No idea what all was on his blog and other google accounts, but according to the article they were used for his work at the university. Also some credible sites like the NYT linking into the disabled blog: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/the-stock-market...
Google may have had some good reasons or it may have just been an example of ML discriminating against a name like Salil. Either way, it's very disturbing how Google shuts down accounts without warning or a reasonable resolution process. They did this to a Canadian psychology professor earlier this month (and then silently restored access after Joe Rogan picked up the story).
I'm extremely loathe to wean myself off of Google's products, especially Gmail. But I can no longer really see it as a safe place to have verifications of all my other accounts sent with all the risks of automated flagging, technical error (which cost me my pre acquisition YouTube account when they forced everyone onto Plus), and their increasingly aggressive security / account recovery mechanisms that ask for information such as the exact month a decade old account was created.
This is why I have been religiously adding my first-name@outlook.com and mail@my-personal-domain as recovery emails or primary email wherever possible on the Internet. Effort is to try and keep email on my own domain as primary and hopefully move off Google ecosystem completely.
I recently moved to iPhone. Now I am not an iFan or so (and I am an Android developer at my day job) but what I like about it that there are couple of service centres in my city and I can actually go and talk to a person directly employed by Apple. Their reps are a phone call away and in fact I can just get a call from them in a few click, or send an email and a human being will respond to me.
I don't like robo bans. I think nobody does. I had really bad experience when Uber banned my account based on some false alarm and it took almost a week to get it revived. Just imagine a robo ban where there's possibly no remedy or in most cases no hopes to contact with an actual human being.
There are also very good paid hosts like https://mailbox.org/en (I moved to them as my third non-throwaway email address after I realised sdf.org can't be anything more than a site for hobby, chitchat, and nostalgia).
I hardly use Hangout now so there's little incentive in sticking with Gmail anyway. Office moved almost entirely to Slack (but it's still GApps mail and GDocs sadly) and friends and family to WhatsApp and Fb Messenger long ago. But this is risky too - Fb owns both. My effort to move them to something like https://signal.org has failed spectacularly (any tips on this? Or alternate services?). Some of them are on Telegram though, and some still on Viber.
I used to use OpenDNS several years ago (before it was bought by Cisco), but also faced some issues not directly related to the DNS service and stability. OpenDNS allowed people to create accounts and specific blacklists/whitelists. That, when combined with the OpenDNS app (same user account) that would run on the users' computers, would tell OpenDNS which sites to block for which source IP address (the user's) even for those with dynamic IP addresses from their ISP. Being on a connection with a dynamic IP address, once in a while I'd get the IP address of someone else who had the OpenDNS filtering setup and hadn't run the OpenDNS app or it somehow failed to report back (or the time between the periodic pings from the app with the IP address update). When I used OpenDNS servers during those times, I would get blocked out of sites and get weird custom messages that those users had setup. The only solution was to create an account myself on OpenDNS, run the OpenDNS app on all my systems, and trigger an IP address update back to OpenDNS from the app if at all something didn't work.
I'm guessing the same filtering support still exists, called Home Internet Security. [1]
One tool I have used in the past to benchmark DNS servers and choose is namebench. [2] It seems like the last releases were in 2010, but it worked for me even a few years ago (haven't checked after that).
Essentially Google only allow Google-hosted AMP content in their search carousel. You could create an AMP (or otherwise fast) page on your own CDN and Google won't show it unless it's on their domain.
Accelerated Mobile Pages
It's a weird accelerator thing for mobile. I've never quite figured out its use case except to hoover up more metrics for Google.
The use case is simple: Transcend through adblockers and show ads in mobiles. Mobile users primarily use adblockers because websites suck their data and also speed. AMP ensures faster content delivery and lite data and also comes with ads.
But remember that in countries where certain sites are censored, AMP provides an easy way to access the restricted blogs/websites. Maybe the most important of these websites is reddit.
This kind of thing is exactly why I don't have a G+ account. When it launched people were getting their accounts banned left and right because of the real name policy, and when that happended their gmail was toast. I can't afford to lose my gmail. I never allowed it to create a G+ account for me. Same with YouTube when they combined them.
Just imagine losing control not only your email, but also every account that is tied to that email. Nightmare.
We're already beginning to see this effect in "customer service" fields: talking with intellectually deficient and apathetic bots to solve any problem is the worst experience ever, and Google is leading the charge.
Google's AI jumbling up my search queries and insisting on answering entirely different questions from the one I asked has finally pushed me to duckduckgo (which is greatly improved and not yet as botty.) So I bet you're right thinking it's a demented bot. Such bots (and especially, "forests" of bots) tend to punish anything that's sufficiently eccentric.
This could be countered by a separate forest of bots that looks for and identifies "mere eccentricity" (such as very heavy internet search use that will inevitably trigger many false bot hits re terrorism merely due to the law of averages.) But we're not that sophisticated yet, it would seem, judging by results. [Run to the patent office! First to file means anyone can steal this idea!]
Luckily, in this case, you won't be hit with a drone strike because you have an odd web site; but in other cases sudden death from the skies has been the result of bot analysis of mass intercepted communications targeting entirely innocent people.
Just to be clear, I actually rather like the idea of drone strikes on bad guys, just not idiotic-algorithm-triggered drone strikes, thanks so much.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. From the FAQ page:
> When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links. For many categories of searches (restaurants, game of thrones, code documentation, etc.), there is usually a specialized search engine (Yelp), content site or other source that does a better job at actually answering the searches than a general search engine does with just links. Our long-term goal is to get you Instant Answers from these best sources.
> To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack, which allows anyone to propose and develop Instant Answers for DuckDuckGo. On the backend, we have a classification and relevancy engine that selects the best sources for a particular search and displays answers to you in real time, be it for recipes, products, images, and hundreds of other categories.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
I strongly recommend everyone to look into hosting your own mail server. DigitalOcean will rent you a Linux VM for $5 a month or something crazy like that. You can figure out how to install postfix/dovecot/squirrelmail it in a few hours.
If nothing else, it keeps critical functionality decentralized, and you learn something and $5 a month for career insurance is pretty damn cheap.
Its not the mail server, its deliverability. If you can set up a $5/month server to send email so can every spammer ever and the big mail providers know this.
Mail sent like this won't be delivered anywhere with even the most basic spam filtering which includes blacklists of known spam-source IP address blocks like Digital Ocean/AWS/Heroku.
I have a personal mail server that collects my mail, but use my "default" Comcast MX to send. I'm sure metric craptons of email flow through that, but a lot of ham does too, so I've never been blacklisted.
I'd suggest that rather than the goal being to instantly leave this service or that the instant that they offend you, that you envision your policy as one of being ready to leave if you ever need to. The biggest key to that is having your own domain name and using that as your email address. Right now having your own domain is the biggest superpower you can have on the net, even with the events of last week. Honestly, pretty much everyone reading this from the US ought to own a domain name and be using it at least for their email address, even if it's purely delegated to gmail for the time being. They're too cheap to pass up the flexibility they offer.
What prevents your domain name registrar from shutting you down arbitrarily?
Also, I'm not sure what you're referring to as Comcast MX, but if you mean a Comcast provided server, that's a huge privacy hole. If you mean your own server on a Comcast line, then your IP is leaked to everyone you email, which is also a privacy hole since it ties your IP directly to your identity.
"What prevents your domain name registrar from shutting you down arbitrarily?"
I did say "even with the events of last week". It's the biggest stick you can get right now. It doesn't make you invincible.
"If you mean your own server on a Comcast line, then your IP is leaked to everyone you email, which is also a privacy hole since it ties your IP directly to your identity."
I don't email out much. Everyone I email is pretty much already going to know I'm me. Comcast already has arbitrarily large amounts of surveillance they can perform on me, sitting here worrying about my "outbound email hole" is a waste of time.
Great advice! Exactly what I'm doing as we speak after reading this. I'm such a cheerleader for Google but after hearing about this a few times its starting to scare the crap out of me. F that. Not a good idea to let a multi-national entity control my access to EVERYTHING with zero customer service options.
I did this. If you comply with some basic stuff like DKIM and ptr you get 100% accepted on everything but hotmail. I don't know how to get hotmail/outlook to stop greylisting me consistently.
Er, no, it seems anti-spam. The fact of the matter is, plenty of people use dime-a-dozen hosting to make spam bots. These days, you're better off using a reputable mail service as opposed to rolling your own, unless you have a fairly large company.
It is anti-spam, but it is also anticompetitive to block anyone that isn't gmail or an already known big player in that space. Apparently lots of people are having trouble setting up a mail server on their own without getting blocked by Google. Can you see that as a problem for the intent at large? I wonder what kinda marketshare gmail has.
It's probably a problem they aren't in a hurry to solve either.
I mean it's not that you're automatically blocked it's just that your server's score for sending email is nonexistent which means a high likelihood of being a spam server.
You have to spend a long time to build up a reputation to get places to mark your email as not spam. This is why many providers that allow you to do bulk email through them have multiple IPs and they only let the most behaved on their better reputation IPs.
It's probably a problem they aren't in a hurry to solve because there's no reason to solve it. Any decently-funded small business can afford to use proper web hosting (Er, I love Digital Ocean. But they aren't really "web hosting").
Google (and basically every other reputable email host _and_ every "independent" email host) are blocking mail from services that host cheap compute power. A lot of Azure and GCP email traffic would likely be blocked, not just Digital Ocean.
If you want to start an email service, use something that isn't a known platform for spammers.
If someone doesn't want to handle his own email server, a simpler alternative is to buy email services for a domain you own; it will be easier to change provider if needed since, unlike a @gmail.com address, you won't need to change any address.
Edit: of course you will need to download and keep the emails by yourself if you don't want to lose access to them, but that's much easier than handling a whole server.
Do you find you have problems delivering to other mail servers?
That has always been the trick. Running the mail server is easy. Having your email show up in other servers is "hard". Right now, with so many users using GMAIL, using gmail is a huge boon to not being marked spam (Google is way less likely to market a @gmail.com email as spam compared to say a @aol.com email).
I haven't had any issues but I've been hosting my own mail server since 2000 or so. I've been blacklisted by spamhaus? before years ago but I submitted a request to remove and they did. Google has a page to help with this though.
Also, I personally host at home and have Comcast business internet. I have a 5 IP block of which one is a mail server. I have occasional internet outages and more frequent power outages, but it's been fine.
I'd like to add another voice to this: I host my own email myself out of my house, and I've never really had any problems with it either. AFAIK I've never been marked as spam, even after I've sent a couple of mis-configured emails that should have probably been marked as spam.
Your IP is leaked to everyone you email (and if you receive mail, to everyone who emails you), which is a privacy hole since it ties your IP directly to your identity. I assume you don't mind, or did you not realize this?
The whois shows my company name. I mean since I run a company, I don't really want that private. Also, those IPs are accessible through a simple DNS lookup of the sender domain, so I'm not really losing any security.
The whois wasn't my concern though (since I already knew it was solvable); my concern was the IP address leakage, which gives away your location among other things...
I run our own mail server at the office for our domain and I don't have any deliverability issues, but I made sure to have the full suite of DMARC, SPF, etc. all set up and kept current on the RBLs. Also it's very low volume, which I think is the key.
I've been using my own kimsufi server for years, and live in Montréal so the latency to their Canadian location is superb. The low end servers are often sold out, but become available every couple months. I went for one with a spinning disk for the extra storage. The server's dedicated so performance is much better than a storage VPS where people share a spinning drive.
However I still end up forwarding everything to to my gmail account and using it as en e-mail client because it makes e-mailing searching and filtering so fast and easy. Outgoing mail sent through my own SMTP server and typically gets through, so I could set up dovecot later.
How good are open source spam filtering tools? Besides not having to maintain my own infrastructure, spam filtering is probably the biggest value add for Gmail, or so it was when I got my account 10 years ago.
They used to be remarkably good. Shortly after PG wrote his A Plan for Spam essay, I set up a customized system that used my own spam e-mails as training data. I can't remember the tool I used, but it involved a script on top of maildir which is sure to be far more kludgy than what you could do now. The technique is powerful enough I suspect it still works remarkably well today because it's tuned to your own corpus of spam messages. Nonetheless, for the last decade I've been too lazy to do this and just forward everything to gmail, though gmail does give me a few false positives every couple years.
That's a very cool idea, but the spam filtering of gmail can hardly be matched. On the plus side, now you could send emails with much larger attachments.
No, but the odds of my email account going away (while catastrophic) seem pretty unlikely, and not having to sift through spam every single day is a pretty nice perk. Basically strong spam filtering support is a requirement for any tool I use, and I'm happy to hop off of Gmail if another tool delivers comparable value.
I do get that. And perhaps you're discreet enough online that your Google account will never attract scrutiny. But it's something that every Google user ought to keep in mind, I think. I'm guessing that Salil Mehta never even considered it.
Fair point, but I don't understand why people think this is a case of Salil offending Google's censors and not simply algorithms gone awry. I got downvoted for expressing this doubt elsewhere in this thread, but no one could answer. I just can't parse a motive for Google to censor him on (as far as I know, he didn't criticize Google's diversity policies or anything of the sort).
I think that's the point, actually. (Unless there's some political issue that I'm missing.) Google can make a simple mistake and the customer has to bear the burden of it. When something like this happens, there's no indication that Google will or even can address the mistake in a timely fashion -- or maybe not ever. Google's basic philosophy of no customer service for free products means there isn't much you can do, other than wait and hope, or raise a stink and hope.
Since it was supposedly reviewed and denied, it wasn't accidental. There may be mistakes of fact made by Google or different reasons than those the target has complained of, but the opacity of the process makes it impossible to determine either of those.
I didn't ascribe anything to malice, though I do miss the "Don't be evil" Google of the early 2000s. It's more an issue of mass automation and the errors that accompany it. This is a company with 93 billion dollars in cash on hand and billions of dollars of profit per quarter that doesn't even offer email support for forced closures of long standing accounts.
You're missing the point entirely; even if it was accidental, would you have access to your accounts? Would your email be a reliable way to reach you or verify your ownership of another account? Would people able to access the content you've posted?
The answer is quite obviously "no," and that doesn't cut it for people need rely on services like these for their everyday workflow. We wouldn't consider "accidental" AWS downtime acceptable, so why will we accept it from Google?
Wouldn't using ones own domain and gsuite alleviate some of these issues? If Google were to shut down your account, you could update your mx records to a different mail server such as fastmail or self hosted as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and be back up and running relatively soon (of course you still wouldn't have your connected YouTube/G+ etc accounts).
Although as I write this it occurred to me, you would likely loose all your contacts and calendar unless they were backed up prior...
Although not terribly enlightening, we can still ascribe malice to an algorithm as a shorthand for its essential behavior. In the end it's a black box, can you rule out anything?
Jordan Peterson, the "Canadian psychology professor" you mention, agree or disagree with him, clearly has political motivations and is explicitly politically active. He's an entirely different case from this.
No doubt Peterson makes a lot of political videos, but he never said or did anything remotely deserving of having his channel shut down. I mean, just as an example, you can find a lot of blatant Holocaust denial and Nazi propaganda channels that are active and have been active for years.
How is that relevant to the story of whether or not it's appropriate for Google, or indeed any large service provider (Cloudflare), to take their account offline?
Because one of them fits in a narrative of Google being politically censorious and the other doesn't. I don't know exactly what caused it but Peterson definitely tests boundaries a lot more than this guy. It's no insult, I'm sure he would say the same of himself.
Even if this was an accident of some algorithm, that no person at Google had any idea this would happen, it is still problematic. Algorithms and data sets can be biased just as much as people are. It's a wake-up call for all of us who entrust too much of our digital lives with Google. It's putting all our eggs in one basket.
I just thought it was interesting you (edit: you're not parent, I meant parent) didn't call him out by name, and I wanted to make the connection explicit.
Despite being successful for an academic, he's not exactly a famous psych prof at the level of say, Steven Pinker. Before politics collided with his work this year he didn't seem to be politically active at all, either.
It might have changed a bit after Joe Rogan's podcast but to be honest, most people outside of Canada probably have no idea who Jordan Peterson is.
Most people, no, but he's immensely popular with a certain section of the right. Nonetheless I was a bit confused because you seemed to be implying that Peterson is just another apolitical academic who caught the short end of the deep learning stick, when there's a lot more evidence that his ban could have been politically motivated. I don't understand why I'm getting downvoted for that.
I think you're right. It was probably politically motivated, at least indirectly. It was more likely due to coordinated flagging efforts rather than a human at Google deciding to ban the account.
He's getting a lot of support from the right, the center (e.g. Joe Rogan) and from many on the left such as Sam Harris as well. In all cases, it seems to be for free speech issues. He seems to hold a deep opposition to political extremes, though it's hard to tell what he favors other than free speech since his videos meander into mythology and literature so much.
Yeah, Peterson is clearly politically active. For those who don't know, he rose from complete obscurity because he opposed an anti-transgender-discrimination bill in Canada. His argument was that it was a serious threat to free speech and would force him to use pronouns he didn't want to use, despite nothing like that being on the bill and despite numerous respectable legal scholars informing him that you could never get in trouble for not using a person's preferred pronoun because of this bill.
But because of his "brave" fight against the bill, he's become a hero to alt-right and other people worried about transgendered people forcing everyone to use pronouns, and this is a lucrative market to attract. So lucrative that he now gets over $40,000 a month through Patreon alone for his classes, where he praises Carl jung, criticises post-modernism, the supposed infiltration of Marxism into culture and ideas like White Privilege and Cultural Appropriation
> despite numerous respectable legal scholars informing him that you could never get in trouble for not using a person's preferred pronoun because of this bill.
As mentioned, his employer's lawyers did think so. The Adversarial Model (legal system) doesn't consider that some parties come to other conclusions. It would be ill-advised to listen to "experts" that are not part of a case, taking the advice of pundits* or other unconnected parties is not compelling evidence of legal finding.
*It's primarily in the US, that the mass media promotes education pundits as corroboration in legal matters.
>the supposed infiltration of Marxism into culture and ideas like White Privilege and Cultural Appropriation
You can't argue that "white privilege" hasn't infiltrated culture. An alarming amount of people have openly disparaged white people when talking to me, even though I am white myself.
If you're not white, it's almost socially acceptable to say "fuck white people" in cities like SF, NYC, and Chicago. I think it's horrible and I think Peterson is right.
Even in Columbus, OH this is acceptable and common. People would say this relatively frequently at a startup I worked at (where nearly everyone was white, except a couple Asians), in addition to making really lame “white people” jokes. The only person to ever call anyone out for this was our black chef. Probably because his views on race were based in realty instead of some dystopian political fashion. Well, that, and I think anyone else saying anything about it would have been immediately accused of being racist and probably given some sort of formal warning.
Those companies shouldn't be monitoring ideologies and morality.
If they want to do that, it's their right. But I will purposefully avoid companies that ban any hate speech. I've already cut ties with Google and it feels great.
Maybe that's the case, but I don't think white privilege and cultural appropriation are inherently Marxist ideas. A lot of Marxists actually reject them as revisionist attempts to bring liberal individualism and individual blame into class politics.
Er, Google has millions of users who have absolutely no problems. One (or even dozens) of bad stories is a tiny percentage of the interactions that take place on their services. It's _far_ more likely to be a mistake than anything untoward, just based on the sheer numbers.
How is this any less scary? If a company can just _mistakenly_ cut off my email without warning, and I can't fight through the customer service abyss to get it back, shouldn't I be concerned?
Except for the vast (and I mean _vast_) majority of users, this is never an issue.
You've got a chance of being struck by a meteor whenever you leave your house (and also while being in it). Do you solve that problem by staying inside? No. You go outside and take those odds. The chance that you'll be mistakenly shut down by a mistake is minuscule. Google has proven in the past to be a reliable way to do things like whistleblowing and hosting questionable content. The fact that one or even a dozen users get banned doesn't invalidate Google's history of keeping a _vast_, _overwhelming_ majority of even their free users safe.
I think you misunderstood; he's not saying "Google isn't very bad because they made one small mistake", he's saying "Why should I switch from Google simply because there is a minuscule chance that they might make a mistake that affects me".
Unless you work at Google and are privy to internal information, how could you possibly know that? The only reason you're hearing about this case is because the account holder is a university professor who lost a long standing Blogger site—used at his school and linked to by the NYT—and then the story made it to the front page of HN.
It's overwhelmingly likely that the vast, vast majority of people who lose access to their Google accounts never make it onto your radar.
The school of professional studies at Columbia offers "certificate" and "professional degrees" with minimal academic standards. Within the university, it is considered an embarrassment.
Advertising this credential is very misleading. This is a far cry from being, for example, a professor in the world class statistics department at Columbia.
I don't know the gentleman nor the facts of this case, but I'd be very suspicious of someone advertising a Columbia SPS affiliation.
This and some of the tweets where he seems overly zealous make me suspicious. E.g.:
Here[1] He is suggesting he was blocked for Probability work on Hilary's election odds.
Here[2] he is implying they are doing it in connection with him being a math educator, and tweeting at all kinds of famous accounts with maximum sensationalism (though in his defense, the only way to get support from google is to make a massive stir).
None of that means anything on its own, and this would be far from the first time Google have closed an account by mistake (though Id be very surprised if the ban was of a political nature).
The automated canned answer is what rubs me the most here. There is a professor who trusted Google's Gmail and Blogspot product, gets the Axe for some violation of Terms of Service or Quality Guidelines, and does not get a clear and straight answer what specifically he did wrong, or how he can remedy the situation.
I wish one of the Googlers reading this here could reach out internally what is going on here.
I'd wager though that the professor's Google account did something wrong, and might be even a serial offender in Google's eyes, so as to warrant a ban. Question is though if the professor himself did something wrong.
In such messages, not telling how he can remedy the situation is intentional. It illustrates that their goal&decision is not that they want him to try and change some behaviour (whatever that might be) but that they want to discontinue the relationship even if the behaviour changes, or (in the case of actually malicious users that need to be banned) gets hidden or kept at a 'slightly below the boundary' level, which is not the intended result.
Also, not telling what specifically he did wrong is also intentional. They have already decided that they don't want any future relationship. At that point, telling which behavior exactly went over the line is counterproductive - since it would invite that information to be challenged, and they've preemptively decided that no, they don't want to read the response or excuses or reasons, they've made a decision already; and throughly explaining and defending a decision takes much more effort than simply making one, effort that Google doesn't want to spend on every banned person.
I know it is intentional. It is the easy way out to minimize friction, potential litigation, social backlash. All short term cost.
Alas, the long term cost of being opaque is lost trust. I much rather have Google give a straight answer. Especially when there is publicity around a case. That way a lot more people would see that Google actually is mostly really reasonable, and that there is another side to the story.
An approach like that would be suitable for this case, but it doesn't and cannot scale to be suitable for the general, standard process that can work for blocking abusive accounts on Google scale. All kinds of spammers, trolls and simply abusive users are able to create many accounts (often in a semi-automated way) and create new ones when you block them. You need a way to block hundreds of thousands of such accounts every day in a cost-efficient manner, because the service is free and revenue per user - low. This applies to pretty much any free service with a large user base, by the way - all of those need ways to efficiently ban lots of accounts and can't afford to negotiate with the banned ones.
This means that you pretty much need a way where the average time spent per blocking an account (including any answers and appeals if you allow them) is measured in seconds, not minutes; and the accounts that need to be blocked will use these facilities just as much, and likely more.
In addition, you generally can't simply give a straight answer in public (the only reason why they'd want to give a straight answer, due to this publicity) - reasons for blocking accounts involve either claiming that the account owner has done something shady, or involve non-public data (e.g. if child porn was transferred in emails or something like that). If you want to publish specific claims of abuse performed by someone, you need to be very thorough and careful about anything you claim (much more thorough than you want to be when choosing to block accounts - you need to be able to block accounts quickly and efficiently) or you open yourself up to all kinds of libel issues, so that can't be done as a routine customer service activity without involving lawyers, making the process even more expensive.
I recall a lot of commentary on this site (especially around cloud flare) that the "worst" need to be banned and lot of skepticism about a "slippery slope" - can't speak to the content of this particular case but seems pretty far from the worst of the worst.
Salil Mehta: "Shameful: if you show probability work like Hillary having lower election odds, then this is new definition of hate speech. @JulianAssange"
I interpreted it to mean that he showed that Hilary's campaign was overconfident on polling, and with proper statistical analysis she would have seen something closer to the truth.
He apparently has worked for both Obama and Trump.
Twitter is not owned by Google. Google's ToS cannot interfere with his activity on a property they do not own. That would be tortious interference of contract.
Having hosted my own email for about 18 years, I don't really think relying on free services from Google is any better than when we used to change ISPs (or when we graduated from college) and had to get a new email address.
I'm not seeing "google is evil" here as much as "we need to do more to inform people that free services from giant companies may change or go away at any time without notice."
After the last time Google shut down a random high-profile person's life (i.e. their website, their email, their account, etc), I immediately downloaded Thunderbird and got a locally stored copy of all my emails.
If Google shut down my account tomorrow, I think I could recover from pretty much everything else (although I'd have a hell of a time with the Android phone), but a decade and a half of emails are damn near irreplaceable.
What if you have your Android Phone tied to their services etc and this is the way Google behaves. This type of unexplained behavior from Google could literally ruin someone's life.
It happened with a phone and he had to create another Gmail account. He was locked out iirc. But his online life mostly revolves around Fb so he didn't care much I think.
* Fastmail.com -- good reputation and track record at reasonable prices
* mailbox.org -- long track record, privacy-oriented, German-based. Some people describe the mail UI as aging (it's OX suite), but I like it just fine.
* Protonmail.com -- UX & privacy focused email with fancy in-browser encryption. Protonmail-to-protonmail emails are E2E (OpenPGPjs). No IMAP, and in-browser (read: scary) encryption, albeit open-source. Based in Switzerland, although that means a lot less than they make it out to, re: privacy.
* tutanota.com -- V. similar to Protonmail. Based in Germany and a cheaper than protonmail. Uses a custom-implemented encryption protocol vaguely and unreassuringly described as a "..standardized, hybrid method.." comprised of RSA and AES [0].
The in-browser, over-the-wire javascript crypto implementation still makes me nervous. I'd love to hear some compelling evidence to the contrary, but as I understand most of what has been stated before about in-browser crypto hasn't changed much [0].
It's going to be less secure than native clients, for sure. ProtonMail has native mobile clients though, and will have a desktop one (IMAP/SMTP bridge) soon, which should alleviate webmail concerns.
It means that the crypto is certainly more solid (roll-your-own is a terrible idea in cryptography) and can in principle interoperate with other OpenPGP implementations, at least once the client supports it.
I like ProtonMail a lot, but full disclosure: I work there, so I'm biased.
Use Google email but from a custom domain -- it doesn't back-up your email, but you can update the DNS to a new provider if you get locked out of Google's services. This means you can still recover accounts, use the same email, etc after a brief disruption, instead of totally hosed.
It's not a total solution, but it does mitigate some problems, which makes Google's policies easier to swallow. (If you do separate email back-ups, then you'll only lose the emails since the last back-up.)
I'm in the process of switching to that set-up (partly because of these antics; partly because of other concerns).
The free tier was removed a long time ago. Those who did register before that change had their free plans grandfathered and made available for free later too. I'm still using my free GSuite account with Gmail for a couple of my domains. My usage is very low, and I'm not sure if Google is mining data from free GSuite accounts. My understanding is that it does not.
1) I use an address on my own domain (hosted on Google Apps) as my primary email address. If Google pulls the plug on me I can point my MX records elsewhere, and won't have to worry about changing my email at countless places.
2) I use offlineimap to back up the contents of my GMail account at home. If I had to, I could load that backup into a new provider's service (or my own). I still have email from the 90s and would be sad if I lost all that.
That's just email, though. If my entire Google account got axed, I'd lose a bunch of docs and spreadsheets, not to mention all my contacts. And, while I do have everything on Google Photos in places other than Google, it would be a pain to gather it all together again.
The domain I use for email does not have an associated website. I use it only for email & Hangouts. Regardless, we're not talking about being bulletproof here; that's impossible. There are always risks.
Don't you lose access to Takeout if your account gets closed suddenly?
Hosting your own email is a huge hassle, and getting pass spam filters is hard. Many website allow adding alternative email addresses so maybe one should use different providers.
I've had good experience with Riseup and VFEmail. Even cock.li ;) I've always used separate accounts for personal, work, etc. For stuff that really matters, it's best to own your own domain. That way, if you lose an account, you can just reroute mail to the new account.
Services like Riseup constantly ask users not to store much information on the servers in order to contain the costs. The quotas are usually much smaller in such services.
P.S.: I do have a Riseup email account that I barely use for some specific areas of activism.
It's easier to just have your own domain and host your domain's email with a provider, such as google/fastmail/etc. This will let you change hosts if you feel the need to.
The hardest part is switching all your accounts to use your new domain.
Problems though: if your account is already disabled, you can't use this as far as I can tell; and there's no diff option, it's a monolithic backup each time. But it might provide a strategy to limit data loss resulting from having an account disabled for whatever reason.
Contacts vcf; Chrome stuff is html and json; Drive is exactly the files in Drive (as is) including directories; Photos directory also has a metadata.json file for each directory and then one for each image, haven't looked at the contents; Hangouts is json and png; Keep is html; Mail is a single file "All mail Including Spam and Trash.mbox"; Voice is html and mp3; Wallet is csv.
These are all put into either a zip, tgz or tbz. The different archive formats have different max download sizes. Looks like the tbz has a 50G download size limit.
Different formats for different services and for some even a choice of formats: iCalendar for Calendar; HTML, CSV or vcard for Contacts; json or KML for location history (Maps); mbox for Gmail... You can see your options before/without exporting anything.
I can't imagine how people depend so heavily on free accounts from Google. Which notoriously ignores help requests. And typically don't retain backups. Seriously?
But bottom line, it's Google's business what they do. And with a free account, there's no recourse. Except maybe getting to HN front page, and reaching someone sympathetic at Google.
"Free accounts" is misleading. Google is not giving anything away for free. They scan the emails and obtain valuable information regarding the user preferences and conversation, which later they use to tune their ads. We are the product.
And, in the case of people like the banned professor, traffic to Google sites (e.g. blog) is multiplied.
We make it sound like Google is gifting us with free email. They're not.
> They scan the emails and obtain valuable information regarding the user preferences and conversation, which later they use to tune their ads. We are the product.
At least for the "free" Gmail, as of two months ago (June 2017) Google promised to no longer scan email content. That change is coming in the near future. [1]
I mean, they have _millions_ of users that have never had a problem. It's far more likely this is a mistake than any kind of malicious act, just given the sheer number of customers they have.
We've had multiple people prominent enough to make the front page of hacker news in the last few months. Maybe we should get some statistics on how many people are prominent enough and controversial enough to land on the front page of hn, then work back to how many of their millions of customers are actually affected. Its probably a lot more than just 1.
Yes, I suspect so. What it takes, arguably, is being just controversial enough to attract complaints and/or attention from algorithms. But not famous enough for a ban to attract huge attention in mainstream media.
If it only happens to one out of millions, why can't they have an actual responsive human being to respond to queries?
"We have so many zillion customers that we're forced to use bots for customer service" and "Only one out of a zillion customers has this kind of problem" would seem to be mutually exclusive.
Well, I've read that Google customer service is quite responsive, for paid accounts. And regarding non-paid accounts, determining algorithmically which queries merit human replies is arguably just as difficult as determining which accounts have violated ToS.
I doubt that this is a mistake, exactly. It's likely intentional, albeit through unreliable automation. I mean, from Google's perspective, false positives are arguably far less problematic than false negatives. And I'm sure that it happens more than we know. Given that most affected users have no way to get attention.
Edit: OK, so I'm dyslexic. False negatives are arguably more problematic, because they attract more attention.
This story is making me reconsider my allegiance to Google Email and other services. For my more private stuff I use other services. I only use Gmail for junk like I used to use Hotmail back in the day. My Gmail was compromised at least twice.
What did you think would happen?
Tolerating the remove of anyone's freedom should be fought. Even if they are not your bed fellows.
Do nothing, and expect more of this to follow.
Couple years ago some enterprising folks got together to teach "Software Carpentry" to academics: git, open data, plotting with open source software, etc...
Seems like there's a new set of skills that academics need to learn; paging Dr Assange.
Are you trolling? Did I miss a scarcasm tag? I am no fan of Trump, but writing off anything pro trump as fake news is beyond ignorant. Take a miniute and replace everytime you say 'trump' with 'obama' and see if you would still want to be your own friend.
We've banned this account for violating the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
It seems reasonable to me that Google's banhammer is largely algorithmic, and that the algorithm made an error. I can't think of any reason for Google to ban him intentionally.
Why doesn't he say which of Google's terms of service he supposedly violated? He just spends the whole 3 pages saying that he hasn't done anything wrong, without even once saying what he is alleged to have done wrong. Seems a bit dishonest.
They don't tell you. My whole YouTube channel was removed 2 years ago, and the only auto-mail I got said "TOS violation". I have no idea what the problem was. When I followed the instructions on how to reinstate, I got a page saying the channel wasn't recoverable. There was no indication of how to get any other resolution.
Google may have had some good reasons or it may have just been an example of ML discriminating against a name like Salil. Either way, it's very disturbing how Google shuts down accounts without warning or a reasonable resolution process. They did this to a Canadian psychology professor earlier this month (and then silently restored access after Joe Rogan picked up the story).
I'm extremely loathe to wean myself off of Google's products, especially Gmail. But I can no longer really see it as a safe place to have verifications of all my other accounts sent with all the risks of automated flagging, technical error (which cost me my pre acquisition YouTube account when they forced everyone onto Plus), and their increasingly aggressive security / account recovery mechanisms that ask for information such as the exact month a decade old account was created.