and the only thing left for me to do is to go walk in to the Gmail teams office and sit down on a computer and fix it myself.
It is pathetic that someone has to get referred to a reddit user account for help with a Google-related problem. I am guessing Google just isn't that good at this "internet" thing. Maybe someone can help them setup an actual customer support portal, with real employees.
It's more Google really isn't good at this "people" thing. They see people as an issue and try to genericize everything into an algorithm then wonder why it doesn't get popular or run well.
My understand is that customer service is a scalability problem and isn't financially feasible for free services. If they had a support number they would be deluged with the very angry people you see in the product forums. Many of these are people they simply cannot help as a CS rep because they are angry about things like missing or dropped features. And as it turns out, free users are often the most demanding in terms of attention, time and resources.
What they really need is a customer service team that finds these people that are having genuine issues that can be resolved. They'd need the means to reach out and communicate without that person being able to subsequently share contact information with the world.
That said, I don't know what I'd do as a Google employee looking at this guy's situation. If david.smith@gmail.com is dormant and my name and ID say David Smith why should that give me access to that mailbox? How do you verify the contents without violating someone's privacy? We're not asking some tiny ISP to take a quick peek, this is Google and they have a responsibility to all of their users to practice great care. So we can't assume they're telling the truth and neither can Google. This guy's situation sucks but the mistake of turning over the account to the wrong person is catastrophically worse than the bad experience of denying the rightful owner access. This exact situation is why they have recovery options.
I think it's likely they're telling the truth and I do feel bad for them and their situation. I've been there myself with a yahoo account years ago but at the end of the day the only way I could recover it was using something I no longer had. The things in that mailbox that I wanted access to were also things I would be furious at Yahoo for sharing with someone else no matter what their identification or birth certificate said.
There a lot of cases where people would gladly pay for service to get an issue resolved. I'd use that as a hedge against the people who just want to complain for free.
Allow people to purchase a "certificate of service" at a nominal cost when the account is set up, and then charge them a fee when they need service for the product, verifying the request against the original certificate. That should cover the tech support problem.
Agreed. I'm sorry, but the "these are free services, you shouldn't have any expectation of support" excuse seems to be trotted out far too often by Google to whitewash the utter lack of a support org in critical parts of their empire.
The issue, regardless of the financial model of the services, is that (a) these are now critical services for some people & (b) there is utterly no support path in the event something goes wrong.
Charge $100 or $200 or $2500 per suppprt case, refunding part of the difference if it turns out to be a Google system problem, and people would still be much happier.
The issue is that there's currently no amount of money you can throw at Google to fix things, and no one besides Google has access to implement a fix. And every system has glitches and corner cases when you're running at the scale Google is.
Lowest tier is $5/month. I know my old company used Google for email. Is there a guaranteed access to support. I saw access to "Forums". Anyone have experience with that.
But then Fastmail is $3/month and you get personal support it seems.
The issue here is that even with a paid phone number, what could the support rep do?
Sure, they could provide advice, but would you want some stranger who happens to work on Google Support India the ability to look into your account? To reset your password?
It's best they provide buttons for you to fix your own problems than choose privileged people who can invade your privacy to fix problems for you.
Not even if you get locked out. I tried asking them why my paid gsuite account couldn't be used like a normal google account and all they could do was copy+paste some response about how great paying for google was and that I wasn't paying for anything else.
Alphabet REALLY needs to work on their customer service, especially for paying customers.
I don't trust having email on a domain I don't control (you can't move a gmail account to another provider like you can a phone number). Yet if you want to take advantage of all the features of google home/music/youtube you have to use a normal gmail account.
Business Gsuite data is also more tightly controlled, which means some integrations necessary to make things work properly aren't possible.
For example, calendar data of Gsuite customers is sensitive enough the assistant AI can't access it, so if you ask the Google assistant "what's my next appointment", it can't answer.
Yeah, and I've been toying with the idea. What sucks is I'd love to use Google home for flight info but because I use gsuite it wont read emails or calendar. Guess I could have all my email forwarded to a dummy google account just for that.
You can but it limits what you can do. Example, I can use my Google home with my apps account except I can't use calendar, flight info, or be a part of my existing google music/youtube red family group.
I have found google chaps do come out of the wood work when you post irrefutable evidence of a 'problem', although whether that is even possible is another thing. Try IRC, although it didnt work for me at all, I do believe they said that if the right guy at the right time is on it, he might be able to help.
I have a similar situation. I had created an account just for a specific client to share files via google drive. Don't remember the password any more and can't access those files. No recourse.
Learn a valuable lesson and move on. I lost some important data to a free service many years ago and now I don't rely on anything that I can't pay for with a credit card. I figure if something goes horribly wrong maybe the credit card company could work the fraud angle for me. Probably not but it makes me feel a little better.
Yeah it's good option for those wanting to get into self hosting. Another option is https://mailcow.email which is a more recent entrant to the email self hosting space.
i very much suspect this story is to try and shut the stable door on exactly that bolted horse.
with gmvault now floating at the top of the page i can imagine the gmail adminstrators on the phone to the account managers every few minutes relaying just how many hundreds of terabytes a second in backup bandwidth closing the accounts is now costing them.
100 million users downloading 15Gigs of email each is not "trivial", even if its $0.00000001 per MB
And gmail has 1 Billion monthly active users, so that is quite likely a conservative guestimate.
I don't think its implausible that shutting down these guys accounts will cost google a 7 or 8 figure sum in (non budgeted) backbone bandwidth charges alone.
Google peers with many national and regional ISPs at exchange points. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm guessing a fairly significant portion of their traffic does not go over traditional "tier 1" networks and rather is handed off directly to ISPs.
Not a big one if you e.g. have someone else provide the backing email service.
I bought my own domain back in 2002 or so, and note it's important that you own it*, and then set up email with a quality shared hosting service company. At some point I noticed this well recommended Fastmail company, which was lots cheaper than the shared hosting, the other features of which I no longer needed. Which has now been providing my email service for years, and I note they also do contacts and calendaring. And have really good customer service. And are reliable, including not having GMail's sometimes too aggressive spam filtering. Etc.
Although if I remember correctly they were pants at accepting notifications from Fanfiction.net, which is not something I really worked at fixing since it prompts me to regularly check my backup Hotmail (Live, whatever) account. Which emphasizes one thing, if you do this, make very sure to maintain another email account in case you have any problems with your personal domain.
You also ought to get treated more seriously by various important others if you have your own domain instead of a generic GMail or other big free email provider account.
On top of everything mentioned by hga, as the name implies, the web UI is fast, and their calendar is good.
Another nice thing with owning the domain is that you can set up a catch-all, then use unique addresses to sign up for stuff. I sign up with <service>@mydomain.com now, so when <service> sells my address, I know who to blame.
I still receive stuff on my old gmail, so I do POP retrieval from Fastmail.
For me the big pain is moving off all the stuff referencing a *@gmail.com address to something else. There is no real such thing as 'phone number portability' in email. Even if you forward everything, you can still lose the forwarding.
The 'phone number portability' of email is you owning the domain, and pointing the mx record to whatever mail provider you like. To switch providers you simply register an account somewhere else and change your dns record.
By starting with an "@gmail.com" address you willingly give that up, but that's not the system's fault.
I did this a few years ago. I don't know if I'm 100% transitioned but I'm just about.
I setup the forward from <name>@gmail.com to <name>@<mydomain>. I then flagged things that are coming from gmail and slowly updated addresses on those websites to point at <name>@<mydomain>. You don't have to be in a hurry to get it done you just have to be working towards the end goal.
I set up my new domain email address as an email forwarder to Gmail, and used it like that for nearly a year. When signing up for things, I'd just use that address instead of the Gmail address.
When I moved to FastMail, I set up that email address to go to FastMail instead. Most of my inbound mail instantly came with it. It's been a couple weeks, I still get stuff on my Gmail. So I check it once or twice a day still at the moment, and when I get something from some website, I go log into that account, and change my email address.
Fastmail can also pull in from your gmail account. You could do that and tag the emails. It might be a good time saver and save you from having to do manual checks.
Yeah, I know. But my concern is if it's 'too easy' to just handle my Gmail messages in Fastmail that I'll procrastinate changing over the accounts properly.
Once I get down to a minimal amount I'll forward and tag.
I did it, and it's less pain than you think as long as you have a year or two to do it. Try fastmail and just start replying to all emails from your personal domain.
I use a dot io domain name for one of my email addresses, but I've always been slightly worried about the possibility of my domain registrar being socially engineered. If someone gets into my domain account, that could lead to ATO and change of the MX records. Should I be concerned? Is there a "best practices" dot io domain registrar that won't allow this to happen?
Might also be worth using a very long (1 week - 1 month?) TTL for your DNS MX records. This is no guarantee but it should buy you some extra time over the default which could be only an hour or so.
Similar problem, a family member lost their gmail account and none of the standard ways work to get it back.
As proof I would welcome Google employees to study the past mail of other family member mail headers including mine to give them absolute proof of whose account it is.
Lost access to my old Gmail account recoveries cause it had been over 4 years since the last login. My M$ account recovery is not possible despite opening about 10+ cases with their engineers who fail to respond 100% of the time. And when they did it was automated. So without either recovery available ill just go to type in all the info I have about my old Gmail. Automated response forms with more automated rejections. I've tried it easily 300+ times at this point. Doesn't work.
Agreed. As a comparison mobile phone credits in the UK seem to last at most 6 months, then the company close the account, resell the number, and eat your credit. And that's for paid service.
It mentions that most people made up brand-new accounts to run the deal from. If Google's initial investigation showed only brand-new accounts, it might explain their move to delete the accounts entirely. They reversed the decision when they realized real accounts were getting caught up as well.
Yeah, let's be honest, if you're running a scheme like this, you probably have a hunch that it may not be the most legal thing ever... why the hell would you use your real account with all your information instead of making a new dummy account?
They probably assumed it was a bunch of fake account and deleted them all in one big swoop, but once they realized a few of them were real, they restored them...
Just the media blowing things out of proportion, and for some reason everyone's defending these people who were doing something clearly very shady and wrong.
I do agree though that the thought of losing access to all your data is scary, and people should definitely do takeout and be more conscious about it, but in this case specifically, it was hardly Google's fault.
Google is at the end of the day a service, and if you go on their lawn and start shitting all over it, what do you expect will happen?
They reversed because they got a ton of bad press for it. They've been banning accounts with no recourse for years now, and will continue to do so until people speak out loudly enough against it. Maybe then at least they could allow those banned to export their data.
...However, to me it feels like its not so much that google killed off access to email as if it was a separate product...Rather, the physical device that google sells (and its associated platform a la Play store) are dependent on an identity mechanism...And the identity mechanism was what google was trying to shut down...It so happens of course that the identity mechanism that google chose to use (and has chosen to use for their android-based phones) is one's gmail address. THIS begs the question, if there was no such dependency (like one's gmail address), could google have exerted such power in shutting down these people's access? I'll admit I've traditionally been a fan of android phones...but this just struck me as way too much power, and scary.
Yeah, i might still need a semi-"throw away" google/gmail account to use my phone, etc. But as far as one of my "identity mechanisms", I'm starting to look at alternatives such as fastmail.com (which I just started a trial account with) for my main email. If anyone can suggest other alternatives - for quality (non-free) mail providers beyond just fastmail - I'm all ears.
The "identity mechanism" is actually your "Google account", gmail and the other google accounts used to be separate. But some one had the bright idea to force G+ on everyone by forcing them to merge all accounts, thus drawing audience from gmail and youtube. A really swell move.
If google wanted to they could provide oauth like identity only service.
Google isn't just Gmail and Youtube anymore though. Maybe it was 5-10 years ago, but now there are dozens of products. Music, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Android.
All of those require an account. You're basically implying that they should have a separate account for every one of their services, which makes absolutely no sense...
Then, back when there are just two things, merging them into one was maybe not so good of a decision, but at this point, having a single account makes much more sense from a user experience point of view.
Perhaps it makes sense for Google to have one account system for all their services, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for people trying to use those services to have them all linked together. It's kinda creepy, honestly, and it really makes me reluctant to use any of Google's services.
I could theoretically register a separate account for any one of those. The thing is. I should be given the option of not connecting all of those. Separation of concerns.
>It's like your power company also sells toasters, and you resell a toaster on ebay, which they dont like, and then they cut your electricity in retalliation.
Could be worse. Google are really tight with the Obama White House. If they're serious enough about maintaining relations with a Trump Whiter House, you might get a digital death sentence for calling a certain man a 'tiny-fingered, cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing sh#tgibbon' :)
Of course, that name-calling person was a Scot, but Google is everywhere and everything…
The fact that it has to be a covered by news really sucks.
I ran a website that got our AdSense account shut down for what Google claimed was invalid clicks. I never clicked on our ads and we made little money from AdSense (we had other ad networks). Since my personal Gmail account was used as a backup email my personal account's AdSense account was also banned. They won't reinstate either account or give any more details.
I don't use any Google Cloud services because I'm afraid that all of my accounts would get shut down for any reason and I would lose all of that data.
AdSense is a giant hypocrisy, they tell you you can't have ads in the first part of the screen on mobile, but you look at Google search results and they so exactly that.
Then, there is a set of guidelines you have to comply, which is great, except it says this "Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site" and also says you can't copy content from other sites, they are basically describing Google search page.
who watches the watchmen?
They obviously provide a good service with Google search, that's out of discussion.
Search is the one you should really stop using when possible. I've found DuckDuckGo's general search to be only okay, but bang patterns are very helpful since I usually want to search stack overflow or another site directly anyhow.
Google search quality has dropped drastically. Any attempt to look up a technical issue results in StackOverflow inconsistently in the top 5, with maybe 20 different shitty mirror sites.
Google has lost their magic. I'm actively migrating away from their services at this point.
> Google search quality has dropped drastically. Any attempt to look up a technical issue results in StackOverflow inconsistently in the top 5, with maybe 20 different shitty mirror sites.
Are you logged in? Maybe their learnt wrong things about you? (For me swiftkey has that problem, had to switch away from it as the more it learnt, the worse the suggestions would become)
Search is the one thing I still need from google. Technical things result in 50% stackoverflow and 50% blog posts or forum posts of people discussing the same problem. For things with multiple meanings google usually gets the right one. I'd love to use DDG, but whenever I try it, I end up having to use bangs to get what I want.
Yep, same has happened to me. Right before I was going to get my first payout of $100 or so, I got my AdSense account killed for invalid click activity. I never intentionally clicked, and the one time I accidentally did I reported it to them (which is what they said to do in the event of an accidental click). I turned over information, offered them server logs, etc., but never got anything more than stock replies that my request for reconsideration was denied and they wouldn't tell me anything more detailed.
That happened a number of years ago and I haven't had them kill any of my other accounts for any reason, but it remains a concern and I certainly don't trust them.
The hard math with ads is that Google keeps perhaps 30%, and from that they pay themselves and their costs. So there's not very much customer service you can offer on accounts that earn them $100 to $300/year. And there really is an enormous amount of real fraud.
That's not how it works, though. In business, you always factor in the cost of everyone, across the board. Ten minutes on the phone with technical support with any small software company is certainly worth more than the paltry $20 license you paid for.
Just like hotels factor in the price and rate of stolen towels when pricing their rooms for everyone, Google, like any other business, makes money from some of te customers and loses money on others. We don't get to pick only the winning horses. Your grocery store doesn't ban you because you dropped a dozen eggs and then left with a 10¢ stick of gum - they price it in.
Being good at business is, in large part, only serving profitable customers. There is no legal right to purchase services from SAAS companies that said company doesn't care to provide.
>Being good at business is, in large part, only serving profitable customers.
I strongly disagree with that notion. Even if you know in advance who will be profitable, you often gain more customers by servicing all customers (or at least the vast majority).
Two examples:
1. A lot of internet companies are built on servicing everyone, and extracting money from a tiny subset (github is one example).
2. If one in every thousand customers costs me more in support than they pay, that's one thing. But becoming known for good support will be more profitable than becoming known for kicking customers who ask too many questions.
We find it to be very good business to provide amazing customer service to all users, free or paid. It results in better word of mouth advertising. It's so appreciated by users that they will evangelize for your service, assuming it's something they use regularly.
The cost for support is low too, relatively speaking. Obviously not all businesses have enough margin to consider this, some support is more expensive than others etc.
Oh it's perfectly fine to only have certain customers.
The problem is when you accept customers and then don't provide proper service.
They could require $1k or $10k per month minimum volume. But they don't. They accept everyone and then stonewall at random, sometimes even when people are high-volume.
Yep, I'm going to be migrating my email off of gmail soon as well.
#1 rule when you get as large as Google is not to burn your users trust. This was about a big of a screw-up as you could do there. You should keep your different services separate and isolated and only ban in the areas of business where it impacts things negatively.
To what? Gmail is so effortless to use. I've been considering running my own email servers because of things like this (and privacy) but I have never found anything as good.
It was the other way around for me. But regardless, the best part of owning your own domain - if you don't like your mail provider, just change the MX records to a new one.
Heck, I could run my own mail server if I wanted (been there, don't want to go there again, but could if I really HAD to).
I didn't use the migration, so can't speak to that. I just had to set up the DNS entries on my domain. Granted, there are a fair few (MX, TXT, SPF, SRV, A, CNAME..), but there's good documentation and it only took me about 30 minutes to set everything up.
Of course, I only have one account (lastname@personaldomain.com) and therefore didn't have to deal with setting up multiple users, migrating data etc. I also set up 2FA for my account.
I did all this over one weekend (from looking at different providers, to signing up for O365, configuring etc), and haven't had to touch anything since. The only question I had was related to billing (I went from a month-to-month to a yearly account) and that was answered quickly by a real human being.
Have you tried Fastmail? I've found them to be very good for many years now, although if you don't like their UI and are sort of old school, try their classic.fastmail.fm older interface.
Another choice is Office365. I use my own domain, with O365 providing the email services. I pay $60 a year for the cheapest plan (with Exchange). I migrated from Google over a year ago, and have slowly moved all my accounts to my new email. It's not something you can do overnight, but if you stick to it, it's not hard to do.
One time I had a question, I was able to use the web interface to request support, and a real human called me back in 10 minutes. It wasn't a very complex question, so I can't say if he was super knowledgeable, but he certainly seemed like he knew the platform, and was able to answer my question in just a few minutes.
Oh, and I know this is a throwaway account, but I'm not a shill for MS. This is just my personal experience with O365, and YMMV - it's worked well enough for me.
Microsoft will happily send you up a creek if you are a large paying enterprise. Don't think you'll get useful support if you pay $60 a year. Their cloud stuff breaks all the time and the typical support offer is to wait and see if it's better tomorrow.
Why does Google care about the trust of scammers? Some customers are not worth the effort. This time it was a mass phone scalping scheme, next time it might be a fraudulent click scheme. Google is better off if people like that never use one of their products again.
It's as if some person kicked out of a store for shoplifting swore they'd never shop there ever again. Good!
Because they falsely accuse people of things, often—especially with AdSense—and that's it, you have zero recourse, your account is permanently dead. There are a ton of people who have been accused of invalid click fraud on AdSense and got banned, but who never clicked their own ads. The common Google and Google fanboy reply is to dismiss those claims and say people are lying, but I can tell you from personal experience that while maybe some are, not all are.
Google's Adsense is a fraud outright. I run a small news website where few people contribute. Almost all content is original. Adsense never approved by website claiming the site has no original content.
The answer is to work on the accuracy of the process, not to throw up their hands and stop trying to ban scammers.
For this story in particular did anyone come forward to say that they had been banned that didn't participate in the scalping scam?
There's a culture of impunity out there on the internet were people think they can cheat the system and nothing will ever come it (think manufactured spending for example). Well, sometimes something does come of it. Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time.
They will never be accurate enough, because it costs too much. The easier and more just solution is to just ban people off of the ad platform, and leave the gmail & other services alone.
If there is email abuse, then you ban from gmail, youtube abuse, from youtube, etc.
Buying a piece of hardware and reselling something you paid full sticker price for is now cheating the system? That's quite an expansive definition you have.
Sure, but if you steal a piece of candy from a store, they don't burn down your house and remove your mailbox. And delete every record of your existence.
Prevent them from ordering another phone from the Google store? Totally, but this went beyond that.
It'd be like losing your voting rights due to getting a speeding ticket.
Google is technically right here but the reason you're seeing such a visceral reaction is that people care about their data a lot and having a relatively unrelated event wipe that out is a big overreach.
No, it doesn't need to be proportionate. They aren't the government. If you try to cheat me and I catch you, it is totally my right, totally reasonable, rational even, for me to decide I never want to do business of any sort with you again.
Sure, and it's totally reasonable, rational even, for other customers to see what Google is doing and react by choosing not to use their services. Nobody is saying Google overstepped their bounds legally; yes, they are totally allowed to choose who their customers are.
That said, if you as a company are going to completely destroy someone's online life over a single incident, then it's totally fair for others to be weary of using your services.
Having been using ddg for the past year, I can say that its results are, unfortunately, noticeably worse than google's. For a lot of technical searches I end up resorting to google.
I started using Bing. My main problem isn't privacy or bad news, its one company dominating search - hopefully this will help out the competition. + you get gift cards :)
Me too! I use !g so much that I end up inadvertently typing it when searching on google.com. The day of reckoning is near - use DDG as intended or just switch back to using Google as the default search.
But you're using it as intended. I'd much rather type "!gi blah" or "!gn blah" than move my hands to the mouse/trackpad to click on the Google Images or News link.
I use bookmark keywords to get access to a cluster or folder of bookmarks instead of mousing. Also not interested in making 9000 bookmarks to reproduce bang functionality: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Plus you still have to type "bookmark" <wait> "search"
I'm not sure what you mean by wait. It really Works For Me (TM) here. I just type im foo in the address bar and it goes straight to Google images search for foo. Same for maps, Wikipedia and some obscure websites which will never be available at DDG :)
> I find that I end up `!g`ing every search eventually.
Often it is good, sometimes better than Google but in some settings I too use !g frequently. I still try to use it without !g first to give some search traffic to ddg.
I hope they can use the data to improve future searches.
I migrated away from Google years ago after a similar incident. I use Fastmail for email. It's decent enough. I am happy to pay for services. I still use Google's search, calendar, browser and location services and Google Play for my android devices. I use YouTube frequently as well. I think the big problem are gmail and drive. By not using Gmail and Google Drive you will prevent something as bad as this from hurting you. My calendar isn't that important to me. If I lost my Google account I'd lose my apps and movies. It's not good, but it's not as big a deal as losing access to my email and personal files.
My cloud storage has always been Dropbox, it's always been great.
I backup my cloud storage (and disk storage) with Arq.
Yes, because if they close my account I can still use google search. My goal is not so much about harming them by avoiding them, but rather to not be dependent on them.
Presumably it's more moving away from everything that stores data they care about. I don't care if I lose my search history, that'd be annoying because Google would get dumber, but ultimately whatever. Losing emails or photo backups or Drive though, is stuff I care about.
Sadly, yes. It's like calling a congressional representative and not having donated enough money to their campaign for your words to be worth their time, yet it's somehow even less fair and accountable.
It happens to me 5% of the time : if the results are not what you expect, you can still ask DuckDuckGo to use google, just add !g to your search (or !gm for Google Maps, or !yc for Hacker News etc.) So userful!
More here : https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Yes. This makes ddg useful as a default search engine even if you decide that you always want to use Google Search, because that you can use all the other bangs.
Being able to search "on the fly" wikipedia, youtube, google maps etc. is very valuable
I find that it still falls down with a lot of programming questions, but in those cases I can always punt out to google. Aside from that, I think it works plenty well.
I use it as a primary search engine on all devices. Every now and then I'd fallback to !g or !gi if a particular search is particularly bad, typically to learn that Google isn't much better. But the fact those commands are there makes it super low friction :)
Is anyone still using StartPage? Haven't seen it mentioned but it's been a great alternative for me. I use DDG on my iphone since safari won't let you set StartPage as the default.
So you're upset because they had a system that automatically banned people intentionally trying to break their system by running a massive illegal reselling scheme? These people were far from being innocent little bystanders who were hit collaterally. Yet, Google still pardoned them and restored their account EVEN when what they did was clearly not only against the ToS but actually probably against the law too.
Yes, I agree it's a scary thought, I will automatically takeout my data and keep personal backups, but let's be honest here, those people in my opinion very well deserved what they got. You can't shit on someone's lawn and expect them to welcome you in their house.
Citation needed. In the past decade, tech companies have managed to perpetuate the toxic notion that they can attach strings to your physical purchases. Despite their aspirations, legally you are free to do as you like with a physical product once you legally purchase it.
But they have the right to refuse the sell in the first place, which I would not have blamed them if they did, but swinging the ban hammer AFTER the fact is a bit harsh in this case.
Google needs to realize that their services (such as Gmail) are critical to a lot of people. I understand why they don't want to offer free support for a free product, they would get flooded with useless support requests. However, they need to offer a paid support option. Something like $25 per support request call. This would reduce the calls to only truly urgent and necessary issues.
It's possible to get something similar using Google Apps and a custom domain. But they need to start offering paid support for the free services (@gmail.com) as well.
If you're a paid Gmail user, and by that I mean you're using "GSuite" or whatever it's called at the moment, the thing with a custom domain, it includes 24/7 phone support.
I don't think there's a way to start paying for your normal Gmail account (and have ads go away, get phone support, probably some other bonuses?), but there really should be.
Are you saying Google loses money on gmail? I can't see that being possible. It displays ads. It harvests incredible amounts of information, on "users" as a whole and individual users. It's a treasure trove of data on how people engage with each other, businesses, etc. It's a stepping stone into the large Google ecosystem where you can and do pay for things.
Gmail is just as valuable to Google as it is to any individual user. I'm not sure why people's gmail accounts would ever be banned. If people do something illegal, prosecute them. Even if they're found guilty, it's not like the court is going to delete their email address or take away where they live.
It wasn't illegal, per se: just against their terms of use.
Probably much harder to litigate than criminal activity, so I can vaguely understand the use of banhammers, even if they were clearly unwarranted in this case.
> It's possible to get something similar using Google Apps and a custom domain.
Not necessarily. I tried to integrate Google's services with a custom domain once before and the previous owner of the domain had done the same thing and I could not figure out how to dissociate the two. There was no way for me to contact customer support about it, and I eventually gave up trying so that I wouldn't run into exactly this kind of fucked up crap from Google.
But I also feel like Google treats people's accounts without a lot of respect. They've successfully integrated into every part of people's lives, and people have a Google Account at the core of their digital identity.
It would be better if Google killed services offered one by one instead of killing the entire account. It would be inconvenient not being able to pay via Credit Card with my Google Account, but it is nothing compared to losing all of my email/purchases/cloud stored files/etc.
I don't think you can suggest a company treats people's accounts with a lot of respect when they allow automated processes to bulk ban them by the hundreds, and offer no appeal process other than making a PR nightmare for them on blog sites.
The problem now also is that you can't upgrade your free account to paid one. Then you could have two addresses to one account - your initial free one and one on custom domain.
Currently when you get Google for Work (or however it is called now) you remain with two separate accounts. You can sync data if you work on it, but whatever you buy via one account stays with that one account.
The whole thing reeks of overly aggressive automation. And while Google has reverted these cases, i fear they have not changed their automation to match.
I am right now looking at two stories of people that has trouble with Google because of some security system or other has picked up "oddities" in the payment activity.
Which part of the automation failed? It appears to have identified with perfect accuracy an organized ring of phone scalpers. I think their account abuse team should be roundly congratulated.
I just don't see the need to depend on Google for anything. They have a good search engine, even though it's ad-choked. (Search for "credit card".) But for everything else, there's an alternative. IMAP for mail, paid backup services, Github. I don't even have Google enabled on my Android phone; at initial power-up, when it asked for a Gmail sign up, I clicked "later" and then deleted the "first time" program.
Google went bad a few years ago. Google had to pay $500,000,000 to DoJ to avoid criminal prosecution in the "sportsdrugs.com" case.
"Federal agents created www.SportsDrugs.net, designed to look “as if a Mexican drug lord had built a website to sell HGH and steroids,” Mr. Whitaker said in his account of the sting… At the agents’ direction, Mr. Whitaker said he signaled his illegal intent to Google ad executives, including Google’s top manager in Mexico. As a tape recorder ran, he walked Google executives through the illegal parts of the websites. He said he told ad executives that U.S. Customs had seized shipments, for example, and that one client wanted to be “the biggest steroid dealer in the United States.”"
"Mr. Page, now Google’s chief executive, knew about the illicit conduct, said Mr. Neronha, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island who led the multiagency federal task force that conducted the sting. “We simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on,” he said in an interview after the August settlement…".
Sadly, it appears Google has abandoned their former motto, "Don't be evil". This is completely sociopathic and amoral and a human had to have approved the action.
It's overwhelmingly likely that without the massive media backlash, Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise defenseless customers. I don't say this lightly and it pains me to say it but they need to be regulated.
> This is completely sociopathic and amoral and a human had to have approved the action.
How is it sociopathic and amoral to ban scalpers?
> Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise defenseless customers.
Defenseless doesn't mean innocent, and there's no evidence that these users were falsely accused or otherwise innocent of the violations they committed.
First, by your own definition "scalping" is nothing more than choosing to sell property that you have legally acquired, and there is nothing wrong with that. Second, even granting that in this case reselling the phones violated Google's terms of service, the punishment is disproportionate to the violation. Speeding is illegal, but confiscating the cars of speeders and permanently revoking their licenses would be absurd.
You are incorrect. The people that were punished were people that ordered phones on behalf of someone else and had those phones directly shipped to that someone else.
Buying something with the sole intention of reselling it for profit is the literal definition of scalper.
The words you're looking for are mastermind and pawns. The pawns took the fall (as they usually do), and the mastermind didn't get hit.
So you're arguing that you don't own the phone you purchase outright? Your argument for scalping falls a bit flat: When it comes to (concert) ticket scalping, you don't own the performance, you're purchasing the ability to view the performance at the given time. When it comes to a phone, you're purchasing the phone (not simply the ability to use the phone) and you should be able to do whatever you want as long as its legally allowed.
"ownership" has nothing to do with why scalping is frowned upon / policed. Scalping is a problem because the goal of scalping is to buy something that's limited in supply so that it can be resold at a higher markup. It's purely an issue because supply is limited, it has nothing to do with ownership.
Concerts are always limited in supply, which is why scalping is prevalent there more than most other things. If tickets were infinite in supply nobody would care about concert scalpers, that wouldn't exist.
And the reason this matters to places selling things limited in supply is that scalpers hurt consumer satisfaction and generate negative impressions of the seller due to greedy opportunists that were otherwise outside of their control. Thus why they place limits on how many you can buy until supply is high enough (like in this case how Google had a limit of buying 5 devices - enough for most families, not enough for re-sellers)
I never really understood this distinction... why can't you similarly say that "you should be able to do whatever you want <with your ability to view the performance> as long as it is legally allowed"?
It's the ownership that's important. You can consider scalping a specific form of the generalized issue of doing something outside of an agreement of something you don't own, e.g. subletting a room on Airbnb if a rental agreement forbids it. If you own a phone (or some other object), unless there is a law that specifically forbids some action, at least in the US you are able to do whatever you want with it, because you're not renting the right to use the phone, you are the owner of the phone. That's why in this case, it's not fair that Google turns off service for purchasing a phone and then selling it to someone else (a reseller in this case) because they person who purchased the phone is now the owner and selling their phone to another entity is not against the law. In fact, there are laws that specifically allow this.
Innocent? No company that uses a double Irish tax structuring scheme to avoid paying billions has any right to cast guilt on consumers who legally purchase phones and take advantage of minor arbitrage opportunities.
If you truly feel that wiping those people's personal communications records and blocking their email is a reasoned response then I sincerely hope you are never in a position of power.
> Innocent? No company that uses a double Irish tax structuring scheme to avoid paying billions has any right to cast guilt on consumers who legally purchase phones and take advantage of minor arbitrage opportunities.
That has no bearing on the issue at hand. Just because entity A is guilty of X doesn't magically make entity B innocent of Y.
If powerful entity A is guilty of X on a massive scale and then punishes weaker entity B for engaging in X on a small scale it makes A even more contemptible.
> No company that uses a double Irish tax structuring scheme to avoid paying billions has any right to cast guilt on consumers who legally purchase phones and take advantage of minor arbitrage opportunities.
What guilt is being cast here exactly? The company used automated tools to disable accounts that were found to breach their ToS, likely the majority of which were bots.
I mean it's one thing to complain if these people were false positives, but they actually weren't.
What happened to these people sucks. I get that. But you make it sound as if someone at Google specifically targeted these people's accounts on purpose, when it's significantly more likely that they were just trying to disable bot accounts for scalpers and didn't realize some people were using their real accounts to help scalpers.
Do you think they are stupid enough to not realize how bad the backlash from this would be?
>"The company used automated tools to disable accounts that were found to breach their ToS, likely the majority of which were bots."
In the US, there's a concept called right of first sale that protects people's ability to resell what they buy to others. Sales contracts preventing resale have lost many times in courts. From my perspective Google trying to prevent "scalping", as you put it, is already overreach, regardless of what verbiage they might have shoved in their TOS or the massive legal resources they can deploy to get their way.
Furthermore deactivating someone's gmail without even letting them export their data is profoundly destructive on the victim's lives.
> Sadly, it appears Google has abandoned their former motto, "Don't be evil"
It was at a time Balmer made Microsoft look bad.Now that he is out, Google looks as bad as Microsoft, even worse, at least when you have a issue with a Microsoft product there is the community and some kind of support.
Good to hear. I think the whole event was a net good for everyone, based on how many HN commenters responded to the news by offloading as much of their data off google servers as possible.
Glad to see google doing good by undoing their own evil.
Anecdotally, this news is what finally pushed me to set up automatic backups, and I can speak for many of peers for whom this was the final motivator as well. I'd be VERY curious to see their internal metrics (data egress volume over time, etc), and my intuition as someone in the business of data analytics/strategy, this sort of reversal likely has some chuckle-worth KPIs behind it.
You could also sign up for Google Suite on your personal domain.
I used to be on Fastmail and started running into serious deliverability issues. I'd send emails that'd never be received and people would send me emails that'd never show in my inbox.
I spent a month trying to get their support to figure out what was wrong, but the response was just "there's nothing wrong" the entire time.
Used to love Fastmail, but can't recommend it to anyone that depends on their email.
can you tell me the ticket number? I'd love to look into what happened there. Too late for you, but maybe we can make sure things are easier for the next person.
Ticket 796081. Also ran into lots of trouble with calendar. Other tickets I had trouble with that weren't resolved were 706457, 611829, 598481, 564293, and 541661.
Migrating to Fastmail is really simple from Gmail as they have an IMAP import tool and you can set all mail to forward and delete from Gmail to your Fastmail account. I set up Fastmail yesterday after seeing the news about the Google account disabling yesterday. It took a couple hours to migrate all of my mail since I have had my Gmail account since 2008.
Yeah, I mean, for Google the damage is already done, many of these customers won't trust Google again, plenty of HNers or readers of news sites will consider alternatives as well. At this point they're just stopping the bleeding from their perspective.
When you can't get your account reactivated unless your plight ends up going out over Associated Press, the company deserves no kudos for finally fixing it.
Outside of the HN bubble, millions and millions of people use Google products and have no reason to treat this as the straw that breaks the camel's back.
For one, a lot of businesses are dependent on google services like email because there aren't many alternatives that can match google's price and sprawling integration.
But it would be good for this info to reach a wider audience. It's frustrating--Why can't THESE stories be the ones Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: by grandma and not the ones about chemtrails and Obama hiding illegal aliens in UFOs?
Do u think people stop checking fb news feeds to get out of filter bubble or promoted news due to this election result (does not matter which side you are from). Or did anyone in the wider population have 1password or use 2FA... People are ‘Security Fatigue’
I am aware of how much smaller of a percentage of users will be affected outside of HN. But given the exponentially wider audience of say, an AP story, we can assume at the very least, multiples of the size of the group of HN people who will switch, will switch after seeing the news story.
Those you say will switch are themselves a very small proportion of the people who will become enraged by the story but in the end change nothing and continue to use Google products.
To me, the key takeaway from this article isn't the fate of these relatively few specific people. They did something that was (probably) wrong and Google's response might have been disproportionate, but was arguably their right and close to reasonable.
What should be concerning to most people is that almost everybody depends on so many of Google's (and other companies) services in the cloud and you can have your entire life removed with absolutely zero recourse unless you get media attention. Google doesn't even offer human customer support if your account gets banned and you want to throw $50 or $100 in their face to speak get somebody's undivided attention for just 5 minutes to resolve the issue.
That's the real issue.
Yeah Google, we understand you cant provide free customer service for the entire internet and deal with every crazy person's complaints. But charge a reasonable fee and give desperate people a realistic way to talk to somebody over life-changing problems. Even Google's paid services are often very flawed in this regard.
I totally see your point: this could be prone to abuse. But it's still light years better than the alternative of not offering any support at all to desperate people.
There are people whose companies and lives get totally destroyed when Google randomly bans them from one of their services and then there is literally no way to get in touch with anybody at Google unless you somehow manage to get media attention.
We're all smart and realistic here: we understand that Google can't offer free tech support for the entire world and deal with every crazy person out there. That's why charging a nominal fee is suggested. Should it be $1, $5, $25 or more? I don't know. But there has to be some way to reach out to a reasonable and smart human being at Google for critical issues.
Absolutely. It is sad that people in hn are condoning this act.
FTA:
Obviously, this is a pretty shady arrangement on all the participants’ parts, and it does warrant a response of some kind from Google.
Buying things discounted that are discounted because you say you'll adhere to certain Terms of Service and then violating those Terms of Service will have consequences.
It's discounted if you hold up your side of the deal and if you don't, then this is what's going to happen.
> Buying things discounted that are discounted because you say you'll adhere to certain Terms of Service and then violating those Terms of Service will have consequences.
That's fine. Terminate contracts with these users then, or sue them for your losses. But throwing away their data is a step too far. It's like finding out that your bank doesn't want to do business with you any more but also that they aren't going to give you your money back.
Google could give these users a data dump, at least.
A Terms of Service violation is a civil matter. Even the courts don't punish contract violators; they only require damages to paid to make the damaged parties whole. Punishments are reserved for crimes, are supposed to be proportional, and you're entitled to justice judged by your peers.
A digital death sentence is the right term for this. In what way is this proportional?
How is Google justified in doing so much more for so much less?
Because this isn't punitive in the search of justice or anything like that. It's just: "You made a deal that said I could do this if you did that. You did that. I did this."
Of course, I happen to love it because scalpers are a blight upon the nation. But that's just me.
Will happily defer to you if you're a lawyer, but no one stopped anyone from transferring a device. An associated service was stopped, and I'm fairly certain that's allowed.
If you're not a lawyer, though, your opinion is as good as mine on law - which is to say, it's worth nothing.
FFS. If you're going to participate in an organized ring to deprive people of buying a scarce item so that you can flip it to your ring leader for a profit so that the ring leader can then mark it up and sell it for considerably more then you deserve what's coming to you.
This isn't just about reselling an individual phone. They knew full well what they were doing was shady.
From a cursory search, I found absolutely no mention of such a law, and the strictest I found is that, in certain states, it's illegal to resell tickets at the venue site. Not only would it be pretty much impossible to enforce such a law, but it goes against other laws like the first sale doctrine mentioned above.
It's good to see my paranoia about depending on a single cloud provider is not entirely misplaced. Losing access to my Google account because of some virtually unaccountable automated process would suck but at least I do frequently export my contacts, email, drive, etc and back that data up to other providers.
The driving force for my mistrust of depending on one cloud provider for everything was getting burned by a hosted email service that I used for everything. Since I didn't control the domain I had no recourse. Taking the lesson learned, I moved to a privately owned domain for my critical stuff and now I can instantly point to another provider (or my own server) of choice.
I'm trying to think of an alternative ecosystem that allows similar level of convenience to the Google ecosystem. Here's the best I could think of: (NOTE: this is for the AVERAGE user, so nothing complex like buying a custom domain)
- Fastmail for email
- Dropbox for data sync/storage
- Switch to iOS devices
My reasoning is that companies focused in one area (such as email or storage) and offering paid accounts will be much more responsive to any issues since it's their core business. And for iOS, it's because there's the option to go to any Apple store and get immediate support for anything. For example, if I'm suddenly locked out of all my Google Play purchases, I'm SOL. With Apple purchases, I can at least go to an Apple store and there's a chance of getting it resolved. That in-person human contact option is very very important and something Google doesn't offer at all.
I have been using exactly this setup for over 3 years (6 years of Dropbox) and I'm very happy with it. It would be great to somehow sync Fastmail and iCloud contacts and calendars but I'm ok with Apple's platform lock currently.
This is so 1984 it's disturbing. I'm a hardcore Google fan with tons of photos of my children saved to their cloud. All of my business-critical, financial, and personal messages are stored up there. Losing access to all that is like losing your basic human rights. It's scary how dependent I am on this one company for being able to participate in the modern world....
They don't care if you resell your pixel phone to a friend or put it on craigslist. They care if you and a thousand other people are being paid to purchase stock for an unauthorized reseller.
Google (and any other product company) wants their products to be sold through authorized channels only so they can manage distribution, keep pricing consistent, and ensure that the devices are legitimate and have not been tampered with before sale.
Customers receiving phones with malware pre-installed is a real problem for companies like oneplus and xaiomi who don't clamp down on unauthorized resellers.
That's a fair point, but the only reason this kind of thing happened is because they purchased their phone via Google from their Google Account, and the consequence, their account being disabled, is really out of proportion with the act of selling the phone to a reseller. I think it would be more fair for Google to limit the ability to purchase products in the future for people known to have done this, but significantly unfair/burdensome to disable their account as their account potentially has their entire life on it. It would be akin to the power company deciding something you did was "bad" and turning off your power, or your landlord kicking you out because of something "bad" they didn't like, regardless of your "bad" action.
Dont you thing of these people who "participate in an organized ring" had a real business - that was scammed they would remain quiet? Take for example PPI insurance scam in UK.
Copied from below:
FFS. If you're going to participate in an organized ring to deprive people of buying a scarce item so that you can flip it to your ring leader for a profit so that the ring leader can then mark it up and sell it for considerably more then you deserve what's coming to you.
This isn't just about reselling an individual phone. They knew full well what they were doing was shady.
Because if you have a bad experience with a Pixel phone, you'll complain about it on social media.
Never mind that it's not their device anymore. Never mind that your problem is because the reseller pried it open and swapped out the battery. Never mind the malware the reseller loaded. Never mind the 30% price premium and "Advanced Warranty" you had to buy, because Google's site was out of stock. Never mind the battery-draining Candy Crunch [sic] game you installed because you mis-clicked.
These days, both Apple and Google are held responsible for anything that happens with their phones, no matter what else goes on in the ecosystem. No wonder they try to control the experience as much as possible.
Great that they did so, but as others are pointing out, with this snafu Google has pointed out a major flaw with having all your eggs in one basket with a company that lacks Chinese Walls between their subsidiaries. As it is unlikely that there will be any regulatory changes, the prudent course of action is to spread your eggs around.
It is terrible that you can't get any help from a human unless you make a big stink and are lucky enough to get press coverage about your issue. PLEASE, please let us pay you money so that we can talk to a human when the products that we depend on, and our businesses depend on, become inaccessible to us.
If it was not publicised that much, the accounts would remain suspended.
Many who use AdSense get their accounts suspended and have almost no chance to figure out what happened and overrule the suspension. When their domain gets blacklisted due to a suspension, they can never use AdSense again.
Can someone explain the scheme to me? I don't quite understand it. I buy a phone from Google, then ship it to NH, they sell it in NH and I make a profit? How? How could it possibly be enough to make it worth it?
Years ago, when Google+ was first launched, you had to enter your birth date to create a Google+ profile. But my friends and I were under 13 at the time, and a few friends had their accounts disabled due to their age. There was a minor fuss about this online, including from people who had accidentally clicked the wrong birth date. (Though they did re-enable accounts if you sent them ID or made a $0.05 credit card purchase.)
As for me, though, I was terrified at the thought that my account could have been disabled, had I entered my actual birth date. Even back then, I had a fair amount of data stored on my Google account. The incident was enough to get me to start downloading data from Google Takeout once in a while.
It's been a while since my last backup, though. I hope this incident serves as a wake-up call to both me and everybody who "owns" a Google account. I also wish that Google would allow at least some disabled accounts to download their data from Takeout: that would make me feel just a little bit safer.
Imagine Google/Apple/Microsoft or any such big business controlling your home appliances via their IoT enabled devices. They can literally kill you by disabling these devices (e.g. room heaters, refrigerators etc) in the time of need. Be warned, say no to "IoT by big corps". I hope, enough people get educated about the dangers posed by this.
This should be a massive wake-up call for anyone using Gmail (i.e. 99% of those who come to HN), and at the very least we should diversify away from using purely Google products, i.e. consider Outlook for business/banking-related emails.
There's no point in trusting them after they did this once, even if they may have reversed it. The fact is they did it once.
I guess I never really "trusted" Google as much as I trust most (rich and leading) nation states to handle my identity trustfully, providing a suitable mechanism (this is often quite expensive) for dealing with clerical or automatic mistakes in a mostly decent way, etc.
I've been a Gmail user since 2004 and have since (like everyone else, more or less) tied my online life around it.
I don't care that much for backups (honestly, I don't store that much super memorable data in the google cloud - I have a separate, offline backup system for that stuff.)
What I do care for is the availability of my personal gmail as a fallback authentication mechanism for these hundreds of online services I've signed up for during the past years.
I would recommend anyone who uses Chrome and its password manager to use the recipe at https://github.com/megmage/chrome-export-passwords to get a list of sites and corresponding passwords. I just printed mine out (all eleven pages). Don't bother storing it on a local drive - it's just another fat target to be stolen.
Up next is going through all those services to see which is critical or non-critical, and how I can get into them if I no longer have access to my primary gmail address. Facebook is probably a big one for most people. (Annoyingly - I tried to add my mobile phone number to FB recently, but at a first attempt I couldn't get it to just be a rescue number, rather than a rescue + spam messages via sms number.)
Some services allow multiple email addresses - for that I guess something like Microsoft's free outlook.com service could be suitable.
I'm also considering removing my credit card details from my Google Account. Seems like you're much more likely to be a target of their automated policing if there's actual money involved. (If they don't want stuff like this to happen, maybe they should invest a little more in that dirty annoying customer management area.)
A lot of people in the comments recommend getting a personal domain, but doesn't that just move the single point of failure to the registrar? For example, quoting NameCheap's TOS: "In the event of termination [..], You agree [..] that Namecheap may take control of any domain name associated with the terminated Services." (https://www.namecheap.com/legal/universal/universal-tos.aspx)
A single company can still wipe your online identity. Is there any solution for that? Maybe getting a domain directly from ICANN somehow?
Just use joker.com or other registrars with sane terms of service. Namecheap (together with GoDaddy et al.) is really close to the bottom of the barrel, and should not be used as a representative example of what good registrar should look like.
You can purchase from a NIC for the TLD, but it's pretty difficult and you would likely still be at the whim of their TOS. It's arguably better to switch to a domain name provider as you can more easily get an SLA that makes termination difficult, and in any case switching to a reputable registrar means your domain getting "unjustly" terminated would be much less likely.
Can someone explain what happened to google. I mean, it was once a company so many of us looked up to and now little by little its becoming the "evil" in their own mantra "don't be evil".
Pretty much every company in the world makes choices, little by little.
Some set of people pretty much always disagree with those choices.
If you make enough choices in a enough of a period of time, over a wide enough area, congratulations, you've now annoyed a lot of people :)
(IE even if Google was to do literally everything that hacker news people want, in the optimal order and way, it would just be some other forum where people are complaining.).
As companies become larger in scope, the number of choices they make, and the likelihood those choices will upset distinct groups of people, grows.
Sadly, pretty much the only thing you can really change is how long the cycle really is.
IE even if you make PR-optimal (for lack of a better term, i mean the choices that upset the smallest set of people) choices, you'll probably just upset 3-5% of people instead of 10-15%.
So you get 15 or 20 years instead of 5.
At some point, people become upset enough, go to the next thing, and the cycle repeats.
You can see this happen in pretty much any group of people, not just companies. Companies are just larger so the timescale is smaller.
All of this is also compounded by the fact that larger companies deal with positive and negative PR campaigns for and against them, which helps change opinion faster one way or the other.
People love to blame shareholders, governments, or whatever, but truthfully, that is just about them disagreeing with the decisions. Look at it from the other perspective - if you did the opposite thing, now those currently-happy people would just be the people who are annoyed. It doesn't change anything, just swaps the set of people. Maybe that set is smaller, but again, that just changes the timeframe.
It's pretty much impossible to be universally loved and large, for any serious length of time, unless you aren't doing anything (again, applies to more than just companies)
Oh give me a break. This isn't some inevitable outcome of physics. They purposefully chose growth at the expense of customer support because it enabled them to accomplish more things that they wanted to do. They looked at the nearly infinite margin of their developed product and figured, hey, even if they lose 5% of that due to shitty customer support, 5% approaching infinity is nothing. And they moved on.
Google chose this route because it was the easiest route to take.
The larger and more successful a company becomes, the greater the distance between senior management and the hierarchy underneath. Once the spotlight of fairness and corporate values is removed, psychopaths amongst middle management are free to rule their minor fiefdoms as they see fit, wreaking havoc along the way until challenged.
True, but I've worked at quite a few large companies now and I haven't once been proven wrong. Conversely, there can be pockets of light dotted throughout the company but the bad departments have the ability to turn the company into a curate's egg.
Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks "I'm going to do some evil today." Everyone has their own definition of the word. And trusting a corporation is never a good idea.
Most of the changes started around 2011, when Larry Page took over as CEO. That's when Google switched from developing open standards to developing walled gardens, killed Google Labs, started disincentivizing 20% time, etc.
(Check out the 10 year stock history for Google, draw a line at April 2011, when Larry Page took over, and notice you have effectively marked the line between Google being a company worth praising, and a company with a meteoric stock price rise.)
I've got to say, Google is one of my favourite companies, but when things like this happen it makes me question if we should allow a single corporation to have this much control over our lives.
I see a lot of comments suggesting FastMail and other email service providers with custom domains. Can someone explain how FastMail differs from Microsoft Office 365 Plans like Business Premium which allows custom domains and exchange because to me Microsoft seems to be the better option with Office suite and OneDrive storage. I'm skeptical thinking whether Microsoft could also ban a paid user's account like this without any prior warning or export option.
"Google may be within its right to take an action — perhaps ban violators from buying more phones or ask them to export their data and move to another provider — but it shouldn’t have the right to completely shut off someone’s digital life instantly, with no warning."
While I don't disagree with the authors position here, if TC want to be seen as a source of quality journalism they really should ensure their "journalists" keep their personal opinions to themselves.
crowd-sourced inventory acquisition program using the consumer Google site. It instructed people to buy phones from the Project Fi site and list the dealer's NH address as their "home address" so phones would be shipped directly to the dealer. The buyers were then paid enough to make a profit on the transaction (probably helped by the fact that NH has no sales tax), and the New Hampshire dealer would later resell the phone at a markup
This is why you should not use Google free services for anything important. Google could turn them off tomorrow. You have no contractual guarantee against that.
Do mail through IMAP. All your devices can sync to a IMAP server. The IMAP server built into Android isn't bad at all. Use Thunderbird on desktops and laptops. Most ISPs offer free IMAP. Or you can get your own domain and use IMAP from a server on it. No ads, too.
> The violation, in a nutshell, involved consumers who bought their phones from Google’s Project Fi mobile operator, then shipped them to a reseller in New Hampshire, a state with no sales tax.
That looks a lot like Google's own tax minimization/avoidance policy, except they do it on a worldwide basis.
For anyone who uses email a lot (most tech people do) it is a bad bad idea to let Gmail keep all those emails for you. I have Google Apps account with periodic archives setup to DRopbox. If google bans me I have to only change the mx addreses and move to something else.
I don't like this; their general MO has always been google giveth, and google can take it away. Introducing inconsistency can only lead to more people trying to disagree post-facto with google, and eventual lawsuits
All of your data from the smart phone service, however, is still going to be available for government surveillance purposes. This makes me unlikely to buy this product - from a reseller or not.
You know what's ridiculous? Google's EMEA HQ is in Ireland, yet they're not selling them here. Instead, we have to pretend we're in the UK or order though a reseller.
Whith stunts like that, Google risks to be regulated heavily. If they continue to pull stuff like that again, I really wish them the regulators on the front porch by now.
It's like if Alphabet bought a company running tollways, and they banned you from using their streets.