I'm curious if "has locked my account" means just Google Drive, or if he also lost Gmail, Android functionality, Chrome profiles, Adwords, YouTube, YouTubeTV, purchased movies and tv shows, Fitbit, Nest, sites where he used federated login (DoorDash, Uber, etc).
I see, for example, his YouTube channel is up, but it's associated with 'team@armouredarchives.com', and not the personal gmail account he posted in the linked forum.
If it was the entire account, something really needs to be done with Google to force them to make these kind of actions as narrow as possible. They can really disrupt your life with a broad account lock.
Another reason to not use Google/Facebook or similar identities to login to a service. You lose access to your Google account, you lose access to all those other services.
This is such a crucial point that so many people overlook, even when being cognizant of the risk of storing data on the cloud, somehow SSO integration is many tech-literate users' blind spot.
I had quite the interaction with Twitch about having lost my email domain. I can still stream to the channel but they said “that you believe to be yours”... quite funny because I believe nothing to be mine, but they came out and said that it’s not mine. They acted as though I were upset, and I’m sure many people that they deal with are. But it’s true, these accounts and phone numbers are not ours.
The closest thing to ours is private keys for onion host routing which are addresssed as the public key derived from the private key tailed with dot-onion (https://pubkey.onion). And most software works with Tor our of the box via torify. Tested with self-signed HTTPS and XMPP and others have with email.
Tor may not be anonymous, but identity ownership is a killer use case. 2022 the year of the onion? I can commit to wrapping all my things going forward.
I used to have many Google accounts (credentials in my password manager). One for gmail, one for every mailing list on goougle groups, one for Google+ etc. For a while they haven't let me use them whithout problems providing a phone number. They force me into some security check-up after logging in which seems to have no way to skip the phone number entry.
Less Google for me, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
In my anecdotal experience, a locked account == locked everything else. That's why they had to make the post from a different account than the locked one.
The tools and APIs that your company offers make it really difficult to create such a backup and to keep it in sync. How can I do this for Google Photos? The Google Photo API returns compressed files with missing EXIF info. The Google Takeout option can't be automated and needs third party tooling to convert back into a usable format.
fyi you can automate Takeout to a degree. You can tell it to prepare a takeout once every 2 months I think, and you’ll then get an email when it’s ready. You could probably script something to look for those emails, download the compressed tgz files, and then store or upload to some backup location.
- to keep things affordable for those who can afford to buy only a few devices
- to extract as much money as possible from those who can afford to buy multiple devices
It’s a pricing strategy. That doesn’t have to reflect what it costs them at all, but ideally should match what it’s worth to the customer (if it doesn’t, they either leave money on the table or don’t get sales)
If google really thinks he is a terrorist, which apparently they did, why on earth would they allow him to use gmail or android? It makes sense they would lock him out of everything possible.
What we really should be asking is why is google examining user data at all. They should not be in the position where they can even find out who is a terrorist.
> What we really should be asking is why is google examining user data at all.
Without reading into the details, I don't think that google arbitrarily examines all user files on Google Drive (and please correct me if I am wrong, but that's what I remember since the last time this discussion was had).
Google only examines files that were shared with other users or were made accessible to others through a shareable link. Which, sorta makes sense, because that's how a lot of people shared illegal content or streamed videofiles (sort of like a personal youtube). And if you don't share those files with anyone and just keep it as your personal cloud drive, I don't think they examine it.
>why on earth would they allow him to use gmail or android?
Google is essentially your mail service (gmail), video platform (youtube), cloud storage (gdrive), and tons of other completely separate services. In physical world, violation of terms of one of the services leads you to being banned only from that service, unless criminal law gets involved. If the law gets involved, then the law can get you banned from using quite a lot of services. But until the law makes the judgement, being banned from a grocery store cannot automatically and without any recourse get you banned from your bank, your car insurance, your mail service, and many other things.
I guess my point on the latter is that no private business (but law) should be able to prevent a person from using multiple completely unrelated vital services. Here are a few scenarios I thought of that would illustrate how it would work:
* An airline banning you for being an asshole on a flight by adding you to a denylist used by other airlines as well? That's congruent with my idea, because it is all within the same service (airlines), and it won't be done automatically.
*A judge completely blocking you from flying by locking you up for participating in terrorist activities? Sure, because the law did it after an investigation and followed proper legal processes.
*Wells Fargo closing down your account because you were an asshole at Kroger when shopping for groceries and got banned from that store? That would be crazy talk.
The only difference between the google scenario and the kroger+Wells Fargo scenario is that kroger+WF are not a part of the same company. But would it be acceptable for WF to close down your account if WF and Kroger were a part of the same parent company? In my opinion, it wouldn't be ok.
I hope I'm not the only one who got a little squeamish at this...I understand the logic, "don't let people transfer/share things that are illegal". But it doesn't sit right that
1) A gigantic private company operating across most of the world/laws/jurisdictions/precedents etc...is in charge of determining (with little to no human oversight) what can and can't be shared between individuals. Who might even be in competing legal jurisdictions. Seems wonky.
2) that it's commonly accepted that they get to look into it period. It's similar to having every package/letter you ever send opened and looked through and judged (ik postal services sometimes scan) but I can't imagine they open every single envelope
Your argument makes sense, and I share your feelings on an emotional level, but at this point, the whole argument can be reduced to "sharing video files streamed from google drive is an equivalent of hosting a video on youtube, so the same rules apply", and that's hard to beat.
If you want to store whatever material you want for personal consumption, you are welcome to. But if you enable sharing, that's when all those extra rules start applying, because you are effectively turning it into a personal youtube that is still hosted by google, and DMCA strikes and other stuff will apply just the same.
Similarly, you can make backup copies of a DVD movie for yourself by burning them onto writeable DVDs. The legality of it is dubious due to copyright law being plain awful at times, but you won't get prosecuted for that if you truly had it only for personal backup reasons. The second you start distributing those DVDs in massive amounts to people, you start inviting a pretty legal trouble to your doorstep.
Mind you, I absolutely disagree with the ban of both the historical footage, as well as the whole google account just because of that footage. However, I do believe that making video public via a shareable link or otherwise puts it in the territory where content rules similar to youtube might get reasonably applied.
>However, I do believe that making video public via a shareable link or otherwise puts it in the territory where content rules similar to youtube might get reasonably applied.
I actually think that not making a distinction between publishing to the world and sharing with a small group of people is the biggest source of unreasonableness in all of these debates.
When I'm interacting and sharing with a few people I know or who I just met, I expect companies and governments to stay out of it (unless there is a criminal investigation overseen by a judge). I don't think that's unreasonable at all. It used to be the status quo until not very long ago.
Everything from political activity to copyrights can be discussed in a far more sensible way if we make that distinction. As soon as we erase that distinction, which has sometimes happened because it's the default with some technologies, everything becomes essentially unsolvable.
E.g, I don't want to defend the right to anonymity of someone who directly and systematically influences entire populations just because I expect to be allowed to do the equivalent of talking to three strangers in a pub without showing ID.
Google knows how many different people access a particular piece of shared content. They should just set a reasonable threshold before unleashing their crude algorithms. 2 is not a reasonable threshold. How about 200?
The rules don't require the person holding the content to scan the content. Normally a DMCA claim is issued before the host has to get involved.
Lets say you and I opened a joint safe deposit box at the bank to share USB drives together with movies on it. If the bank found out, they wouldn't be required to drill it open and scan the drive to make sure none of the movies were copyrighted. This is google drilling open the safe deposit box because someone shared the keys, and they think there may be a movie they don't like there.
>The rules don't require the person holding the content to scan the content. Normally a DMCA claim is issued before the host has to get involved.
Legally, you are 100% correct. The law doesn't require the host to do anything until a DMCA strike is received. But YouTube has its own rules, which is fully legal as well, as long as they are more restrictive than the law (e.g., establishments prohibiting alcohol inside are allowed, even though alcohol is legal; establishments allowing crack cocaine usage inside are not allowed, because crack cocaine is illegal).
And YouTube decided to take proactive approach here. The reasoning for why doesn't matter to the point at hand. The fact of the matter is, YouTube took a stricter approach to DMCA moderation and tends to not always wait until the video receives and actual DMCA strike.
Because you actually have to pay for google drive to host your videos on it, and the storage space is pretty limited. You don't need to pay anyone to store videos on youtube.
Google Drive is a paid service with different subscription tiers available depending on how much storage you are using. I know that video uploads count towards that storage limit, and you can easily test it yourself. Try uploading a video, and see it counting towards your Google Drive storage limit.
>But until the law makes the judgement, being banned from a grocery store cannot automatically and without any recourse get you banned from your bank, your car insurance, your mail service, and many other things.
in your analogy the grocery store also has a gun shop next door they own, you're in the grocery store and they decide that you are buying something to poison someone so they don't let you, you go next door to the gun shop where they say 'hey, customer 2214 potential murderer of course you can buy the gun!' You buy the gun and go kill the person you were intending to kill.
When the law gets involved the company owning the grocery store and gun store will find it has a lot of liability.
Basically anything where you think the law will get involved and have to make a determination will mean you will have to shut down all services.
Notice the law getting involved banning is of course different than the you were an asshole banning.
on edit: I of course think it's ridiculous that this account got banned, but that doesn't change the fact that the argument put forward here about wait for the law to make determination just isn't going to fly in any situation, and think about it if someone was a terrorist, got banned in service X but used service Y to coordinate their big attack that killed thousands would you really be sitting here saying service Y was right not to ban them? Maybe you would, but the law and general public opinion probably wouldn't.
> Without reading into the details, I don't think that google arbitrarily examines all user files on Google Drive (and please correct me if I am wrong, but that's what I remember since the last time this discussion was had).
They say that they process all of your data:
> To provide services like spam filtering, virus detection, malware protection and the ability to search for files within your individual account, we process your content.
They also have some weirdly specific claim about advertising, which I don’t trust bc it sounds like they’re mincing words:
> We don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—including Drive—for advertising purposes, period.
A better analogy would be if you made terroristic remarks to the sporting goods clerk, and walmart banned you not just from sporting goods but the entire store. Gmail and Google Drive are just different departments of the same place.
But in this case it's just that walmart zoomed in on your notebook with a security camera, saw some arabic scribbles about allah on a tank drawing you were sharing with your friend, and decided you were a terrorist. Sure, they absolutely should toss you out the store if they think you are one, but they shouldn't have been zooming in your notebook in the first place.
Not a fan of that analogy. Walmart can't brick your home thermostat, voice assistant, tv box, cable service, federated logins to Uber, DoorDash, your email account, cloud storage account, and so on.
So you think if google really thinks you're a terrorist that they are obliged to go on supporting you? There's a big difference between having no idea terrorists use your platform, and actually supporting them by enabling those you believe to be terrorists.
Who is this "Google" person that "thinks" he is a terrorist? There is no actual human entity here that is doing any "thinking" at all. It is an automated system, that cannot be argued with or challenged by normal means.
Terrorism is an INCREDIBLY SERIOUS allegation. It should be dealt with by law enforcement and the courts. And the penalties for _false_ accusations, which is exactly what this is, should be severe as well. It can be life-ruining.
The entities that authored or authorized the system to identify the content as such are the persons that "think" so, because they wrote the definitions that identified him as such. You don't get to just make a system and totally disclaim all liability for what happens with it. If the people at google run the system, then they own what happens. In this case, they own the fact that they identified suspected terroristic activity and they should be held responsible if they don't stop it, at least until it can be reviewed.
Terrorism should not just be dealt with through the courts. If you think someone is committing violence against others your responsibility is to shut down all support of that person, you mustn't aid them in any way. There's no requirement that private entities wait for the courts before stopping commerce with suspected terrorists. If you are google, that means completely locking out all accounts that you identify as involved in terrorism.
The supreme court has held that when making statements of public concern, you haven't committed libel if you are acting without malice. It's pretty clear google wasn't acting with malice here, and that it is a great public concern if someone is actually amassing armored vehicles to use against others. And just because someone is a terrorist, doesn't mean you should or can act through the courts. If google believes someone is acting against non-US nationals in a foreign country, then there's very little the US courts could pragmatically do about it other than order entities in the US not to support them. Of course if evidence did emerge that google flagged that terrorist activity was happening, and they continued supporting that activity, I don't think that would look favorably during any prosecution.
Which, yet again, brings me to my original point, which is that google shouldn't even be putting themselves in the position to scan private data and open themselves up to the liability of having invade privacy and to suspect someone is engaging in crimes.
> If you think someone is committing violence against others your responsibility is to shut down all support of that person, you mustn't aid them in any way.
Intent matters. For instance, if a fed or informant asks to use your services and you think they are doing it for illegal purposes, such as terrorism, then you can be convicted (Even though the fed / informant never actually would have executed them, and it was a ruse to arrest you). If you come into my business, and I announce I believe you are engaging in terrorist activity, then the case is pretty much open and shut for my intent if I go on to support your ongoing concerns.
So if you're wrong, you merely didn't engage in commerce with someone you believe to be a terrorist. There's nothing wrong or illegal about that. The agreement for free services by google doesn't mean google can't end the service at any time, and I'd bet the boiler plate for any paid service has a pressure release valve to end the service if google merely suspects you of engaging in illegal activity. In short, Google owes you nothing, and they're not your slave to provide you service despite believing you're a criminal.
I'd say when you twig to google as a violent terrorist it should escalate to a real human to check before shutting the account down and forwarding it to the FBI.
And in the meantime before a human can check it, you think google will be completely without liability if they flag someone as a terrorist but let them continue on with their business, even aiding them with all of google services?
They most certainly should be, because an automated Google system having "flagged" a user as "a terrorist" means nothing in the eyes of the law. On the other hand, they should not in any way be without liability for wrongly suspending a user's account just because their automated system unjustifiably "flagged" them.
>they should not in any way be without liability for wrongly suspending a user's account just because their automated system unjustifiably "flagged" them.
A legal team of 1,000+ at google is betting that you're wrong. I have a feeling they came to a pretty logical decision that liability of aiding someone flagged of terrorist activity is greater than liability of shutting down someone to whom you owe nothing.
They seem to be banning accounts that are clearly not terrorists.
Also, I get there are some black and white cases here. But there's plenty of grey also. I imagine a lot of terrorist videos aren't posted by terrorists, but rather by some disenfranchised/angry person who hasn't done anything illegal.
Unfortunately, google clearly has stated they think terroristic acts are happening. Once you indicate that you believe a counterparty is engaging in terrorist acts, you mustn't support them. Quite a few people have gone for prison for a very long time because a fed or informant who had zero interest in actually carrying out a terrorist act, made someone believe they were. And all the prosecutor needs to show is that Google _thought_ they were aiding someone making terroristic acts, and the prison sentences could be lengthy.
Remember the legal system doesn't have much room for nuance when it comes to criminal conspiracy. Even if somebody else gives you all the tools to do something horrible and eggs you on to do it, you are responsible if you make any act whatsoever towards what you believe will have that end, even if the person egging you on is actually a fed who knows all along the act isn't meant to ever happen and in fact you were only presented with the idea that an act could happen on false pretense so you could be tricked into going to jail.
And this brings me back to my original thought, which is that google is pretty dumb for even putting themselves in the position where they have a very dumb system for deciding if they're dealing with terrorist material. Because it opens them up to huge liability that they wouldn't have had if they simply allow their users to exist in privacy.
If Google thinks you do something illegal then they should call the police after a real human checked. If not they should not ruin your life, who knows tomorrow all your Google accounts get locked forever because an Artificial (Non)Intelligence found a word or a part of an image that looks like something "bad" but not illegal.
It's estimated 2 billion people use google. And in the US for instance, one third of the people here have records for criminal activity. Google doesn't have the manpower to call the police on millions of criminals actively using their services.
So what is the solution?
Google (and others) are clearly not competent to implement a good algorithm, so why the hell not give the unfortunate users a simple way to demand a human to check that your image or words are not criminal?
Sony did this to me, they blocked my son account for 2 months,no reason why or a way to appeal. The good part is that I now have a reason to not buy Sony products again, the bad part is that until it happens to you , you will think that there are millions of users and only few are affected by this so for sure it will not happen to you.
I've already stated the solution, it is the parent to which we are all responding:
>What we really should be asking is why is google examining user data at all. They should not be in the position where they can even find out who is a terrorist.
The solution I advocate for is they shouldn't be looking at our data. I don't want them evaluating who is a terrorist or who isn't, because as soon as they do that they need to take action on that information or be liable for failing to do so.
But I think you have found a very good solution with Sony, and maybe we should apply this to google and simply not use their service rather than get upset because they've chosen not to support those they think are terrorists. Again google is not your slave that must perform a service for you.
Walmart will do that. I worked at a mall bakery where some lunatic threatened to blow up the place because he was dissatisfied with the cream cheese serving size.
He was banned from all properties owned the malls parent company.
All of those walmart departments are doing the same thing: they sell you different kinds of consumer goods in a single marketplace.
If you get banned from the entirety of Amazon marketplace by harassing sellers in the gardening equipment department, that seems fair. If you get your AWS account banned for doing the same thing that has nothing to do with AWS, that's a different story. One thing is a consumer goods store, the other is a cloud service provider.
We're not talking about harrassment, we're talking about google thinking this is a violent terrorist who is sharing pictures of their armored vehicles.
Can you really say with a straight face that once google thinks they have a terrorist, they should just go on supporting that person in any way whatsoever? There can be very serious penalties for knowingly aiding terroristic acts (even if it turns out it was say a "harmless" fed or informant instead of an actual terrorist).
The appropriate analogy is at the automated checkout, a computer vision algorithm can't assure you correctly scanned an item. So it automatically sends a robot to the parking lot to boot your car, and a drone hovers over you and jamming your cell phone. Why? Idk, why not. Maybe if the store is really enthusiastic they tape your mouth, bind your hands, dump you in an alley and forget about you.
Terrorism is usually only defined by your allegiance, yes. In this case google is a US company so in the case they know violent islamic extremists use their platform, their allegiance is with the Americans, even if it happens to be the Americans blow up innocent Arabs and the extremists may just be engaging in self defense.
I have wondered what locked account actually means in context of the mail and its configuration being "active". E.g. I have setup email forwarding in my Gmail so that I always get a copy at another address. When my account is locked, I know I can't connect to Gmail but what happens to the above "workflow"? Does Gmail stop receiving messages / forwarding rules no longer work?
The second line of his post indicates that he's unable to post using the email account in question, so I must assume that means that the account in its entirety has been blocked
One of the simplest functions of a justice system - before impartial judgement, before detailed laws, before qualified advocates - is simply the right to summon a powerful person to justify their actions. Increasingly it seems that we will need this to be applied here, ideally in some simpler and less costly way than a full trial. It is just wrong for companies to make money by inviting people to rely on them , and then ghosting if something goes wrong.
IMO there needs to be some kind of minimum allowed customer support when handling user data. If you can't provide real support for free, then remove the free plan. If everyone has to then they are all equal again.
It's just wrong to trick people in to trusting a service with their data and then yanking it with no support contact.
Having recently dealt with what I’m assuming are a meatbag support team from Microsoft (specifically their business partnership program), I can honestly say there’s not much difference between a bunch of useless meatbags and no support whatsoever.
It took me 4 weeks to sign up for a service which requires few business details and proof of a domain by form of an invoice.
For a reason I don’t understand, it has no bearing on the rest of the registration process whatsoever, I just gave them proof of some unrelated random domain I own.
That's easy to fix. You have a government body that takes complaints and if a company receives too many complaints over their customer service, they must pay a penalty.
I had a problem where my spouse’s employer’s Health Savings Account custodian (PNC bank in this case) was simply giving us the run around on charging a fee that was not on their fee schedule, which the employees of PNC even acknowledged was an error, but no one could get in touch with a person with enough power to fix the problem.
I submitted a request on the CFPB website asking them to look into it and within 48 hours I had a boss call me from
PNC bank to confirm that my error was resolved and provided me her email address and phone number if there were further issues.
Trump did neuter the CPFB though, but hopefully Biden will bring it back:
And if people file these complains for doing stuff like actually hosting terrorism? For this to work you'd also need a review board to determine if TOS clauses are "fair" and not overbearing.
If a literal terrorist files a complaint then the police department can pick them up. The complaints department only needs to handle local citizen complaints.
However you feel about a company and their support policies, don't call other people "meatbags". That's gross. You're no higher tier of person than they are.
I think that's the wrong answer to a real problem. Instead of trying to prop up an equally-powerful entity to address power abuses of another powerful entity, why not decentralize power in the first place?
Why should there be megacorporations or nation-states to begin with? They seem to be causing more problems (massive inequality, environmental destruction) than they are solving.
I agree. But I'm not sure what the solution is. A lot of people will say "Hey, it's a private company", and as a libertarian minded person I tend to agree. But increasingly these private companies have more power of my life than my own government does, and it's accelerating further it seems.
The solution is government regulation. It should not be legal for Google to host peoples important data and yank it without any way for the person to get their data back.'
Google should be legally required to either provide a phone number to call, or make the Takeout feature always available regardless of account bans.
This is only true since the governments are ran by congress people that openly trade stocks based on insider info and take 'campaign gifts' from the companies.
This isn't new, by the way. Companies have had their way since the advent of the telephone, it was just in the shadows since the internet wasn't around and we didn't have companies attaching their brand name to every consumer-unfriendly act committed.
They only gain as much power as you allow them to have. You can still use your own domain. You can still back up to external drives in your house. You can still leave encrypted copies of those drives at a friend's house.
As a person residing in France, that's alien to me. We've had government regulations for ISP choice for almost two decades now. I'm very critical of them because they're actually not enforced (still very hard/impossible for smaller non-profit ISPs to use big corp fiber despite the law saying so), but at least they enable me to choose whatever xDSL provider i'd like, or even start my own for somewhat-reasonable prices.
I feel bad for you. Comcast recently accidentally disconnected my service twice now 2 weeks before my move because their internal systems are screwed up and then told me they couldn't fix their own issues because of their system, thus leaving me without Internet for multiple days.
This is where libertarianism ends up abutting to anarchism (or left libertarianism if you prefer); the recognition that governments are not the only power structure capable of trampling the individual.
Fun fact! The word “libertarian” was self consciously co-opted by the libertarian right in the 1960s by Murray Rothbard, who viewed that co-option as an important part of his war with the left.
As a libertarian, you would surely agree that leveling the playing field (with regulations and technical solutions) is a good thing. What do you think about hosting coops such as those listed on libreho.st or chatons.org federations?
Your capitalist reflex might be to dismiss self-organized, user-oriented coops... but they seem to provide better service and support than most commercial services i've dealt with.
I know this is avoidable, and I know it’s a semi-regular occurrence, and I can recognize Google’s moderation problem is non-trivial, but I really can’t shake the feeling that Orwell was off by a letter and the future will truly just be a bot stamping on a human face forever.
You don't even need bots - simple sorting algorithms do more damage. It shows human vulnerability more than anything else. All it took was a single fake message to get 600 people killed in Burma.
This is exactly how Google markets Drive. Go visit https://www.google.com/drive/ in a private browsing window and take a look for yourself.
> Your content is safe, private, and never used for ad personalization
> And Drive is cloud-native, which eliminates the need for local files and minimizes risk to your devices.
> Your important work, files, and precious memories are protected by our industry-leading security. You can rest easy knowing that the things you care about are stored safely in the cloud.
If Google markets a product in a specific way I don't think it's unreasonable to criticize Google when they fail to live up to that marketing.
Google does similar things with files stored in the corporate G-Drive product, which is supposed to be a replacement for on-premise file servers (i.e. there is likely no other copy of the data).
At a previous job, we had a forensic image of a compromised laptop stored in G-Drive. Google blocked access to it because of the malware on the disk. No "no, really, this is important and I need to download it, I acknowledge the risks" button, nothing. Good thing the person who uploaded it hadn't deleted the original copy yet.
This is your daily reminder that nothing in your digital life should EVER entierly depend on any Google services.
Im writing this from an android phone. It is not de-googled per se, but uses a replacement for every single Google service (files, books, maps, search, movies, ...). Yes I pay money for those replacements, but God its good to not my life in the hand of a overzealous ML algorithm.
I had Apple lock me out of iTunes, App Store, Mac Store, ... - for an entire month, if not more - alleging that I spammed others with my iMessage account.
The fact is that I never, ever used iMessage! I used only WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS.
In every support call, I would hear them say the same thing. I would tell them that I never used iMessage, let alone spam others. But, they would say, some users marked your iMessage account as spamming. I would ask them for proof, with iMessage records; they would say they cannot disclose that!
After that experience, I simply moved off iPhone to a Pixel.
I still have an MBP for work purposes, but I needed to create a different AppleID.
You can use everything and just dump your account data frequently with Google Takeout. It's super simple to use and provides the data in a format you can easily upload to alternatives.
Google drive and photos are my primary data copy and the .tgz dumps are my backup.
The problem with this is you need to remember to do this often enough before the ban hammer falls. The only automated takeout default they allow is once every two months.
There's a middle ground too. I use lots of cloud services, but I also spent $300 on a home NAS device to sync copies of the stuff I can't live without. Not affiliated with them, but I bought a Synology unit, and the UI lets you pretty easily sync things like Google drive.
I'd still be scrambling around a bit to fix stuff if Google banned me, but I'd at least have copies of the most important things.
That works for us tech people who have know-how and cash. Most Internet users across the world don't have 300$ to spend right away (in many parts of the world, 50-200$ for a laptop/phone is already quite the expense).
I believe only by empowering smaller, user-friendly providers (eg. hosting coops) can we actually change the situation.
Yes, but the $300 device wasn't really my main point. Just some middle ground of using Google, but maintaining a copy of important data. The copying could be done with a $30 external usb hard drive and regular visits to the Google Takeout page.
Yes. but remember that openstreetmap is the database. Its third party applications which will expose and build upon it, e.g. including searches in DDG and Facebook and Apple. The project website is not a one stop shop to compete against gmaps.
Of course the data can only be shown if someone adds it; with OMaps you can contribute for example `opening_hours` and the pub which is non-existent in OpenStreetMap ;)
I wish those didn’t exist. They’re wrong a lot. And people think they’re some official source of business hours even going as far as saying “on the website it says the hours are”.
MapQuest uses OpenStreetMap data, or at least shows me stuff I added to OSM in my vicinity.
On their mobile website they seem to be missing attribution, though!
It's possible he really did violate Google's "Program Policies" which are utterly ridiculous:
"If storing or distributing content related to terrorism for an educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic purpose be mindful to provide enough information so viewers understand the context."
So a random photo of a ute with the ISIS logo on the side might be a violation if you don't also write some commentary explaining what it's about and assuring everyone that you aren't promoting or celebrating terrorism. But where? in another file? How will a person with a link to the photo find that?
As if the Google AI is smart enough to understand context anyway. If you are going to use google services, set a calendar reminder to download the takeout dump very frequently. It's pretty easy to do and saves you in these cases.
Google was once my favorite company when it was still run by its founders and genuinely followed the "don't be evil" policy.
Now everything it does has turned into dark patterns. Google's #1 revenue generator Ads (formerly AdWords) now uses dark patterns to trick advertisers into spending more. For example, most of the recommendations make a user's campaign spend more money while not getting results. Many unwary users ignore these recommendations without realizing that Google added a setting that by default is on that automatically implements all of Google's recommendations after 14 days of wait time. These recommendations are implemented without the users consent or even knowledge. Even if a user turns off that setting, the recommendations appear everywhere throughout the interface with enticing "Apply All" buttons that are easily clicked on accidentally.
Also don't take any important dependency on any Google service. If Gmail is your primary email you may end up locked out of everything associated with it.
ISIS is probably an extreme example, more recently there have been moves to brand many non-mainstream movements and groups "terrorist". For example, Antifa is considered by many to be a terrorist group and if Google were operating in Hong Kong they would likely have to view supporters of the Hong Kong protest as terrorist.
My concern with actions like this is that there is rarely a clear line between what is acceptable and what's not, instead decisions are made in a highly political manner either by companies themselves or more authoritarian governments. So the question I have here is whether Google is simply respecting and enforcing national laws against owning illegal terrorist materials or are they making their own decisions about what is and isn't terrorist material?
IMO this just touches on a wider problem that in many countries simply owning concern books without a good excuse is illegal. To be charitable I suspect Google doesn't have much of an option here. If the government has classified something as terrorist material, even if Google disagrees with them doing so, Google probably should still respect national laws on not allow that material to be stored, or worse, distributed on their platform.
You've employed a strawman fallacy; you took a policy which is on its face pretty reasonable:
"be mindful to provide enough information so viewers understand the context"
and hyperbolized it, to put it mildly, into: "you are forced to write some commentary explaining what it's about and assuring everyone that you aren't..."
Context is the opposite of "an explicit statement spelling it all out."
Maybe I post photos of a vacation trip somewhere there was a car with an ISIS logo on it. The information and context they are talking about would be "2020 Vacation photos" for the album title and it being accompanied by pictures of sunsets, my partner, birbs, etc. that make it plainly obvious it just is a random car in my vacation photos.
>Context is the opposite of "an explicit statement spelling it all out."
Just because the context is very explicit does not mean that it's not context. Is it additional information that clarifies the primary info? Then it's context.
And how does that work when you're researching tanks and other military vehicles? Perhaps the researchers should photoshop someone wearing shorts and drinking a pina colada into their catalog of armored fighting vehicles from the Middle East.
> And how does that work when you're researching tanks and other military vehicles?
The title / description that says something like "Study of the use of mechanized artillery by guerilla fighters in the blah blah region", which is what you'd do anyway if it were for public consumption?
"Study of the use of mechanized artillery by guerilla fighters in the blah blah region"
is context but
"use of mechanized artillery by guerilla fighters in the blah blah region"
is promotion? Clear as mud.
Remember when ISIS started showing beheadings on Youtube and people thought it should be allowed to inform the public of how horrible they were? Turns out it was actually promotion and helped recruit foreign fighters.
This is very disturbing; hundreds of thousands of individuals and companies host their important documents in Google Drive--and pay to do it. Imagine that tomorrow you are locked out of those by a faulty AI, and the company that you have spent years building goes into bankruptcy and the livelihood of your employees goes away, just like that. Google has no business snooping in their customer's data for any reason, much less with buggy software.
> If Google becomes aware that Customer's or any End User's use of the Services violates the AUP, Google will notify Customer and request that Customer correct the violation. If Customer fails to correct the violation within 24 hours of Google's request, then Google may Suspend all or part of Customer's use of the Services until the violation is corrected. Suspension of the Services may include removal or unsharing of content that violates the AUP.
Being free is not an excuse. If Google can't give a reliable free service, then they should stop offering free services. Thee way they're doing it is way unprofessional.
This is like saying the Red Cross should not be allowed to give free sandwiches to homeless people if they are made of baloney and government cheese. It's unprofessional! Either use premium meats and cheeses and artisanal bread, or don't give them any sandwiches at all.
No, its like saying they should not be allowed to serve expired food and let x% of people end up sick. They should either serve safe to eat food or no food at all.
If the Red Cross is found to hand out poisonous sandwiches on occasion because of an error in their internal processes, you bet they will no longer be allowed to give out free sandwiches.
> The added grievance to this is that my drive also included my own personal family photos and my current book on the subject
I mean, how many times does this need to come up for people to learn the lesson? If you are storing your data with a third party, and you do not have an iron legal contract with this third party, then that third party can and will do whatever it wants with your data, including locking you out of it. We certainly don't like this state of affairs, but that is the world many of us have created.
Have you seen the TV ads for cloud storage services? They’re advertising themselves as being dependable. We cannot blame average consumers when events like these happen.
We need to stop pretending that software, including free-as-in-beer SaaS, doesn’t have an implied warranty. It does. The implied warranty in Google Drive is that “we’ll host your files for you”. Google screwed-up (an “honest” mistake, it pains me to say) but a consumer advocate (the FTC in the US?) should be going after Google for failing to comply with their own implied warranty.
Google is well aware this is a problem and actively obfuscates ways to get connected to support (unless you pay them extra, of course) so I have a real hard time accepting this as an "honest" mistake.
So much this. Host locally, and push encrypted backups to a cloud service.
Doing this will screw Google’s ability to optimize storage for identical files, which may drive up costs, but it’s the best way to ensure your data stays private.
Give them a NAS / old PC with shared network folder (Windows context menu or Samba on Linux), replicate the parts they want on phones etc. with Syncthing, and use any encrypted backup tool of your choice for the cloud backup.
Often people put quotes (or even air-quotes) around things to imply it's sarcasm or that it's only that thing if you can suspend disbelief, so I don't think there's any disagreement there.
Additionally, making them accountable for these mistakes is a way to actually have them resolve them, so honest or not, it's likely to stop of decrease in occurrence then.
> And what, a refund for 99% of the time what is a free at point of service to the consumer?
No, but give them a punitive fine (on the order of a percentage of their daily average profits) for failing to live-up to their own expectations set in their own advertising.
Then make it a simple fee/fine for screwing the customer. You promise that you're gonna host files and you deleted/restricted them? Pay $100 for every day that the files are unavailable.
Legitimate companies will have no problem with that. Scum that wants to lure users in (to capture their personal data) but doesn't even have the decency to hold up their end of the bargain will have to reconsider whether they still want to provide such a service.
> Have you seen the TV ads for cloud storage services?
Google Drive is not a "cloud storage service". You're not a paying customer of Google and you have no leverage with them at all. Putting your only copy of any data that you can't afford to lose on Google Drive is just asking for trouble.
> Google for failing to comply with their own implied warranty
There is no implied warranty for a service that's being given to you for free and for which you have no customer agreement or contract with Google. If you want a warranty, express or implied, you need to be a paying customer.
This should serve as a reminder that Google has been scanning the entire contents of your account for the past decade, and as usual (for Google), no human beings are in the loop to review the decisions made by algorithms.
Take a look at FreeNAS. It is FreeBSD, which is self-recommending for things like NAS, built on ZFS (all the nice parts of a modern file system like snapshots, easy backup, etc.) and has a nice management GUI.
(I also don't recommend exposing your NAS directly to the internet. They frequently make doing so attractive with the ability to run addons like file sharing or "private cloud" services. If you must, run them in a VM on the NAS and isolate the VM from everything else on your network. And keep up with patches.)
Synology works reasonably well, but is not setup and forget.
A few months ago, I decided to migrate to my new laptop by restoring a backup from the old one , just as a way to test the DS216j backups. I found:
a) I was on an old backup solution of them, and they had migrated to something new. I had a hard time to find the old backup software's installer to do the restore.
b) The old backup was good enough to restore individual files, but had no real way to do a full restore. It seems they thought I'd click on each individual file, even if there are hundreds of thousands in my home folder. I believe there was an option for zipping a folder, but it just timed out.
c) Their site had great documentation for telling me about how to do backups, but I could not find anything for the I-urgently-need-a-full-restore use case. Maybe I overlooked it, or their new software is better documented.
Now all the data was safely on the NAS, and I think I could scrape it out with a few days work, but none of the above would be fun to find out in the middle of an emergency. I've since thrown their backup software out and replaced it with a custom rsync to the NAS. At least I know how to deal with that when the full cow farm production hits the turbofan.
A NAS is generally safe if you don't do anything stupid with it (there are footguns available of course). But you can easily cut it off from the broader internet entirely.
Synology is great if you want to stick to using their GUI, which is very capable. If you are more of a DIY/CLI person, I would avoid Synology and similar products. They have everything set up in a very particular way, and you can’t mess around in the backend too much without risking corruption of some kind.
You spend less on a used computer with Ubuntu or FreeNAS or some other distro, have way more flexibility, but a lot more to maintain.
Sounds to me like you would probaby be fine. As the article states there are various safeguards against it. Even just 2FA helps against brute force. Alternatively don't have it accessible from the internet.
Synology is a good compromise for ease of use and being able to actually set it up the way you want and need it. I have been using them for a few years and I'm happy with them. You actually get a good range of options for setting it up securely. I'm much more concerned about my router being taken over in some way as it doesn't get security updates and there is not much you can do with it.
And yes, I use it amongst other things for local backups. But then still back up to Dropbox and Google Drive from the NAS and other devices. And to external hard drives to swap around. It doesn't make me use cloud storage less, but I'm a lot less concerned about losing access with having everything local as well.
That's a good point I hadn't thought of. My motive for "get out of the cloud" was more about losing access than risk of breach / leak / spying etc. So that doesn't require getting out, it just requires the local backup copy.
If you rent a flat without a contract, absolutely. Which is why I specifically said:
> f you are storing your data with a third party, and you do not have an iron legal contract with this third party, then that third party can and will do whatever it wants with your data
Sorry, but you've got the wrong take here. Google is presenting this service as a reliable place to store and share files. They have a responsibility to provide adequate human customer service. Sure, people shouldn't trust them, but not everyone follows Hacker News to know how common this sort of thing is. Regardless of whether the next person should trust Google, the right thing to happen here is for Google to restore access to these files, not to blame the victim.
> They have a responsibility to provide adequate human customer service.
A moral or ethical responsibility, maybe. A legal or financial one? Not under our current system, unfortunately. And corporations are not ethical actors.
Just to be clear, I'm not victim-blaming here. It is abhorrent what has happened to this person and to many like them. This is why education about avoiding snake oil I believe is essential in the school system. Economics courses should devote a full module to identifying snake-oil claims and inherent risks of "something for nothing" swindles, which Google Drive is a classic modern example of.
Especially Google, which still OWES me money after they closed my adsense account for bullshit reasons (and they know it since they sent me a worthless adwords voucher at my physical address). But at least I get to tell every single business I worked in (and some were huge) to never use any Google SAAS as a revenge and will continue doing that.
Ditto. And when I felt it was near end-of-life, I just moved it over to a more stable SSD.
I'm honestly thinking I'm going to have to backup my entire G-Drive externally and wipe it (for the security of my Google account). I mean, who knows what will trigger the deletion of your Google account these days... I guess the storage I pay for is just for e-mails.
Incidentally, I’ve had more SSDs fail - or misbehave - on me than spinning-rust drives now. And I don’t just mean cheap SSDs either, but an Intel Optane 905p I own results in hundreds of PCI Express bus errors every minute when plugged-in to any ASUS motherboard I own, while a SATA Intel 530 woke-up one day completely unreadable. And throw-in a couple of Samsung SSD failures too.
It’s enough to make me anxious between backups: at least with spinning rust-drives we can transplant the platters and controllers (separately, even!) while SSD hardware recovery is almost unheard of.
I keep SSDs less than half full and use trim, paranoiacly. Because of this I use an SSD for a year or two before I get a larger one, or an additional one (software and game assets keep getting larger!).
I've never had even the cheapest mwave or microcenter special ssd die. Sata or nvme m.2, nothing.
I also haven't had a spindle die in 15 years, ever since I started letting them sleep and using UPS to smooth out power.
That noise you hear is me knocking on wood pretty frantically.
Sounds like a plan, it’s actually cheaper in a sense. Today I saw my webhost had nextcloud one-click installs, that might be useful for those files you want accessible everywhere. I already pay for the space, so it doesn’t cost me extra.
A Synology NAS with RAID1 and a few terabytes is $400 to $500 including taxes. Seems pretty cheap for not having to back it up regularly. Although, the second location risk would remain.
The author of this article is not an average consumer. He's a person undertaking a particular project that requires a lot of digital data storage, and anyone doing that needs to take the time to think through the risks and benefits of the various available options. "Just put it on Google Drive and hope it's safe" does not qualify.
uhmm... there is no article. It's a link to a google support forum thread. And the way the author of the initial post (not just the replies) describes the way they use Google Drive and how they use technology in general suggests the person does not have the same level of tech-savvy as a typical HN reader.
> there is no article. It's a link to a google support forum thread
Fine, then s/article/post/ in what I said.
> the way the author of the initial post (not just the replies) describes the way they use Google Drive and how they use technology in general suggests the person does not have the same level of tech-savvy as a typical HN reader
I agree; I'm simply pointing out that if you are going to try to execute a project that requires a lot of digital storage of important data, you should be tech savvy, or collaborate with someone who is. You certainly should not expect a free service like Google Drive to be a secure, reliable data store for your only copies of important data.
> Welp - affordability. It's expensive and arguably less reliable to get an external hard drive.
I think multiply redundant back-ups get expensive, but one external hard drive with scads of space is cheap (at least from the perspective of someone who grew up when you measured space in MB). It won't provide you the security against data failure, but it will provide some recourse for when the cloud provider yanks your data.
Well, it will if it's in a different location. But that's just what I mean—you don't need one solution that protects against everything; different solutions can protect against different threats, and all you really need is one to make it through.
I don't think this really deserves to be downvoted does it? Even if it's simplified. And I say that as someone who is in a tiny fraction of the population in terms of having my own fairly serious business TrueNAS system at the core of my data story, behind an OPNsense firewall on a fairly fancy network setup and with also my own offsite backups and Backblaze B2. I'm working on upgrading my ESXi system too, continuing to take more stuff self-hosted. And I'm pretty happy with it all, as well as any other benefits it's just plain faster to do stuff locally.
But it's definitely fundamentally more expensive because there are tons of fixed costs that would be much better amortized across more parties. The hardware could handle far more than I throw at it, and importantly the incremental cost of expanding the setup is much much lower then the setup cost. My NAS could easily have nearly triple the storage space at "only" the cost of the drives themselves and maybe a bit more memory (which is dirt cheap). It's not processor or bandwidth limited. I don't need that much space, but if there were another few folks joining me on using it and we split the cost between us we'd each pay less for more. And the whole thing as-is leans heavily on my own personal amortization and professional knowledge, I can justify some of it as a business expense and I actually already knew tons of the basics before doing anything for the first time. A larger group could have someone devoting even more time to it.
That's the simple relentless logic behind "cloud services" really behind whatever layers of fancy marketing or conversely outrage. It really is cheaper at a basic level, but unfortunately the way it's often been implemented lends to centralization and perverse incentives.
Efforts to address it have to tackle those head-on. Ideally at a minimum there'd be legally mandated offering of standard "cloud APIs" for every platform so that iCloud or whatever could be slotted right out for something else compatible. It does seem like there is potential for more decentralized sharing and discovery, but the UI and reliability challenges are quite significant. We'll probably see a lot of gyrations back and forth as everyone searches for the right balances depending on their own situations along with whatever semi-ignorant semi-opportunistic bumbling responses governments come up with. Unfortunately even on HN lots of people tend to reach for sledgehammers over scalpels when it comes to the law.
Most web hosting providers will give you plenty of space for a pretty low price, particularly if it's just data you want to store, not make accessible through a web interface. Also there's tarsnap.
Don't know how it is today, but decade ago it was admins favourite pastime to rummage through people accounts and look for juicy stuff. Girlfriend pictures, movies, diaries. Always encrypt data locally before sending to the cloud.
Sure is, and it’s excellent. I make a backup of everything Google stores about me every couple of years. I’ve never needed them, but they’re really interesting and give me peace of mind.
This is exactly the reason why I'm against Apple CSAM. It's just a matter of time before someone innocent gets flagged.
Lots of parents take a photo of their child having a bath or something similar at least in Europe/Asia and it's clearly of non-sexual nature. Now, how does the Apple algo know that?
I'm generally curious: Have you tried to contact Google before about any kind of issue? It took me like a day or so to chat with an actual person the last time I had an issue.
I agree with your point as a whole but the Apple CSAM wouldn't really have this issue as it compares the images hashes against hashes of a specific list of CSAM.
Reminder that it's perceptual hashes, not cryptographic hashes. So it's enough that images have enough visual resemblance, according to the model. Natural collisions have been observed and generating collisions for planting on someone elses device is trivial.
Apple also only recieves a DB of hashes and so have no way to verify that they're only scanning for CSAM and not other "undesirable" content.
Given the siloed disjointed nature of various Google products, it's probably because the security and Takeout teams don't care to deal with with one another.
It’s unlikely they’d want to let someone accused of “terrorist activity” download their data, since if it was actually a terrorist some future investigation would probably blame them for materially supporting terrorism which is illegal.
Daily reminder that a former sitting president is still banned from a major social media network yet we are blessed with updates from literal terrorists, so when another big tech co keeps their eyes open for "terrorists" you know it's a facade to impose their draconian wishes, and remind us proletariat who really is in charge.
Daily reminder that big tech is the biggest threat to democracy we face today, even bigger than some conspiracy Q theorists LARPing in the capitol.
Daily reminder that if we simply enforced our current anti-trust laws, we could disassemble the bulk of these companies, all the meanwhile distributing the opportunities and improving the economy for all.
If Microsoft deserved it in the 90s, Google sure as hell does today.
Encrypted data is too much of a pain because it breaks cross platform integrations. I mostly upload files via my ipad and phone which are unable to encrypt the data. It also prevents you from previewing things without downloading the full file first.
You get a mail sometime in the future and after receiving it you have to turn around and download multiple chunks, log in for each of them and do it quickly before they disappear.
Probably more of a pain if you have a large amount of data and a slow internet connection. For me it all fits in the 50GB file and downloads in a few minutes. I guess pulling out 1TB of data on a slow connection would be difficult but I can’t see how google could make it better since downloading and extracting a 1TB zip on its own would be almost impossible.
mega.nz somehow managed to do this all encrypted. Dunno if its "NH approved encryption" also dont advice on using that service it has a bad reputation. Nonetheless it seems like it would technically be possible to have large amount encrypted files without losing the ability to handle single files and download whole folders as archive.
None of that is a problem is you only use the google cloud as a backup and not as a the place to work on/with the data directly. It simply isn't save to use for anything other than as an additional backup.
Ban algorithmic account suspensions to users who have derived $250 from a service in last year - all must be confirmed by a human.
Gives Google, fb, twitter, et al time to ban the bots (in first 30 days of an account life), while still protecting users from ever expansive tech cos.
A few years ago someone ported my google voice number out without my authorization. The normal methods of contacting Google was useless. I eventually went to people in my linkedin network at Google for help and they were able to get me in touch with the right people. Google should be embarrassed...
Aside from all the moral and ethical questions this raises from the usage of faceless AI, really this happens time and again, I suspect so Google can employ less human reviewers and so they can claim "not our fault". I think I've commented on a couple of these posts by now every time with the same advice.
But anyhow, people should be well aware cloud providers do use AI systems and they will make mistakes, so you should:
1: have multiple redundant backups, seriously this is a no-brainer, AI or no even Google can lose data if a storage device dies. Depending on how important the data is you might consider as many backups as you can manage.
2: encrypt, encrypt, encrypt. If you store even so much as a text file unencrypted you're making a mistake. Use archives, double compressed, use the myraid of tools out there to ensure your files can't be read by anyone but you and who you decide to give the key to.
Is this more work? Absolutely, but at the end of the day regulations mean Google need to scan content, and they will have a false positive match, and then it goes on HN and magically Google restore the data.
I hope they get the data back but sometimes being burnt is actually a lesson in remembering best practice, why oh why your only copy of family photos are on one user hostile data-mining platform is beyond me, but it's a terrible idea.
Yes, the entire business model is Google offering a service to everyone, hiring the bare minimum number of moderators, automate most moderation, and treat the <0.001% of people caught in the cross-fire as as a negligible loss.
I have more concerns about Google Docs than Google Drive. While files can be moved around and used pretty much the same offline as online, the same cannot be said about the use of Google Docs for collaborative document editing.
If you're trying to de-Google your life, what is a sane replacement for Google Docs in a collaborative team environment where you can have some confidence that you won't lose all your assets?
How many times does that have to happen before people realize there is no cloud, only other people's computers.
The data that is stored there is no longer yours, just as thanks to Apple and Co. your hardware no longer really belongs to you, but you only enjoy a temporary right of use.
It will be interesting to see when hardly anything remains of an entire generation because everything comes from the cloud: Photos, videos, games, film, music.
No more treasure troves in the attic, no more of grandma's record collection or dad's DVD collection or uncle's old console games. Everything just rented and when removed from the catalog, they are gone forever.
Only our plastic waste remains.
This is why I've stopped buying books on kindle. It gives Amazon the power to censor your book library, and it would not surprise me at all if we see them exercise that power soon.
I personally find a rip of the book online to drop onto my reMarkable then purchase it through some ebook marketplace. Now I have a DRM-free copy and the author gets their cut.
That's certainly noble, but it doesn't send the message that you're unhappy with DRM. You're ultimately engaging in piracy and at the same time not voting with your wallet.
I don't see any alternative, but just wanted to make that point.
Whenever I buy an ebook I go through the painful process of downloading it to my laptop either directly from the store (e.g. Kobo) or via Calibre [0] if I bought it from Amazon which I try to avoid, removing DRM via some tool I found somewhere and uploading it to the ebook again via Calibre. It's annoying an probably illegal but no one can take my ebooks away that way.
I'm pretty sure the kindle DRM is broken easier than that, DeDRM came up on my quick search, but flipping through the book to copy all the pages is an easily scriptable task.
They have pulled books before I believe. However there are many good drm free ebooks. I still use a Kindle because I like the device but I keep it in airplane mode nearly all the time and copies of drm free books on my pc.
Edit: I manage my library with calibre and the device plugged in. You never have to take it off airplane and it gets better battery life.
Amazon banned me (for something completely unrelated to Kindle books), and I lost access to everything on Kindle as a result. It's a good thing I hadn't spent much money there, and obviously I'm not buying any ebooks going forward.
Buy ebooks from Baen directly, or from Tor on your service of choice. These publishers release books DRM free, so you actually own the file. Any other ebooks you “buy”, you’re renting.
I actually really don’t care about kindle because it’s only useful for certain formats I tend not to keep anyway and is a lot more convenient and cheaper than hunting down physical copies of stuff.
I originally had over 200 books, all read, gathering dust so I gave them away. They took up space and attention and were a pain in the ass when I had to move house.
As for the convenience, I do a lot of hiking and it’s not much fun dragging two books from the expanse series with you versus a kindle in a ziplock bag.
I have physical copies and PDFs for technical books and reference material though. And a lot of text files.
tell yourselves a decade ago: everything is streamed, if something doesn't meet the most up-to-date social guidelines created by a mob of microbloggers it's removed from a storefront or completely kicked off most of the internet, oh and privacy? too radical!
We have to be able to rely on some cloud services, though, if we want georedundant backup of local files. I agree that relying on Google drive without additional backups is a bad idea, and it's generally a bad idea to store unencrypted files on cloud servers (or rely on their encryption), but the problem is more general.
It should be prohibited by law for cloud service providers to snoop around in other people's data without a warrant, no matter whether that snooping is automated or done by humans.
I told someone I had catalogued over 20k songs and they thought that was insane. When I explain them my backup system they think I spend a fortune on it. I don't even have an NAS. Just a simple mirroring system with like 6 separate hard drives.
There is a counter movement, for example, these guys place a significant role (and as far as I know primarily with a practical focus): https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/
If everything I've paid for and supposedly own some right to access can be taken away from me by a wayward algorithm at a moment's notice with zero recourse, you bet your ass I'm going to "pirate" content, even if I still buy it first!
The best pirates would never use free open source solutions. They'd just take whatever corporate solution that's the flavor of the day and then use that with anxiety inducing cracks that will give your antivirus a heart attack.
I worked as an intern for an archive digitizing old letters among other things. Many aspects of key historical figures are available — letters, etc. You know what they were thinking because you can read some of their personal thoughts.
In this day and age, if you’re lucky emails exist, but due to discovery, etc many entities just purge everything. Bad news, this era will be a black hole for future generations to understand. Good news is that the idiocy of this era will be toned down.
OTOH, if that sort of data is not purged, it could be far richer than any letter. Many people pretty much use their phones/devices as extensions of their minds, and phones are a very personal, private place.
They still have censorship power over the App Store. You can't even have reader apps that show titties, as Tumblr learned, or show UGC expressing wrongthink, as Gab and Parler learned, or offer VPNs in China, or protest apps in Hong Kong.
The topic of this discussion is cloud-based censorship.
Stop using Google Drive. Unless you're storing cat photos, or you use an rclone-encrypted mount that is stored in your Google Drive, you can't trust any public file store.
While not Google Drive, today my Ad words account was suddenly suspended because of non payment. No warning just a suspension. I have a 100% Valid credit card number on my account. I need to submit an appeal and then I get a vague "because of Covid 19" we can't respond even though we know Google has hired a record number of contractors and folks in the US this year. Something isn't right.
Interesting - I got a sternly worded warning about the billing information for my GCE account this evening, and after looking and verifying that the credit card on file was, in fact, still my credit card, and not remotely close to expired, I shrugged. The VM I run there as a freebie instance for a few things isn't that important, it would be annoying to lose it, but... I'd just spin up another VM somewhere else for the purpose.
I don't think I had the option to appeal, but they've also not actually terminated the VM yet, and I'm up to date on my billing according to their system so... shrug
Someone pushed a billing update without testing it properly first and it got confused, most likely. I expect a "Please ignore our last email..." sort of message tomorrow.
> [Under Investigation] Customers may receive "Payment failed" notifications.
> Error Message: “Your payment information could not be processed. Visit the payment overview page to make sure your payment information is up to date and to pay any outstanding charges.”
I wonder if it's more widespread and you got caught in the same thing.
It looks like this happened yesterday, and he says in the link that it normally takes 2 days to investigate and respond.
This is an unfortunate incident, but IMO hardly as egregious as other commenters are making it out to be. A false positive for literal videos of terrorist vehicles does not seem at all unreasonable, and yet HN has given it less than 24 hours to be resolved before blasting it to the top of the front page.
Don't rely on Google Drive if your documents are important, or of academic significance or whatever. Period. Google can lock your account for any reason. If you value your data and privacy, don't use Google drive or one drive or icloud or anything like that. When will people learn their lesson?
>Hungary-based game developer Gaijin Entertainment found themselves in a tactically difficult position last week when a user of their combat simulator War Thunder tried to win an online argument by sharing classified documents in the company's game forums.
Maybe checksums of that document are circulated to cloud providers for censorship purposes.
Why the heck do people still store their important documents (that they absolutely can’t do without) somewhere where they have no control over and where they could be kicked out at any moment is beyond me.
Obviously it’s always sad to see such a great amount of work go to waste, but at what point are we just going to start blaming people like that who are just careless with their data.
Don’t use a cloud you don’t have total control over for something that you absolutely need control over. At the very least don’t use fucking google.
Most people are not technology savvy let alone HN elitists. When I talk to non tech people about stuff like this I get a lot of blank stares. Whenever I’ve said if the service is free then your are the product I get even blanker stares.
Most normal people wouldn’t consider using Google Drive as being careless with there data. They would actually considering it being smart as Google is one of the largest tech companies.
Put yourself in someone else’s shoes for a minute. People who have these kids of hobbies do it because it’s their passion and a lot of times, the best ones at least, don’t have a lot of disposable income to spend on said hobby.
> Why the heck do people still store their important documents (that they absolutely can’t do without) somewhere where they have no control over and where they could be kicked out at any moment is beyond me.
Cause they think it will never happen to them, until it does...
Looking at pricing for Google One to compare it with a Synology, I noticed my account doesn't seem to have the option for the higher tiers of storage such as the 5TB or 10TB that should be an option, instead 2TB is the highest. Have these plans gone away recently, or is this perhaps an account issue? I see articles mentioning them this month.
Until we move to E2EE, we will all get policed for the wrong reasons, even if the files we have are legit.
The scale of some things has forced people to use non humane flagging, and to comply with some tyrannical government requests. The best solution? NAS it or use E2EE providers only.
I don't mean to be insensitive but what on earth possessed you to have your only copy of anything be held by some gigantic corporation, let alone one as completely nihilistic as Google.
Dear Everyone, Buy a USB stick and keep some copies of your important stuff in your own possession.
Deja Dup on Linux supports this. Just pick a directory to back up, sign in with your Google Account, and check a box to encrypt your stuff before uploading. Google Drive just sees encrypted chunks with file names like “duplicity.gpg”.
The further the cloud technologies go the less reliable they are becoming. More users also mean more automated and inapropriate bans and less chance to get through to support. Good time to invest in hard-drive manufacturers ;D
> Google Drive which I used to back up all of my data
Google Drive is not a backup of your data. We need to help people get to know this - I keep telling this to friends all the time, hardly anyone listens.
Would it helped if the content was encrypted? I guess yes, so before using any cloud storage, set up the process to encrypt everything you are going to put up there
All historical information is subject to correction by MiniTrue. Until Google Drive supports such a scenario, it is inappropriate for publishing historical information.
I will upvote and comment to hopefully gain visibility at the minimum.
Google really has an unfortunate customer support set up, in that there isn't one. Your best bet when Google does something bad to their customers like this (And regardless if its a bad AI or bad bot, its still Google doing it), is to post it on twitter or hackernews and hope it gets the visibility for a Google employee to fix it, or contact someone who can fit it. That isn't a support model.
I saw comment in another one of these discussions saying you should treat google as a potentially hostile adversary and have a contingency plan for what to do when they turn on you.
I agree with this really in relation to every cloud provider. If your business continuity and data are important, there should be a plan for how to keep the lights on if a provider through malice or incompetence stops playing nice. The google specific problem is they are into so much stuff that its not just a question of not using them, you also have to consider what happens when your emails are flagged as spam our you're delisted from search, etc
I work for a smaller tech company and we do large scale events periodically with our customers. We do lots of perf testing and ensure our servics can handle these sustained bursts of usage which can reach upto ~500k users concurrent.
Google flagged our main event site as a phishing site during a large event that was lasting multiple weeks. No matter how many load tests you do, always have contingency for Google.
TDLR: Even if you DONT USE GOOGLE as YOUR CLOUD provider, always be aware of its impacts on your customers/busisness!
In a nutshell: always have redundancy. And always verify that your redundancy works when you need it. Nothing worse than a broken backup.
Beyond that, it's a damn shame startups keep choosing Google for Google Plus or GSuite or Workhorse or whatever the fuck it's called now. The winning move is to not play with them.
I have no activity on YouTube, Blogger, or any other Google service since they tied up all the accounts, just to minimize the chance of getting my Gmail chopped off.
(Note to self: stop giving feedback on Maps routing. You never know.)
I'm sure you already know, but setting up your own myname@mydomain.tld and then setting that up in Gmail[1][2] means that in a catastrophic scenario (your Gmail is closed) you don't lose your email address.
In addition to that, you should frequently take a backup of your Gmail emails[3], then in case your account is locked you can use the exported mbox[4] archive, and import it in Thunderbird, this works reasonably[5] well, e.g. recently I had to find an airline ticket from 10 years ago which I had originally received in Gmail, and it took just a few seconds to find it in Thunderbird.
That was very helpful, thank you - I didn't know all that, and even if I did, many others coming across this probably did not either.
I still don't feel like going traipsing around minefields. I'm sure there's a benefit from tying together all Google services - for me, it just keeps me away from most of them. And I even pay for Google One.
you would think that paying for it would translate into a slightly better level of customer care. But that doesn't seem to be the case with Google. I pay for YouTube premium and I had my fair share on unanswered issues. Not sure about the other services though, YouTube is the only Google product I still use and I have a separate account only for that. Hopefully Google One turns out to be better than YouTube Premium!
Or just use Zoho. It's free to link your own domain ($1/mo if you want IMAP access) and they have actual support. I have contacted them in the past about a bug with their DKIM implementation (or really, the UI) and they sorted it out manually on the spot.
This was in case OP didn't want to give up Gmail straight away. Of course you can just migrate to another provider, or, as in my case, spin up your own mailinabox[1] instance. That way the only provider you have to deal with is the cloud provider for your VPS, and in the remote case my account was terminated, it would be very easy to switch to a different provider (because Mailinabox includes functionality to do automated backups to an external location).
I've thought about doing this myself, but apparently it's a lot of work to get right. I read from others who tried it that a lot of their mail would be caught by spam filters and they didn't necessarily know why.
I've been using mailinabox for almost a year, I had an email caught in spam once, I contacted the spam filter and said my IP was probably being used by someone else before I took it, and they whitelisted me.
So you can have an occasional annoyance but it's not that common.
When I get a new IP (e.g. because I'm upgrading to a newer machine) first I check my IP against a list of antispam filters (I don't want to advertise any of those services, but a quick internet search will show you where you can check, most services have a free tier), if it turns out that the IP has got a bad reputation, I just get a new one instead of trying to whitelist it.
The only time that my email got bounced, that IP was not "clean", it had been blocked by one of the filters but I thought "oh I will just whitelist it on that one filter". I should have generated a new one instead.
One more thing that some people might not know: with all spam filters, if your email is caught by the filter, you will get a message, it's not like you don't know if the email has been delivered or not.
You will see something like "Your message could not be delivered - The mail system [host, ip] refused to talk to me: [reason, e.g. spam]"
In a past job I was frequently around the globe and was not able to have my phone and SMS always with me. No matter how many settings I tweaked, it just seemed that google would not let me get into my gmail without my phone. Of course my banks would not let me in without my email. Ultimately I had to "de google" for the sake of being able to use the needed internet services wherever there was internet. When so much is tied to email these days, paying for a service that at least has a phone number to call if something goes wrong seems worth it to me, especially since most paid email services are reasonably priced.
Google's fetish for not providing human support is so counter-productive it makes me think there must be a single powerful individual executive maintaining the policy. It's too stupid to have widespread support among Googlers.
You cannot feasibly provide any level of acceptable human support and remain “free” with a huge user base. Meanwhile, being “free” is crucial if your actual paying customer is the advertisers. If you stop being free, you (gasp) normalize paid service. Suddenly you are conflicted and fighting two fronts, you compete with other paid services, your users can actually demand things and vote with their money, etc.
Remember, over $1 BILLION dollars a quarter of free cash flow into their cash hoard EVERY QUARTER.
An absolutely stellar customer support network with real people was being operated by Network Appliance when I was there for less than $60 million A YEAR.
Google is absolutely capable of providing a level of service that is unmatched, but they choose not to.
In my personal experience NetApp support was excellent, but most of their customers were at least sane, computer literate, and able to communicate coherently. That situation does not obtain with the masses of Google users.
It's possible that Google could provide support, but they are also trying to create a reputation of providing infrastructure so reliable that the technology is simply finished and doesn't need support. They don't want to give the impression that they're giving up that battle.
Even if that was completely correct it wouldn't apply to their paid services like Workspace, Google Fi, YouTube Premium, etc that also have no customer service whatsoever.
Any entity that can control an aspect of your life but doesn't give you the possibility to even talk to a human should not exist. I had to call the IRS today and with a little navigation cheat sheet, I found how to get ahold of someone with a 30 minute wait time. It sucked, but I spoke with a human that was very courteous. For a government agency, people dread it. But I at least have a ridiculous timeline to respond and can engage with a representative of the government. Google can virtually shut down your ability to access websites tied to an email, and now you're extraordinarily SOL without any recourse except for legal action. Not to mention they don't even tell you rules you violated if they give you the boot. Even the government today has to do that. But a private company? God forbid!
Except I believe that there’s a deeper cause here, the misalignment between the interests of the actual users and the company to whom the users aren’t actually a source of revenue except by numbers that can be shown to advertisers and investors. (Further down this goes to our expectation of free service; it was all fun and beta at first but it turned out to be a trap.)
Importantly, providing human service will address a symptom but not eliminate said misalignment—it’ll keep manifesting itself.
Simply put, especially in a 2FA worlds, emails need to be a right. Let's say you have a government account tied to your gmail account. Gmail locks you out. The government then tied your ssn to that email account. How do you sign up for the government account now that google has effectively prevented you from interacting with the government?
That kind of stuff needs to end. Email's are required to conduct business and interact with the govenrment nowadays. A private company should not be allowed to just remove your ability to interface with businesses online. My bank can't effectively steal all my money and close my accounts just because I have a personal viewpoint or hell, even committed a felony! But for some reason (especially redditors) people think it's okay for a private company to shut someone down entirely just because of some form of speech or whatever reason simply because it's a private entity.
Yeah, the problem isn't that Google offers a free no-support email option. That's a legit market segment.
The problem is that because so many people misuse that option they deny the economies of scale that would support flourishing paid email providers. And a lot of people think they are OK with the no support plan but they really aren't, and this turns out to be the case when a bot shuts them down. Unfortunately the paid privacy focus email providers suck right now, both at spam filtering (looking at you, protonmail) and the overall UX. Gmail is just much better.
(Former Googler here. There's no individual executive.)
People who comment on Google's lack of human support ignore the fact that it's a virus that's engulfed the whole online world. Almost every large company has automated chatbots, voice response systems, FAQs, and every imaginable way to avoid paying human beings who know things. And let's not even talk about whether they're empowered to actually do things for you.
Google could certainly lead and maybe the rest of the world would have to follow. Maybe.
It would be very difficult to model a financial benefit of offering dedicated support for free products. If you pay for Google One (extra storage), you get access to phone support. I wonder if they would've been able to help in this situation of a locked account.
For what is worth, Drive as part of 'One' actually comes with support - I've been on live chat with them. They weren't super helpful overall but I was amazed I could get instant chat support in the first place from Google that I let it go.
It doesn't exactly have widespread support; it's more that nobody can propose a better solution that doesn't blow the budget completely out of the water.
Here's one - how about allowing you to pay to get official support if your account has been locked. And maybe even, god forbid, refund you if your complaint had merit.
And to teach other users to stop critically relying on such a capricious service. I have less sympathy when it happens to someone techy, who should know better, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
IMO, the real issue is relying on any single storage solution for such critical and hard to replace data. You should always have multiple, redundant, tested backups of such data, the minimum being 3 copies, in 2 different formats, with at least one located offsite.
That said, Google does ha reputation for this shit, especially on their free plans, so, you should definitely keep that in mind when storing data on Google Drive.
Well, when you're making an omelette you have to break some eggs.
There has been a literal, yet largely silent, book burning going on with Google services in recent years. On youtube, many alternative voices are silenced, billions of comments deleted.
I know its a private company, but in the US there are free speech laws + the possibility of using the court system (if someone makes a libellous statement). But no, silencing voices is in the realms of corporate policy - the rule of law has been deemed to not apply.
I remember during the BLM riots, I had shared probably 50 videos of individual destructive and/or violent acts by the rioters in a Slack channel I'm a part of. Probably 6 months later, I went back to look at some.
No I mean I scrolled past all the comments that linked to the videos and they were all "the account that posted this video has been suspended" or "that video has been deleted". Don't remember the exact messages, but they were all deleted by Google.
Please don't characterize this as a political voices thing. Of course it's _related_, but this instance is about misclassification of private data, not silencing voices online.
They are a private company in the sense that they are not a government entity, and thus the first amendment does not apply to them. This is a different sense of the word "private" than whether their stock is or is not publicly traded on an exchange.
The nature of the problem (a big monopolist behemoth of a corporation is too big and powerful and lacks incentives to change) and the solution (only state action, regulation, mandates, i.e. something more powerful than Google must enforce Google to act) is by definition a political problem. This is like the epitome of what politics is for.
Except that the only reason that these large platforms can sustainably exist, is government granted immunity from the content posted to them as a common carrier. Currently they're trying to have it both ways, where they can both be immune from any liability from bad content that gets uploaded, while selectively censoring whatever content they don't like.
It's not like the government doesn't play a role. These platforms can only exist because of government protections, and those protections should come with protections to the public against censorship.
Personal opinions about censorship aside, Google aren’t breaking any free speech laws because free speech doesn’t mean anyone can post anything on private channels. No, the law is a lot more specific than that, eg the government cannot censor individuals.
To that end, free speech has been upheld against social media platforms in specific circumstances. Eg when Trump blocked people he didn’t like on Twitter.
I’ll get downvotes for saying this because it’s a popular meme on HN to shout “free speech” but most who argue it misunderstand the law and it’s important to understand what the law actually states if you want to make a complaint about business not abiding by it.
Personally I don’t think the problem is that platforms are legally allowed to censor the content they host. In fact I can think of some legitimate case studies for why a company should be allowed to moderate the content it hosts (eg if it’s a platform aimed at children). I think the real problem is a combination of:
- people repeatedly falling back to the same few hosting platforms for everything, this allows the impact of those company’s hosting terms to be far further reaching than it ever should be. Eg if you know your military studies might trigger Googles bot then don’t use Google!
- and the companies providing a broken escalation process. Meaning what should be a relatively simple review ends up taking a mammoth public campaign on yet another social network just to get a human to look at the case.
Point 1 is really the crux though. This is one domain where boycotting actually does make a difference. Granted not to Google’s financials, but it does make a difference to us. Because the best way to avoid shitty T&Cs is to use a service that doesn’t have shitty T&Cs. There’s no shortage of hosting platforms out there so it really is that simple.
I really wish people who downvoted this would explain. Like it or not, the first amendment does not apply to private companies. This conversation is not about what's fair, it's about the actual state of things. Shouldn't you be mad at the constitution and our founding fathers instead?
I recently decided against G Drive and for office.com for our tiny startup. One reason being the unreliable customer support often mentioned here on HN.
Any paid Google service with an SLA is perfectly fine.
The choice between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace should mostly be a matter of taste.
Google Workspace is very straightforward and largely offers better finish and UX. I personally dislike Google's material design and find myself confused by it, but most people seem fine with it.
M365 Business Standard on the other hand is arguably a better deal if you value the macOS and Windows versions of Microsoft's office apps. The UI isn't always good and the web versions suck, but everything is also very flexible and intended to scale to almost everything the IT dept of a Fortune 500 companies with tricky compliancy requirements might require to control a fleet of Windows machines.
G Suite / Google Workspace / whatever they're calling it this month has generally very good support.
eg I had to fix a domain issue, albeit a domain issue caused by some stupid google stuff, and was connected to helpful competent people within a minute or two. Peers have similar experiences.
Google Workspace has incredible phone, email, and chat support. I've used them multiple times over the years and I live in a tiny country in the middle of the Pacific ocean.
The "gOoGle pRoVIDeS nO sUPPoRt" narrative is only about their free offerings. Paying customers get stellar support, at least in my experience.
This has also been my experience. Google One will get you to the right person to get things fixed. I had a billing issue that they were able to resolve in under 24 hours. But I could see the problem if your account gets banned that has the Google One on it... Would be hard to submit a request when you can't log in.
Google workspaces requires you to attach a non-workspaces-related account. Unless they both go down, you can still contact them. Worst case, I believe Workspaces requires a phone number now -- at least Google can't wipe that!
Oooh... looks like they now have an option on Takeout to automatically do an export every two months, and send it to a third-party provider (your choice of Box, Dropbox, or OneDrive).
Like Facebook and content moderation, Google is incapable of support. Look at the terms: at the very least, they'll be opening themselves up to people calling in with every KilledByGoogle complaint and lament. My impression from watching Google since they launched is that they absolutely do not want to do anything even close to that. Ever, as in the dictionary definition of 'anathema.'
Like Facebook and content moderation, it's a problem entirely of their own making. Zero sympathy, caveat emptor.
I think it will be Google downfall if they don't change.
No one wants to deal with a company that can shut you down any moment for no good reason and with no way to resolve the situation. If they continue like that, their dominance may be slowly eroded by smaller companies that actually care for all of their customers. It won't happen overnight, but once the movement has gained momentum, it will be hard for a giant like Google to adjust.
I see this complaint and it doesn't fit my experience at all. I pay for a google account (GSuite) and every time I've asked for help I've gotten it quickly/timely. Maybe if you aren't paying?
it is like this for almost anything in which money is not being exchanged. Impossible to get support unless you know someone who can give you a signal boost. Or if your compliant goes viral. otherwise, forget about it.
To Google, this is not unfortunate, this is planned. They truly do not give a single shit about you. Consume content and shut up is exactly what they want you to do.
Google is so bad that I'm surprised that he got enough information on even have a clue as to why it was locked/flagged by Google.
To say they have no support is too generous. It is more like they have an aggressively anti-support model.
Sadly, it seems that this should be so well known as to be considered foolish to use Google (and many others) for anything critical.
Its is not like Google lacks the capital or organizational scale to provide good support - they just refuse to do so. If they actually did it, they could probably do an amazing job, but that is not their goal.
There have been a lot of WW2 fanboys who have been writing fawning articles about nazis who won a medal or two and were secretly, actually anti-Hitler the whole time. The reality, as far as documented, is that most of these were run of the mill soldiers without any known tendencies to be treasonous in wartime. She's been finding most of the heroics to be bullshit, and the real soldiers to be nobodies, and hence having the articles deleted per WP non-notable policy.
This attitude is exactly the problem - we are selling our data in exchange for a service. If it's value were $0, Google would go bancrupt. So this 'pretend the service is free' thing needs to die because Google has been able to make billions. Clearly they are making a profitable trade. It's basically digital barter
Where there is profitable trade both parties have certain responsibilities.
Personally I stopped using free services everywhere I can because of this legal vacuum leaving me exposed.
Oh wait, I think that's even worse. This is the case for all google sites, if you use firefox, back button is disabled. Maybe this is to worsen the user experience for Firefox and encourage use of Chrome?
I'm also using Firefox. No addons, running on Ubuntu. I click on the link, read the article, click the "Back" button, and everything works as I expect.
I'm on the AWS cloud. I've never had a problem like this. I pay the $100 / month for the basic AWS support plan. Even store side AWS has done reasonably OK by me (except for all the crap listings in their storefront - wish they'd fix that).
By this I mean any problem I've had has been fixed. So at least Amazon has SOME humans still in the loop handling AWS support tickets and Amazon store calls.
I'm on Google Cloud and Google Drive and have never had a problem like that either. I have Google One and it gives me access to humans when needed for chat, email and phone support.
I pay way less than $100/month
My evidence is as good as yours. Anecdotal.
I think the real lesson here is that you should backup your data. Simple as that.
The guy losing access to their Google account today is at fault just like the guy that lost all his data because his HD got burned a decade ago. It's just slightly easier to blame Google than to blame a faulty drive. But ultimately you are the one to blame.
Just backup your Google Drive to a S3 storage or equivalent. And maybe keep a local copy in an HD or optical media.
As a person who formerly worked on the technical side of anti-abuse (both content and account) at Google, I urge you to read these kinds of reports critically. There is no reason to believe any of the details given in the post, which incorporates a lot of supposition about how this system works. For example, we have no rational basis for believing that this was done by some robot at Google. It is at least as likely that the content was flagged by some other user.
Anyway, Google will never ever comment on the reason for account disabled in public, therefore whining about it in public is not going to work. The way to get accounts enabled is https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/disabled2
There have been plenty of reports that this doesn't work either, with a bot simply 'reviewing' your account and not enabling it.
The OP is 'whining about it in public' because it's the only hope they have of getting a human being at google to notice the problem and save their data. If google had a functional support system that wasn't 100% bots, users wouldn't have to complain in public!
>As a person who formerly worked on the technical side of anti-abuse (both content and account) at Google, I urge you to read these kinds of reports critically. There is no reason to believe any of the details given in the post, which incorporates a lot of supposition about how this system works. For example, we have no rational basis for believing that this was done by sone robot at Google. It is at least as likely that the content was flagged by some other user.
>Anyway, Google will never ever comment on the reason for account disabled in public, therefore whining about it in public is not going to work. The way to get accounts enabled is https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/disabled2
No, Google has proven itself to be a pretty awful enterprise and deserves no benefit of doubt.
A user flagging is not the same as banning. The process that follows a flag can have human intervention and the assumption is that it does not currently in Google. As someone who worked in this space you could provide information on the process that would be valuable. Or maybe not on the basis of NDA or policy. In the former please do, and let us know the human touch points in the process end to end. If the latter, similar to your criticism for taking what OP says as granted, we cannot also take what you say as granted just by virtue of work experience you claim in a forum.
We actually do not care if Google comments or not, that is an internal policy decision for the time being. With legislation in Europe though I believe it will have to explain automated decisions and also will have to provide users with their content.
I am inclined to believe, btw, that someone who stored terrorism or other questionable material, would not be bold and stupid enough to make noise about losing access to it.
You really should not believe what I say just because I said it, but neither should you just resign all your mental faculties every time you find some forum post that confirms your prior assumptions. Just read critically.
> As a person who formerly worked on the technical side of anti-abuse (both content and account) at Google
oh well, did you “dogfooded” your own human-review system once flagged by your anti-abuse bots ? Of course not, and that’s why your system suck. If your are/were working at google, you are part of the problem, and if you want to do something about it, you should come down from your ivory tower.
I would say that Googlers are pretty likely to get locked out of their accounts, it happened all the time when I was there, usually for exceeding rate limits of one kind or another (Googlers get orders of magnitude more emails than anyone else for some reason). Dogfooding is generally practiced at that company. Every major system I worked with had new releases inflicted on insiders first.
I see, for example, his YouTube channel is up, but it's associated with 'team@armouredarchives.com', and not the personal gmail account he posted in the linked forum.
If it was the entire account, something really needs to be done with Google to force them to make these kind of actions as narrow as possible. They can really disrupt your life with a broad account lock.