[HN Gopher] Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Googl...
___________________________________________________________________
Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets
locked
Author : benhurmarcel
Score : 1841 points
Date : 2021-02-08 08:10 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| avesi wrote:
| Google makes ~$90 billion in profit a year, they can shave off a
| little to open up a few call centers to deal with issues like
| this. It's seriously shameful at this point.
| krajzeg wrote:
| I just wish that regulation would step in and make behavior like
| this illegal for the corporate giants. It is definitely possible
| to limit the power of the TOS, and it's already done in some
| cases in Europe (certain common TOS clauses are just void and do
| nothing).
|
| One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies
| from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems
| like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next
| step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal
| service termination.
|
| But right now, we're in the middle ages with this. "You're in
| jail, no we won't tell you why, no, there is nobody you can ask
| why and no process to revert it".
| sofixa wrote:
| > One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding
| companies from terminating service without stating a reason,
| which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have
| that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a
| way to appeal service termination
|
| In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. If you
| want to get in the details ( action X on date Y violates ToS
| section Z), that might be pretty useful to bots and spam
| accounts ( know which actions get caught and what to avoid),
| which are probably the vast majority of what is getting banned.
| PixyMisa wrote:
| Kafka approves.
| cf0ed2aa-bdf5 wrote:
| > In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation.
|
| When the ToS are 15 pages long this is about as useful as
| hearing "You're being arrested for breaking the law" when
| you're in the back of a cop car. Doesn't really narrow it
| down and provides you no way of actually defending yourself.
|
| I agree that being _too specific_ can help bots but the
| current way of handling these things is obviously flawed.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > When the ToS are 15 pages long
|
| You're off by at least 1 order of magnitude.
| krajzeg wrote:
| It needs to be enough information so that it can be either
| remedied (if the violation is real) or disputed (if it
| isn't).
|
| I agree that currently, "you violated the ToS" is legally
| enough reason and enough information. I don't think it should
| be.
|
| I also don't think we want the fight against bots and spam to
| justify taking inscrutable actions against real customers.
| xondono wrote:
| Please don't, the only thing worse than no response is a
| byzantine system that makes you _think_ there 's a path and
| becomes the biggest time sinkhole of your life.
|
| Just vote with your feet and move out of their services, life
| on the outside is just fine.
| ncann wrote:
| You can't just hand wave it away like that. Having regulation
| on a resolution process for account recovery is absolutely
| needed. You can't just tell people to move away from Google
| where their entire digital life is on it. At the very least,
| it should restrict your account to a read-only state and make
| it possible to download your data.
| suction wrote:
| Isn't that "socialism" and therefore harder to implement in the
| US than a gun ban?
| jjcon wrote:
| Regulation != socialism
|
| Welfare != socialism
| kevingadd wrote:
| Got bad news for you about modern American political
| discourse. Just tune into one of the major right-leaning
| networks sometime, it's rough.
|
| Just one random example of a high profile career lawmaker:
|
| "The senator dismissed House Democrats proposals to boost
| paid sick leave and bolster safety net programs like
| unemployment insurance and food stamps as "wage controls
| and price controls and socialism."" https://www.houstonchro
| nicle.com/politics/texas/article/Ted-...
|
| "Sen. Ted Cruz took aim Friday at socialism, which he
| blamed it for killing jobs in liberal cities.
|
| "The blue states with high taxes, high regulation their
| people are fleeing because they don't have jobs," he said
| while speaking at the Conservative Political Action
| Conference (CPAC) in Maryland's National Harbor.
|
| The Texas Republican said socialists effectively threw out
| thousands of jobs by pushed Amazon out of New York earlier
| this month."
| https://apnews.com/article/6d18da8f6b5ffc516bc23af722130a8b
|
| Noted third-world socialist country New York, home to wall
| street.
| swiley wrote:
| I'm hoping they don't and Google just dies.
| sadmann1 wrote:
| The only thing scarier than the thought that Google has
| algorithms that track your every move is that these algorithms
| are fundamentally faulty and furthermore they take decisions
| based on these algorithms. Case in point Google ads thinks I'm 70
| years old and married
| jjcon wrote:
| I also got locked out of my google account - not because of a
| violation (automated flag or otherwise) but because google
| decided my login location was too different. I know my password
| and have access to my recovery email but I am put into and
| endless login loop of 'unable to verify'. I contacted support
| which had me fill out a form and that was maybe 6 months ago.
| I've moved on now but I'll never use a google product seriously
| ever again.
| Nacdor wrote:
| I'm always afraid this will happen when I use a VPN or TOR. The
| internet in general is pretty hostile to any sort of privacy
| protecting measures, which they justify by saying your activity
| looks "suspicious". I've already been locked out of my Facebook
| account once because I forgot to turn my VPN off.
|
| The last time I used TOR it was almost impossible to do
| anything on the internet. Every Google search was met with "We
| detected you are a bot" and every website interaction was
| blocked by never-ending CAPTCHAs.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Unfortunately, enabling TOR basically makes your traffic
| "malicious-shaped" these days. One of the largest users of
| privacy services are users (bot or human) who don't want
| their traffic easily traced because they're doing something
| malicious.
|
| It's definitely not the only use case for such services, but
| if a service provider sees that 90% of traffic shaped a
| certain way is malicious traffic, it's understandable they
| will take steps to mitigate that traffic.
|
| ETA: I'm not happy about it because I believe in the value of
| anonymity, but it is what it is. Here's a Cloudflare blog
| post talking about the challenges handling Tor traffic, which
| to their estimate is (a) 94% malicious "per se," so any
| tooling you do that tries to estimate intent based on origin
| IP address is gummed up by the malicious signal emanating
| from the same Tor exit node as your legit traffic and (b)
| anonymized by design, therefore any attempts you might make
| to build a reptutation signal for a given client are intended
| to be thwarted. The result is that a Tor user's traffic looks
| reputationless to a service like Cloudflare, and you can't
| just assume reputationless signal is benign (so, CAPTACHAs
| and "bot-like behavior suspected" walls).
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/
| grishka wrote:
| My ISP has literally a single public IP address they use for
| all subscribers. And, I have third-party cookies disabled in
| my browsers because they are almost never used for something
| legitimately good. Because of these two things, I'm
| constantly being punished with captchas, and sometimes
| downright bans ("your IP isn't good enough to post on this
| forum"), in places where I least expect. Yes, looking at you,
| Google and Cloudflare.
| pkulak wrote:
| Oh wow, the dreaded carrier-grade NAT. I still can't
| believe that's a thing.
| grishka wrote:
| I asked them about IPv6 at some point, they said there
| are no plans to deploy it but "well you could buy a
| static IPv4 address if you don't like the NAT or want to
| run a server". It's a nice ISP otherwise, no "value-
| added" services, the speed is high (too high for many
| servers) and service disruptions are rare.
| suddenexample wrote:
| Each day I become more convinced that Google at the end of this
| decade will be nearly irrelevant.
|
| It's a company with MBA leaders who don't care about the product,
| which values engineers that have technical prowess and often
| don't care about the product.
| softwhale wrote:
| I'd rather pay a (small) fee and get _some_ support than deal
| with this nonsense. Come on Google...
| g_p wrote:
| From a European perspective, EU regulation 2019/1150 covers
| protections for business users of online intermediation platforms
| [1].
|
| Article 4 sets out a range of protections for business users,
| including a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific
| facts or circumstances, including contents of third party
| notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online
| intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable
| grounds for that decision"
|
| This would seem to point towards a gradual start of the change in
| this way, although it will be interesting to see if anyone from
| Europe is ever able to use this against Google and others
| successfully. On the whole, the legislation seems to be
| sufficient, and it will come down to the usual issues of national
| regulators and their willingness to aid in enforcement action.
|
| [1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
| content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
| lalalandland wrote:
| Anyone know of a good way to back-up google account content ?
| johnyzee wrote:
| To Google's credit, it's pretty easy. Go to your account (from
| GMail choose 'manage my account'), then go to 'data &
| personalization', find the 'download your data' option.
|
| They'll zip up all your data for you to download.
| progval wrote:
| https://takeout.google.com/
| abrookewood wrote:
| Google, Google, Google! When will you guys learn that you simply
| can't do this? You want me to use Google Cloud Platform but you
| keep killing off apps and locking people's accounts. Why would I
| trust you with my livelihood? The PR fallout from stories like
| this is killing your chances.
| blunte wrote:
| Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions,
| including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not
| unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time
| and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human
| about the issue.
|
| But Google (and Facebook, and probably some other companies)
| don't have reasonable processes for disputing or resolving these
| situations.
|
| Some have said that we should consider Google's challenge: lots
| of users/activities that need to be monitored and policed. The
| assumption is that Google could not afford to do this
| "reasonably" with humans instead of automated systems because the
| volume is high.
|
| But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a
| process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases.
| They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I
| haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they
| still have a healthy profit.
|
| In the unlikely event that involving more humans would be too
| expensive, then Google should raise their prices (or stop giving
| so much away for free).
|
| To summarize, there is no excuse for Google to operate this way.
| They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into
| the "acceptable losses" column.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I'd bet Amazon has more retail customers trying to get disputes
| resolved, than Google has business customers attempting to do
| the same, yet Amazon manages to get a human on the other end of
| the line. And I'd bet that Amazon's disputes have far less
| monetary value per incident. Maybe apples to oranges, but it's
| impressive from a customer service perspective.
| a1o wrote:
| Microsoft and IBM are also companies with a lot more humans
| available. I have solved lots of things with phonecalls be
| business or as a customer. You need to be really big to get
| humans on Google side.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| And it absolutely bites them in the ass. Google's awful
| reputation at the enterprise level is probably why GCP is
| struggling to make it among that sector.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| It's in Google's culture, too. A few years ago when I was
| learning GCP for a role and wanted to know if they had an
| AWS Firehose equivalent, I asked on their Slack and the
| response I got from a GCP rep was "just make a process in
| Dataflow." Doing that would have cost far, far more than
| Firehose costs, not to mention the dev/troubleshooting
| time.
| oillio wrote:
| What did you expect the response to be. Should they have
| said, "No we don't have that, you should probably just
| use AWS"?
|
| They didn't have exactly what you wanted so provided a
| workaround that would solve the problem.
| __david__ wrote:
| > Should they have said, "No we don't have that, you
| should probably just use AWS"?
|
| Yes? If you can't trust your rep to give accurate
| recommendations, then what's the point of even having
| one?
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| I think the point is obvious, that AWS is far more
| customer-centric than GCP. Google's gotten better at this
| but at the time, it seemed to me that GCP was more an
| amalgam of individual projects developed separately while
| AWS approached it more from the user's perspective, and
| that showed in the toolsets available.
| hinkley wrote:
| They are becoming the AT&T Wireless of Cloud providers.
|
| If you have no problems, it's fine. The first time you
| need to call customer support, you start wondering if
| TMobile or somebody else would be a better provider.
| time0ut wrote:
| What an excellent analogy.
|
| Google is AT&T: technically great, but customer support
| is intentionally and aggressively incompetent.
|
| AWS is Verizon: technically good with some weird rough
| edges and legacy stuff, but customer support will bend
| over backwards for you.
|
| Does that mean Azure is T-mobile? I have little
| experience with either.
| mikehollinger wrote:
| > They are becoming the AT&T Wireless of Cloud providers.
|
| On that note - I have AT&T. I'm fine with AT&T, except
| that group MMS / messaging is broken with non-iPhone
| users. I've tried calling support, walking into a store,
| and now - simply given up. I tried two other carriers a
| few years ago, and had far worse problems, so I just suck
| it up and call people when we have to communicate. At
| least that part works.
|
| You sum it up well.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| This bit me after switching from Mint to Verizon. I
| thought it was the Verizon's fault for a long time, but
| Reset All Settings on my iPhone finally fixed it.
|
| https://tedpiotrowski.svbtle.com/switched-to-verizon-
| iphone-...
| webmobdev wrote:
| Yeah, the clients are different - Microsoft and IBM target
| enterprise clients and they know that if a client can't
| reach someone on the phone, they will lose their business.
| Google on the other hand is a business-to-consumer business
| trying now to be a business-to-business one, and still
| thinks that it can ignore the "older" generation and target
| the current generation who are more familiar with
| interacting with automated response systems. It's already
| biting them in the arse.
| anm89 wrote:
| The fact that someone else might be worse says nothing about
| this issue.
| mountainb wrote:
| Amazon has tremendous numbers of contractors and employees
| who handle customer issues, seller issues, and partner
| issues.
|
| Google, on the other hand, pretends to be a good provider of
| lots of software services, but if anything ever goes wrong
| with any of them, you are screwed, including if it's a
| premium service that you pay for. This is why you should
| never allow Google to control anything that is important to a
| business of yours or to your personal life.
|
| Google has tons of sales reps on the ad side who will be
| happy to give you a rationale on why you should spend money
| more aggressively on their platform, but even they will
| sometimes be useless at fixing problems unless you are a
| truly massive customer for them. If you ever need to talk to
| a sales rep, you can get a Google ad person on the phone in
| minutes, but they will tell you to bid more aggressively and
| to buy more display ads.
|
| If your problem with Google is that you aren't spending
| enough money on display ads, they're Johnny on the spot;
| they've got 9 trillion hammers that they want to sell you for
| that particular nail. Need help with anything else
| substantial related to a Google service? We have a robot you
| can e-mail for that, and that robot will ignore you.
| [deleted]
| ssully wrote:
| Yeah I have been pleasantly surprised with how good Amazon's
| customer support is. In contrast I've had a Google wifi and
| home device stop working on me, and it was nearly impossible
| to get in touch with a customer support rep from Google. At
| this point, I refuse to purchase Google device because I
| don't know what to do if I have a problem with it.
| moksly wrote:
| In the public sector in Europe we've long liked Microsoft
| because they actually sell support. When they decided to
| push 365 additions as enabled by default and no easy way to
| turn it off, we suddenly had a couple of thousand employees
| trying this new teams thing out. After a few hours on the
| phone with Seattle, it was possible to disable, and later
| Microsoft changed policy to let their enterprise customers
| decided what features are on. We have a lot of those
| stories, and it's something people often overlook when they
| wonder why the public sector favours Microsoft. We have
| more than a quarter century of great relations.
|
| When AWS first arrived they had the same automated support
| system that Google does, and they didn't really want to
| comply with GDPR. We probably would've gone with Azure
| anyway because it's the easy option for operations when
| you're already in bed with 365, but the Amazon/Google
| attitude meant they weren't even considered beyond the
| first look.
|
| Since then AWS has overtaken Azure in GDPR compliance and
| the availability of their support, and we now have several
| supplier operated solutions in AWS.
|
| Google is still on the "do not buy from this company" list.
|
| But maybe they just aren't interested. They are primarily
| an advertising company after all.
| grawprog wrote:
| Not a big Microsoft fan in general, but I will say, I can
| agree with their support being great for commercial
| customers.
|
| A couple years ago, there was an update that affected a
| bunch of embedded devices and caused some machines to go
| down. Luckily our machines were on an older version, but
| another shop we worked with got hit by it.
|
| Within an hour of Microsoft being alerted to the issue
| they'd begun working on the problem and within two hours
| machines were back up and running again after Microsoft
| pushed an update.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| I mostly agree with you, but I think you might be
| overestimating the benefit of simply having humans on the other
| end. There is a lot more to building "reasonable" processes
| than just adding humans to the mix, those people have to be
| given some power to make exceptions but not too much or it
| defeats the point of the original rules, and you will still
| have honest mistakes and a few bad actors on the dispute
| resolution teams. Doing that at scale is always going to be
| hard.
| blunte wrote:
| At least with a human you have a way to make your case or ask
| to speak to a manager. Of course they could deny you, but in
| my experience it is rare to be denied if you persist in
| politely asking.
|
| Without a human to contact, you have no recourse. The email
| that you received denying your request for re-evaluation is
| no-reply@big.co, so you're stuck. It is a surprisingly awful
| feeling of helplessness. In fact, if a human on the other end
| of the phone were to say, "I'm sorry, it doesn't say why, but
| our system won't let you back in.", you would probably feel a
| little better because some soul heard you.
| MockObject wrote:
| It's hard for some people but, isn't this a field of
| expertise with decades of development? Aren't there thousands
| of people who have years of experience managing exactly such
| a process?
|
| The problem isn't that it's hard, but that it's a cost center
| instead of a profit center.
| gowld wrote:
| > They do because they can, and because the damage still falls
| into the "acceptable losses" column.
|
| Only in the vaguest sense. Don't attribute to corporate greed
| what can be adequately explained by an out-of-control
| bureaucracy made of competing personal interests and baroque by
| leadership by committee on promotions and raises.
|
| Writing a fast computer program is much easier than designing a
| good bureaucracy.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| "Don't attribute to greed." You're not my dad, you can't tell
| me what to do
| benlivengood wrote:
| > But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a
| process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases.
| They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this;
| I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing
| they still have a healthy profit.
|
| They'd waste 99% of their time with spammers, scammers, and
| attackers trying to social engineer account access. There's no
| reason to waste a human's time on that.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| There's no reason they can't put a reasonable support ticket
| price in place. Hell - MS has been doing it for ages.
|
| Make the support request cost $250-$500. Guarantee a human on
| the other end. That drops spam/scam attempts down to
| basically nothing. It also helps cover the cost of providing
| real review. Plus, $500 is a very reasonable expense for most
| companies (basically negligible for all but the smallest),
| and it's a high bar for scams/spam.
|
| Basically - No, your answer is not a valid reason to not
| provide human based support.
| philsnow wrote:
| That's pretty much an impossible (or at the very least,
| asymmetric) amount of money in much of the world.
|
| So charge them less? Now the scammers will call from those
| places.
|
| How does msft handle support contracts from customers in
| the developing world?
| d1zzy wrote:
| I don't think there are a lot of development world people
| posting on HN so it's all good /s
| foobiekr wrote:
| The problem is no different than their content moderation
| problem, and I'd point out to you that they do mostly solve
| that, and mostly through masses of human contractors.
| passivate wrote:
| > There's no reason to waste a human's time on that.
|
| Google is already wasting 'a human's time' - but its the
| user. When a user is banned, an enormous amount of time is
| wasted trying to re-register their new email with every
| single website, service, bank, etc - at times talking to a
| human to fix things. And that is the best case. The worst
| case is that their livelihood is affected - app developer,
| youtuber, etc.
|
| The status-quo needs to change - and Google should provide
| better service. It doesn't really matter if they hire more
| humans or not.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| I remember someone had a post here a couple years back:
|
| - They bought google wireless. - Their charge was declined,
| whatever the reason, they wanted to correct that. Or possibly
| an accidental dispute. - Google disabled their account because
| of non-payment - Google's customer support couldn't help
| because they weren't a paying customer. - They literally
| couldn't do ANYTHING because google was ignoring every step of
| the way. - Their account was blocked from making any payments
| and couldn't contact someone until they made a payment. -
| Eventually their phone was disabled, and they lost the phone
| number because... no payment!
|
| And once the phone number was released / re-used there was
| nothing they could do.
|
| Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO
| MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss"
| on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on
| their radar.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| What I don't understand is why they _lock you out of your
| data_ when they ban you. For IRL evictions, they 'll give you
| notice to start moving your belongings or, worst-case, dump
| them on the curb. Sucks, but you still ostensibly have access
| to them. If Google bans you, they should provide avenues to
| permanently move data out of their services. Not providing
| this is tantamount to theft, since I sincerely doubt that the
| data is straight-up thrown out; it's still used for and
| tangled up in their ad and machine learning algos.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO
| MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss"
| on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on
| their radar.
|
| Just curious, why would you accept this risk? Even though the
| probability of losing your account is small, the impact is
| huge. I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for
| an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to
| host the email).
| Fogest wrote:
| This is kinda what I do. I personally really enjoy Gmail
| and don't find any competitor can match it, especially
| since I use a catch-all domain and really value having
| Gmail's spam filtering in place. However I use my own
| domain and have all my email forwarded to Gmail. If I ever
| get locked out of my Gmail account I can just switch where
| my email is going and be good to go.
|
| I also do regular Google Takeout backups so that I at least
| have access to the majority of emails and google data.
| 295310e0 wrote:
| >... your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you
| just have Gmail continue to host the email).
|
| I have considered this, but converting is not risk free.
| Say I utilize my own domain backed by Gmail. I have
| increased my surface area by being reliant upon both Google
| and the security of my domain registrar. Perl.com was just
| stolen[0] due to some shenanigans -how I would I keep
| myself immune?
|
| My fear with using my own domain is that if it is
| compromised, then an attacker can access all of my email
| linked accounts (eg banking). If Google shuts me down, at
| least I know the domain is secure and the email is dead and
| unable to be intercepted.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25940240
| gowld wrote:
| Perl.com is worth stealing via a targeted attack.
| Yourboringname.com is not.
|
| Banks use 2FA so stealing your email won't steal your
| account.
|
| Anyway, you can appeal to the registrar and IANA for help
| if your registration is attacked.
| Dayshine wrote:
| > I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for an
| E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to
| host the email).
|
| I've yet to find a good solution for this without paying
| for Google's business product, which I find way too
| dangerous to risk. You can't get a custom domain on
| consumer gmail.
| gowld wrote:
| You can forward mail to your personal Gmail account.
|
| Anyway why is Google's paid business product _more_ risky
| than their free Gmail?
| Dayshine wrote:
| > You can forward mail to your personal Gmail account.
|
| 1. You need to pay for a mail server, and then you lose
| the benefits of gmail's spam filters, and also you start
| having deliverability problems.
|
| 2. You lose the benefits of some of gmail's features as
| they don't classify forwarded emails the same.
|
| Because as a person I have some rights under GDPR, as a
| business I don't really. Business accounts are even
| easier for them to shut, and using a business account for
| personal things sets off loads of red flags. You can't
| review products, you can use family features, your google
| home products get messed up, etc.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Do you mean google fiber? I've called fiber before I had an
| account there to ask some questions and I had 0 problems
| talking to a human immediately and they answered all my
| questions.
| strgcmc wrote:
| Think that story is about Google Fi. I'm a Fi user, but
| haven't had to try and reach a human to resolve a problem
| yet; I dread the day if/when that happens where I actually
| do need a human to solve something I encountered...
| nicolas_t wrote:
| On the flip side, I reached out to Google Fi for a
| payment issue (my account was a French account originally
| which got converted to a US account and that created an
| issue) and I got through to a human. This was during the
| beta phase though so might have been different during
| that time.
| emidln wrote:
| I attempted to be a Fi user. I was a Google Voice number,
| but apparently some small % of Google Voice numbers could
| not be ported into Fi at all. After a couple escalations
| the rep was very sorry but said their system was not able
| to handle my account unless I was willing to give up my
| Google Voice number. They suggested I create an alternate
| google account just for Fi, although Fi and Google Voice
| cannot front one another, so I end up with a separate
| phone number that nobody would know.
| jamesrr39 wrote:
| > Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO
| MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss"
| on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on
| their radar.
|
| I have a monthly calendar reminder to do a GDPR export
| (Google Takeout, Facebook, etc), and I just save it to a big
| HDD. I keep the instructions to order exports for each
| service in the "event description" to make it as quick and as
| little effort for me as possible.
|
| I know it's boring... but I read the article this thread is
| about and it just re-inforces that I am doing the right
| thing.
| Sosh101 wrote:
| It's a crazy situation. There should be regulation requiring
| reasonable dispute processes.
| harha wrote:
| I'm actually surprised there isn't more legal action taken. Not
| this specific case, but in advertising there's quite some
| damage for automated bans with unreasonable time to resolve the
| issue.
|
| In a setting where advertisers are effectively forced to use
| Google to avoid giving market share to competitors, there's the
| element of not having a choice while ending up with a
| significant disadvantage once these mechanisms falsely trigger.
|
| With Google being the operator of the platform and judge at the
| same time, I don't think they can hide behind terms of use in
| all jurisdictions. Scaling up without carrying the costs
| involved seems pretty unjustified.
| astrange wrote:
| For some of these cases you could sue them in small claims or
| pursue CFPB or GDPR claims depending on jurisdiction. I've
| had good luck with CFPB.
|
| People might be afraid of lawyers but they aren't involved in
| these processes.
| hinkley wrote:
| > there's the element of not having a choice while ending up
| with a significant disadvantage once these mechanisms falsely
| trigger.
|
| Some people would call that racketeering.
| mcguire wrote:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/alex-kearns-robinhood-trade...
| rodgerd wrote:
| > Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions,
| including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is
| not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of
| time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a
| human about the issue.
|
| It's almost like they could, I don't know, have some AI ethics
| researcher who could explain to them the pitfalls of letting a
| bunch of programmers act like their algos are infallible and
| suggest how to avoid those pitfalls.
|
| Nah, just kidding. You sack her for being an uppity black lady
| who won't just churn out reports saying Google are perfect,
| because it hurts the feelings of the programmers and their
| managers.
| Pxtl wrote:
| At this point I'd be more than willing to pay a monthly for
| Google services if it meant I knew I'd get prompt support if
| something went wrong. I've looked into getting a GSuite account
| but from my reading like there are some incompatibilities with
| services that I use on the free tier.
|
| I already use Google's paid-tier for their storage and I use
| their domain registrar.
|
| I get that I'm using a free product so that means they have to
| do customer service on the cheap. I get it. I'm happy to give
| something that's mission-critical in my life mission-critical
| payment without the pain of migrating to a new email provider.
|
| Shut up and take my money, Google.
| foobiekr wrote:
| There's an assumption here that Google would behave
| differently for paid consumer accounts which I do not think
| is justified/safe.
| tedivm wrote:
| Google treats all their customers, paid or not, like trash.
| If you ever have doubt of this go over to the Google Fi
| subreddit and see all the people that got screwed by Google
| Support.
| anxman wrote:
| This is called Google One. I pay for it.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Checkout Google one: https://one.google.com/about which is
| more of a personal plan but come with support.
| Pxtl wrote:
| > from my reading like there are some incompatibilities
| with services that I use on the free tier.
| easton wrote:
| GSuite != Google One, which is an add-on to consumer
| accounts. GSuite makes you a different account that has
| different access to services.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I'm actually already on Google One for the storage - iirc
| when I bought it I was just buying a storage upgrade...
| maybe I got transferred in from storage upgrade to the
| Google One product? I don't remember if it was called One
| when I bought in.
|
| Looking it over, I didn't realize the Google One product
| offers human support options, so... maybe hypothetically
| I could actually get service if my account was shuttered?
| Or they'll actually be resistant to shuttering my
| account?
| __soter__ wrote:
| There are many features that Google blocks if you have a
| GSuite accounts. You cannot use Stadia, post reviews in the
| google play store, use any of there family subscriptions as
| the paying account or as a family member and note
| application integration with google assistance. Those are
| just the few I can think of off the top of my head.
| rkangel wrote:
| Ohhhhhhhhhh. That's why I can't find the 'write review'
| button in the Play store.
|
| I didn't know about Stadia. I had been thinking of
| getting it, partly out of curiosity. Now I won't bother.
| peeters wrote:
| You also cannot join non-GSuite meetings, or at least for
| the educational version of GSuite.
| technofiend wrote:
| There needs to be a raft of community managers @ Google
| handling these sort of failures, including some senior ones to
| deal with escalations of this kind. They need this to counter
| the phalanx of people who enjoy spending their time trashing
| google. Just check reddit's ProjectFi or Stadia subgroups to
| see people who've made it their life's work to downvote every
| thread and response in those forums and spew vitriol at every
| opportunity.
|
| Edit: I'm not defending Google's actions in the case of the
| Terraria developer's account or any other. I'm saying there are
| some people who have an axe to grind and right now they are the
| loudest voices. IMHO Google needs to counteract that by taking
| real action at a broad scale.
|
| At some point the trolls will win for no other reason than
| inaction on Google's part.
| sitkack wrote:
| I am not trying to write a post for ABoringDystopia, but I
| would wager that the vast majority of folks with banned
| accounts that actually want them back would just pay, either
| for the review or just to get unblocked.
|
| Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
| technofiend wrote:
| >Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
|
| No clue, my friend; I am not a Google employee.
| gowld wrote:
| > does take-out still work with a banned account?
|
| No, because banned (not merely "suspended", which you can
| fix using google tools) accounts are usually banned because
| of bad content.
| tgtweak wrote:
| There is no excuse for the laziness/ambiguity surrounding bans
| like this. I have witnessed, in 1 degree of separation, 3
| separate Facebook business account bans in the last 12 months
| alone - the only reason cited is "you violated our community
| policy" with a link to the entire community policy and 0
| clarification before or after requesting review.
|
| In 2 of those cases, they were high-6 & low-7 figure follower
| companies and were spending well into the 6 figures per year on
| facebook ads. They were both ultimately overturned after
| escalating via an "agency-only" facebook person who looked into
| it and found it to be automated violations (both the original
| and the appeal!). The excuse for why it wasn't overturned upon
| appeal was "Sorry we cannot disclose this since people would
| game the system if we did" yet a single person manually
| reviewed and overturned it in a matter of minutes.
|
| I don't understand the (successful) business logic that gets
| Facebook into a scenario like this where you can't put 1 hour
| of human capital into reviewing a potentially million dollar
| contract.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| FB is the worst when it comes to this.
|
| I created instagram filters this cycle for a client which I
| thought would be really cool; I haven't seen any from
| campaigns beyond the Biden Aviators (I work in politics). I
| wanted to do a 'i just voted' type challenge; tried many
| ideas and combinations like swappable campaign buttons
| without text showing 'issues,' branding, different voting
| method 3d objects.
|
| Facebook kept rejecting and pointing to policy that clearly
| did not apply to what I was uploading.
|
| I wish they would have just said 'we don't want political
| filters.' Escalating to actual @fb employee emails did not
| work. We're not important enough.
| blunte wrote:
| I'm no fan of Facebook by any measure, but I think when it
| comes to current political content and ads they are in a
| very tricky position.
|
| If they say something is not allowed, at least one group
| will claim they are suppressing free speech. But if they
| allow it, they end up having to allow some misleading or
| completely false disinformation.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| > they end up having to allow some misleading or
| completely false disinformation
|
| That is most of politics....
| gowld wrote:
| But they are disallowing things so GP can claim they are
| suppressing free speech.
| jeroen wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350968
|
| That was more than 12 years ago, and there has been a steady
| stream of incidents like that one. If you're still using a
| Google account for critical stuff, you know what you're getting
| yourself into.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > They do because they can, and because the damage still falls
| into the "acceptable losses" column.
|
| Yeah, until they piss off someone too big to not give up
| without a legal/public fight or they piss enough people to make
| a dent on their bottom line.
|
| I think Google right now is just coasting and the short term
| evolution is just reactive/siloed plans but no bigger picture
| of where they want to go (basically just "evolution for
| promotion points")
| gowld wrote:
| It's been what 10 years of this, already? Even with Facebook
| gobbling up ad space and Apple gobbling up mobile? How long
| can a coaster coast?
| aspaceman wrote:
| It's honestly really sad / pathetic.
|
| Big ass tech company been around for ages saying it's gonna
| change the world.
|
| All you do is coast. Like what. Could you imagine going
| back in time and saying that to folks? That their whole
| "I'm gonna change the world" routine is going to be given
| up on?
| MockObject wrote:
| They already did change the world, and they gave us a new
| household verb, placing them in maybe the top 10 most
| successful businesses of the last 100 years?
| reddog wrote:
| >until they piss off someone too big to not give up without a
| legal/public fight
|
| Don't hold your breath. Didn't Google/Youtube recently ban
| the sitting President of the United States who is also a
| billonaire and notoriously litigious?
| benlivengood wrote:
| Coasting at a rate of 20% Y/Y growth on $10^12.
|
| The big plans are cloud/youtube. Smaller plans are things
| like Nest, Pixel, Stadia, etc. Web ads will take care of
| itself indefinitely.
|
| There are always moonshots in flight but it's non-trivial to
| create a second trillion dollar business out of thin air.
| WalterSear wrote:
| GCP is in big trouble at the moment. Their issues are long
| standing and endemic, and not shared by their competitors.
|
| They have absolutely been coasting, and the market is only
| getting more cutthroat.
| d1zzy wrote:
| I'm curious if Google were to provide a payed service for their
| web services, which includes human support, how many people
| would pay for that?
|
| ... Probably as many as currently pay for Youtube Premium and
| then come to HN and complain about ads on Youtube :)
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Banning your account is one thing and understandable that they
| want some kind of protection from bad actors. But on the other
| hand locking your data is simply theft and digital havoc. Just
| consider the amount of work that can get vaporised.
|
| Imagine if your landlord would kick you out and burn your assets.
| At the very least they should provide access to the export tool.
| mabbo wrote:
| Always remember: if you aren't paying a company to use their
| services, you aren't a customer- you're the product.
|
| Google does not care about non-paying customers _individually_.
| They have literally billions of them. They 're easily replaceable
| and provide roughly the same amount of value each- not much, but
| worth lots in aggregate. If Google were to have a human review
| all the complaints from the non-paying customers, then they would
| become a small cost each rather than a small profit each.
|
| Google's only option is to start assessing which people are
| dangerous to offend and then provide just those people additional
| customer support. I'm sure there won't be any social consequences
| of that though.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| This is insightful and it explains pretty much everything.
|
| One thing that doesn't make sense is that there are many
| acounts (but a small percentage of the total) that do make
| google money individually. Accounts that own popular apps, for
| example. Accounts that control Google Cloud accounts, for
| another. There is absolutely no reason those accounts should be
| auto-banned with zero human interaction, even upon appeal.
| delecti wrote:
| He mentions having purchased thousands of dollars of apps on
| the play store. You're not wrong about nonpaying customers
| being the product, it's just not relevant to this story.
| kevingadd wrote:
| The catch is that having a Google Account is free. Whether or
| not you made Play Store purchases isn't relevant to the
| people who handle accounts or (for example) automated gmail
| bans. And as it happens, if the gmail team decides to ban
| you, it cascades to the services where you spent money.
| delecti wrote:
| That's conjecture though. You don't know which team decided
| to ban him. You don't know whether he pays for a G Suites,
| or expanded Drive storage.
| kevingadd wrote:
| We can't possibly know, but the point is there are a
| bunch of free services and bans generally cascade. If
| Google provides an explanation we can conclusively answer
| this, but as is anyone using Google services is probably
| getting some of it for free.
| p410n3 wrote:
| This happens again and again. I have had that happen to my
| twitter account. I see this regulary on HN.
|
| My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms
| that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine
| learning and other AI related technology to ban people. Because
| honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening
| on these platforms has to be mind boggling high.
|
| So I get why they would try to automate bans.
|
| But after years and years of regular high profile news of false
| positives, one would think they eventually would change
| something.
|
| I mean the guy had direct business with Google going on....
|
| Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR
| person at Google?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR
| person at Google?
|
| Does bad PR actually cost Google money? I'm not sure it does.
|
| A bunch of advertisers claimed they were going to boycott
| Facebook, but they didn't stick with it, and it didn't
| meaningfully impact FB revenue.
|
| I think the only think that will really dent Google at this
| point is privacy legislation, so the only PR they're worried
| about it is upsetting legislators -- not upsetting game devs.
| vidarh wrote:
| It won't change until they start bleeding enough users that it
| actually starts hurting them. In other words, when they mess up
| with someone "important enough" prepared to hold a serious
| grudge.
|
| [EDIT: I still hold a grudge against DHL for 20 years ago
| listing my credit cards as "in transit to South Korea" while I
| was in Santa Cruz, waiting for them. If Google hits someone
| with an actual large following or sufficient clout in a large
| company, then they might just find that one day they do so to
| someone prepared to hold a 20 year grudge even if they
| eventually fix the immediate issue -- I'm not mad at DHL for
| the initial mistake, but for the amount of trouble and lies I
| had to deal with before they took it seriously]
| WA wrote:
| Shows the bias in machine learning. One simple parameter isn't
| added and the whole model is bullshit.
|
| One parameter would be: _Amount of money this customer has
| spend on our products._
|
| Another would be: _Active time since signup._
|
| I'm pretty sure if "money spend > 0" is actually a legitimate
| threshold to remove a lot of spam, although not all. "money
| spend > 200" might to the trick though.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| This can be gamed. There are so many stolen credit card
| numbers and/or payments using Apple/Google pre-paid cards out
| there, so it's not difficult to automatically build accounts
| with this kind of 'reputation'.
|
| Unfortunately the best way to do KYC is (still) human
| intervention (and use of data).
| kevincox wrote:
| It can be gamed. But if the average value of a fake account
| is $100 and you set the threshold to be $200 it is no
| longer profitable.
|
| Of course this still isn't a perfect metric. But it seems
| that banning people with accounts that have spend thousands
| of dollars and been active for many years should probably
| be avoided and this will significantly help that.
|
| I mean if the account has spent >$50 you can probably
| afford a human review at the very least.
| utucuro wrote:
| It is significantly harder to game though - companies
| succesfully offer behavioral monitoring for DLP products
| with far less data than the payment data Google has access
| to. Years of payments with a certain payment type? That's a
| pattern. Renting movies at certain time in the week? That's
| another... The truth of the matter is, somebody has to
| actually care to do this. From accounts of googlers I've
| read, that's not what the culture of Google is likely to
| result in though.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Forget ML, this is just business process mapping. If it's a
| payer-customer's account, issues should be sent to a human.
| Payer-customers should have access to a secondary channel
| (read: alternate phone number). Payer-customers Google
| contact(s) should be notified & included in the process.
|
| As a general rule of thumb, if Google is struggling with a
| problem, it's not a tech problem.
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| Regardless of what's happening internally, I've come to the
| realization that Google has become the prototypical dystopian
| corporation. Yes, perhaps not the only one, and perhaps I
| should have come to this realization just sooner, but there it
| is.
|
| Taking the long view, the apparent culture of "just don't give
| a sh*" isn't going to work for the human race, not in the long
| run.
| ralfn wrote:
| Yeah. Its super scary. The idea that an algorithm decides and
| no legal recourse, all decided by a company that has an illegal
| amount of control on what is supposed to be public space.
|
| Imagine all the public squares to be owned by some company
| rather than the community. Now imagine an algorithm deciding to
| exclude you from that. To just ban you from participating in
| life.
|
| It is taking too long for Google to understand what they need
| to do (to own public space, you must bring all the other public
| stuff too, like a legal system and proper rights protection and
| due dilligence).
|
| We should kill the monster, while we still can. Break them up.
| They'll never learn. They'll keep destroying lifes. Less than
| 0.1% is acceptable statistical error, right? Just pray you are
| never the 0.1%.
| dathinab wrote:
| > So I get why they would try to automate bans.
|
| The problems are less the automated bans but the missing human
| support _after_ you got automated banned.
|
| I you got banned go through a reasonable fast human review
| process then temporary reinstated a day later and fully
| reinstated a view days later it would be super annoying
| comparable with all google services being down for a day, but
| no where close to the degree of damage it causes now.
|
| And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review
| process, even if they limit it to accounts which have a certain
| age and had been used from time to time (to make it much harder
| to abuse it).
|
| But they are as much interested in this as they are in giving
| out reasons why you are banned, because if they would do you
| might be able to sue them for arbitrary discrimination against
| people who fall into some arbitrary category. Or similar.
|
| What law makers should do is to require _proper_ reasons to be
| given on service termination of _any_ kind, without allowing an
| opt. out of this of any kind.
| enumjorge wrote:
| > And lets be honest google could totally affort a human
| review process
|
| This is the part I find baffling. Why can't they take 10
| Google engineer's worth of salaries, and hire a small army of
| overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize
| that no customer support has been in Google's DNA since the
| beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.
| Aerroon wrote:
| They could start with having support for all the accounts
| that make significant amounts of money for them. If an
| account makes Google >$100k a year then isn't it worth it
| to have support personnel that will handle the 2 tickets
| the account might have in a year? And the rest of the time
| they can focus on other tickets.
| benlivengood wrote:
| > This is the part I find baffling. Why can't they take 10
| Google engineer's worth of salaries, and hire a small army
| of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I
| realize that no customer support has been in Google's DNA
| since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die
| on.
|
| My best guesses:
|
| 1. The number of automated scams/attacks and associated
| support requests is unbounded vs. bounded human labor so
| it's a losing investment.
|
| 2. Machine learning is sufficient for attackers to undo the
| anti-abuse work on a low number of false positives from
| human intervention. Throw small behavioral variants of
| banned scam/attack accounts at support and optimize for
| highest reinstatement rate. This abuse traffic will be the
| bulk of what the humans have to deal with.
|
| 3. They'd probably be hiring a non-negligable percentage of
| the same people who are running scams. The risk of insider
| abuse is untenable.
| sbarre wrote:
| > They'd probably be hiring a non-negligable percentage
| of the same people who are running scams. The risk of
| insider abuse is untenable.
|
| This is the first time I hear someone making this claim.
| Is there prior evidence of this being a regular
| occurrence with outsourced customer support operations?
| benlivengood wrote:
| My reasoning;
|
| 1. OP specifically said offshore hires presumably for
| cheaper wages. Anywhere wages are currently cheap there's
| a greater incentive to run Internet scams: it's farther
| from law enforcement agencies that care, alternate
| employment doesn't pay as well, there's even a culture of
| acceptability in some countries where trickling money
| from richer nations is seen as a net benefit to the local
| society.
|
| 2. Google is a high profile target. Scammers will try to
| get hired, existing workers will get bribed or realize
| the opportunity they have.
|
| I don't have any scientific evidence.
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.abs-
| cbn.com/amp/business/0... is one instance of Google
| having to switch vendors for fraud in a non-1st-world
| country.
| tjpnz wrote:
| >Why would they continue like that.
|
| Sheer hubris?
| craftinator wrote:
| > Sheer hubris?
|
| I would actually lean towards organizational incompetence.
| There is just too much human brain mass at Google to say the
| the company as a whole is screwing up this bad because of
| hubris. They are just at such a high complexity level that
| the disorganization is causing incompetent outcomes.
| pfortuny wrote:
| And that is why "innocent until proved guilty" is such an
| important tenet of Western justice.
| sydd wrote:
| > Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR
| person at Google?
|
| Because they can afford it, they are a monopoly
| mro_name wrote:
| please consider indieweb.org/POSSE to not loose your digital
| home, when huge organisations cancel tiny ones.
|
| The big ones just cannot care about all, even if they really
| wanted. They had to be both onmiscient and omnipotent.
| foxhop wrote:
| I wrote an essay about big tech's aim for a monopoly on
| moderation.
|
| https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| Google is above needing PR. Or at least they seem to think so.
| apexalpha wrote:
| _My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because
| platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on
| machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people_
|
| Most likely yes. And the annoying thing is that they don't take
| into account different languages. The AI can recognize words,
| but not meaning.
|
| A while ago some Dutch person tweeted: "Die Bernie Sanders
| toch." Die = that, in Dutch. But the AI obviously recognized
| the word (to) 'die' in English along with Bernie Sanders and
| just instantly drops the ban hammer. And it takes days,if not
| weeks to get an actual human to look at your case.
| p410n3 wrote:
| These are exactly the cases that worry me. ML / AI is not
| ready to be used like that. IDK if it ever will be, but they
| are already using it in production anyways.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| It reminds me of when powerful institutions treat lie
| detectors or facial recognition systems as infallible.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| regex != ML
|
| They've applied ML to discern status updates from emails.
| They've applied ML to recognize speech fairly accurately...
| This kind of behavior seems far too unsophisticated for
| that. In the Twitter thread some people are suggesting it's
| something to do with politics. If that's so, then it likely
| means hands-on-keyboard-finger-on-scales thing a human
| would cause.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Worse than that, these systems are perfect for decision
| laundering. You can make the system do arbitrary
| judgements, and blame negative consequences on "bias in the
| training data" or such.
| Hamuko wrote:
| It was like a couple of weeks ago when an Android app got
| banned from the Play Store because they supported Advanced
| SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitles and mentioned it in the
| description.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes and it's proof there is no such thing as "AI", just
| stupid pattern matching programmed by not very brillant
| people.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Businesses that have this happen to them should call a lawyer
| and sue. That ought to get a human on the line...
| mrjin wrote:
| Well, frankly speaking, as an individual or a small company,
| you do not matter much, especially in comparison to the cost to
| get the problem fixed. While an organization grows larger, it
| has to employ lots of processes which are obviously not perfect
| to make things work. When it grows even larger, it has to make
| changes to existing processes, abolish some processes become no
| longer appropriate and introduce new processes over existing
| processes to serve their business better. Unavoidably more and
| more automation are introduced and eventually AI. All those
| changes seem to be really minor and clear and works in most of
| cases. Yep, I meant most cases, not all cases. Then suddenly,
| something really should work per everything standard and
| process stopped working and no one really knows why. So here
| comes the question, if you are the decision maker, your system
| works for 99.999999% maybe even 99.999999999% of your customers
| but not for those 1 maybe 10 customers, are you going to spend
| $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ to get it fixed?
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| There's virtually no chance that the automated system that
| banned him knew the account belonged to someone with whom
| Stadia was doing business. Even if we assume there's a list of
| high profile people/accounts not to automatically disable, I
| can't see him being on it.
| philjohn wrote:
| It's possible to have a system that marks high profile
| accounts that shouldn't have automated actions applied ...
| that it appears Google doesn't have something like this is
| worrying.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Then again, if all high profile accounts were exempt from
| being auto banned then there would be even less chance of
| problems being brought to light.
| avh02 wrote:
| they then become high profile targets for takeovers, and
| can run amok for too long before being disabled.
| brynjolf wrote:
| He is developer of Terraria including their official Youtube
| has been suspended. What does a guy have to do to become a
| true Scotsman? Fall acy?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think the point is that he has direct business with Google
| and yet _even he_ can't get his account unbanned.
|
| If someone in that position is screwed, an average joe is
| most definitely screwed.
| berdario wrote:
| Notably, it also happened to an employee's husband:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think I'm going to spend the next few days working on a
| backup strategy for all my google related data and
| accounts...
| speedgoose wrote:
| I would start with takeout.google.com and put that in
| cold storage in a good cloud provider (obviously not
| google cloud).
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Thanks; I've initiated that process on your advice. Is
| the data in a reasonable format and not just something
| you can re-import into a replacement google account?
| PixyMisa wrote:
| Good luck with that. My Takeout export was supposed to
| start three days ago.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Already downloading my takeout export as I write this
| comment :). Will probably use backblaze for backup cloud
| storage of stuff.
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Couldn't care less about twitter but if you use google for
| email/storage/docs etc then it's a real issue.
|
| Email is how i do business or access to other websites and i
| store important documents in the cloud.
|
| Like you i've seen the ban issue many times and even worse
| there's no customer support to help (just automated responses).
| Ever since i've been migrating away from google.
| amelius wrote:
| > Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are
| likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling
| high.
|
| So hire more people. You can't argue that you can't do your
| work properly because your AI is not yet up to the task.
| lou1306 wrote:
| Agree. I find it odd that so many people bring up this
| argument, like these companies aren't sitting on piles of
| cash that could be invested in systemic, human-in-the-loop
| improvements. (Ok, maybe except Twitter)
| koheripbal wrote:
| You think humans are better at spotting abuse? Mods on Reddit
| demonstrate that such systems can be worse.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| You've shown that it's possible for human moderation to be
| awful, you haven't shown that it's impossible for human
| moderation to work well. It is possible. HackerNews is a
| fine example.
|
| Paid moderators can have their work supervised (a 'meta-
| moderation system') akin to Slashdot.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps, but at least you can talk to a human, which is
| another aspect of the problem and probably requires a
| similar solution (more humans).
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Reddit _also_ has AI that can shadowban you.
| [deleted]
| poisonborz wrote:
| Maybe the solution is to not have single platforms that are
| this big.
| root_axis wrote:
| Popularity cannot be dictated, unless you're suggesting
| something like a regulation that would limit the total number
| of users a website is allowed to register.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Network effects are pretty handy, though.
| Guthur wrote:
| Then move off. It's not the only solution.
|
| There are alternatives to all these: Search, Email, Game
| streaming, Online doc editing, Etc
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| > Then move off.
|
| Great, let's legislate that you can switch providers but
| you have to be able to keep your email address, like we did
| with phones.
| aphexairlines wrote:
| You already can, if you use an email provider like gmail
| with your own domain name.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Which literally puts you on all autoreject spam lists
| because SPF and DNSSEC. Unless you pay for GSuite and/or
| your mail provider allows this custom domain
| functionality.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| SPF is trivial to set up for people who already have
| their own domain; it's literally 1 DNS TXT record.
|
| I'm not aware of any mail providers that require DNSSEC.
| Were you thinking of DKIM? That's just 1 more TXT record
| (to publish the public key used to verify the signature),
| and some mail signing software if your mail server
| doesn't have that feature built-in (which is freely
| available).
| threeseed wrote:
| So pay for it ? GSuite is $6/month and other mail
| providers can be found for cheaper.
| lou1306 wrote:
| The point is, when you switch your phone operator, you
| _don 't_ have to pay the previous operator, in
| perpetuity, for the privilege of using your number
| without your calls being blocked.
| umvi wrote:
| Yeah but most people aren't paying for g-mail. It's like
| if you were using T-mobile "free" plan where you don't
| have to pay anything but you get a number that starts
| with "TMO", and then getting mad when you can't transfer
| your free number to Verizon because T-mobile refuses to
| transfer it.
| lou1306 wrote:
| > Yeah but most people aren't paying for g-mail
|
| ...Or are they, except not in cash? :) Jokes aside,
| that's a fair observation, but then one should be able to
| "transfer" their address by paying a one-time fee, rather
| than getting a GSuite subscription.
| umvi wrote:
| True, email addresses ideally should be more like phone
| numbers where they are not tied to a specific corporate-
| owned domain (i.e. "gmail.com"). We would need some sort
| of standardized lookup though to support such a system.
| [deleted]
| PixyMisa wrote:
| Don't like it? Build your own.... Everything.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Then move off.
|
| It works for you (as in, single person). Not for your
| friends and family who will ask you one day what to do
| about the account they lost.
|
| We (technical people) know this happens and have seen it
| happen - it is on us to push for better solution than
| convincing one person at a time. Unless one prefers
| nihilism and watching the world burn of course.
| Guthur wrote:
| The world is not burning. Do you know what was before
| play store, YouTube, twitch, whatever... nothing.
|
| It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful
| garden.
| viraptor wrote:
| This is not about accounts on media consumption services
| - those can be easily replaced. From the tweets, this is
| the problem:
|
| > My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of
| apps on @GooglePlay. [...] My @googledrive data is
| completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The
| worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of
| over 15 years.
|
| This can be literally the end for a small company which
| started relying too much on that environment.
| Guthur wrote:
| We've all been signing those nefarious EULAs for decades,
| long before Google play store.
|
| Stallman has been shouting about it for equally as long
| and we either called him a crank or label GPL as viral
| whatever. We reap what we sow.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The world is not burning. Do you know what was before
| play store, YouTube, twitch, whatever... nothing._
|
| You know what was before electricity? Nothing. But switch
| that off today, and the whole world will burn.
|
| Between Google Drive, Photos, GMail, and Google account
| being used as authentication, losing a Google account is
| a life-crippling situation for many people.
|
| > _It 's not like they came and stomped over your
| beautiful garden._
|
| That's the thing, though. _They did_. They put a highway
| next to it, and now nobody is gardening, the garden shop
| closed down, everyone 's commuting to the city, and no
| one wants to buy my produce because my garden is too
| close to the road...
|
| ...or, to unpack it: the big platforms, by their very
| existence, killed off people's "beautiful gardens".
| Facebook and Reddit _are_ why discussion boards are
| mostly dead. Google _is_ why it 's infeasible for most to
| host their own e-mail server these days (the heuristic of
| distrusting senders other than the big e-mail providers
| only works because there are big e-mail providers).
| Guthur wrote:
| Sorry I couldn't disagree more, mobile devices were
| little more than mono function curiosities, app stores,
| love them or hate them, opened that too a whole new
| market where many software providers have made money. You
| can cry all you want about the Google and Apple profiting
| on it but there really wasn't any alternative before.
|
| And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can
| host one now if you want but if too many people actually
| used it the group think thought police would be all over
| you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or
| comment sections, rarely worth the hassle.
|
| The email spam issue is a problem. I'm not sure the
| solution for that because people are going to expose
| their email address and the spam torrent is real.
| ben_w wrote:
| > And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You
| can host one now if you want but if too many people
| actually used it the group think thought police would be
| all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums
| or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle.
|
| About 20 years ago, one of my A-level friends set up his
| own site and discussion forum with phpBB. I still have
| friends from non-corporate IRC servers, and can even
| recognise a few Hacker News usernames from some of the
| channels I was on, though the relationship there is more
| of "in the same place at the same time quite often" ( _/
| me waves to @duskwuff ;)_). It wasn't _all_ Livejournal
| and AOL chat.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I'd argue there's no real alternative to YouTube. There's
| got to be orders of magnitude more content there than all
| of its competitors combined.
| Guthur wrote:
| I'll give you YouTube :)
|
| YouTube feels like it's about to hit some wall though,
| content matching copyright take downs seem to be getting
| out of control.
| tal8d wrote:
| I've always used private playlists to organize things.
| They look like swiss cheese with all the deleted videos.
| dbuder wrote:
| If you pay for google premium those playlists will show
| you what the video that is now gone/deleted was..!
| tal8d wrote:
| lol, wow. On one occasion I actually did need to know,
| but only remembered which playlist it would have been in.
| I ended up having to search for websites that linked to a
| few dozen dead youtube urls. I never thought I'd be happy
| to land on a poorly executed Chinese content farm full of
| scraped html and incomprehensible markov chains. After
| that I started treating Youtube like the ephemeral thing
| it is.
| Jach wrote:
| Long ago I setup a nightly cronjob to archive some of my
| playlists.
| swiley wrote:
| I just gave up the last time my google account died. There's
| really little value in it at this point if you're not
| publishing apps and I would _never_ build a business on one of
| their platforms for this reason anyway.
| mtgx wrote:
| Using an AI to automate banning is not an excuse for not being
| able to quickly redress the problem for a multi-billion dollar
| company such as Google.
|
| In fact, it should probably be illegal for companies to
| automatically ban any of their users/customers with
| AI/algorithms without being able to respond to said complaints
| within 24h.
|
| Bottom line is that Google should have better customer support,
| because it's not like they can't afford it.
|
| The only reason they don't have good support is because they
| are a monopoly and monopolies don't care about the
| repercussions to any individual customer unless something is
| illegal.
| daitangio wrote:
| I think there is a simple solution: the "fail2ban" approach.
| Instead of banning, lock out users for some times (1 day). An
| AI system should make temporary changes to your IAM, and then
| report too often disabled guys to a human being
| jwr wrote:
| These companies are maximizing their margins at our expense.
|
| > "the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on
| these platforms has to be mind boggling high"
|
| That is true, but the amount of money these platforms are
| making is mind bogglingly high, too. It's just that they
| decided that they will use low-cost automated methods in order
| to maximize margins. And as long as we all accept this, it's a
| good decision: more money!
|
| But it is absolutely possible to do these things right, it just
| costs more.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Their size insulates them from competition, which means less
| accountability.
|
| We need to give them competition in the form of neutral and
| permissionless decentralized platforms. Such platforms should
| be the primary forum for commerce and communication, and
| privately owned permissioned platforms like Google should be
| small/bit players in comparison.
|
| Right now the situation, in terms of whether the digital
| commons are primarily controlled by private companies or by
| public networks, is the opposite of what it should be.
| muratsu wrote:
| We keep hearing horror stories like this on HN and yet Google
| Cloud revenue jumps to $13.06 billion in 2020, up 47% year-over-
| year from $8.92 billion in 2019.
|
| Either HN bias towards google is making sure these posts hit
| front page frequently (frequent enough for me to notice at least)
| or certain tiers of customers are treated differently.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Google Cloud at least has a contact page with a contact form.
|
| https://cloud.google.com/contact
|
| It may not be the right human, but it will be a human you get
| in touch with.
| muratsu wrote:
| On revenue reports, the term Google Cloud includes Google
| Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).
| Sorry for the confusion.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Try the form anyway :)
| Clewza313 wrote:
| You probably want support, not a salesperson:
| https://cloud.google.com/support/
|
| Basic billing support (including account suspensions etc) is
| available to all GCP users for free via ticket, chat or
| phone.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Note that many people have Google accounts.
|
| 30 000 random bans per year without justification are entirely
| consistent with Google Cloud revenue in billions.
|
| In similar way as people keep doing things despite (sometimes
| tiny!) potential for death, mutilation or bankruptcy.
| seankimdesign wrote:
| I found My old gmail account placed under a flagged status one
| day. It would not allow me to purchase anything on the play
| store. Turns out, it was because I used an old Google service
| called Google Checkout(?) or something more than a decade ago to
| purchase a few hundred dollars worth of clothes overseas. The
| clothes were purchased from an H&M equivalent, legally operating
| stores of course, and no payments were deferred or anything -
| they just simply said something about my account being associated
| with possible fraud and disabled all Google Wallet features
| suddenly many years after, citing my purchase history. Wanting to
| purchase a $2 game on my phone, I inquired about removing the
| restrictions placed on my account, but the response I received
| were quite haphazard and they finally stated that they would not
| accept anything short of physical copies of my IDs before
| removing any restrictions. No, fuck off.
|
| I guess it's easier to throw out blocks and bans, placing the
| burden of proof on their customers rather than to have people
| looking into why completely innocent accounts were getting
| flagged in the first place. I've made my peace with it and I'm
| happy not spending a cent on your damn play store for the rest of
| my life.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| As long as the cost of false-positives is lower than the cost of
| human support staff, they will keep doing this stuff.
|
| Millions of pages of EULA, but not a single line in there to
| protect the user? No right to get your data once banned? No right
| to appeal or even be informed about the reasons?
|
| Just imagine if Google ran the Justice system! They would suspend
| peoples drivers licenses without their knowledge and then throw
| them in jail because of a two strike rule when they get caught
| driving with a suspended license.
|
| ...
| sudomakeup wrote:
| Funny how google's attitude on false positives is the complete
| opposite of what it is for interviews
| pnt12 wrote:
| The cost/loss idea is bad enough, but that person is a business
| partner and this situation might be the final nail on stadia's
| coffin.
|
| Would be interesting if this stadia fiasco would lead to Google
| rethinking their customer support (ie actually start treating
| their users as customers).
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| I think Google is so used to trying projects and cancel the
| stuff that fails, that they are not really good to _make_
| things not fail anymore.
|
| They fail in stupid ways (like this) and then cancel Stadia
| and then celebrate their "failure culture".
| cableshaft wrote:
| Well, considering Google announced they're shutting down all
| internal development on Google Stadia games, and now they're
| locking people out of developer accounts, guess it's safe to say
| that once again, Google can't be trusted to follow through with
| their products and need to be taken with extreme skepticism on
| any and all future endeavors.
|
| I didn't think for a moment this might be successful, especially
| when it stumbled out of the gate, because Google is so bad at
| sticking with projects that don't immediately do gangbusters.
|
| Even still, it looks like the plug is being pulled faster than I
| anticipated.
|
| https://kotaku.com/google-stadia-shuts-down-internal-studios...
| Ansil849 wrote:
| Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address,
| phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped
| and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time. It
| doesn't matter if you host your own domain/mailer daemon, the
| host and/or registrar can choose to suspend your account as well.
| So really, there is no solution. Other than the realization that
| our communications channels are not ours, they are always someone
| else's, and we are forever at their mercy.
| throw14082020 wrote:
| This is academic/ theoretical. Having control over your email
| and preventing total loss of email like Terraria's author is
| not "difficult". Own your email domain, but pay a hosting
| provider for emails. Then, if that hosting provider doesn't
| want to host you anymore, you can switch to another provider
| instantly or host your own mail server (bad idea). You can
| argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that
| doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain
| or don't pay the annual fee. The case with Google is neither of
| these serious issues.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from
| you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal
| with that domain or don't pay the annual fee.
|
| Registrar TOSes are just as opaque as email providers, which
| just as many case of seemingly irrational domain seizures.
| throw14082020 wrote:
| I presume you mean there are cases where registrar's have
| "seized" a domain. Would be good if you had an example,
| because I sure can't find one.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| Here you are, from last month:
| https://domainnamewire.com/2021/01/17/godaddy-explains-
| ar15-...
|
| And by 'seizure', I think it is pretty clear that I mean
| 'revoking access to', in the same way as in the OP Google
| has revoked access to the given Google account.
| foobarian wrote:
| The PGP trust graph is the ultimate fallback here. As long as
| your public key is out there you can even not have DNS and
| change your IP address and still be able to prove the identity.
| lxgr wrote:
| Self-custody has risks too, most notably theft or loss of the
| private key. It's tradeoffs all the way down.
| thekyle wrote:
| Yes, in practice you always have to rely on someone. Even
| before the internet you'd have to rely on the USPS to carry
| your letters.
|
| Unless you are physically speaking to someone in person, then
| there is always a middleman.
| httpsterio wrote:
| the difference here though is that physically you can at
| least own the address, but even your digital address isn't
| actually yours. Phone, email, ip and whatnot are all provided
| by someone else and can be taken away.
|
| Domains can be stolen, deprecated or simply restricted from
| your use.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Well, the USPS has renamed towns before. Ask Waimea, Hawaii
| Island, Hawaii.
| foolmeonce wrote:
| > physically you can at least own the address
|
| No, a town owns an address and rents it to you. If
| something goes wrong with the billing you get evicted, if
| they want a mall they forcibly "buy" it from you.
|
| There's no resource you can count on in this way. Resources
| get reallocated at some point.
| umvi wrote:
| Well you can always just create your own courier. If you want
| true free speech these days you need to build your own stack
| from the ground up anyway.
| Lammy wrote:
| We Await Silent Tristero's Empire
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Beat me to it.
|
| Paranoia is not new.
| arbitrage wrote:
| Oh? Is the government interfering in your ability to say
| what you would like to say in an online space?
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I really detest this kind of attitude. Yes, the
| government is NOT restricting what you can say in an
| online space. But at the same time, there is no
| government platform I can speak from. They're not
| stopping me from saying what I want but they're also not
| giving me a platform.
|
| Why are we giving corporate entities a pass on tyranny?
| It's not like restricting people's liberties is _only_
| something the government can do.
| arbitrage wrote:
| Oooh, you detest my attitude. I'll watch out and be more
| careful with my word choice next time!
|
| Right, so I agree with all of that. But maybe you should
| use the proper words to describe what's going on, instead
| of using alarmist word choices that purposely obscure
| what the point of the conversation is about.
|
| This isn't a "free speech" issue. It's a wealth equality
| issue. It's a captalism-gone-amok issue. But it
| specifically isn't the government out to get you.
| biohacker85 wrote:
| My onboard, state of the art, military grade AI suite is
| detecting infantile sarcasm, irritability unrelated to
| the current topic, and a tone unbecoming of a hacker news
| commenter.
| emeraldd wrote:
| This is well outside of the practical capabilities of
| anyone but a nation state or _large_ commercial entity.
| Even then, it 's hard. It's more practical for a physical
| letter than for digital stuff. For a digital service, you'd
| have to go down to cabling infrastructure or take something
| like the SpaceX route and launch satellites. If you need
| something between a few nearby buildings, it's more
| practical to come up with a solution, but anything further
| out ... you're kind of stuck.
|
| (Your ISP classifies as a middle man as well...)
| yunesj wrote:
| > you can always create your own courier
|
| It is illegal to compete with USPS to deliver letters.
| gruez wrote:
| AFAIK there are exceptions for express couriers, which is
| why you can still use fedex/ups to delivery documents.
| high_density wrote:
| ...but you can delivery boxes...?
|
| so put mail in boxes?
|
| I mean, there's DHL, Fedex, and others...
| gumby wrote:
| I don't believe the law has ever been revoked that
| requires anyone sending documents through a non-USPS
| service* to include the appropriate USPS postage
| _cancelled with a pen_ along with their shipment
|
| * excepting a point-to-point courier service for some
| reason
| rektide wrote:
| > Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address,
| phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped
| and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time.
|
| Not only can they, for many companies disabling accounts is the
| only tool in the shed. There's no digital governance platform,
| no user rights, no process, no punishment at all besides this
| final cruelest kill: only this bit flip, from enabled, to
| disabled, alive to not alive.
|
| it's unbelievable tha not a single big platform seems to have
| any system of justice or remediation in place. it's all vast
| uncaring corporate monoliths as far as the eye can see, no
| contact I do, no follow up possible.
|
| these entities are monsters. they treat us like trash.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| The focus on customer service and customer care is what sets
| Amazon apart from Google.
|
| Amazon will bend over backwards to ensure that the customer is
| taken care of and will even eat some costs or make concessions to
| make sure that the customer experience is top-notch.
|
| By comparison, Google's customer service is absent. Google has
| plenty of money that they could spend to hire customer support
| teams and boost the customer experience so that incidents like
| these do not happen or at least get resolved quickly, but that
| does not appear to be a priority for them.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Amazon will bend over backwards to ensure that the customer
| is taken care of and will even eat some costs or make
| concessions to make sure that the customer experience is top-
| notch.
|
| I think this narrative is false. Amazon will certainly refund
| money or eat costs but they have seemingly done little to stop
| scams, review bribes, or counterfeit products. Their UX is also
| increasingly user hostile (try cancelling Prime).
|
| I would put them on par with WalMart, which also has a very
| liberal return policy.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, and it would seem that Amazon has recently destroyed
| one million worth of clothing from a business owner on
| (allegedly) spurious counterfeiting claims, and an inability
| to get into touch with support.
| duxup wrote:
| I had an old blogger account with a domain registered through the
| blogger site.
|
| It expired and I got repeated emails about signing into my G
| Suite account to address it. But I didn't register it and I don't
| have a G Suite account... and the only support is, step 1, sign
| into G Suite.
|
| I finally tracked down the registrar they used and I contacted
| them directly and they helped me re-register the domain.
| _ink_ wrote:
| When Stadia was announced I wanted to buy one. I pre ordered it
| in the Google Store. A couple of weeks later I received an email
| that they were not able to process my credit card. That never
| happened anywhere else. They also said that pre ordering would
| not be possible anymore and therefore I would not be able to
| purchase the limited pre ordering offer. They would be sorry, but
| stated that I could buy Stadia as soon as it gets released.
|
| This is why I have no Stadia.
| can16358p wrote:
| The more Google doesn't care about its users, the better more
| people move away from anything Google.
| Ninjinka wrote:
| This is what terrifies me about Google, specifically losing
| access to all accounts that I signed up for using my Gmail. I
| started transitioning to a custom domain that I can redirect to
| any email, but I just realized I bought that domain using Google
| Domains...I'm **ed if Google decides to ban me.
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to
| treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a
| necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications
| companies I don't believe google actively _hates_ its users at
| all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the
| nature of things).
|
| For Google, users are necessary as they are product to be sold.
| Next are various small customers (developers) as they help bring
| in more users, or user interactions to be monetized. Android,
| nest, even google cloud (lost $5B last year) are either ways to
| bring in more user interactions and/or ways to try to diversify
| the revenue stream slightly to try to convince Wall Street that
| they don't have all their eggs in one basket (which they do)
|
| But there's a risk: every new user is a potential source of
| inappropriate content (basically: anything that might disturb the
| customers, who would complain about their ads being associated
| with something or other). Their volume is high (so there are lots
| of opportunities for bad actors) but also their volume is high
| (so false positives aren't a big deal). So it's natural to have
| an immune system that just boots out perceived risks and also
| natural not to do an expensive thing like trying to follow up and
| see if it was a mistake. There's no malice involved, any more
| than there is in a tiger that eats someone.
|
| The only real defense for any individual or smaller organization
| is to reduce your risk envelope. 1: don't put all your eggs in a
| google basket, and 2: when you must use google, make separate,
| carefully unconnected accounts for each project.
|
| This sounds like work, and it is, but you have to do your own
| backups, brush your teeth, and call your friends sometimes.
| That's life.
| sneak wrote:
| > _2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully
| unconnected accounts for each project._
|
| How can one make this advice actionable? Creating new Google
| accounts requires providing a phone number to which one has
| long-term access (as they will sometimes require you to do SMS
| 2FA, even with 2FA off, when logging in). Using one on a
| different Google account links them (and could cause multiple
| accounts to get nuked), and you can't use a Google Voice
| number.
|
| For some things I've taken to buying "aged" Google accounts on
| forums when I need true non-linkability, but in general this is
| an unsolved problem. I'd lose several accounts simultaneously
| if I hit the big G's antispam, as I've had to reuse some phone
| numbers several times.
| gumby wrote:
| If you have a business you get a separate phone number for
| it, and potentially for each customer project. You can reuse
| it when the project is done, or it makes it easy to hand off
| the amount, assets etc to the customer.
|
| What I do is use my gf's number (so occasionally I have to
| ask her for the code that shows up on her phone :-) ). I am
| fortunate not to use google for anything I care about, or
| even much at all, so this is no inconvenience for me; OTOH
| she not only keeps everything in google but used to work
| there.
| gsich wrote:
| >As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to
| treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a
| necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications
| companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at
| all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the
| nature of things).
|
| Airlines and ISPs usually have support you can either call or
| mail. I don't know how to reach anyone at Google. By anyone I
| mean a real human, not a markov chain.
| time0ut wrote:
| I keep seeing high profile cases of this pop up every month or
| two. If it happens to this many high profile people, imagine how
| many people it happens to that don't have a voice.
| mullingitover wrote:
| This is a great case for Google to decouple, either voluntarily
| or by court order.
|
| YouTube's faulty algorithm erroneously locking your account
| should never result in you losing your access to your Drive,
| email, Android, media purchases, or anything else unrelated to
| YouTube (it shouldn't erroneously lock your YouTube account
| either, but limiting the blast radius is a no-brainer).
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Abandoning Google services will not work because only a
| negligible number of people will actually do it. Here's what may
| actually work:
|
| - Make a website documenting cases like this and strongly
| encourage visitors to install an ad-blocker and tell friends and
| family and social media followers to do the same.
|
| - Whenever there's a high-profile case like this, ask people to
| install an ad-blocker and share a link to this website.
| toyg wrote:
| _> Abandoning Google services will not work_
|
| That depends on the definition of "working". Will it change
| Google's practices? No, but it will ensure _I_ don 't have to
| endure them anymore, hence "it will work" for me just fine.
| [deleted]
| indigochill wrote:
| This incident seems pretty damning of Stadia in particular. What
| partner in their right mind would work with Stadia when that work
| can be arbitrarily canned for no reason and with no reasonable
| recourse (of course, I feel similarly about western game
| developers publishing in China given their review board and
| capricious past actions like banning Animal Crossing there
| because of players voicing support for Hong Kong in-game, yet
| major western developers continue to court China, so what do I
| know)?
|
| There also seems to be some interesting correlation of megacorps
| being terrible at games, between Google doing their utmost to
| shoot Stadia in every foot it has, and Amazon execs having no
| idea how to produce games people actually want to play.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Unsurprising level of arrogance from Google. They are a monopoly.
|
| I am currently reading through Google's SRE book and there's a
| similar arrogance to it. It should be read as "here's a bunch of
| practices that we can get away with because we are a monopoly &
| our end users are mostly non-paying/our real users are companies
| running ads".
|
| So many practices in that book would get me and my entire team
| fired it's hilarious.
|
| There US government has changed our treatment of monopolies over
| the last 60 years such that we allow those that lower costs, so
| most of our current tech behemoths are able to continue... they
| are "free".
| galgalesh wrote:
| > So many practices in that book would get me and my entire
| team fired it's hilarious.
|
| Such as?
| jszymborski wrote:
| Google is evil, etc..., but just a PSA: people often overlook
| emails in their backups. Don't trust your provider to not fumble
| the ball and lose them (or lock you out of them).
|
| If you're ready to add another layer of tin foil, don't store
| emails long term on an IMAP server if your emails leaking would
| be a problem for you (a la Sony or Clinton).
| myko wrote:
| Google should have fixed this years ago.
| euph0ria wrote:
| The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to
| how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that
| there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and
| find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want
| the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from
| Play Store ban to GCP etc.
| amirhirsch wrote:
| Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google
| Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google
| knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.
| p_l wrote:
| GCP is the only Google service where I regularly, easily, got
| humans to take up my problem.
|
| Once including waking up people in Mountain View on weekend.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Well because otherwise they would never be able to compete
| with AWS. I hate Amazon, but AWS has the best customer
| support of any product I've ever used.
| notyourday wrote:
| Why on earth would anyone want to rely on GCP if Google's
| executives have constantly been demonstrating that they do
| not give a shit?
|
| Yes, it is the problem of Google executives, not of
| "Google". Fish rots from the head. Google has rotten upper
| management. That's why the middle management runs like
| drunk frat boys allowing for this kind of behavior
| downstream.
| lima wrote:
| Human support for Google Cloud has been very good, even on a
| small account.
|
| Now if only they could figure it out for consumer accounts...
| Those are customers as well and deserve to be treated as
| such.
| chii wrote:
| i suspect that google's cloud infrastructure's first customer
| is google themselves, and they don't care that nobody else is
| buying it.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We
| have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all
| sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our
| account.
|
| There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who
| added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a
| business account. Google support isn't there for the former,
| but there's plenty of it for the latter.
| georgebarnett wrote:
| I can sign up to AWS and get world class service on day one
| with just a credit card.
|
| That's the bar.
| p_l wrote:
| And that absolutely works on GCP too. In similar way,
| even.
|
| You just add "support contract" on that credit card
| (without it, AWS is just as likely to ignore you too)
| mstg wrote:
| Not true. I've found AWS support really helpful even on
| accounts without a support contract. Super fast,
| responsive and professional.
|
| I love Google Cloud for its technology, but their support
| needs improvement.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| The more fundamental issue here is a lack of trust.
| Google has lost it due to years of this stuff, and it
| will take a lot more than "we actually do have support on
| GCP" to rebuild it.
| danpalmer wrote:
| It's not the criticism being levelled here, that Google
| has no support.
|
| I'd also say that it's not a particularly useful end of
| the market. If I were to judge a cloud provider purely on
| their "day 1" experience I'd just go to Digital Ocean,
| it's far better than AWS at that level.
| kobalsky wrote:
| > We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
|
| _hold my datacenter_
|
| Do they have to honor the SLA if you are doing stuff
| against their ToS or if you were hosting illegal content?
|
| I'm pretty sure they can and will shut your account off if
| they think you are being naughty, that's the problem with
| AI making decisions. The reasons are _good enough_.
|
| I'm saying this as a heavy GCP user. What we did are the
| usual recommendations, have an extra owner for the projects
| as a fallback (not a fake backup account for the love of
| god, someone real and trustworthy). Buy your domains
| somewhere else. Have backups/replication outside Google's
| reach. Have a doomsday scenario plan to bring everything
| up.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| Even if so, people will judge and measure by the long list
| of Google services cut-off just ,,because" and sometimes on
| short notice.
|
| Would I start any new business on GVP? Never, now, because
| I would be scared that they just change something that
| breaks my app because they can.
| umvi wrote:
| > I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good.
| We have an account manager, engineering support contacts,
| all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our
| account.
|
| That may be true, but many people won't even try it to find
| out because "Google" itself is synonymous with "customer
| service black hole". They should have given their cloud
| product a name other than "Google", similar to how
| Microsoft named their offering "Azure" and not "Microsoft
| Cloud" - if Microsoft (the name) has bad rep, they can just
| drop that moniker to preserve their cloud offering as
| simply "Azure".
| Uberphallus wrote:
| I'm the first one to jump onto the Google-hating train, but
| Google is literally throwing engineers at us for free so ours
| are ready to migrate large workloads off from our platform
| onto GCP.
|
| It also helps that we're one of the largest telcos.
|
| Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.
| reitanqild wrote:
| Have worked on a big, high impact Northern Europe GCP
| customer.
|
| Support was hit and miss:
|
| - once 2 actual engineers, onsite, recreating problems
|
| - another time: some hapless, bottom of the barrel support
| technicians who must have been following a script similar
| to the old "have you turned on and off your modem"-scripts
| from early internet days. No clue whatsover.
|
| - another time, some brass tuning in, promising a fix in
| next rollout. Didn't happen.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Google _has_ humans, but not _for_ humans.
| gundmc wrote:
| Google Cloud actually has pretty good and reachable support
| including by phone in case you have login issues.
| speedgoose wrote:
| How much money should I waste into Google Cloud to have good
| support for my Google account ?
| ramraj07 wrote:
| It has pretty good support _today_. Who knows what will
| change with Google tomorrow given its track record? Amazon
| otoh has been exactly consistent in its customer support
| starting from amazon.com till AWS.
| ztjio wrote:
| This is a bizarrely biased view. There are no shortage of
| nightmare testimonials out there for Amazon customer
| service, unfairly banned accounts, and all of that.
|
| Amazon might be slightly better than Google with regards to
| finding a person to speak with, but, not any better with
| finding a person who can do anything when you've been
| wronged.
|
| That said, it seems that "Amazon" and "AWS" have entirely
| separately run customer service organizations. I have no
| reason to believe GCP customer relationships are managed in
| anyway resembling the way they manage their cattle on their
| free services where the user is the product anyway. Why
| would they?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Despite the picture you're trying to point, generally my
| perception is that Amazon (both AWS and the retail) is
| known for the quality of its support, Google is known for
| having awful support.
|
| I'm certain GCP has separate support, otherwise they
| wouldn't be able to compete with AWS.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Personal experience has been the absolute opposite, and
| so has been what I've read. Please check hn history for
| no of times AWS customer service was said to be bad vs
| google
| ashtonkem wrote:
| It's a matter of trust and credibility. Google has lost
| it for engineers, Amazon hasn't. Trying to come up with
| arguments against an emotional position is pointless.
| yonixw wrote:
| Not for everyone:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609
|
| From the comments:
|
| > Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-
| moderation bot our entire project was shut down immediately
| theshrike79 wrote:
| What if my Google Cloud account gets nuked because of
| something not related to it? Can I still contact the Cloud
| support to get my account back open again?
| danpalmer wrote:
| The answer is that you don't have it entirely dependent on
| your account. You have a business account with an account
| manager, and while any one dev who's linked to your account
| may get banned, your account shouldn't, or at the very
| least your account manager would be able to re-instate it
| because they know the relationship.
| 015a wrote:
| Same here. We're only in the high six figures in annual spend,
| but we wanted to do some low-level multi-cloud replication of
| our data and database read replicas, maybe looking toward
| compute multi-cloud in the future. Google Cloud entered and
| exited the discussion within a day.
|
| We do disaster recovery and analysis all the time. And, not
| just dumb-brain "well, this is what their policies say
| happens", but real-world "this is what we're reading around
| social media, use-cases, blog posts, etc". This Terraria
| situation has already made the rounds in our slack DR channels.
|
| We pulled off G-Suite about a year ago due to their stance on
| privacy, and concerns that the corporate firewall of G-Suite
| may not be as strong as they want you to believe, intentionally
| or not. Account lockout issues are also, obviously, a secondary
| concern.
|
| Google Enterprise/Workspace/Cloud/etc needs to be separated
| from Google. At this point, I am blown away that their
| investors haven't begun to demand it. I understand that they
| may look at it as a new revenue growth area for the whole
| company, but frankly, this is flat-out wrong. These
| conversations are happening _in nearly every technology-
| oriented enterprise_. Google cannot be trusted, not by
| consumers, not be enterprises. Google proper is a cultural
| liability to the actually strong products their enterprise
| divisions put out.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| What would happen if you mailed Google a physical letter about
| this/faxed them something? YouTube has a mailing address and a
| fax number.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us
|
| That seems to be what they want...
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| When my outlook.com account was banned by Microsoft, i wrote a
| letter to ms in Germany.
|
| got a reply 4 weeks later without any solution. account was
| never unblocked.
|
| since then i am not trusting Microsoft and not purchasing any
| of their products.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| What did they say in the letter?
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| The letter said that my account was banned because of
| violation of their terms. no further details. no options
| for the solution of the problem.
|
| until today i don't know what the issue was. i only can
| assume that some nude pictures of my ex gf were uploaded to
| skydrive a few days/weeks before the account was banned.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| Du bist verboten.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success
| rate, but are dealing with _billions_ of accounts, that 's still
| tens of thousands of false positives.
|
| At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want
| "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects
| Per Million" or even "DPB".
|
| You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal
| process. But what's to prevent the bad actors from abusing the
| appeal process while leaving your more clueless legitimate users
| lost in the dust?
|
| (As the joke goes: "There is considerable overlap between the
| intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" [1])
|
| Can you build _any_ vetting process, and associated appeal
| process, that successfully keeps all the bad actors out, and
| doesn 't exclude your good users? What about those on the edge?
| Or those that switch? Or those who are busy, or wary?
|
| There's a lot of money riding on that.
|
| [1]
| https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a...
| xalava wrote:
| Yes there is a lot of money riding on that, but that is the
| cost of doing business.
|
| Why banks have heavy compliance costs? Doing proper AML and KYC
| costs money and society decided that it was critical enough to
| bear that cost even in light regulation countries.
|
| A lot of the financial success of those companies is in part
| the result of not fully taking responsibility for the
| consequences of their business activity. Eventually they will,
| under social pressure that this post success represent, or by
| laws.
| seankimdesign wrote:
| Can you please elaborate on bad actors absuing the appeals
| process? Is your point about how everyone will automatically
| appeal, making it difficult for genuine queries to receive the
| human attention they need? Or is there another vector of abuse
| you were thinking of?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| That's basically it.
|
| If every action taken against an account by automation is
| appealed, then the automation becomes worthless.
|
| In gaming forums that are run by the developer, such as the
| World of Warcraft or League of Legends forums, I have very
| frequently seen people whining and complaining that their
| accounts were banned for no reason until a GM or moderator
| finally pipes in and posts chat logs of the user spamming
| racial slurs or some other blatant violation of ToS.
| wilde wrote:
| It's even worse than that because the bad actors are doing
| this at scale and will have automation to auto-appeal while
| normal people will sometimes shrug and decide it's not worth
| it. So your appeals queue likely contains a higher flow of
| bad actors than the distribution of FPs.
| mooman219 wrote:
| I think this is a balancing act of risks, and I wanted to bring
| up what I believe to be a success story when it comes to
| handling suspensions: Microsoft.
|
| One thing I believe Microsoft gets right is that suspensions
| are isolated to the service whose TOS was violated. I.e.
| violating the hotmail TOS doesn't suspend you from their other
| services. I think this makes the impact of a false positive
| less catastrophic, while still removing actual problematic
| users from the service. This may be an artifact of how teams
| work together at Microsoft.
| lwansbrough wrote:
| > This may be an artifact of how teams work together at
| Microsoft.
|
| It may be an artifact of Microsoft actually being regulated
| for monopolistic practices.
| nl wrote:
| There's nothing at all in the old DOJ settlement that
| imposes anything like this.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| That isn't what they're asserting.
|
| I worked there for more than a decade. The settlement
| changed behavior - you thought about how to avoid future
| trust-like behavior.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Yup, I agree this is the better solution. The monolithic "one
| account rules _everything_ " approach just increases the
| user's vulnerability.
|
| It's largely what made Facebook's forcing usage of their
| account for Oculus users so ass-backwards.
| aparsons wrote:
| If we did that at Microsoft when we were bringing Hotmail
| under the MS umbrella, DOJ would have ripped the company into
| 10 pieces
| dustingetz wrote:
| Yes; decentralization
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| that's not a solution to a problem.
|
| end users don't want to run their own spam and moderation
| filters, and they definitely do want them.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| At some point percentage is insufficient, but it's because it's
| a rate. Permillionage/DPM doesn't fix it. It's the number of
| people affected that matters, so if you have it at 99.9% and
| grow 10x, you ought to improve it to 99.99% to not become
| eviler. If you just stay at 99.9% when you grow 10x, you're
| harming 10x the people.
|
| I'd use the total number of false positives as the proper
| measure.
| ruph123 wrote:
| The problem with unjustified bans due to some algorithm is
| also: These cases might not even be a close calls like: "oh
| yeah this person did something that is in the grey area of what
| our policies state. I will ban him but he might interpret
| things differently."
|
| No if you enforce your policies strictly by (machine learning)
| algorithms it could just be a matter of misinterpreting a
| different language, slang, irony or something else. Which makes
| these bans even more infuriating.
| int_19h wrote:
| If a company has so many users that it can't hire enough
| employees to manually handle the false positives properly, it's
| too big to exist, and should be broken up.
| d0gbread wrote:
| Why broken up vs users migrating to a competitive service?
| Seems like a very simple facet to compete on.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's interesting to me how Bloom Filters avoid the uncanny
| valley between probably correct and definitely correct. I don't
| know if this is a technological difference between problem
| domains or a purely ideology/mindset.
|
| Dividing a problem by 10 should get notice. By 100 (eg, Bloom
| Filters) respect. By 1000, accolades. Dividing a problem by
| infinity should be recognized for what it is: a logic error,
| not an accomplishment.
|
| Most times when I'm trying to learn someone else's process
| instead of dictating my own, I'm creating lists of situations
| where the outcomes are not good. When I have a 'class', I run
| it up the chain, with a counter-proposal of a different
| solution, which hopefully becomes the new policy. Usually, that
| new policy has a probationary period, and then it sticks.
| Unless it's unpopular, and then it gets stuck in permanent
| probation. I may have to formally justify my recommendation,
| repeatedly. In the meantime I have a lot of information queued
| up waiting for a tweak to the decision tree. We don't seem to
| be mimicking that model with automated systems, which I think
| is a huge mistake that is now verging on self-inflicted wound.
|
| Perhaps stated another way, classifying a piece of data should
| result in many more actions than are visible to the customer,
| and only a few classifications should result in a fully
| automated action. The rest should be organizing the data in a
| way to expedite a human intervention, either by priority or
| bucket. I could have someone spend tuesday afternoons granting
| final dispensations on credit card fraud, and every morning
| looking at threats of legal action (priority and bucket).
| nightcracker wrote:
| > But 0.001% of billions or users is still millions of
| accounts...
|
| Not that I disagree with your point, but even if we assume 50
| billion accounts (6+ for every human on earth), 0.001% of that
| would still be 'just' 100k, not millions.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Oops, quite right. I multiplied by 0.001 when it should've
| been 0.00001 (because _percent_ ) >_<
|
| Fixed
| esja wrote:
| The lesson here is: you are too big. If you were smaller, you
| could manage these issues. But you choose to be big instead.
| judge2020 wrote:
| You can't choose to stay small unless you're someone like
| clubhouse which still has a long waitlist for sign-ups, and
| even then they're trying to build their infrastructure wide
| enough to accompany everyone. Not offering service to
| all/99.9% of potential customers is effectively lost value
| and goes against shareholders' expectations.
| majormajor wrote:
| Then lets regulate size if the market is going to push
| companies towards inhumane choices.
| saurik wrote:
| That's like saying a restaurant can't choose not to serve a
| billion people even though it only has enough capacity to
| seat and make food for 20: if you can't provide legitimate
| service for everyone, you need to not allow more people.
| The core problem here is that users keep signing up for
| Google services without being informed correctly ahead of
| time why that's idiotic, and the only fix for this is going
| to be regulatory: either Google needs to change how they
| handle banning people (there should be some law that if
| they accepted responsibility to store someone else's data
| that they have some minimum retention time for it letting
| you access it or something), come up with a working appeals
| process (and ensure that they have enough employees to
| handle the expected appeal load before either signing up
| new accounts or banning old ones), or they need to be
| forced to have a giant sticker on the box with a skull and
| crossbones on it which says that the moral equivalent of
| the surgeon general needs you to be informed of the serious
| risks that are associated with using this ridiculous
| service offering.
| wmf wrote:
| Is this really true? If Gmail was replaced with a dozen
| competing services each with "only" 100M users each, would
| the total number of moderators be lower? How does the number
| of required human moderators per million users scale, and
| why?
| BingoAhoy wrote:
| I agree: not true. The advantage of automation is you can
| do more for less which extends the reach in wealth and
| services available to the human race. Automation is a
| beautiful thing and gmail being too big to service with
| human support is not understanding that we'll never have
| enough intelligence power to police every square inch of
| existence + the net if we rely solely on human
| intelligence.
|
| Problem is: can we cultivate machine learning intelligence
| to be as good as some of the best human arbiters?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91TRVubKcEM
| wmf wrote:
| I don't think anyone is proposing that moderation rely
| solely on humans. The question is about machine learning
| with human backup/appeals vs. Google's approach of
| machine learning with no appeals.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Depends on how much of that wealth is captured and how it
| is distributed after it is captured.
|
| If a huge amount of wealth is created and 90% of it is
| captured and the vast majority of it is distributed in
| share price/dividends then increasing inequality can
| really fuck up society even while GPD rises.
| int_19h wrote:
| Automation is a form of capital. In an economic system
| that has conditions for a runaway positive feedback loop
| of accumulation of capital, in the long term, it benefits
| primarily those who own the capital. Specifically, it
| allows them to collect more economic rent from it, and
| share less with the rest.
|
| Taken to its logical conclusion, when everything is
| automated, the people who own the automation don't
| actually need the rest of the population at all - it
| becomes redundant. Of course, the "redundant" population
| might have different ideas about itself...
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| This would all be perfectly okay and understandable if the AI
| were the first line of defense and there was any meaningful way
| at all to contact support and escalate things _after_ that
| filter. (I mean _besides_ making headlines in all the gaming-
| news articles.)
| judge2020 wrote:
| > You can't even trust phone companies to do their job right
| and ensure the secure verification code is sent to the right
| phone! You provided some more secure ways for users to
| authenticate themselves,
|
| For those that don't know, phone companies are easily
| susceptible to sim-swapping attacks which can make it easy for
| an attacker to intercept SMS 2fa:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016212
|
| Edit: looks like OP changed their entire comment while I was
| replying.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Yeah sorry, I thought the original version was overly
| flowery, and the same point could be made more succintly.
| booi wrote:
| If you're implying that there's just no way to support their
| users then I'm going to disagree.
|
| At Google's scale and profitability, saying you can't build an
| appeals process that supports your paying users is just
| ridiculous. And at this point the collateral damage to Stadia's
| already tenuous reputation is going to be a lot more than
| paying someone to vet him manually.
| Mizza wrote:
| Man, some of those replies on Twitter are unreasonably harsh to
| this guy. Being a game developer seems like a really thankless
| task. Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?
| RL_Quine wrote:
| I was pretty taken aback by that, they go way further than
| disappointing about not having the game on their platform of
| choice, to just outright yelling at the developer for somehow
| this being their fault?
| me_me_me wrote:
| Most of those people are children, or adult-children. Anyone
| else just doesn't care.
|
| I think this is just a case of very vocal minority.
|
| Who reasonable is exited about Stadia anyways? I don't think
| it will last till next year without being slashed by google.
| RL_Quine wrote:
| Definitely need to make a betting site based on the death
| date of google products.
|
| I wager 18 months.
| Tinyyy wrote:
| I'll take the other side of the bet, for $100, that the
| core product of Stadia (video game streaming) will still
| be playable 18 months from today.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Apparently they killed the Stadia Game studio after a
| year.
|
| As if you could create a big impact game from (or near)
| scratch in a year xD
| toyg wrote:
| _> Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?_
|
| Probably because they are the biggest group out there. Games
| are now bigger than movies, after all. The bigger the group,
| the more likely it is to contain a well-populated minority of
| viciously hateful people, a bit like "the bigger the country,
| the more likely it is that it will contain a sizeable group of
| hardcore nazis".
| bogwog wrote:
| There's that, but also the fact that to these people games
| are "just games". Maybe the HN crowd is accustomed to dealing
| with professionals and business clients that use their
| software, so it looks jarring to see responses like in that
| Twitter thread.
|
| As a developer providing professional software, you're
| reasonably entitled to some respect from your customers,
| since your relationship is likely work related. But if you're
| making games, your product is eating up peoples' very
| valuable free time. If you mess that up for them, then you
| shouldn't be surprised to get a torrent of hate mail.
| toyg wrote:
| It is somewhat ironic that "work time", for which one gets
| paid, typically ends up perceived by individuals as "less
| valuable" than free time. It's one of many ways in which
| our societies are effectively broken.
| jennyyang wrote:
| We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs
| in these huge companies.
|
| Google is getting away with this behavior because of their
| monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be
| spending billions on customer support, but because they have a
| monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is
| their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly.
| It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence
| of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to
| politicize this issue.
|
| Facebook is exactly the same way.
|
| When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely
| rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al.,
| then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now,
| which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not
| spending any money on customer support.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| If they are so big that we need to regulate them, I would
| rather they either be turned into public agencies or be split
| up or face some other mechanism to increase competition and
| choice. Regulation will still be needed to some extent for data
| portability, but the massive centralization of power on a
| governmental scale should really mean that they are subject to
| government-level rules (the law). It doesn't make sense for
| example, that Twitter - bigger than almost every nation - can
| have a unilateral set of private laws that make our US first
| amendment rights virtually inaccessible because we've
| outsourced the town square to a private company.
| skissane wrote:
| > We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and
| SLAs in these huge companies.
|
| Poland is introducing a law [0] to provide a right of appeal to
| the courts if a person is banned by social media platforms. The
| law's intention is to limit the platform's ability to remove
| content that they claim violates their policies, but which
| doesn't violate Poland's laws. Depending exactly on how that
| law is worded and implemented, it might provide protection for
| people banned for non-content reasons as well, including the
| inscrutable "we claim you broke our rules but we refuse to tell
| you which rule you broke". Of course, this doesn't do anyone
| outside of Poland any good, but other countries might copy
| Poland's law.
|
| The downside is that Poland's law is inspired by the banning of
| Donald Trump and other right-wingers, and being associated with
| that political context is going to discourage people on the
| left from supporting it, even though I think people on the left
| could benefit from it as well.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/poland-
| plans-t...
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| Citizens of the free world, you actually have a choice in the
| matter. Don't use facebook. Never did, no one cares.
|
| Stop relying on "gubmint" to handle your diaper changes. Think
| for and act by yourselves.
| kodah wrote:
| The problem seems to be that spam (and fraud) are increasing,
| especially in the domain of identity.
|
| Companies have been answering this growth with machine learning
| and that machine learning appears to scale poorly. Humans also
| scale pretty poorly. What would regulation look like?
| leephillips wrote:
| "we have no choice [...] we all rely on Google, Facebook, et
| al."
|
| I don't use Facebook at all, and I use some Google services,
| but not in any way where it would affect me much if they went
| away tomorrow. It's a choice to use these services, and if you
| use them in a way where you give them the power to hurt you,
| you have chosen to do so.
| superkuh wrote:
| Maybe instead of regulations we could spend the money as a
| society on non-coercive mitigations like education about
| technology that would allow people to see that centralized
| corporate services will always end up this way.
| cycloptic wrote:
| >If they had competition, they would be spending billions on
| customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can
| get away with having virtually none.
|
| I can't agree with this, there is so much competition in this
| field already and and it doesn't seem to make a difference.
| There will always be ad-supported free services with minimal
| support and few security/privacy guarantees, that is the entire
| low end of the market.
| username90 wrote:
| There is no competition if you want to sell phone apps. You
| have to sell via google store and apple store. Foregoing one
| of the stores drops 50% of your userbase that you can't reach
| with the other store, so you have to do both or leave money
| on the table.
| cycloptic wrote:
| I think that's completely different from what was said in
| the GP post, but I'll address it anyway. I agree there
| should be anti-trust action taken against Google and Apple
| for their behavior with the app stores and there are
| actually solid claims to be made there. I can't say the
| same about them running a free email or social media
| service that has crappy support.
| [deleted]
| CivBase wrote:
| > We need to politicize this issue.
|
| We have been for a while now. In usual political fashion, there
| are two competing solutions (regulation vs trust busting)
| locked in a perpetual stalemate to the advantage of the
| abusers. Looks like you're in the regulation camp.
| oblio wrote:
| Trust busting is regulation...
| CivBase wrote:
| By "regulation" I'm referring to laws which explicitly
| state that companies can't do something or have to do
| something - like the GDPR or the Communications Act of
| 1934.
|
| "Trust busting" is often offered as an alternative
| solution, by which I mean breaking up a company into
| smaller, more vulnerable pieces and letting a competitive
| market handle the rest.
|
| Both methods have pros and cons and there are more than a
| few comments in this thread already arguing about which is
| better.
| eldavido wrote:
| No!
|
| What we need is _competition and choice_ to ensure companies
| are responsive to what people want.
|
| I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think
| "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what
| happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws
| getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the
| game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of
| the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them.
|
| Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings
| and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is
| helping the people who _do_ participate, generally the larger
| firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to
| their constituents.
|
| Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time,
| in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors
| the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change.
|
| "Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move
| money same day, because all of, I think _seven_ banks started
| across the country in the past 6-7 years. I 'm not even making
| this up--check for yourself.
|
| "Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance
| companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local
| (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state
| lines.
|
| "Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists,
| lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and
| overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the
| full force of competition and innovation.
|
| Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who
| wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go
| deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad
| examples, and really study the process of how these things get
| passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used
| (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San
| Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits.
|
| What we need is _competition_ , not just some abstract thing
| called "regulation".
| ck425 wrote:
| "Regulation" gave us the end of Slavery.
|
| "Regulation" gave us the end of child labour.
|
| "Regulation" gave us a 5 day work week.
|
| "Regulation" gave us a reasonable number of holidays (in
| Europe atleast).
|
| Regulation isn't fundamentally bad. Nor does is need to be
| controlled by lobbyists and big business. Your points against
| regulation aren't against "Regulation", they're against bad
| regulation. The response to bad regulation shouldn't be no
| regulation, it should be to work on better regulation and a
| better legislation process for that regulation.
| incrudible wrote:
| "Regulation" gave you slavery. In the more natural state of
| affairs, you can't just go about enslaving someone without
| the risk of them running away or outright murdering you
| while you're looking away. It is the power of the state
| that captures the fugitive slave or punishes them for
| defending themselves.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| With the arguable exception of slavery, social change gave
| us all those things. Regulation was just the part where we
| coerced the hold-outs to do as we wanted under threat of
| violence. Regulation in a democracy always lags social
| change.
| capdeck wrote:
| > "Regulation" gave us a 5 day work week.
|
| Wasn't it Henry Ford who gave us 5 day work week? 5 days to
| work, 1 day for church and 1 day to get out and buy the
| cars he was making.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Not everyone works for Ford.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act_of
| _19... is what extended something similar (a 40 hour work
| week) nationwide.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think your critiques of regulation are fair, but I think
| regulation and competition are closer together than your post
| suggests.
|
| >Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings
| and by and large don't participate.
|
| Ordinary people have less access to companies' internal
| strategy meetings and, like government, companies will choose
| to favor their most lucrative clients over the strategy that
| outsiders might find more 'fair.'
|
| Edit: A way to think about this is that, in order to
| 'compete' with Apple or Google on the app store, you'd need
| to build an entire mobile OS. In the past we've dealt with
| this by classifying things of that scale as utilities and
| requiring Goog / Apple / AT&T to sell access to their
| infrastructure. It's just not realistic to expect a
| competitor to build up from 0.
|
| >regulations are static [...] which means you get an
| entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo
|
| This is often untrue, many regulations are outsourced to
| various agencies which are free to adjust policy as often as
| they see fit. By the same token, reluctance to cannibalize
| business or sunk costs can hold back private industry (i.e.
| 'green' energy needed massive public investment even though
| it was clearly potentially profitable).
|
| > "Regulation" gave us banking[...]the healthcare system
|
| The rest of the world has, arguably, more financial and
| health regulation and also has no problem moving money
| 'instantly' or administering care. I think this is unique to
| the calcification of the US at the moment.
|
| > "Regulation" gave us professionals
|
| This one is actually very interesting! Professionalization is
| generally a process of a group of private actors lobbying the
| government for a legal monopoly. I'd argue it's a mixed bag.
| It's good, for instance, that engineers can be held liable
| (and be blocked from working) if they design unsafe things. I
| think, now that we can track individualized results more
| easily, licensure may be an outdated way of accomplishing
| this goal, but I'm not sure it was always bad.
| eldavido wrote:
| Great comment. They probably are closer than I originally
| said.
|
| I totally agree on your point about professionalization.
| There might be a legitimate public benefit angle to it. But
| if you look hard enough, the distinction between a
| regulated profession (which ostensibly exists for public
| benefit) vs a union (which exists to advance its members
| interests) is fairly thin.
|
| Since it is easier to track outcomes directly, it might be
| time to retire professions, or at least regulate them in a
| much finer-grained way, than just saying "Doctor" and
| letting someone do...anything...that falls under that huge
| "medical" bucket.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I agree with you about the potential that we're at the
| end of usefulness for our current system of
| professionalization. It's easy to forget how recently
| we've developed technology to cheaply distribute
| information about the past performance of individuals.
|
| I think the key ingredient we'd need to do away with the
| organizations is have some strong form of identification
| that's safe to share publicly. Like, right now the bar
| association (or whoever) can check that you are who you
| claim to be and haven't assumed an identity. Having
| people get public / private key pairs from the government
| (or whatever) would do that as well, but we would need a
| system.
|
| P.s. thank you for the compliment!
| dannyr wrote:
| For there to be competition, there needs to be regulation to
| help new players enter the market.
| esja wrote:
| Why not both? They aren't mutually exclusive.
| eldavido wrote:
| You're probably right.
|
| More active antitrust may need to occur via regulation.
|
| I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats
| some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation"
| as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
| jamesrr39 wrote:
| Good regulation can be a great answer to problems (and
| not just anti-trust). Bad regulation is... well, not a
| good solution of course.
|
| For example, in another comment on this topic I wrote how
| I do a monthly backup of all my data in Google, Facebook
| and other online services that I don't want to lose. I
| wouldn't be able that without GDPR. (The export services
| (e.g. Google Takeout, "export my data" features on other
| sites) did not exist before GDPR... coincidence?)
|
| You also call "regulation" abstract, but let's be honest;
| "competition" is also pretty abstract at this point, and
| to get a company to compete (with a reasonable market
| share) with Google across the Google suite of consumer
| products is arguably a much huger undertaking than good
| regulation.
| oblio wrote:
| > I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that
| treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called
| "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
|
| I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that
| treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called
| "competition" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
|
| See how that works? Competition can also mean races to
| the bottom, price dumping, plus it works best with
| commodities. In every non commodity market competition is
| diminished and sometimes disappears naturally.
| wwweston wrote:
| Complaining about "regulation" in general is as insightful as
| complaining about code in general, and for pretty much the
| same reasons.
|
| > What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing
| called "regulation".
|
| If there _isn 't_ competition, how do you plan to get it,
| short of policy to encourage it (aka regulation)?
| tal8d wrote:
| Enforce existing law. You remember the last several times
| that a person/alt-service was permabanned across multiple
| platforms in a period of time so short that it looked
| coordinated? It looked that way because it was. That kind
| of coordinated gatekeeping should have drawn heavy
| scrutiny, but it didn't - for obvious reasons.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > It looked that way because it was.
|
| Maybe, but I don't think so. It's entirely likely large
| corporations have _fairly_ similar thresholds for action
| on such things, especially when reporters are calling for
| comment on a specific act.
|
| If you go around poisoning the neighborhood cats, chances
| are your neighbors will all rapidly think you're a dick,
| even without a neighborhood meeting and vote to decide
| it.
| tal8d wrote:
| That would be a good argument if there weren't public
| conferences, discussion panels, and work groups that
| these companies send representatives to in order to
| coordinate their efforts in "combating the rising threat
| of <insert boogeyman>".
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm not aware of any interpretation of antitrust law that
| forbids networking at conferences.
| tal8d wrote:
| lol, yeah, "networking". That kind of self delusion will
| come in handy as the cartel activity becomes increasingly
| bold and the regulatory capture ensures no way out.
| cesarb wrote:
| > It's entirely likely large corporations have fairly
| similar thresholds for action on such things
|
| It's also likely that there's a higher threshold for
| being the first to take action. Once the first one takes
| action, the rest can hit their (now lowered) threshold
| much faster or even immediately. That can give the
| appearance of coordination, but the only coordination
| being that everyone was waiting for someone else to be
| the first.
| whomst wrote:
| There's a lot of policy to encourage competition that isn't
| regulation. The USPS helped with early airplane development
| by contracting out mail delivery to civilian pilots, and
| grants provided by NASA et. al are partially done to help
| with competition in the aerospace field (can't find a
| source for this one but the people I know in the space all
| agree this is by design).
| dleslie wrote:
| And then the competitors _tacitly_ collude and form an
| oligopoly, using their combined market power to consume small
| competitors and collectively reduce product quality.
|
| The unregulated free market makes minnows of us all for the
| whales to feed upon.
| koheripbal wrote:
| This is obviously not true in a majority of industries
| falcolas wrote:
| Like the diamond industry, the oil industry, the
| telephone industry, the Silicon Valley software
| development talent industry...
| hinkley wrote:
| Regulatory capture makes it hard for new companies to
| enter a field.
|
| It's one of the main reasons there's so much hype about
| SpaceX.
|
| What seems to happen is that an oligopoly makes the
| written and unwritten rules so complex that they injure
| themselves, creating a power vacuum for deregulation or
| just someone saying "fuck your (unwritten) rules" and
| either staying exactly within the confines of the letter
| of the laws, or leveraging their popularity into getting
| away with infractions. "Oops, didn't mean it!"
|
| That we root for the underdog is in part an expression of
| our shared pain in the stunted progress that was made up
| until that point.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "Regulation" also gave us things like a rapid reduction of
| deaths in cars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_f
| atality_rate_in...) and airliners (https://en.wikipedia.org/w
| iki/Aviation_safety#/media/File:Fa...), and it's hardly
| illegal to start a Google competitor.
|
| "Competition" isn't a cure-all any more than "regulation" is.
| Google got big _because_ they competed well with the
| alternatives at the time.
| bargl wrote:
| And yet, we're static in that most of our crash tests are
| done the same way they have for years. They haven't started
| testing cars crashing at 60+ miles per hour. So while these
| regulations are great, it's also competition that's caused
| us to get better safety in some ways.
|
| Long story short, we need both, but we also need to figure
| out how to keep regulations moving forward instead of
| stagnating.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Is "survive a 60mph crash" really the best goal?
|
| We've made cars quite safe in this regard; I suspect
| there's more wiggle room to drop deaths with crash
| _avoidance_ at this point. Backup cameras (now mandated
| by regulation), pedestrian detection, automatic breaking,
| lane change warnings, etc.
| bargl wrote:
| I was being brief, I completely agree this needs to be a
| data driven approach.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >And yet, we're static in that most of our crash tests
| are done the same way they have for years
|
| Exactly.
|
| Modern cars are optimized for "the tests" occasionally to
| the point of absurdity. As in certain systems get de-
| tuned (so to speak) so they are completely and totally
| used up at whatever the max test speed is because that's
| what makes the car look best in the benchmarks.
|
| If we modernized the tests high speed crashes would be
| more survivable and low speed crashes would be less
| costly.
|
| It's not all government's fault though. Society has a
| very unhealthy relationship with risk. If you make a quip
| about how crumple zones shouldn't be tuned to activate in
| parking lot collisions you are instantly inundated with
| idiots that don't understand that a stiff neck in a 10mph
| hit could be what makes a 60mph hit survivable at all.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If you make a quip about how crumple zones shouldn't be
| tuned to activate in parking lot collisions you are
| instantly inundated with idiots that don't understand
| that a stiff neck in a 10mph hit could be what makes a
| 60mph hit survivable at all.
|
| Or they're pedestrians who don't want to be cut in half
| in a parking lot. Car-on-car isn't the only thing in
| consideration here.
| bargl wrote:
| As you alluded to in the other comment, these would be
| safety factors not regarding the structure of the car
| (which should be focused on decelerating the car) but
| instead on mechanisms that alert the driver /
| automatically stop the car when it is going to hit a
| pedestrian.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| A crumple zone capable of affecting the deceleration of a
| 3000+lb car while complying with bumper strength
| requirements (though today's standards are much relaxed
| from those decades ago) isn't going to protect a sack of
| meat from a car. The bulbous front end plastics that take
| up a lot of space without much underlying structure,
| flimsty upper radiator core support and thin easily bent
| hoods are where the pedestrian safety comes from.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Regulation gave us Google (and chrome).
|
| If the US and the EU hadn't threatened Microsoft with anti-
| trust they clearly would have embedded browser and search
| into their (then) dominant OS.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Regulation gave same-day/instant money transfers between
| banks in other countries, blame US politics for the
| regulatory capture
|
| > "Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists,
| lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and
| overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the
| full force of competition and innovation.
|
| I find the overconfidence funny if not for the sheer
| ignorance of history. Snake oils were literally a thing. (And
| you're still free to buy them in a way)
| andylynch wrote:
| Always worth adding - snake oil was a legitimate thing
| based on traditional medicine in both Europe and China,
| imported to America. But then some folks found it more
| profitable to pass off mineral oil rather than bothering
| with the snakes.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There's a lack of competition because Google and other giant
| companies have leveraged their monopolies in certain markets,
| like search or mobile operating systems or mobile app
| distribution, to crush and prevent competition in other
| markets.
|
| We've seen this before, and thankfully anti-trust legislation
| allowed regulators to take effective measures against it when
| the market itself couldn't or wouldn't.
|
| We could use a reminder that Google's competition, including
| Adobe, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, eBay, and
| Google itself, all colluded with each other[1] to limit
| competition and market processes in order to keep tech
| employee compensation below its true market value.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
| iooi wrote:
| There are so many alternatives to email -- Outlook, Yahoo Mail,
| Proton, iCloud, etc. How can you argue with a straight face
| that Google has a monopoly on email?
| oblio wrote:
| You'd know if you tried to send a newsletter, for example, to
| 10k subscribers.
|
| Just because unicycles exist as a means of locomotion doesn't
| mean that personal transportation isn't dominated by
| automobiles.
| falcolas wrote:
| A monopoly does not require 100% market share. It requires a
| majority market share and using that position against its
| competitors (which can be argued for, given how easily non-
| google emails end up in spam folders).
| dr_hooo wrote:
| Clearly Email is not the point of discussion here, as no one
| is building a business around it. It's Android with its app
| ecosystem, stadia, YouTube etc. Do you not see any problem
| with having effectively no support for these services?
| iooi wrote:
| Why is Google forced to provide customer support* for
| something they provide for free?
|
| * they do provide customer support, it could obviously be a
| lot better
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Why is Google forced to provide customer support* for
| something they provide for free?
|
| Providing something for free is not a defense against
| anti-trust law.
|
| The most famous example showing this, was regarding
| internet explorer, which was provided for free, yet anti-
| trust law effected it anyway.
| dal wrote:
| You pay with your PI which they market to advertisers to
| be able to target you with personalized advertising. They
| use your data to train their AI and build better
| algorithms which you are not getting payed for. Instead
| they offer you some free services.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| You pay for a license to be a developer on the app store.
| You pay for a phone. You pay for apps on the app store.
| You pay monthly for Stadia. YouTube aside, these are not
| free!
| syshum wrote:
| Where did the OP talk about gmail? Is it your opinion that
| Google is only Gmail? and that is the only service they
| offer?
|
| Of all the services Google has, email is the least
| monopolistic, but simply because there is competition in
| email an open standard that many companies (including google)
| have tried to make less open does not change the Fact Google
| has market dominance in many other services
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Can we just break them up? If the problem is monopolistic
| behaviour, just end their monopoly by chopping them up into
| pieces. There's plenty of historical precedent.
|
| IMHO trust busting would be lot more effective and free-market
| friendly than having some bureaucrats trying to write
| regulations for what counts as "adequate" customer service or
| not.
| schoolornot wrote:
| > they would be spending billions on customer support
|
| Having supported tens of thousands employees on G Suite I think
| I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to call
| support. Admins know the support is poor, the agents aren't
| capable of providing more than basic break-fix support.
| Generally, calls are just to get official confirmation of an
| outage before notices hit the official dashboard. This isn't a
| service that requires a ton of support. Operate your business
| on a free account at your own risk.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| For counterpoint, they provide products like Gmail for free at
| point of use because the support costs are very low (amongst
| other factors).
|
| Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation,
| or let users decide what they want?
|
| Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but
| real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand
| how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad
| experiences see public light so people's choices are informed.
| malinens wrote:
| Actually their support in gmail is non-existing. I work for
| European regional free e-mail provider (also ad supported)
| and we have free phone support for free users where You can
| talk to real support people who know product in 5 different
| languages. Google abuses it's dominant power by making
| basically impossible to get support
| [deleted]
| MikeUt wrote:
| Would I prefer government enforce food safety standards, or
| let consumers decide what they want?
|
| Would I prefer government enforce building safety codes, or
| let consumers decide what they want?
|
| Would I completely ignore the fact that Google has sucked the
| air out of the room with their market dominance, so hardly
| any competitors are left for consumers to decide between?
| II2II wrote:
| The first and second case deals with issues that are mostly
| opaque to the consumer and affects their safety.
|
| The third case is not actually a singular case. When we are
| talking about consumer facing services, there are many
| competitors in most cases. I suspect that it would even be
| difficult to make anti-trust arguments since the factors
| that funnel people towards Google is largely outside of
| Google's control.
|
| Google's behaviour towards businesses is a different
| matter. While businesses may turn to the competition, their
| dominance means that avoiding Google will have negative
| consequences.
| Fogest wrote:
| Let's not forget that any time a competitor starts taking
| part of their market or becoming successful they just buy
| them out with an amount of money that is hard for any sane
| person to turn down.
|
| The WhatsApp founder seems pretty against Facebook and is
| encouraging and funding Signal. He took money from a
| company he doesn't believe in or like because who wouldn't.
| And this is despite him not liking Facebook. So
| realistically competition is great on paper, but in this
| case the competition already has such market dominance that
| any new company that tries will get squashed with a buy-out
| or other aggressive tactics. So realistically I don't see
| how competition will do anything.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| I don't think public safety standards are the same thing as
| support level for free email, subscription music, etc.
|
| We can all easily name multiple email and subscription
| music providers.
| MikeUt wrote:
| What about giant app stores that control almost all
| consumer spending in those markets? How many businesses
| can survive being banned by both Apple and Google's
| stores? Or even by just one?
|
| Sure your business is destroyed, but you're right, you
| can easily get a new email address.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Just to be clear, you are talking about the quality of
| b2b services, between parties that have entered a
| business relationship, not consumer protection.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Counter-counterpoint
|
| They provide products like gmail for free because it allows
| them insight into people's communication which they can then
| leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than
| they could simply selling email services.
| gerash wrote:
| I'm all for regulations to avoid these account closures
| with no recourse.
|
| That said, why do people care so much about Google using
| Gmail data for ad. You either trust Google or not.
|
| If you are convinced that random humans won't read your
| private emails for fun and giggles then why should I care
| if their regexes or neural networks are fed my emails or my
| search history?
|
| The only downside is if someone is watching your screen,
| certain ads can reveal the content of your emails in that
| scenario.
|
| Google should simply provide a paid version for all its
| services in case people dislike ads but whether their code
| runs on my gmail or Google Drive content doesn't matter
| that much to me.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > why do people care so much about Google using Gmail
| data for ad.
|
| What does this have to do with anything I said?
|
| I never made a judgement of it being bad or good. I just
| pointed out that probably Google isn't providing Gmail as
| a free service out of any kind of charity
| gerash wrote:
| I assumed you're implying mal intentions. Otherwise, sure
| it is ad supported and not a charity.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Sure, that's absolutely true. But the margin would be
| eroded if they provided much better customer service for
| unpaid Gmail. At some service level, the margin would be
| negative.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| IMO the problem is the dismissive attitude towards human
| support where it is viewed only as a roadblock to
| "scale".
|
| Being able to provide good support is a difficult skill
| to acquire and maintain, and most companies struggle with
| doing it regardless of how much they spend. You cannot
| get good support by throwing money at the problem any
| more than you can get good engineering -- it's a
| necessary but not sufficent condition. Moreover being
| able to provide good support requires a customer focus,
| attention to detail, and focus on quality that was never
| part of Google's DNA, and which Google prides itself as
| not caring about. To make Google into even a decent
| support company that creates as good of a support
| experience as Amazon (which is years ahead of Google)
| would require much more than higher margins, it would
| require a total rework of the corporate culture,
| leadership team, hiring policies, internal training and
| communications, etc. That's hard to do at a company that
| has such a dismissive attitude towards its user base,
| primarily because historically the real customers are
| advertisers and users are the product. It's hard to
| transition to more of an Amazon model where the end users
| were always the customers and the business was built
| around that understanding.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| This is a bit of a tautology. Of course if they spend
| more on service than the service makes them the margin is
| negative.
|
| But let's not lose sight of the fact this is one of the
| biggest companies in the world we are talking about. A
| company that could probably treat the entire GDP of a
| small country as a rounding error.
|
| That margin you're referring to is very likely enormous
| and even if it cost them 10% of said margin to offer
| better service for it, they would still be making absurd
| amounts of money.
| strombofulous wrote:
| Google has not done that in many years.
|
| "These ads are shown to you based on your online activity
| while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read
| your Gmail messages to show you ads."
| https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
| craftinator wrote:
| > Google has not done that in many years.
|
| I love that you post a copy of the Google PR written help
| documentation to support this claim. Also, "I have never
| lied. Ever!".
| minikites wrote:
| But the reason they created it was so they could. It
| doesn't matter that they changed their mind later.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| All this shows me is that Google pinky promises that they
| don't do that.
|
| Even if they don't scan the contents of your email
| bodies, you don't think they know who you are getting
| emails from, who you are emailing, and a boatload of info
| about who you do business with and such as a result?
|
| I'm betting they do.
| ping_pong wrote:
| They do scan your emails for Amazon receipts so that they
| know what you purchase. That's why Amazon changed how
| they send receipts.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-
| purchase...
| username90 wrote:
| Google engineers aren't exactly known to be loyal to the
| company, if Google didn't keep their promises about stuff
| like this I'm pretty sure it would get leaked quickly.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| The language of the "promise" is such that there is a lot
| of gray area and there is a lot of information contained
| with an email that is not the "message" of the email.
|
| Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails
| and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for
| their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the
| planet is just ignoring all of that data?
|
| Ok.
| username90 wrote:
| > Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails
| and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for
| their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the
| planet is just ignoring all of that data?
|
| Yes, here is the official statement:
|
| > Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for
| any ads personalization after this change. This decision
| brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for
| other Google products.
|
| https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-
| traction-in...
|
| Edit: The problem with google is that they collect a lot
| of data they can abuse, not that they are particularly
| known to abuse data. So the danger is that their policies
| change while still having your data, then there is
| nothing you can do.
| owenmarshall wrote:
| An interesting question is how Google defines "content".
|
| I'd imagine Google could build up great profiles based on
| metadata alone - which domains email you, which you
| email, etc.
| mithr wrote:
| The sentence right before the one you quoted is
|
| > When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected
| to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process
| of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is
| fully automated.
|
| They created that page in order to highlight that there
| are no _humans_ reading your mail, but OP 's point that
| "it allows them insight into people's communication which
| they can then leverage with search and ad networking to
| make way more than they could simply selling email
| services" is still true to this day. It's just that it's
| all automated.
| username90 wrote:
| No, read the next sentences:
|
| > These ads are shown to you based on your online
| activity while you're signed into Google. We will not
| scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.
|
| They don't scan your emails for ads, they use your search
| history etc for ads.
| mithr wrote:
| Fair point, though I think that wording leaves room for
| interpretation...
|
| Does learning your social graph by looking at email
| metadata (sender/addressee, location, time) count as
| "scan[ning] or reading your Gmail messages"? There are a
| lot of insights you could "skim from the top" if you
| control an entire communication platform, even if you
| don't fully dig into the content.
|
| And regardless: to OP's larger point, the reason Google
| offers services such as Gmail for free isn't mostly
| because their support cost is low -- it's mostly because
| these services allow them to collect a large amount of
| data that is then used for selling targeted ads, far
| surpassing the amount of money they would earn from
| offering ad-free services.
| gsich wrote:
| Or email headers, which can also tell enough.
| diob wrote:
| This is going to be tough politically to fight. If I had to
| guess the tactic that would be used to fight it from the other
| side is something of the sort:
|
| "If we force these regulations on Facebook / Google / etc. or
| break them up, the stock market will go down (aka your 401k)."
|
| Whether that's true or not for the common folk, it's a
| surprisingly effective tactic.
|
| And it's definitely true for those at the top of the economic
| food chain, who are likely invested in these companies.
|
| Given they tend to have more power politically, I just don't
| see us touching this.
| shakezula wrote:
| I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data
| handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no
| reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and
| refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof
| of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a
| picture of me to confirm.
|
| I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was
| any other way to get verified, but never got a reply, and a
| short while later they deleted my account and all of the
| pictures and data with it. I'm pretty bummed out because in
| losing all that, I lost most of my pictures from high school. I
| have almost no pictures of myself or my friends for roughly a 7
| year span of time.
|
| It's my fault 100% for not backing it up, but that's not the
| point. I was more frustrated with the fact that, for no
| apparent reason, my entire account was locked and they demanded
| pretty intense verification to even just get it back. I haven't
| used Facebook or any of its platforms since, but I have to say
| it felt pretty gross to be handled like that.
|
| It's pretty sus that these companies use our data for
| everything but have no actual express responsibility to it.
| slivanes wrote:
| Interesting, I wonder if deliberately getting one's account
| flagged as a bot is the best (and quickest) way to get
| "deleted" from FB?
| spullara wrote:
| For better or for worse, that is good customer support with
| clear remediation procedures.
| dhimes wrote:
| I think the bar for remediation procedures needs to be
| higher than "clear" to qualify as good customer support.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Not answering a simple question about what the options are,
| followed by irrevocably deleting data the user wants.
| That's what you think good customer support looks like? I
| never want to be your customer.
| sethammons wrote:
| Why is it "intense verification?" What is a good alternative?
| I lost access to my blizzard account once and I had to send
| in my driver's license.
| andylynch wrote:
| This seems fair. I need to do the same when picking up a
| parcel from the shop. Just an easy way of seeing your Alice
| or Bob and not Chuck.
| II2II wrote:
| There comes a point when the demands of the business
| outweigh the value of the services they provide. For some
| of us that will include providing identification,
| particularly in cases where the handling of the
| identification is opaque. These cases are far removed from
| letting front line staff glance at a card to compare your
| face to a photo or verify the details that you voluntarily
| submitted on a form. The only times I have let anyone
| actually handle my identification for services directed
| towards consumers were for financial services and with my
| employer. The latter case was only because I knew how the
| identification would be handled in the transaction.
|
| In the case of Blizzard I would say no and accept my
| losses. (Well, let's say Steam since I have actually dealt
| with them.) In the case of Facebook or Google, I would say
| no simply because I don't trust their motivations.
| Swizec wrote:
| Because Facebook is not a government institution. My legal
| identity is no concern of theirs.
|
| You can do a lot of stuff at the bank, with your doctor,
| etc without ever having to show your state ID. What is
| facebook doing that's so very serious they'd need it?
|
| (not OP but I use a consistent nom de plume online)
| sethammons wrote:
| I show my ID to pick up my order from Home Depot. I'd
| suppose Facebook would be trying to prevent someone else
| from accessing your account, like Home Depot is
| preventing someone from taking my order.
| shakezula wrote:
| Very different to flash an ID to a store employee than to
| give them a copy of your license tied to a highly-
| detailed account of online activity on and off of their
| platform :shrug:
| sethammons wrote:
| sure - but, as I originally asked, what is the
| alternative? I'm not attempting snark; I genuinely want
| to know what a better approach is.
| ycombigator wrote:
| Profiling you to increase revenue.
| belorn wrote:
| It would raise some flags if my bank representative or
| doctor ask for a photo copy of my passport. Asking to
| simply see it, given that they have a specific reason to
| do so, would not.
|
| Online however there is no such thing to simply see
| something. Everything is a copy that can be used for any
| purpose.
|
| A few years ago there was a major leak at a porn
| streaming site with a large number of people getting
| their passports leaked. It was reported as a major
| disaster for those involved.
| rkalla wrote:
| They did this to a lot of accounts back in the day and I
| suspected then (and now) that it was to encourage (force)
| people to upload high res pics of their PII information to
| have on file.
| shakezula wrote:
| I had and still have the same suspicion. I had a lot of
| friends who said they had the same thing happen around the
| same time and they all just did it. The real tinfoil hat
| part of me wonders if it was to aid efforts being fed and
| ramped up by firms like Cambridge Analytica et. al. in
| anticipation for the 2016 election and their data
| collection ops as a whole.
| remus wrote:
| While I agree with the broader point that there should be avenues
| for someone who's account is incorrectly closed this article is
| pretty vapid.
|
| There are a lot of examples of individuals who have lost access
| to their accounts but no discussion of whether this is a
| significant proportion of google users. If I've got a 1 in 10
| million chance of incorrectly losing access to my account that is
| very different to if there is a 1 in 1000 chance of losing access
| to my account. Without that context, you're basically just saying
| "losing access is a crap experience for the person involved"
| which is obvious from the outset.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| I largely agree, but OTOH the degree to which this is a
| sticking point for many people is an early warning that that
| this is a serious issue that Google has to solve. This problem
| will only get worse as Google grows. Yes it's unprecedentedly
| difficult to solve, but I suspect it'll become increasingly
| difficult to ignore. Systemic failure on this level is the
| CEO's job and it's disappointing to see Pichai seemingly fail
| to do something big about it.
| dv_dt wrote:
| When assessing risks one way to look at them is to consider
| both the chance of occurrence as well as impact if it occurs.
| With many google services (esp email), the impact if it occurs
| is high. So the risk is still serious even if odds are low.
| falcolas wrote:
| > no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of
| google users
|
| Who cares?
|
| No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our
| justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you
| get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that
| doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use
| public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants
| & food poisioning, etc).
| remus wrote:
| I agree with the principle, but in a world of finite
| resources you've got to pick your battles. The reality is
| that there is no system in existence that's gonna work
| perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got
| malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to
| quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort
| you put in to fixing it.
|
| It is, unfortunately, the same in many aspects of life,
| including many criminal justice systems. For example, if you
| are wrongly convicted in the UK it is incredibly hard to get
| that conviction overturned. It's literally life destroying
| for the people affected (definitely a lot worse than losing
| access to your gmail account!) but apparently the majority of
| the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure
| politicians in to changing it.
| falcolas wrote:
| > The reality is that there is no system in existence
| that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so
| when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the
| system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem
| and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it.
|
| That doesn't mean the company gets to throw their hands up
| in the air and say "fuck it, it's too hard". We wouldn't
| tolerate that with our justice systems, and we shouldn't
| tolerate with corporations.
|
| > apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't
| care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
|
| Remember, Google spends millions of dollars on lobbying
| every year as well. And that money comes from its
| customers, whether directly or indirectly.
| spullara wrote:
| The justice system isn't even close to error free even with a
| fair trial, as we define it, so I'm not sure that this is a
| good analog.
| falcolas wrote:
| And yet we don't allow for blowing off that error rate
| because of the number of total cases in the system. It's
| also possible to get a retrial or dismissal if the errors
| are identified.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| In practice, we collectively do blow off that error rate.
| For example, the US has many high profile miscarriages of
| injustice that it hasn't meaningfully solved for decades.
| There are people who get jerked around the justice system
| that can't get the system to justify a retrial or their
| retrial produces the same flawed outcome, similar to how
| Google's systems jerk people around with little
| meaningful recourse. There has been plenty of public
| protest (and insurrection) about these issues throughout
| the US that indicate the system isn't working as these
| people are fighting their issues outside normal
| civic/political channels.
|
| The US is a democracy and its citizens _do_ tolerate this
| level of failure.
| tjalfi wrote:
| > No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to
| our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if
| you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And
| that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability
| to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords,
| restaurants & food poisioning, etc).
|
| It doesn't detract from your point but we are effectively
| applying this logic to our justice system. Most cases are
| plea bargained[0] and don't go to trial.
|
| "The vast majority of felony convictions are now the result
| of plea bargains--some 94 percent at the state level, and
| some 97 percent at the federal level. Estimates for
| misdemeanor convictions run even higher." Excerpt from
| Innocence is Irrelevant [1]
|
| [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-
| bec...
|
| [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/inno
| cen...
| croes wrote:
| I guess that's the AI we should really fear. I hope nothing
| really important ever relies on a FB, MS or Google account. But I
| guess it's too late.
| detritus wrote:
| As an aside - what benefit is there to having a game such as
| Terraria on Stadia in the first place? It has fairly low system
| requirements, and given how much energy is eaten up by server-
| side rendering and streaming, it seems wasteful in this context.
| suction wrote:
| I agree. Also, I don't want Stadia to become flooded with cheap
| indie games, at least not for now. Because the storefront is so
| bad (no search), it would make it very hard to find the things
| you want. Google should concentrate Stadia's efforts to make
| AAA-games available to people who don't want a console or
| gaming PC, because that's a real niche. I personally know 5
| people who would never buy dedicated gaming hardware, but will
| get Stadia to play the latest FIFA in great quality on their
| work laptop or TV (with Chromecast).
|
| Indie gamers won't come to Stadia anyway.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Not sure how "cheap indie games" comes into the picture here,
| Terraria is a wildly successful and sophisticated game that's
| sold over 30m copies lifetime and is available on a bunch of
| platforms. We're not talking about a Flappy Bird clone.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Typically deals like this are about a mixture of cash and
| access. The platform holder will often partially or fully fund
| development, sometimes they pay an advance on sales up-front.
| For one project I worked on Sony provided an up-front advance
| that fully covered the port in addition to some sales (and it
| took a while to recoup for reasons mostly under their control.)
|
| My guess for this is that given Terraria's large fanbase and
| high profile, Google probably handed them an advance for this
| and promised some promotion once the title launched on Stadia.
| Stadia also potentially provides access to users who can't play
| it on PC (it has a client for phones and some TVs, etc)
| bogwog wrote:
| Gamers don't care about the tech that's being used, they only
| care about playing good games. If you're a Stadia user, why
| _wouldn 't_ you want to play Terraria? Because it's not a good
| use of streaming? But it's an awesome game!
| detritus wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal for Google of having it
| on there, but from the sidelines here, it seems to me to be
| terribly wasteful. It's like the energy consumption angle was
| never even considered. I presume it wasn't.
|
| OT - where does your username come from? I'm sure it's not,
| but for a Brit to read it, it stirs thoughts of a terribly
| un-PC origin! :)
| bogwog wrote:
| Man I came up with that username when I got my first
| Nintendo DS for christmas when I was ~9 years old. The only
| game I had was the Sword of Mana GBA cartridge, and that
| game asks you to come up with a name for both a male and
| female character when you start. Being a hilarious 9 year
| old, I wanted to give the female character an ugly sounding
| name, so I just started making random ugly noises with my
| mouth and trying to transcribe them into the text field.
| That's how I ended up with "bogwog"
|
| It wasn't until a few years ago that I stumbled upon an
| Urban Dictionary entry for it. That was so disappointing
| because I always thought I was so creative coming up with
| that unique and interesting-sounding name...like Tolkien!
|
| I'm definitely not important enough for anyone to bother
| cancelling me over it (especially considering how mild and
| obscure it is), but I've stopped using it just in case. I
| still have a lot of old accounts lingering around that use
| it though.
| tarruda wrote:
| > The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over
| 15 years.
|
| I've read quite a few of these stories over the years, and it is
| really bad if all your digital life is tied to the Google
| account.
|
| A couple of months ago I took the courage and started migrating
| to a new email (using mailbox.org) with my own domain purchased
| via namecheap.
|
| Took a few days to migrate most of my accounts to the new e-mail,
| but I highly recommend for anyone in a similar situation looking
| for some peace of mind.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Some of the flak this guy is getting in his comments is pretty
| ridiculous.
|
| He's the one getting stiffed by Google, but "gamers" always love
| playing the victim, especially when a game developer draws a line
| of any kind.
| newbie578 wrote:
| I just don't understand Google leadership, how can you allow
| stuff like this to happen and just ignore it? Your brand keeps
| getting more and more tainted, people make jokes out of your
| strategy and tendency to give up like a little child...
|
| I didn't think I would ever say it, but I miss Eric Schmidt...
| Sundar has been an absolute disaster. Has Google even
| accomplished anything during his reign? And if they did, did they
| accomplish because of him OR despite him being there?
| Arech wrote:
| Same thing happened with Schmidt too. I have heard stories of
| people banned from (some) Google's services and unable to get
| any help a decade ago. Nothing new here, unfortunately((
| ngc248 wrote:
| What is this meme about Sundar being bad? Any details on this
| .... I keep seeing this on HN.
|
| "Google Support" was already a joke way back.
| newbie578 wrote:
| It is not a meme. You tell me what did Google achieve under
| Sundar in the last 6 years? The only "noteworthy" things he
| did is fostering a hostile environment by firing employees
| who spoke out against discrimination, and fighting against
| unionization.
| SXX wrote:
| What Eric Schmidt would do to help with Google Account bans?
| Bans without any appeal process were a problem since foundation
| of Google and it's exactly how Schmidt built that company.
|
| The only people who ever got their accounts recovered at all
| were celebrities or people who go HN / reddit frontpage.
| berdario wrote:
| > were a problem since foundation of Google
|
| You might be right, but Google changed as a company.
|
| They started selling phones (ok, even if your account gets
| locked... you can still use your phone and/or create a new
| account to install free apps from what was the android
| market)
|
| They started to sell storage (ok, even if your account gets
| locked, as long as you can retrieve your contents with
| Takeout, you just lost access to Google Drive, and not
| something of lasting value)
|
| And they've been selling music (not anymore), movies, books,
| games (both on Play store and Stadia)... and more hardware
| that ties into their services (e.g. Nest Hub is useful
| precisely because you can have it automatically show your
| pictures from Google Photos, and you can have calls with
| other people on Duo)
|
| The more new commercial products they offer, the more they
| should be careful about account bans. At the very least you
| want to segment access to them (as an extreme* example: even
| if you uploaded child pornography on Google Drive, after
| you'll have paid your debt to society, you ought still be
| able to play Cyberpunk 2077 that you purchased on Stadia)
|
| (* extreme both because of the heinousness of the crime, and
| also how trivial/unimportant a videogame is on the grand
| scheme of things... but I think there's an easier case to be
| made for someone to retain access to the game that they
| purchased, vs retaining access to their Google contacts,
| which might not even be backed by any payment for the
| service)
| username90 wrote:
| Most companies doesn't have leadership, they have
| administrators and bureaucrats who are paid a high salary to
| ensure the company doesn't change course.
|
| Sometimes a great leader appears, but most of the time big
| companies are just slowly rotting away after the initial people
| created and grew it.
| tzfld wrote:
| Just look at the revenue chart. After all that's what a
| company's ultimate goal is.
| vultour wrote:
| It blows my mind that technically literate people still use gmail
| after countless horror stories of people losing their accounts.
| randyrand wrote:
| I regularly export my Gmail emails every year.
|
| Gmail makes it fairly simple to do. I highly recommend it.
| stepri wrote:
| This is the reason why I have offsite backups of my Google
| account as everyone has a chance of getting banned. It really
| feels like Russian roulette.
| sschueller wrote:
| What method do you use? I want something automated, I don't
| have time to trigger google take out every so often and then
| manual click 100s of links and download them.
| stepri wrote:
| Within Google Takeout, you can setup monthly backup to
| another service (I chose OneDrive with 1TB storage)
| bronikowski wrote:
| For whatever it is worth, you can setup Takeout to make a
| copy every X months for a year or something like that. Far
| cry from automated solution, but better than nothing.
|
| I need to find Photos alternative because that's the last
| Google service that gets any real use.
| gcatalfamo wrote:
| I honestly cannot believe these incidents (plural) never reach
| top management. It's just not possible.
| smartties wrote:
| Thanks for this reminder that google is never to be trusted. I
| just bought a proton mail, I can't risk to lose access to my
| mails.
| tzfld wrote:
| What does ensure that Protonmail will not have the same
| business model and the same behavior 10 yers from now as
| Google?
| periheli0n wrote:
| For starters, users pay for that email service with money.
| This only works if users are willing to pay.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Google and Proton both offer free and business plans.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| Worst case for your Protonmail account is losing access to
| your email (which you can almost fully mitigate by using your
| own domain and having backups).
|
| Worst case for your Google account is losing access to
| hundreds of Google services and anything you paid for, like
| apps or movies. And Gmail doesn't even allow you to use your
| own domain, other than by paying for G Suite which is clearly
| not targeted at individuals and doesn't work well if you try
| to use it as an individual.
|
| If in the future Protonmail extends into other areas like
| Google does, and you start using these new services, it would
| absolutely have the same risks.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Do no evil was it?
|
| They have to fight a lot of fraudsters and scammers, and do so
| successfully every day. It is easy to say that they cannot
| possibly monitor everything properly because they are so big, but
| they earn billions because they are so big.
|
| This shouldn't come for free, every company has costs and proper
| customer care and monitoring is a cost for these kind of
| businesses.
|
| The other argument is that you shouldn't use these services if
| you don't like them, but these companies are simply too big to
| avoid.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| Every time these stories come out I get terrified. And, angry,
| because just like all the carelessly built services that get
| breached because of poor-to-nonexistent security, this taints all
| SaaS companies a bit.
| jVinc wrote:
| People complaining they they want the game on stadia and blaming
| the creator are really just being assholes. Imagine if you spent
| 3 full weeks figthing some extremely obvious extremely silly but
| on some system, like adding two integers causing a runtime error.
| Would you really continue to work even harder trying to support
| that platform?
|
| The guy lost access to his primary email for nearly a month... I
| think he's exhibiting a metric ton more constraint that is
| reasonable in this situation and google needs to get their damn
| shit together.
| sparkling wrote:
| Having core parts of your personal computing or business
| computing rely on Google or AWS infrastructure is a systematic
| risk. Unless you are are racking up a $50k bill every month, you
| are simply too small that anyone there would care.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Utterly untrue. AWS is not a 'systematic risk', that's
| absolutely ridiculous and I can't even begin to address that
| statement.
| sparkling wrote:
| The recent Parler incident is proof otherwise. If you happen
| to cause any inconvenience for them, you are at risk of being
| cut off.
| Jonnax wrote:
| AWS has a terms of service. They'd warned Parler for months
| about their lack of moderation [0]
|
| "Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it
| sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for
| racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist
| invective about Democrats, including former First Lady
| Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users
| to "kill 'em all.""
|
| " Those posts call for, among other things: killing a
| specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race
| war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing
| several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams,
| Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former
| President Barack Obama."
|
| Their CEO was recently fired for apparently wanting to have
| stricter content moderation [1]
|
| Parler isn't entitled to be their customer after violating
| AWS's term of service.
|
| AWS had a dialogue with them over multiple months.
|
| It's not equivalent to someone losing their Google account
| for no reason and having no recourse.
|
| People trying to make Parler some martyr is so silly. They
| could have hosted their platform co-located in a data
| centre in Alabama. Or hosted it in a friendlier to their
| content country like Russia.
|
| [0]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-
| amazon-wa...
|
| [1] https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/131526/parler-ceo-
| fired-ov...
| polytely wrote:
| At least the Parler incident seems foreseeable, if you are
| hosting content that could bring down the hammer onto the
| giant corporations that you use to host the content, these
| corporations will cut you loose to protect themselves.
| Parler leadership must have know they were in hot water as
| soon as the amateur coup happened.
|
| The Google thing is such an unforced error because despite
| this same story happening time and time again, google still
| doesn't have any ways for (important) customers/partners to
| reach them if things go wrong. In this case it's especially
| funny because Google Stadia needs Terraria way more than
| the other way around. (Terraria sold 30 million copies and
| is available basically every platform except Stadia, Google
| Stadia is a struggling new platform that keeps failing to
| incentivize developers to develop for the platform)
| throwaway19937 wrote:
| > The recent Parler incident is proof otherwise. If you
| happen to cause any inconvenience for them, you are at risk
| of being cut off.
|
| AWS cut off Parler after several months of moderation
| problems
| (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-
| llc-...). Any service provider will cut you off if you
| break the acceptable usage policy or don't pay your bill.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Being an alt-right/neo-nazi content host is a systematic
| risk. Nothing particularly shocking about that. Doesn't
| have much to do with AWS, tbh.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| This is inaccurate. A $50K a month AdWords spend does not get
| meaningful support.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I think I've seen meaningful support for this level of
| AdWords spend.
|
| A $5k a month cloud bill definitely gets this.
| dagw wrote:
| Can't speak for Google, but I've gotten great phone support
| from AWS while spending less than $100 a month.
| phreack wrote:
| I know the usual explanation is that they're too big to respond,
| but at this point I've become of the mind that if you can't
| handle the most basic explanation as to why lock out a user from
| your service, and at least one way to appeal and get a response
| from someone able to make a decision, then you shouldn't be
| allowed to scale at all. Even if it would become a bottleneck,
| this can't keep happening.
| danielrpa wrote:
| That's unfortunate. The silver lining is that there will be more
| people talking about this here on HN than actually affected by
| not bringing some game to _Stadia_.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Maybe the timing's good for Microsoft to open an Android App
| store and other degoogly APIs. Should get better traction than
| Amazon's.
| chrischen wrote:
| Google's product philosophy is more like they are providing the
| technology, not the product. If the product fails, then it is
| your problem because they only offer up until what their tech
| actually does.
|
| Had a similar experience with Google Ads where their automated
| systems shut off our paid ads just before Black Friday due to a
| technical error, and despite having constant human sales contacts
| none of them could do anything useful.
| [deleted]
| tlogan wrote:
| Terraria is very very popular game so I wonder what is going on
| inside Stadia team... could it be that they are just incompetent
| and they do not even monitor Twitter feeds of popular game
| developers?
|
| Or maybe Stadia team actually wants to help but they are ignored
| inside Google? Or they just know the project will be canceled so
| they don't care?
|
| Or maybe they really do not want terraria on their platform so
| they are willing ignore this?
| mchusma wrote:
| My list to improve the play store process that requires $0
| additional dollars from google and would fix 99% of issues: 1)
| give developers a period to respond to the complaint before
| takedown (maybe 1 week) 2) if they respond, make a decision
| within 1 week. 3) show all this information in a portal to see
| basic information like your app is facing a review, pending
| google response, etc. Really basic stuff. 4) allowing you to
| attach information in responses (one situation I have been in,
| the trademark office had ruled in my favor but I literally didn't
| have a way to provide that ruling in the appeal). 5) having a
| premium developer support program that provides good support. I
| think most serious devs would prefer to pay $300/yr to have good
| support vs what they have now (zero support).
| tpl wrote:
| Move your email off Gmail immediately is all I can say. Google
| cannot be trusted to provide continuous access to something as
| important as email.
| jacobp100 wrote:
| I was pretty disappointed by the EU's big tech bill not
| addressing this.
|
| In the UK at least, the largest banks have to offer you at least
| a basic current account.
|
| A lot of these big tech companies have monopoly positions over
| certain areas. They should have to provide at least a minimum
| level of service, and have proper processes when there are
| conflicts.
| javagram wrote:
| I use G Suite and regularly export all my data using google
| takeout in case something like this happens. Plus since I have my
| own domain I can move my email address to another provider.
|
| Way too many google horror stories to keep using my @gmail.com
| account. Although admittedly the actual odds are probably 99.99%
| that this frustrating issue doesn't happen to any individual.
| tkinom wrote:
| For the folks that loss the access, it is 100%.
| 42droids wrote:
| As a small business we use Google Suite. We would need a single
| solution which provides all these: - Email (unlimited domains,
| unlimited addresses) - Drive (Docs, sheets, forms) - Photos (this
| is where we also store out private photos 2Tb+; also, auto-sync
| is a lifesaver) - Calendar
|
| Any alternative which is as affordable as Google? How about Zoho?
| Lutzb wrote:
| We are also on GSuite (Workspace now?). I am currently
| considering moving everything to Office 365. However I am not
| sure about the photos part.
| 42droids wrote:
| Honestly, Office 365 sounds good, but we are a Linux & Mac
| only business. Can't imagine using MS products... Or will
| that not matter at all? :)
| toyg wrote:
| MS software for the mac is pretty decent - Excel alone is
| likely worth it to any org. Linux users can access the web
| versions, which are now pretty powerful. And if you are a
| Slack user you can move to Teams (which is now fairly good)
| and drop that subscription.
|
| I hate to say this, but MS really have their act together
| on "office in the web age".
| 42droids wrote:
| Thank you for this. I will signup and check their
| offerings. If we can use the tools in the browser on
| linux, that is fine.
| lexs wrote:
| A hosted Nextcloud with OnlyOffice/Collabora and a Mail Server?
| There's quite a few providers for that.
| 42droids wrote:
| Yes, I did consider this option. The only issue is the Mail
| Server. It has to be secure & maintained. + SSO for all
| services would be ideal.
| miedpo wrote:
| Consider cloudron if you want an easy to maintain mail
| server. It works really well.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| How does office 365 compare?
| dang wrote:
| Threads are paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working
| on it), so to see the rest of the comments you need to click More
| at the bottom of the page, or like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=2
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=3
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=4
|
| (If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the
| annoying repetition.)
| nvarsj wrote:
| I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only
| company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives
| are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on
| something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is
| no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience
| over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only,
| and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and
| improvement.
|
| We see this again and again. The cynic in me sees Stadia as yet
| another internal promotion scheme, masquerading as a product.
|
| I doubt this will ever change. The internal momentum of the
| company culture will make it so. What does it mean for investors?
| Google has enough money they can just buy their way into markets
| indefinitely. It will probably keep them going, but I don't
| expect huge growth. I'd probably be putting my money into other
| stocks if I had to choose. I honestly don't think people would
| miss Google much if it was gone.
| msoad wrote:
| This is not just Google. All other tech companies including
| Facebook are using the same system to promote workers. As a
| result:
|
| * Nobody is held accountable for the long term success of the
| product. Making little things work nice is not rewarded.
| Maintaining UX is defiantly not rewarded.
|
| * Rewarding process over product. That's why you see so many
| Google products shut down. It takes a few people from L7 to L8
| to build it and rewards someone from L6 to L7 to wind it down.
| Every annual performance review in the process is all roses and
| rainbows!
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| Brilliant comment
| m463 wrote:
| I wonder if it's the lack of a single founder?
|
| Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk - founders at the top who
| owned it.
|
| More directly, Gabe Newell and Valve.
|
| It might be that google started with Page/Brin and co-ownership
| might have weakened that a bit, and now they are not to be
| found.
|
| Not that a single founder is a surefire recipe.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I think that their higher tier promotion system is partly to
| blame, and could be easily fixed. As I understand it, at a
| certain management level, the most effective way to pad out
| your promotion packet is to launch a new product. These packets
| are judged by an anonymous review board. This board could
| change the culture overnight by updating the criteria to reward
| managers that grow products or retain paid customers. Heck, if
| they just updated the definition of a successful launch to
| include a year+ of operation & growth or even just a proper
| roadmap, we might start to see and end to the usual pattern.
| brundolf wrote:
| Stadia, from day one, has seemed like an engineering-oriented
| project. It's a cool tech that nobody asked for and not many
| people actually want (and has been atrociously packaged as an
| actual product). I can just hear the kickoff meeting:
|
| "We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have
| one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of
| companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we
| could!"
|
| That part is true! But then:
|
| "Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and
| messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We
| can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy
| part."
|
| ...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.
| moksly wrote:
| Are you sure people don't want it? I think it's one of the
| biggest market potentials in gaming right now.
|
| I'm quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to
| not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one
| thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a
| week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you
| can bet I'd never own another desktop in this life.
|
| That's anecdotal or course, but there's quite a lot of us.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The narrow "want to play games on my mac" problem could be
| solved if game developers chose to build the game cross-
| platform from the start and release a mac build. Many games
| are already cross-platform, as they run on both Windows and
| consoles. The fact that so many game companies don't even
| bother with a mac build shows they don't want to solve this
| for whatever reason (probably mac just not profitable
| enough).
|
| If a developer is not willing to lift a finger to port to
| mac (a small market, but one with a known size), why would
| they port to Stadia or some other unknown market?
| wheybags wrote:
| Because macs are terrible platforms for games. They have
| been very low end for a long time (m1 notwithstanding),
| and they have been killing off opengl, the only cross
| platform rendering API (before vulkan, which they don't
| support). Also their insistence on breaking changes means
| your back catalog needs constant maintenance. That's
| normal for app developers, but not gamedev. Oh, and if
| you do make the port, they will be about 1% of your
| users. Or less. So, to summarize, mac support is
| expensive, difficult, and not profitable. Should we still
| do it? I tend to think you're better of spending your
| time on linux support.
| brundolf wrote:
| Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally easy
| (and most of the smaller games that use those engines do
| release Mac builds); doing a Mac build from an in-house
| engine may be a ton of work
|
| But more importantly: Mac hardware usually isn't really
| equipped for high-end games. If you have a pro-tier
| machine you might do okay, but nobody _buys_ Macs for
| gaming, at the very least. It 's just too niche of a
| market to go through a lot of effort to support it
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Doing a Mac build from Unreal or Unity is generally
| easy
|
| You'd think, but a lot of mainstream engine-based games
| that could "easily" have a mac port never get one, even
| an unofficial one offered as totally unsupported. Look at
| _Among Us_ for example. Not by any stretch a high-end
| game. It runs on Windows, Android, iOS, a bunch of
| XBoxen, and probably other consoles. I bet the developer
| could spit out a working native macOS version with the
| push of a button, but so far hasn 't.
|
| _Kerbal Space Program_ is another example. When last I
| checked, they did have a native mac version, but it was
| hamstrung in some way--I think it was limited to 32-bit
| or something.
|
| I can't imagine these examples are actually a huge amount
| of effort to make happen. As a fan and programmer I'd be
| willing to do it for free.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Apple's moving to the M1 chip for desktop/laptop Macs.
| That's going to make the target look more like top-end
| Mac hardware... and the iPhone.
|
| The latter isn't a niche market, it's a 'not high-end'
| market. But that could evolve, I think.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Still has a bigger market share than Linux, with people
| that actually pay for games, and all major engines
| support Metal.
|
| Whereas GNU/Linux, even with the massive amount of games
| targeting Android, hardly gets to see them.
|
| Same applies to Stadia, which is mostly GNU/Linux +
| Vulkan, with Google sponsoring Unity and Unreal as well.
| brundolf wrote:
| I don't think it's impossible that streamed games will find
| a market, but I think there are several hurdles that
| (unsurprisingly) weren't apparent to a company with no
| experience in the industry:
|
| 1) PC gamers tend to revel in owning (building,
| customizing, optimizing) their hardware; not just because
| it lets them play the games they want to play, but even for
| its own sake. RGB arrays, overclocking, custom case builds.
| Streaming can't compete with that.
|
| 2) "Casual" gamers already have powerful devices in their
| pockets with thousands and thousands of games available,
| including many free ones and many high-quality ones.
|
| 3) Console gamers are presumably the target (?) market. But
| an Xbox Series S costs $299. The (absolute minimum) Stadia
| starter kit costs $99; you're already a third of the way
| there. And then there's the subscription fee. And _then_
| you still have to buy the games. Something I don 't think
| Google realized is that over a console generation, the
| dominant cost quickly becomes the games themselves, not the
| hardware. If Stadia users still have to buy them at full-
| price - $60 a pop - that $200 you saved at the beginning
| quickly becomes a diminishing fraction. You just aren't
| saving that much, and in exchange, you get the constant
| risk that your whole library will simply be killed at any
| moment, as well as...
|
| 4) The latency. The problem with latency is it's not a
| fully solvable issue, no matter how much hardware or money
| you throw at the problem. There's a physical lower bound on
| how long it takes electricity to get from your house to a
| data center and back. And then there's all the routing
| infrastructure run by your ISP, which a) is outside of
| Google or Microsoft or whoever's ability to improve, and b)
| is unlikely to be improved by the ISP because game
| streaming is basically the only usecase where bleeding-edge
| latency actually matters. And in terms of how much it
| matters: one frame at 60FPS translates to 16.7ms. Client-
| rendered multiplayer games don't have as much of an issue
| with higher latencies because of client-side prediction:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction
|
| Here's the only way I could see game streaming being
| successful:
|
| An all-you-can-eat, Netflix-style buffet of big-budget
| games. Like Apple Arcade, except it has games like Call of
| Duty and Borderlands that you could normally only play on a
| console or a gaming PC. You pay a monthly fee, and you
| never have to buy or even download a game. Dedicated thin-
| client hardware is a waste; anybody who wants to buy
| hardware will just buy a console. Your target customers
| don't want that. Instead this would only be playable on
| existing platforms, primarily desktop/web/mobile, though
| possibly existing consoles as well.
|
| That would be a decent value-proposition for some people.
| Those playing really fast-paced games and/or sticklers for
| latency wouldn't go for it, _some_ existing phone-gamers
| might, but mostly you would get people like your friend
| from college who just wants to play Borderlands with you
| but isn 't really a "gamer" outside of that.
|
| Microsoft is the most clearly-positioned company to succeed
| at this, as far as I can tell. They have two decades of
| experience in the industry, they have cloud chops and
| datacenters, and they carry clout with publishers and even
| have in-house studios (because a subscription-only game
| buffet it going to be a tough sell when it comes to
| license-holders).
|
| And of course they've already started: Xbox Game Pass is a
| smallish version of the all-you-can-eat subscription, and
| they've been experimenting with cloud-hosted releases. You
| can even play Control on your Nintendo Switch via
| Microsoft's cloud. That's pretty cool.
|
| But I don't think this will ever make gaming PCs or even
| consoles obsolete, mainly because of the unsolvability of
| the latency issue. It will be good enough for some people.
|
| Oh and Stadia will die anyway, because Google doesn't
| understand any of the above
| VRay wrote:
| One quick nitpick: The latency in streaming isn't as bad
| as you'd think
|
| Most AAA games already have 200+ ms delays between
| pressing a button and anything happening on-screen. So
| there's plenty of room to redesign things to work around
| that latency in a lot of games
|
| (This obviously doesn't apply to high-end play on twitch
| shooters or fighting games though, those are pretty much
| screwed when it comes to streaming)
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Most AAA games already have 200+ ms delays between
| pressing a button and anything happening on-screen
|
| Absolutely false, and I don't know where you got that
| from.
|
| If there was a game that had that kind of latency between
| input and reaction, people would notice and the reviews
| would be horrible.
| fredophile wrote:
| At 30 fps a 200ms lag would be over 6 frames of delay
| between input and the action happening on screen. Can you
| point to any examples of AAA games that actually have
| this much input lag?
| brundolf wrote:
| Wow, I didn't realize it was that high. I stand
| corrected.
|
| I think most of the above still applies, but maybe expand
| "it'll be good enough for some people" to include some
| portion of average console-gamers (assuming the rest of
| the productization is done right, and assuming those
| console-gamers have fairly good internet)
|
| The thing is that, even there, if you're putting it on a
| TV you're likely not going to want to plug in your
| Macbook or whatever. Which means, if you don't already
| have a console, you're going to be buying dedicated
| hardware regardless. Which significantly cuts into the
| "savings"/"no-purchase" angle, and steepens the question
| of "what's the point of this?"
|
| One thought though: Microsoft _could_ use this as a way
| to keep last-gen console owners engaged. At some future
| date when the Xbox Series Y or Z or whatever comes out,
| people with a Series S might still be able to play the
| latest games by streaming them. They 're using dedicated
| hardware that plugs into a TV, but it's hardware they
| _already bought_ which is essentially being repurposed.
|
| Edit: Another thing is that the subscription model and
| the streaming model don't have to go hand-in-hand. I
| think game subscriptions are absolutely the future, but I
| think there will always be a market for devices that
| download and run those subscribed games locally.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| >> Most AAA games already have 200+ ms delays between
| pressing a button and anything happening on-screen. So
| there's plenty of room to redesign things to work around
| that latency in a lot of games
|
| Source please?
|
| I have produced / designed / managed a few AAA games in
| my life and none of them had a 200ms latency between when
| you pressed a button and something happened on screen.
| That delay would be horrible for a fighting game or a
| driving game. How are you even defining "something
| happening on screen"?
|
| Let's suppose you are right, that there is a longish
| latency between when your input is polled and when the
| game systems fully react. That happens to some extent in
| RTSs, because changes in the game state are synchronized.
| But in that case the delay isn't going to hide the
| network latency, it is going to be added on top of the
| network latency.
| judge2020 wrote:
| They might be talking about engine delay (ie. frame
| times/framerate) but i've moreso seen delays of 100-150
| milliseconds deemed acceptable by people playing console
| games on an old flat screen TV that doesn't have a low-
| latency mode available, and I haven't really experienced
| this on anything other than consoles since even cheap PC
| monitors tend to have <10ms display lag[0].
|
| 0: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015WCV70W
| georgeecollins wrote:
| You probably know this 100ms = 10 FPS. What kind of
| display shows video at less than 10fps? Game engines
| aren't always synced to frame rates, particularly
| simulations. But a simulation that updates every 0.1s
| isn't great for fidelity.
|
| A 30 fps game could go through a complete loop, updating
| everything: object positions, inputs in 33ms. At 60 fps
| assuming everything is synced to frame rate that would 16
| ms.
|
| I was asking for the commenter's source of information so
| I didn't have to guess what he or she meant. It's
| possible to make a game that doesn't respond a user's
| input in less than 200ms, but why would you? You don't
| need to be making a technical tour de force to respond in
| 16-33ms.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I was commenting on how the TV can add latency/'display
| lag', not that it only shows a frame every 100ms. TVs
| have gotten much better[0] but input lag can be high with
| cheap TVs sold 5-10 years ago.
|
| 0: https://displaylag.com/best-low-input-lag-tvs-gaming-
| by-game...
| georgeecollins wrote:
| That makes more sense. I am sorry I misunderstood and
| thank you for explaining.
| rdw wrote:
| Here's one site that attempts to catalog this:
| https://displaylag.com/video-game-input-lag-database/
|
| Found an article from a few years ago: https://www.gamasu
| tra.com/view/feature/3725/measuring_respon...
|
| Not all games are that bad, especially these days. And
| your overall point is correct: adding even a little bit
| on top of that already horrendous latency is going to be
| noticeable by players.
| 1_player wrote:
| Worst out of the 23 games listed in the first link has 8
| frames of latency at 120 fps, which is about 66ms.
| Monitor input lag included.
|
| 200ms, while possible, is far from "most AAA+ games", as
| OP stated.
|
| Sure, there's people that play on lowest-end consoles, on
| a crappy LCD TV with game mode disabled, but let's not
| consider that the norm for all players/all AAA+ games,
| and I'm going to need hard sources showing whether those
| worst case environments get even close to triple digit
| latencies.
| buffington wrote:
| I hate doing this, but I feel like I need to pick at each
| of your described hurdles, because I think each of them
| make assumptions or assertions that don't hold up.
|
| 1. You claim PC gamers do it for the hardware as much as
| the software. Let's assume the data backs that - it
| certainly seems like it's likely to be true. And I'm
| biased in wanting to believe it too, because I like to
| build and revel in the machines that run the games I own.
| What isn't true is that those same people, people like
| me, cannot also be attracted to things like Stadia.
|
| 2. Services like Stadia do not replace the many games
| that people play on the many devices that already exist.
| It's not a "one or the other" thing. They allow those
| devices to play more games.
|
| The biggest flaw is in suggesting that casual gamers (a
| term which is flawed for many other reasons) wouldn't be
| a potential market for a thing like Stadi. Mobile game
| sales account for almost half of ALL game related sales.
| 48%, in fact. $76 billion in sales. A thing like Stadia
| means that people can play more games on their devices.
|
| And let me say, games on Stadia play incredibly well on
| my iPad that's a few generations old. That's _very_
| attractive. Being able to play PC quality games on my
| iPad when I travel is worth every penny. I 'd even argue
| it's easier to play games on Stadia than it is to play
| natively installed games. With Stadia, there's no
| downloading of the game, no installing, not time wasted
| waiting for updates. You just turn it on, and it works.
|
| First, where you say "casual gamers", I think what you're
| trying to say is "people who play games on their mobile
| devices." You go on to describe the abilities that mobile
| devices have. While I won't dispute that, one thing I
| think you're missing is that services like Stadia make it
| even easier to play games on those devices that don't
| exist for those devices, or will at some future date,
| optimized to run on those mobile devices.
|
| I'll probably beat this horse to death, but to compare: I
| was playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my iPad through Stadia
| minutes after it was available. It took nearly a day
| before I could run it on my PC, and after the first
| several patches I just stopped bothering. Granted, the
| game is a beautiful mess, but the point is: it was
| effortless on the iPad, and has been ever since. Not only
| that, but I can switch to my iPhone, or to my PC and pick
| up right where I left off. If I do it quick enough, the
| game just unpaused when I jump to the new device. And I
| can travel and still play. There's no way my PC, with its
| UV reactive liquid cooling is going to travel with me.
|
| 3. Stadia starter kit is optional. Stadia is free. Do you
| have a controller? Keyboard and mouse? A web browser?
| You're good. There is no required subscription fee. You
| buy the games, and they cost the same as console games.
| So yeah, if you have a device that can run modern
| browsers, you don't need to buy a console.
|
| 4. I assume when you mention latency, you mean "input
| latency" - meaning, the time it takes for the game to
| react to your button press or mouse movement. There are
| indeed hard limits to how low input latency can be. The
| game cannot update its entire model and render it in 0ms.
| It has to make calculations based on your inputs, then
| show you what changed. But that's not the only
| constraint. Consider the entire picture: a target on the
| screen moves, and you need to shoot it. If you're good,
| it'll take you about 100ms to react. Most people can't
| react in less than 150ms. It takes 5-10ms to transmit
| your reaction over USB. It takes the simulation any
| number of milliseconds to process and tell the monitor to
| redraw itself. Let's assume the processing time of the
| game engine is 0ms. The best monitors will add 2ms to the
| clock.
|
| So, from your human reaction to the resulting frame, at
| best, it takes from 107ms to react to something on screen
| and see the results of your reaction.
|
| And that's on your PC. No networking.
|
| What does Stadia add? On a good connection, it'll add
| 20-30ms. To be fair, that's what I've seen on my pretty
| normal cable company internet connection over 5ghz Wifi.
| With most games, you'd never notice the extra time. Are
| you going to notice it as a pro gamer playing FPS
| competitively? Probably.
|
| Your assertion that Stadia will die is about the most
| right thing you've said. Even with a market, Google tends
| to kill things seemingly at random. What will help it die
| quicker is if Nvidia's service is able to outperform
| Stadia in terms of simplicity and streaming speeds.
|
| But saying streaming based gaming won't find a market
| reminds me a lot of what the cable companies and
| Blockbuster used to say about Netflix.
| appletrotter wrote:
| >So, from your human reaction to the resulting frame, at
| best, it takes from 107ms to react to something on screen
| and see the results of your reaction.
|
| People can perceive delays smaller than their reaction
| window. For argument I'll say it's 50ms is the
| perceivability barrier, since we seem to throwing numbers
| around here. I can get 50 or 60 ms lag on my wifi often,
| and I would say that I have a pretty good connection. So
| therefore, the input lag potential with stadia is
| significant. 60 > 50.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > What does Stadia add? On a good connection, it'll add
| 20-30ms
|
| I can't ping my router and get consistent latency that
| low.
|
| Latency on speed tests varies between 15 (off peak no
| load) and 100ms (normal).
|
| There is no way that by the time that all adds up, stadia
| is going to be a better experience than local.
|
| My internet is also shared with other people, in a
| country with notoriously subpar internet (yay Australia),
| the closer we get to reality, the less appealing stadia
| becomes. The kind of game streaming I could get behind is
| the rainway/local streaming approach where I run the game
| on local hardware (pc/PS5) and stream to convenient
| device.
| TheJoYo wrote:
| You don't need to buy a Stadia controller to play Stadia.
|
| It's free with an optional subscription for games and 4k.
| brundolf wrote:
| The confusing messaging around that question has been a
| big part of the problem
|
| Regardless though, I think buying full-priced games that
| you don't actually own is the real non-starter. These
| aren't $0.99 songs on iTunes; these are $60 investments.
| nerfhammer wrote:
| nvidia has a competing service that supports that title,
| and it honors your steam account instead of needing you to
| re-buy it
|
| https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/games/
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Yeah I don't see how nVidia doesn't dominate this market.
| Their product just makes way more sense.
|
| To even get on Stadia you have to port to their custom
| Linux distribution, which is a pretty huge ask for most
| games.
| akiselev wrote:
| Unfortunately Stadia is the only one that supports 4K
| (I'm a casual user of Nvidia's service since it was in
| beta)
| myko wrote:
| It's also much more performant and user friendly than
| GeForce Now
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Does 4k matter? The way you state it makes it sound like
| it's a major issue (disclaimer: I've never seen a 4k
| game)
|
| This is an honest question, since I don't game much
| (witcher 3, death stranding and a few point and click) ,
| and regular 1080 doesn't bother me, so I'm genuinely
| curious.
| Duralias wrote:
| Would describe Stadia 4k to be inline with native 1080p,
| at least when playing stadia in a browser. Stadia 4k may
| look better using a chromecast ultra, but I haven't tried
| that.
|
| And It is weird how resolutions are the focus in
| streaming when the most important thing is bitrate, feel
| like we need some kind of standard, because bitrate means
| nothing to most people.
| Axsuul wrote:
| How do you know not many people actually want it?
| odessacubbage wrote:
| i'd like to think even a middling engineer would be able to
| recognize an intractable infrastructure problem that is
| entirely out of their hands. stadia can have perfect tech and
| the best customer service in the world and it simply will not
| matter until you effectively create your own nationwide isp
| as well. space age technology does not mean shit if your
| customers are still in the age of horse and buggy.
|
| terraria also highlights the utter absurdity of game
| streaming. it can and has been ported to practically every
| relevant device and costs less than a big mac. google
| invented a billion dollar laser to cook microwave popcorn.
| sithadmin wrote:
| >stadia can have perfect tech and the best customer service
| in the world and it simply will not matter until you
| effectively create your own nationwide isp as well
|
| To add a layer of situational irony here: Google already
| tried to solve the last-mile delivery infrastructure
| problem and unsurprisingly appears to have found it
| intractable
| myko wrote:
| > Google already tried to solve the last-mile delivery
| infrastructure problem and unsurprisingly appears to have
| found it intractable
|
| This failure was more political in nature though, the
| technical solution is there
| JakeTheAndroid wrote:
| And we arrive at the premise. They can build the tech,
| but they can't be bothered to navigate the social
| dynamics that make up the rest of the world.
| jes5199 wrote:
| my friend at Google reported almost exactly that: it's an
| amazing technical achievement, really pushes the cutting edge
| of what's possible. And the sales and marketing have no idea
| how to do anything with it.
| odessacubbage wrote:
| they need an experience that sells the actual upsides of
| game streaming in the same way that mario 64 sold 3d
| movement and the analog stick. 'here's popular game except
| worse' will never be a winnable pitch. even casual users
| who don't know what latency means will instinctively
| recognize that all the games just feel kind of shitty to
| play. you need a tailor made experience where latency is a
| much more negligible factor.
| nathanyz wrote:
| Stadia works amazingly well which was actually surprising.
| Playing Cyberpunk 2077 in 4k with just a controller and
| Chromecast stick is frankly amazing.
|
| Consoles are great if you play enough, but I found that
| every time I could squeeze an hour here or there to play,
| the Xbox needed to update yet again for 20 minutes, and by
| then something else has come up and I am out.
|
| Stadia lets you jump in and out, no updates as far as I
| have seen, and just magically works.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't work for Google or any of the game
| studios and was actually skeptical they could solve the
| latency challenge.
| brundolf wrote:
| Slightly OT but you deal with the updates issue by
| leaving it running in rest mode all the time. When
| something needs updating the console will get a ping,
| download + install, and go back to sleep. Makes things
| much easier.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only
| company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem.
| Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one
| wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting
| and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an
| excellent user experience over the long term - which usually
| can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work
| of continuous introspection and improvement.
|
| This goes well beyond Stadia - Google has an air of
| institutional contempt for humans, especially humans who aren't
| inside Google. Dealing with humans who are struggling with
| getting bounced by "the algorithm" is something they simply
| aren't interested in.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Does anyone not working for Google have an opinion which isn't a
| variant on "Serves Google right"?
|
| I assume that many Googlies also have that opinion, and a few
| others are sure that this can be fixed, because they don't
| recognize that this is a systemic cultural problem. There's only
| been one Abcedarian unit that ever understood customer service,
| and they (Google Fi) dropped it on the floor and beat it to death
| within 3 years.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| You'd think that there'd be a "this person is high profile and
| any automated bans will cause a stink" flag on accounts to
| require human review on such decisions, but apparently one of the
| richer companies in the world just can't be bothered to hire a
| few extra people to avoid a PR problem.
|
| That or they're convinced that they're _this_ close to fixing the
| automated system, which they obviously are not.
| retSava wrote:
| On the other hand, I'd prefer they fix this process for
| everyone and not just those with X twitter followers.
|
| I'm completely uninterested in making waves on social media,
| but I still expect services (whether paid or free) to work as
| advertised considering I'm not misbehaving. If they don't want
| me as customer/user, then say so and I'll find another
| provider.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| As an end user, I agree. But Google clearly doesn't care in
| the slightest about the end user; if they did we wouldn't be
| having this conversation. I'm thinking about this from
| Google's own self interest only.
| lima wrote:
| > _That or they're convinced that they're this close to fixing
| the automated system, which they obviously are not._
|
| Knowing Google's engineering culture, you're probably spot-on.
| Ignoring long-tail events like this one is a common failure
| mode of this kind of relentless metrics-driven optimization
| (and they should know better).
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > You'd think that there'd be a "this person is high profile
| and any automated bans will cause a stink" flag on accounts
|
| What does high profile mean? I've heard of Leon Spinks, the
| boxer, but I've never heard of Andrew Spinks in my life until
| today. People with 5 digit Twitter follower counts are actually
| a dime a dozen.
|
| Even people who were obscure can become "high profile" for a
| day. That's how going viral works.
| lifeformed wrote:
| Andrew Spinks isn't famous, but Terraria is. This probably
| cost Google a few million dollars for botching a simple
| customer support case.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Surely the creator of a video game that's sold tens of
| millions of copies, who also has an on-going business
| relationship with your company passes the bar?
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| My point is that literally millions of people could be
| considered "high profile". Does (the recently deceased)
| Leon Spinks pass the bar? I could go on naming semi-famous
| people indefinitely, they all ought to pass this bar.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I agree that it's a trickier line to draw than I
| initially considered. However, there are only ~200
| developers building games for Google Stadia. If Google
| cannot guarantee it won't cut any of them off at a
| moment's notice, with -- seemingly -- no right to appeal,
| then I think that bodes very badly for the ongoing
| viability of Stadia.
| [deleted]
| dsissitka wrote:
| Some context:
|
| > However, they were hit with a Terms of Service violation via
| email. They assumed it was issued accidentally, but three days
| later, their entire Google account was disabled without any
| warning or recourse.
|
| https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/terraria-studio-re-logic-...
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > They assumed it was issued accidentally
|
| That seems like a dangerous assumption to make.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Three days from initial warning to disabling their account is
| ridiculous though. What if the person behind that mailbox was
| off sick or on holiday?
| Rexxar wrote:
| And why disabling all other related account ?
| pishpash wrote:
| That's the abuse of monopoly part.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Chances are they simply can't get their internal
| teams/systems in line to enable partial bans, and nobody
| with the political clout to get it done cares.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Given it's the Terraria YouTube account it _has_ to be either
| stupidity or accidental, both on Google 's part.
|
| My imagination fails trying to picture a scenario where you
| could justify suspending _that_ account.
| ummonk wrote:
| Good reminder that I need to prioritize making the switch from
| Gmail to iCloud mail.
| Aissen wrote:
| If Google's goal is to make sure that future regulation forbids
| them from ever banning an account of real person or company,
| they're on the right path for that.
|
| In a few years we'll have spammers with legit companies able to
| legally force Google to deliver emails to their "customers"
| inbox, to abuse compute resource, etc.
|
| Just because Google decided not to act on its kafka-esque banning
| process.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| It does seem like there should be some laws around the appeal
| process. Right now the only hope some of these devs have is to
| make it to the frontpage of some newspapers/hnews etc
| judge2020 wrote:
| Which it always does for name-brand businesses since it's
| basically free clicks for news publications.
| kweinber wrote:
| Isn't Stadia effectively dead in the water anyway? The idea was
| based on universal infinite low-latency bandwidth which is
| wasteful and incongruent with the laws of physics. There are
| articles elsewhere showing Google abandoning its own development
| on the platform.
|
| This was a mainframe play for gaming. Think this platform will be
| around in 2023?
| OliverJones wrote:
| A tech challenges in machine learning these days is teaching the
| machines to explain _why_ they made their decisions. With Google
| 's commitment to 100% lights-off handling of terms-of-service
| violations, it seems unlikely that non-Google entities will get
| any decent explanations unless there are revenue implications for
| Google.
|
| Big fines for violations? Maybe. But they have more lobbyists
| than that rest of us to resist legislation. Won't happen without
| a mass political movement (in the US at any rate).
|
| How about a review department at Google?
|
| We could pay US$200 for a human review of the situation, with a
| reasonable SLA (maybe two working days), with a promise of a
| refund if they determine the error was theirs.
|
| Possibly a larger fee for a more aggressive SLA?
|
| Possibly a subscription-style fee for publishers of mission-
| critical stuff? (Meaning, critical to the publisher's mission,
| not Google's mission.)
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Maybe unrelated but I was pretty much banned from using Amazon
| for over two years through no fault of my own. I even asked here
| for suggestions on what I could do. Alt accounts just got
| immediately locked too.
|
| In the end, the only way I managed to get my original account
| unlocked again was by collecting a huge list of @amazon.com
| support addresses and writing a bot to spam hundreds of emails
| until someone competent picked up and realised my account had
| been mistakenly locked. I made dozens of calls but they hung up
| the phone most of the time (literally).
|
| FAANG seriously needs to step up their support game. And not with
| "AI" chatbots or outsourced support teams with a few buttons in
| front of them.
| falcolas wrote:
| What's just as bad is the public resistance to these kinds of
| social media pleas (I'd say astroturfed, but the public
| response to COVID has jaded me).
|
| "Oh, they must have had child porn in their drive."
|
| "I bet they were spamming."
|
| "Return fraud, totally sounds like return fraud."
| gambiting wrote:
| They are posting billion dollar profits year on year on year.
| There is literally no incentive to do this at all. For every
| customer wronged this way there are hundreds if not thousands
| who are extremely happy with the service.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| That's what made it so daunting. I was completely powerless
| to argue against this massive, faceless corporation. I
| imagine for those who store their whole lives on Google, this
| feeling is amplified 100x.
| villgax wrote:
| Gives me a chuckle for every high profile case such as this. Just
| get a domain & link it with a Zoho Mail account or any other paid
| one, for everything else use self-hosted storage
| kevingadd wrote:
| Does Zoho Mail offer Youtube accounts now? Any serious game
| ends up needing promotion on YT.
| oauea wrote:
| How you going to use that to host on Stadia?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Monopoly abusing monopoly.
| runamok wrote:
| It's also bananas that they ban your entire google existence. If
| you violate some Developer TOS then ban you in the app store not
| in google drive, gmail, etc. That kind of collatoral damage begs
| for them to be broken up IMO.
| rabboRubble wrote:
| Perfect time to advertise Google's Takeout Services:
|
| https://takeout.google.com/
|
| This service permits the export of (nearly?) all Google services
| data on both a scheduled and unscheduled on-demand basis.
|
| I have my Google account configure to automatically export all
| service data every 2 months and upload ZIP files to MS OneDrive.
| This process completely bypasses me and my local computer. I just
| have to remember to check that the data transferred to OneDrive
| as expected.
|
| The only constructive criticism I have of the Takeout Services
| scheduled process is that the scheduled exports are limited to a
| one year duration. I have to remember to reconfigure the next
| year's scheduled exports. Ideally I'd be permitted to set and
| forget, with a periodic reminder that the export is still
| happening and a "Good" / "Not Good" confirmation that the process
| ought continue.
|
| Takeout Services won't restore function and applications, but at
| least a great part of my data won't be irretrievably lost.
| grumple wrote:
| Number one step to leaving google: get your own email service.
| One that you pay for, from a company whose primary business is
| email. Then gradually move your important accounts off.
|
| This doesn't help much if you have to publish things on the play
| store. But you can distribute android apps directly.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Google takeout ftw!
| accounted wrote:
| Going against popular sentiment, I dont know how people can't get
| in touch with a human at Google.
|
| Whenever I have needed something that required human support,
| such as resolving a false DMCA claim against my content or help
| with my G Suite account, I had no trouble getting email and phone
| support. I'm not a big company or influence of any kind either.
| mullingitover wrote:
| Google has a serious problem with their tightly coupled
| identities. They need to be forced to decouple their business so
| losing your YouTube account doesn't have an effect on your email
| service or literally any other service. Clearly they're not going
| to do it voluntarily, so it's time for courts to step in and
| start taking care of consumers.
| grishka wrote:
| They have to at least provide the ability to download all your
| data in case they ban you. Otherwise it's a hostage situation.
| IIRC even Facebook does that.
| iamdual wrote:
| This is why I avoid using important services (i.e. e-mail
| accounts, your backups, any digital products) in the one place.
| Just a little violate and then lose access to all of them. It can
| happen anytime, shouldn't be left to chance.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Google needs a read only account mode that can be used instead of
| disabling/deleting accounts. Even if a user violated ToS, its
| pretty harmless to just let them export data which at least would
| mitigate the worse parts of this & free up energy from data
| recovery to time spend getting the account unlocked.
|
| I mean what's the harm if a bot has a read only account? Or an
| account than can send 1 email per hour - just enough you could
| tell your contacts that you have to migrate to another provider.
| Even if the machine is AI driven - the actions taken could be
| more nuanced in order to stop the ToS violation but provide
| limited account functionality.
| suction wrote:
| I just can't imagine that this has happened completely "without
| reason" as he states. The reason might be silly, erroneous
| (whether human or AI), or dumb, but it exists. If Google has no
| procedure in place to investigate these bans on request, then
| Google is evil. But by the sound of this I get the feeling that
| this guy is leaving out some facts.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Not hard to do some Google searches to find lots of examples
| where people were banned by Google without reason or
| explanation. Sure, a reason might exist, but if it's impossible
| to get anyone to tell you what it is, then how can you tell? In
| at least one high profile case _a Google employee 's spouse_
| was banned and it was still impossible to get an explanation or
| reversal!
|
| You can assume that a high-profile game developer _in a
| business partnership with Google_ is evil and got up to some
| sort of large scale malfeasance with their gmail account
| (why??? for what purpose? why would you risk a business deal to
| do this? what 's the upside?) and then Google decided to ban
| them but _not_ expose them for their misconduct. Or you can go
| "huh it sure seems like something bad happened to this person
| and he's not getting an explanation for it."
| henriquez wrote:
| That thread reads like someone put the Stadia shill bots on
| maximum overdrive.
| dandare wrote:
| I am not fan of regulation, but apparently not every abuse of the
| market can be solved by courts in a practical way. Like in this
| case, a mere mortal can not possibly sue Google.
|
| I can imagine the EU will step in soon. There are multiple
| different aspects of being locked out of a "free" service
| provider like Google:
|
| - Losing your email addresses - even if it was provided for free,
| will cause an immense harm. Email addresses will soon be
| transferable between companies like mobile numbers are today.
|
| - Losing your own data - GDPR was a first step, user should have
| a right to his own data even if he was locked out of a platform.
|
| - Losing digital goods like apps or ebooks. With a transferable
| email address these will become transferable too.
| Tom4hawk wrote:
| How do you want to transfer your apps from Google Store? Is
| there any other service with those apps?
| dandare wrote:
| Not away from Google Store, just under a different account.
| But you are right, I did not think it through.
| motogpjimbo wrote:
| I'm not sure how a foo@gmail.com email address could
| realistically be transferred to another provider.
|
| At the very least, I wish there was a regulation that forced
| platforms to provide users with an explicit reason why their
| account was suspended. No vague "please read our T&Cs"
| statements. Instead, something along the lines of "We have
| suspended your YouTube account because in video A you made
| statement B at time index C which violates our rule D". No
| doubt it would be burdensome for the likes of Google to
| implement, but that's what you get when you become so large
| that you can destroy your users' livelihoods on a whim.
| benjohnson wrote:
| The quote I'm going to remember:
|
| "Doing business with Google is a liability"
| [deleted]
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill
| of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies. At the
| very least, companies must be legally required to present you in
| writing with the so-called violation of terms they're accusing
| you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone # or other
| immediate contact so that you can dispute the accusations. It's
| insane that these basic legal rights don't even exist.
|
| You could of course sue Google, but that's an extremely expensive
| and time-consuming option, rarely worth it for a mere consumer.
| Going to court certainly won't make your suspended account become
| unsuspended any quicker.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer
| "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
|
| Nope. That gives players like Google a platform to negotiate
| from now and in the future, and it won't curb abuses long term.
| These abuses are a symptom of economic concentration and a lack
| of competitive markets. The only resolution guaranteed to work
| is to break up these companies down to smaller parts until they
| no longer act like quasi-governments.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > The only resolution guaranteed to work is to break up these
| companies down to smaller parts until they no longer act like
| quasi-governments.
|
| Why not both?
|
| A consumer bill of rights and breaking up Google are not
| mutually exclusive. Consumer protection laws protect
| consumers from all companies big and small, present and
| future. Breaking up Google won't do anything about the "next
| Google".
|
| It's a bit strange to think that antitrust is a long-term
| solution when the successful antitrust case against Microsoft
| didn't prevent Google, Facebook, and Apple from arising.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| It's a bit strange to think a nebulous "consumer bill of
| rights" is going to protect you when the actual Bill of
| Rights is routinely violated. We have utility designations
| for instances where it makes sense, and even then you see
| customer abuses. Forcing companies to focus on competition
| and survival is the best way to make sure they treat their
| customers well. Abuses pop up when customers don't have the
| choice to take their business elsewhere.
|
| > Breaking up Google won't do anything about the "next
| Google".
|
| The same regulator that has the power to break them up also
| has the power to prevent the next Google. Good pricing
| regulations have the power to prevent the next Google.
| These are solved problems, we just don't enforce the laws
| on the books or modernize them appropriately.
|
| > It's a bit strange to think that antitrust is a long-term
| solution when the successful antitrust case against
| Microsoft didn't prevent Google, Facebook, and Apple from
| arising.
|
| That's probably because it wasn't successful in the
| classical sense. Geroge Bush won the 2000 election and
| settled the case before it went to judgment. If it had, and
| Microsoft had been forced to break up, we may not be in the
| current situation.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > It's a bit strange to think a nebulous "consumer bill
| of rights" is going to protect you when the actual Bill
| of Rights is routinely violated.
|
| The Bill of Rights were written over 200 years ago and
| could really use a rewrite for modern times, but passing
| constitutional amendments is much more difficult than
| passing laws. Moreover, the issues involved in the Bill
| of Rights are much more contentious, whereas pretty much
| everyone is annoyed by Google's complete lack of customer
| service.
|
| I also find this statement to be somewhat at odds with
| your later statement: "These are solved problems, we just
| don't enforce the laws on the books or modernize them
| appropriately." How does your Bill of Rights analogy not
| also apply to your own argument about antitrust?
|
| I would say that consumer protection laws that can be
| applied in an ongoing, daily basis are better than
| antitrust laws, because antitrust enforcement is a
| monumental task that at best can take years to achieve,
| only comes into play when problems have already gotten
| out of hand, and may not have the desired results, as you
| mentioned. Better to try to prevent some of the problems
| from occurring in the first place, with laws that apply
| to all companies without exception, instead of trying to
| just go after a few of the current biggest troublemakers.
|
| And Google is far from the only company who pulls this
| crap, so at the very least we would need _multiple_
| successful antitrust actions.
|
| Right to repair is a similar issue. So, breaking up
| Google and Facebook might help somewhat with the account
| suspension issue, but then we also have to break up
| Apple. And John Deere! And other companies. Or... we
| could pass right to repair laws. Antitrust feels a lot
| like Whac-A-Mole to me. Not that antitrust is bad, but
| you knock down one BigCo, and another arises. Why not
| more directly address the abuses caused by the BigCos?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The abuse is economic concentration, everything else is
| treating symptoms. Antitrust, price regulations, fair
| competition laws and the like are the remedy to that
| abuse. Obviously we would need to do more than one action
| - I'm talking about restructuring the economy. It's only
| whack-a-mole if you go one at a time. Knock-off a few big
| ones and the rest will settle to get the best deal
| possible.
|
| I don't believe we are as impotent as your response would
| imply, and we are certainly capable of putting a stop to
| these abuses and enforcing laws that create fair,
| competitive markets. I agree it's a longer term project,
| but it's the only one that will actually solve the
| issues. It's a losing proposition to focus our energy on
| short term fixes.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > I don't believe we are as impotent as your response
| would imply
|
| I don't believe we're impotent, which is why I'm
| suggesting new laws such as a consumer bill of rights and
| right to repair. I think that antitrust is actually too
| little too late in addressing problems. After all, you
| can't take anti-trust action against a company until it's
| already a trust. ;-)
|
| > It's a losing proposition to focus our energy on short
| term fixes.
|
| I think we disagree about which is the long term fix and
| which is the short term fix. I personally consider
| antitrust action against individual companies to be a
| short term fix, whereas permanent universal consumer
| protection laws are a long term fix.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > After all, you can't take anti-trust action against a
| company until it's already a trust. ;-)
|
| That's not what the laws on the books say. It's a
| colloquial term, and nobody like a pedant.
|
| > I personally consider antitrust action against
| individual companies to be a short term fix, whereas
| permanent universal consumer protection laws are a long
| term fix.
|
| Ralph Nader said the same thing in the 60s and 70s.
| Consumer protection laws have been used to encourage
| economic concentration and the abuses of labor and
| society that always come with it. The American government
| has never succeeded at compliance regulation -- it gets
| weakened and corrupted, and we always wind up getting the
| worst version of laissez-faire economics as a result.
|
| Further, how would you make it "permanent"?
| Constitutional amendments are a non-starter right now,
| and Congress can't pass laws that have 80%+ popular
| support. You know what is permanent? Court-ordered break-
| ups under the Clayton Act.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > That's not what the laws on the books say. It's a
| colloquial term, and nobody like a pedant.
|
| It was merely a play on words, but the point was that
| antitrust only kicks in when significant market power is
| involved, some kind of restraint on competition, whereas
| other laws protect consumers from abuses by companies of
| all sizes, even the smallest "mom and pop shop"
| companies.
|
| > Ralph Nader said the same thing in the 60s and 70s.
| Consumer protection laws have been used to encourage
| economic concentration and the abuses of labor and
| society that always come with it. The American government
| has never succeeded at compliance regulation -- it gets
| weakened and corrupted, and we always wind up getting the
| worst version of laissez-faire economics as a result.
|
| Again, I find it strange how you think one set of laws
| can't possibly be intelligently and usefully applied by
| the government, while at the same time thinking another
| set of laws can, i.e., antitrust.
|
| > Further, how would you make it "permanent"?
|
| What do you mean? Laws are permanent by default, unless
| the legislators write an expiration date into the law.
|
| > You know what is permanent? Court-ordered break-ups
| under the Clayton Act.
|
| Tell that to AT&T. ;-)
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > Again, I find it strange how you think one set of laws
| can't possibly be intelligently and usefully applied by
| the government, while at the same time thinking another
| set of laws can, i.e., antitrust.
|
| It's not strange if you look at historical priors. The US
| Government has frequently succeeded at regulation that
| involves rulemaking, investigation, and prosecuting
| abuses. The same government has failed to achieve its'
| goals any time it tried compliance based regulation.
| Sure, both are subject to regulatory capture, but I've
| only seen the one model succeed.
|
| I'm generally against these types of "consumer
| protection" movements explicitly because they target the
| smallest "mom and pop shop" companies. Consumer
| protection costs wind up driving those smaller businesses
| out and promote corporate concentration. Once you have
| that, the corporations are writing the rules, and the
| laws stop protecting customers (see: Boeing 737MAX).
|
| > Tell that to AT&T.
|
| ATT, Verizon or T-Sprint? If they don't answer I can
| leave a messaging on their answering machine using free
| long distance, or send an email using a modem. Just a few
| things that resulted from that breakup...
|
| And we're only back down to three because of a (going on)
| five decade streak of executives that favor laissez-faire
| economics, which kind of proves my point that it's a good
| solution. Look at how much effort it took to undo that
| breakup, and they still haven't gotten back to the Ma
| Bell days.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > we're only back down to three because of a (going on)
| five decade streak of executives that favor laissez-faire
| economics, which kind of proves my point that it's a good
| solution
|
| I think that kind of disproves your point, but maybe we
| should just stop there. :-)
| MisterTea wrote:
| > It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer
| "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
|
| Google is a private company who offers free internet services
| in exchange for your privacy being violated. They have no
| customer service because you are not a customer as customers
| pay. You have no rights on their platform because again, you
| are not a paying customer. And you agreed to their terms of
| service when you signed up. They don't owe you anything at that
| pont.
|
| So stop expecting "paying customer" treatment from a shady
| adware dealer who gives you "free" "integrated platform" stuff
| to get you hooked. That's an old drug dealer tactic anyway.
|
| Want to be treated like a person? You have to pay for that.
| Otherwise stop whining about the tyranny of "free" platforms
| such as google, twitter, facebook, etc.
|
| The only thing the government should do is fund PSA's to warn
| people of the rights and privacy hazards of free internet
| platforms.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > The only thing the government should do is fund PSA's ...
|
| Should governments allow caller ID spoofing, spam bordering
| on harassment, or lazy oligopolies to be negligent?
|
| Governments should do whatever we agree they should. Both
| governments and companies serve the humans.
| Sayrus wrote:
| To be fair, even as a paying customer, you don't get much
| more "customer service".
|
| The same also applies for Google Play Store where without a
| doubt you paid at least once and continue for every in-app
| purchase.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > Want to be treated like a person? You have to pay for that.
|
| Andrew Spinks, the author of the linked tweet, was a business
| partner of Google's. That didn't save him.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Partner is not a customer. They don't care about any human
| on their platform because their platform is not designed to
| care about humans, only exploit them.
| anthony_r wrote:
| You're not seeing the other side of the coin - the huge amount
| of spam and abuse that such systems correctly identify and
| remove. If every abuser requests those explanations (which they
| will) there will be far more spam going around the Internet.
|
| Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who
| were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over
| their mental health.
|
| (I am offering no solutions here, for I know none)
| paulsutter wrote:
| Perhaps the process should cost $100 or $500, so that actual
| spammers can't use it
|
| Maybe they really just need to offer a paid account option
| with real support, since that has much better incentives
| wcoenen wrote:
| There is a paid option: for $6/month you can use gmail with
| your own domain name. It's targeted at businesses but you
| can use it as an individual.
|
| https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html
|
| It includes support, but I'm not sure if that helps in
| cases where google thinks you have abused the service. I
| just use it because I like having my own domain, and so
| that I don't lose access to my email if google locks me
| out. The idea is that I can update my domain's MTX records
| and use another email service.
| sam_goody wrote:
| Support does not include if your account gets suspended
| or if you lose access.
|
| We had a paid Google App account. One of our workers
| would only login from their computer. It died, and she
| tried to login from the new computer. It gave a
| unrecognized machine error, and we had to hire someone to
| resuscitate the old computer for her.
|
| I know of a company that had the entire companies'
| accounts suspended without warning because one user did
| something that violated their terms, but they could not
| figure out what. The company lost three months of revenue
| from it and I am not sure if it caused bankruptcy. No
| help at all from G.
| KMag wrote:
| About a year ago, I started migrating to a vanity domain,
| currently hosted at Google, for this reason. If I get
| locked out of Google, I lose my history, but at least I
| can move to another provider and avoid being locked out
| of my life for the indefinite future.
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes, refundable if the company ban proved in the wrong.
| Sounds like a great solution IMO
| AlfeG wrote:
| No need in charges. Strong person identification via
| Passport or Bank. Limit those request per identified person
| or throttle them.
| ballenf wrote:
| This is an age old problem in the criminal justice system. A
| solved problem.
|
| After a lot of trials with various approaches, we settled on
| letting some criminals go free over convicting someone on
| weak evidence. Second we decided that trials should be open
| and evidence viewable by default.
|
| Finally you generally have the option to give some security
| to stay out of jail during trial.
|
| Closing a google account is a punishment worse than many
| criminal convictions. And will only get more important as we
| progress to an all digital existence.
| fredgrott wrote:
| no if the AI can be used to automate the banning it can be
| used to provide the electronic news email of the rule
| violated.
| gambiting wrote:
| Well their main argument against it is that if you don't
| tell scammers which rule exactly they are breaking they
| can't improve until the app is approved. But of course that
| hits normal customers too. It's the equivalent of arresting
| random people on the street and not telling them why -
| surely, innocent people will just get their lawyer to free
| them.
| bildung wrote:
| aka due process
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > If every abuser requests those explanations (which they
| will)
|
| It's not a request, it's a requirement. If your account is
| suspended, you deserve an explanation. You should get one
| without having to request it.
|
| I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend
| accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to
| be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent.
| The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are without
| any recourse whatsoever.
| daemin wrote:
| I heard on a podcast recently that a trading system needs
| to keep logs of why a particular trade was executed for
| several years just in case the authority wants it. So it
| isn't too much effort to build a similar report or log of
| behaviour to explain why someone was banned.
|
| Obviously this will also help the spammers who will use
| this information to get around the filters.
| gibspaulding wrote:
| Complete speculation because I don't actually know how
| this works, but I wonder if the explanation would be
| something like this:
|
| "You've been banned because our black box ML algorithm
| says your usage patterns share similar traits to those of
| known spammers."
| p410n3 wrote:
| Thats kinda what the PayPal support told me when I asked
| why half of my in-store payments via Google Pay get
| rejected.
|
| Most were payments of about 2EUR in the same store next
| to work.
|
| Whatever I dont use it anymore
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Some government decisions are indirectly forbidden from
| using black box "algorithms" because they are obligated
| by law to explain (on demand) the steps that the
| algorithm took to reach its decision. Maybe something
| like this should also apply to some private companies ?
| daemin wrote:
| Podcast link: https://www.twoscomplement.org/, I think it
| was the latest episode.
| rukshn wrote:
| I think we give up on that when we agree to the rule
|
| Google has the right to suspend, remove your account
| without prior notice
|
| I'm sure there should be a clause like that in their TOS
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| For the record, they don't give away these explanations
| because such explanation would hint the spammer to what
| they should _not_ do next time, to avoid getting caught.
| Same as with anticheat software.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > they don't give away these explanations because such
| explanation would hint the spammer to what they should
| _not_ do next time
|
| We've heard this excuse countless times, but it's simply
| not acceptable. The foundation of our legal system is
| that it's better to let a criminal go than to punish an
| innocent person. How many innocents have to get caught in
| the crossfire before we start protecting them?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This isnt criminal law. This is the right a private
| property owner (say the owner of a bar) has to kick you
| out. There are some limits on that (e.g. a restaurant
| can't kick black people out) but for the most part a
| business that doesnt want your business doesnt have to
| serve you, right or wrong.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The reason people are incensed about FAANGMP doing so is
| because, in their respective markets, they're monopolies.
|
| No one would care if Google banning a developer meant
| they could list their app through a non-Play app store
| with decent exposure, or a non-App Store at all.
|
| But that's not the reality we live in.
|
| So it's more like if Walmart moved into my podunk town,
| put all the local shops out of business, and then banned
| me.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Hmmmm. I thought it was Apple that banned sideloading.
|
| Maybe Google kicked this guy out for the same reason they
| fired off their own Stadia devs.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I don't think the "but you can" rounding error alternate
| Android app stores and side-loading constitute a viable
| developer alternative. *
|
| * Except in China, in which case it's only true for their
| domestic Android market
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It's different for Huawei's app store ?
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| There is speculation that Google will ban sideloading in
| the near future, too. That is, it will extend its
| Advanced Protection model to mass-market Android. Then,
| sideloading will only be possible for that tiny minority
| of nerds like us who know how to use ADB and install an
| .apk over the command line.
| badjeans wrote:
| Well, and Huawei users.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > This isnt criminal law.
|
| Not yet, but that's my whole point, it needs to be: It's
| painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer
| "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech
| companies.
|
| You can't really compare getting kicked out of a bar with
| losing access to your gmail. There are no "algorithms"
| automatically kicking innocent people out of bars.
| Getting kicked out of a bar is a direct human
| interaction, which is exactly what I'm demanding.
| syshum wrote:
| >>e.g. a restaurant can't kick black people out
|
| Well they can, just not for the sole reason of being
| black...
|
| >>This isnt criminal law.
|
| No it is Civil Tort law, but that does not mean your
| rights are completely removed, nor that principle does
| not apply
|
| >>This is the right a private property owner (say the
| owner of a bar) has to kick you out. There are some
| limits on that
|
| Absolutely, and those limits are normally set either by
| over riding civil / businessl law passed the government,
| or a contract entered into by 2 parties
|
| The problem with Google and many other online platforms
| is their ToS (their contract) is sooooooo one side that
| IMO it should be considered an unconscionable contract
| thus void and unenforeable.
|
| Also we have things like Truth in Advertising laws, many
| times these platforms Public messaging, and advertisement
| in no way match their terms of service
|
| I am fully in support of the right of a private business
| to choose who they want to do business with. I am not
| however in favor of allowing business to use marketing
| manipulation, false advertisement, and unconscionable
| contracts in the form of ClickWrapped Terms of Service to
| abuse the public
|
| the "mah private business" defense is a weak one, very
| weak, and it is telling that people defending the large
| companies with this defense often times do not support it
| in other contexts.
|
| Google has every right to choose who it does business
| with, but it need to make those choices in transparent,
| and public manner.
| msh wrote:
| But then they should be required to refund your
| purchases, fx in the app store or their movie store.
| Majromax wrote:
| > This is the right a private property owner (say the
| owner of a bar) has to kick you out.
|
| Not exactly?
|
| It's certainly not criminal law. Proof beyond reasonable
| doubt has no place here.
|
| But it's also not exactly the relationship between a host
| and guest, where the guest has no rights save what the
| host grants. Website terms of service purport to be
| contracts, so there is a contractual rather than ex
| gratia basis for the relationship.
|
| So, begin interpreting website terms of service as
| contracts of adhesion, and read in a duty for website
| operators to enforce those terms fairly, with a
| reasonable basis (on the balance of probabilities) for
| harmful decisions.
|
| This isn't the _current_ law, of course, but it 's not
| hard to imagine the law reaching that place from here.
| gabipurcaru wrote:
| the legal system deals with a finite number of people;
| the internet enables that finite number of people to act
| as a potentially infinite number of entities, without a
| great way of disaggregating them into people.
|
| E.g. if a spammer can pretend they're 10 million
| different people, and each of those "people" requests an
| explanation, the whole system grinds to a halt.
|
| This is the reason behind a push for more KYC-like
| verification on these platforms (e.g. asking for IDs).
| But this comes at a huge privacy cost for legitimate
| users. So one way or another people who are real,
| legitimate and with good intentions somehow pay the cost
| of the harm that is being done on the internet. This is a
| hard problem.
|
| Source: am thinking/working on this sort of stuff; not
| representing my employer, my opinions are my own etc.
| etc.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what's current thinking (broad strokes)
| on methods to address this?
|
| My first guess would be third-party attestation of
| identity, with stored credential disposal on a short
| schedule? Essentially normal-user-verification-as-a-
| service?
| throwaway19937 wrote:
| Self-sovereign identities
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sovereign_identity)
| are one attempt to address this issue.
| gabipurcaru wrote:
| privacy, online safety, no false positives
|
| Pick two.
|
| Different companies do different trade-offs. The optimal
| solution depends on how the internet community weighs
| each individual axis
| PixyMisa wrote:
| Two would be amazing. One would be nice. Currently we get
| zero.
| Majromax wrote:
| > This is the reason behind a push for more KYC-like
| verification on these platforms (e.g. asking for IDs).
| But this comes at a huge privacy cost for legitimate
| users.
|
| A way to square this circle is to have rights engage at
| the point of payment.
|
| A truly pseudonymous account with no monetization (going
| either way) has little intrinsic value, and less need for
| KYC-like identification.
|
| On the other hand, an account with some sort of payment
| history (either giving money in the case of purchases or
| receiving money in the case of developers/website hosts
| placing advertising) faces a higher standard. There's a
| reasonable probability of real economic harm if the
| account is nuked arbitrarily, and at the same time any
| money flow is open to theft or money laundering concerns,
| triggering moral if not legal KYC obligations.
|
| The latter should also help prevent the proliferation of
| straw bad actors, since providing payment imposes a
| direct cost, while the KYC rules open up the possibility
| of more direct action for flagrant breaches of contract /
| use of the platform for other abuses.
|
| The "spammer" can only pretend to be 10 million different
| people because e-mail is free. Paying a tenth of a penny
| per e-mail has been one of those long-standing impossible
| anti-spam measures, but walled gardens can implement
| something like this at their whim.
| gabipurcaru wrote:
| > The "spammer" can only pretend to be 10 million
| different people because e-mail is free. Paying a tenth
| of a penny per e-mail has been one of those long-standing
| impossible anti-spam measures, but walled gardens can
| implement something like this at their whim.
|
| Maybe. A few problems here:
|
| 1. payments come with privacy concerns, unless maybe
| you're talking about zero-knowledge-based blockchains,
| but we're a LONG way from such functionality being
| widespread
|
| 2. $0.001/email is actually very reasonable for an
| attacker; they'd probably gladly pay even up to $1 or
| more, depending on their exact needs, _especially_ if
| that comes with an elevated privileges account
|
| 3. all of this is easily defeated by fanouts. E.g. if
| they sign up with bob@gmail.com and then are able to use
| bob+1@gmail.com, bob+2@gmail.com etc. to sign up for a
| different service, this defeats the purpose
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > E.g. if a spammer can pretend they're 10 million
| different people, and each of those "people" requests an
| explanation, the whole system grinds to a halt.
|
| Again, it's not a "request".
|
| If spam detection and account suspension can be
| automated, then suspension notifications can also be
| automated.
|
| I'm not sure I understand where the 10 million number is
| coming from. Are you suggesting that 1 spammer can create
| 10 million accounts on your system (which appears to be
| Facebook)?
|
| Regardless, no spammer has the time to get on the phone
| and personally dispute 10 million account suspensions --
| disputes which are unlikely to succeed if there is good
| evidence -- so I'm not sure how the system grinds to a
| halt.
| gabipurcaru wrote:
| > How many innocents have to get caught in the crossfire
| before we start protecting them?
|
| > Again, it's not a "request" [..] suspension
| notifications can also be automated.
|
| Can you clarify what you mean by "protecting" them? I'm
| not sure suspension notifications qualify as meaningful
| protection
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| This was specified in my original comment: "At the very
| least, companies must be legally required to present you
| in writing with the so-called violation of terms they're
| accusing you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone #
| or other immediate contact so that you can dispute the
| accusations."
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063313
|
| Except for the part where someone has to answer phone
| calls, it could be automated if the account suspension
| itself is automated.
|
| I'll also point out my later comment: "I'm not saying
| that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts
| temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a
| way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent.
| The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are
| without any recourse whatsoever."
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063399
|
| And to forestall any replies that providing information
| to suspended accounts would help the spammers, I've
| already responded to that point:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063660
|
| Temporary account suspensions that you can quickly
| reverse on appeal are annoying but could be justified to
| fight abuse, as long as they don't happen too often. On
| the other hand, indefinite account suspensions that are
| impossible to reverse, such as the case of Andrew Spinks
| of Terraria, are simply indefensible, there's no
| justification whatsoever for that.
| gabipurcaru wrote:
| > I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to
| suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that
| there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended
| if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is that
| innocent consumers are without any recourse whatsoever.
|
| This is absolutely spot on, with the caveat that you do
| need to disaggregate from accounts to people, which is
| the hard problem. Having people call a phone number is
| definitely not going to work as a way of achieving this
| disaggregation. I'm pretty sure I could create a system
| to bring that call center to a halt with fairly minimal
| cost in less than a week of coding.
|
| As an attacker, you can also hire people in call centers
| to make phone calls at scale for you.
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| > As an attacker, you can also hire people in call
| centers to make phone calls at scale for you.
|
| I think we may be talking about different things? I was
| just talking about a scaling problem of providing legal
| notifications of account suspensions and providing a
| means on getting them unsuspended. I wasn't talking about
| DoS attacks.
|
| Lots of companies have call centers, so I'm not sure what
| you're envisioning here, or what financial gain there
| would be for spammers to DoS the call center. After all,
| their accounts are already getting suspended by the
| algorithms, regardless of whether innocent consumers have
| any appeal to this, and DoSing the call center won't help
| spammers get their accounts unsuspended.
| donatj wrote:
| It would also give non-spammers a better understanding of
| why they were banned and teach them to be better humans.
| It's this lack of empathy that's leading to more and more
| anger online.
| Macha wrote:
| When someone is in court on charges of child abuse, maybe
| we don't want them to know in case they (After serving
| their sentence) or their friends go for reprisals. Maybe
| the next child abuser might know their likely avenue of
| getting caught. Yet still we tell them the charges and
| evidence and give them a chance to defend themselves.
| Often in my country, given the damage such allegations
| could cause to both the victim and alleged (but not yet
| proven) perpetrator, we don't even reveal the identities
| of culprits until there's a guilty verdict.
|
| If we can extend that courtesy to people accused of child
| abuse, surely we should extend it to people accused of
| internet spam?
| AlfeG wrote:
| I imagine if that happen in real courts. And You got jail
| without any info on why on how to evade - or You will
| behave properly on not go in jail
| _flux wrote:
| Well it would still be better, because it's at least
| documented what kind of activity will lead into that.
| kalleboo wrote:
| You don't have to tell them how you detected them but you
| can tell them what they did wrong. A lot of times when
| these cases come up there is nothing in the reason you
| got banned that would help you avoid the ban. It's purely
| to avoid any kind of accountability (if they say you got
| banned for a reason that is plainly not true because
| their algorithms suck)
| jlmb wrote:
| But surely it's possible to use methods other than what
| currently seems to be the first and only solution: "your
| account has been banned, bye".
|
| For example, if an automated system thinks an account is
| sending spam, enforcing a (very low) outgoing email rate
| limit would be a much more reasonable first step.
| khawkins wrote:
| I think this is a convenient narrative for an abusive pattern
| of behavior by Google. The company is infamous for having
| non-existent customer service. It's not a matter of their AI
| having too many false positives, it's that when there is a
| false positive you have literally no recourse even if you're
| a well known business partner.
|
| Are we really going to believe that Google, one of the
| highest grossing companies in the world, doesn't have the
| money to provide even basic level customer service? If it
| were really a matter of not being able to afford it,
| certainly they could offer it for a fee. No, they're
| stubbornly refusing to address the issues, relying on this
| lie, and using their market dominance to avoid having to
| answer for it.
| criley2 wrote:
| Technically they do offer customer service if you pay them
| with their Google One product. I have phone numbers and
| human access very quickly, because I pay for it.
|
| Although obviously if they banned me, I wouldn't have
| access to my direct support line anymore.
| oauea wrote:
| > Although obviously if they banned me, I wouldn't have
| access to my direct support line anymore.
|
| Which they will do literally on a whim. Who are you going
| to call then?
| criley2 wrote:
| I reject that they ban "literally on a whim". I get that
| people do get banned, but clearly they aren't in the
| business of banning people based even on the number of
| people in this very thread with Google accounts. You
| don't have to exaggerate to make a point.
|
| (And now I'm being downvoted for pointing out the Google
| One support product. What a lovely community we've got
| here!)
| KMag wrote:
| People are talking a bit past each other here, but
| inexplicable arbitrary machine learning false positives
| are anthropomorphized as whims of the algorithm. Without
| any explanation as to why the false positive occurred,
| the effect is indistinguishable from the whims of a
| person pulling a lever behind a curtain.
| oauea wrote:
| > on a whim: because of a sudden decision
|
| How was them banning Terraria's accounts not a sudden
| decision? How about any of the other stories posted in
| this thread? They literally ban accounts on a whim,
| usually with no warnings issued.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| You're being downvoted for unintentionally agreeing with
| the main point: Even if you are paying for support, you
| have no recourse if they decide to arbitrarily lock your
| account.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > I reject that they ban "literally on a whim".
|
| They reject based on complex statistical models of
| behavior with so many variables that no individual
| understands how the whole thing fits together.
|
| And as a developer, you're constantly doing all sorts of
| unusual things that might be perfectly reasonable but
| still trigger a warning.
|
| And then - no recourse. I'm backed up pretty recently
| with Google but what about this week's email? What about
| all the people who have that address?
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I think you're being downvoted because you're rejecting
| reality, ie. The literal topic being talked about that
| literally happened to a person.
| Chazprime wrote:
| Literal topic?
| a_passable_dev wrote:
| Ghost busters
| Person5478 wrote:
| I know HN doesn't like these types of comments, but I
| genuinely laughed.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators"
| who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns
| over their mental health.
|
| Hire them directly instead of via labor farms, pay them an
| actual living wage, give them full health benefits, _and hire
| enough of them to prevent overload_.
| _pmf_ wrote:
| > the huge amount of spam and abuse that such systems
| correctly identify and remove.
|
| Maybe allowing single service providers to capture several
| billions of users is the problem here.
| jeegsy wrote:
| Ding Ding Ding!!!
| syshum wrote:
| So what is the proper Blackstone's ratio for you in these
| situation?
|
| Is 1000 innocents ok to punish as long as 1 spam message is
| stopped?
| hertzrat wrote:
| I think we're in a post consumer lawsuit era. Almost every
| terms of service on earth requires arbitration, or else
| absolves the vendor of any liability whatsoever
| gowld wrote:
| Arbitration isn't so bad. It still costs the company every
| time they have to deal with a case. Mass/automated
| arbitration claims can turn the tables, and lawsuits can be
| filled to challenge the neutrality of arbitrators.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| >It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer
| "bill of rights"...
|
| Maybe? But I worry that politicians will use that as a tool.
| Look what DeSantis is trying down here in Florida. He wants to
| fine "Big Tech" for banning politicians during an election.
| Personally, I'm tired of the lies and provocations and hate
| speech of some politicians and I don't think any company should
| be compelled to share those messages.
| Yizahi wrote:
| So those evil politicians will do what? Force corporations to
| indiscriminately ban arbitrary people without possibility of
| appeal? Oh, wait a minute...
| jsmith45 wrote:
| The EU recently proposed The Digital Services Act, which is a
| DCMA like legislation (with both copyright infringement and
| other illegal content like CP as targets).
|
| Part of that draft law pretty clearly states that companies
| must have a proper appeal process for banned accounts. This
| would apply to "decisions taken by the online platform on the
| ground that the information provided by the recipients is
| illegal content or incompatible with its terms and conditions",
| which in practice covers basically all bans except for Age
| restriction or non-payment based bans.
|
| They must provide details of what part of the Terms of Service
| they claim you violated: "where the decision is based on the
| alleged incompatibility of the information with the terms and
| conditions of the provider, a reference to the contractual
| ground relied on and explanations as to why the information is
| considered to be incompatible with that ground".
|
| If the internal appeals process fails, the consumer can take
| the company to online binding arbitration (with the consumer's
| choice of accredited arbitrators certified by the member
| state). The company always pays its own costs in the process,
| and must reimburse the user's costs if the company loses.
| smartties wrote:
| > which in practice covers basically all bans except for Age
| restriction or non-payment based bans.
|
| Google avoid this EU restriction by suspending accounts/app
| indefinitely instead of banning them.
|
| You can see a Google employee explaining this here : https://
| github.com/moneytoo/Player/issues/37#issuecomment-76...
| izacus wrote:
| Claiming that "an indefinite suspension" is just a type of
| temporary suspension and different from a ban will have you
| laughed out of any actual court.
| prepend wrote:
| You know it's funny that lots of the basic functions of
| business with consumers (eg, ability to return items) were set
| and codified in the US as the Uniform Commercial Code [0] that
| was established in 1952. Before then it was wild and variable.
|
| What's really interesting is that it seems like of hacker-like
| in how it was implemented. It was published as a guide and then
| states passed laws to implement.
|
| Reminds me of a de facto standard that is then implemented by
| vendors.
|
| I suppose we could start up some form of Uniform Consumer
| Commercial Code (UC3) that set up practices that are good that
| could then be passed by states.
|
| I shudder to think through all the arguments about how it would
| specify some "don't be evil on social cause X" that it almost
| smarts my conspiracy brain that the "corporations" started this
| trend to bikeshed/scissor statement society so they can't make
| meaningful economic and commercial policy.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code
| AnHonestComment wrote:
| The original reason for free speech was to allow people of
| different creeds to work together against government.
|
| The Bill of Rights is establishing as a baseline the policies
| that were found to reduce tribal conflicts in the European
| empires -- having a strong central identity as a state (eg
| "American Destiny"), but allowing individual tribes under the
| state a great deal of freedom in religious practices. As a
| secondary purpose, it tamped down the worst state abuses.
|
| The anti-religious messaging, the anti-conservative
| messaging, etc undermine this and are bringing back sectarian
| strife inside the state.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The problem with this sort of thing is that because it's
| interstate commerce, states usually do not have standing to
| regulate effectively.
|
| The Federal government struggles to implement new regulatory
| authority because of political challenges. Various groups of
| stakeholders will declare any such regulation an infringement
| on free speech (ie. "The constitution gives me the right to
| sell fake penis pills to fund my radical political agenda!"),
| biased against marginalized minority or cultural groups ("My
| marginalized constituency of blind, alcoholic yak herders
| have a religious prohibition against reading contracts"), or
| a unfair mandate restraint of trade ("The Chamber of Meme
| Commerce believes that this rule will cost 10,000,000 jobs in
| the meme industry and kill puppies."), etc.
| prepend wrote:
| This was addressed in the UCC and is pretty simple actually
| as each state implements laws to saw who has jurisdiction
| and how to handle.
|
| It also bypasses the federal government in that the code is
| established by some big council and implemented in (most)
| states.
|
| That's why when I live in Missouri and buy something from a
| vendor in New York, they still have to accept returns,
| issue refunds, provide for basic warranties, etc. and if I
| have problems I can easily get remediation in state courts.
|
| There's 50+ years of where this works ok. Not perfect and
| lots of room for improvement. But better than the current
| shitshow that exists like this article describes. If we had
| the minimum level of legal structure, it would be so
| helpful.
|
| Because of UCC, if I give away a product for free, I have
| to support it through its commercial life. So if I hand out
| knives, for free, and they explode after 20 years, I must
| still support it. Even if they come with a form that users
| have to click that says "I will not sue PrependCo if these
| free knives explode."
|
| Google's free (and even non-free) services are causing harm
| to people and aren't being supported.
| MockObject wrote:
| > Because of UCC, if I give away a product for free, I
| have to support it through its commercial life. So if I
| hand out knives, for free, and they explode after 20
| years, I must still support it. Even if they come with a
| form that users have to click that says "I will not sue
| PrependCo if these free knives explode."
|
| Why does the UCC covers free knives, but not paid Google
| services?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Because Google One, for example, is a service governed by
| a contract which details performance expectations.
| MockObject wrote:
| So the UCC is only the default, which covers
| goods/services without their own custom contracts?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| All products have a warranty of merchantability defined
| by UCC. Basically goods need to be average/expected
| quality.
|
| With services it's a little different because there is no
| average unless the contract is missing performance terms.
| If you agree to a term of performance, then that is the
| obligation.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Various groups of stakeholders will declare any such
| regulation an infringement on free speech (ie. "The
| constitution gives me the right to sell fake penis pills to
| fund my radical political agenda!")
|
| This is just an awful example. There is not a free speech
| right to pay for your own speech by committing crimes, and
| nobody claims or would claim that there is. Similarly, you
| don't see the argument made that vendors enjoy the
| constitutional right to sell fake pills. What spammers want
| to do, and what anti-spammers want to stop them from doing,
| is to advertise real pills, and yes, there are extensive
| free speech implications _there_.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| If it was sold to a resident in some state online currently
| that resident can sue in the local courts. The business is
| considered to operate in all states.
|
| The alternative is all suits under ~$75k(?) don't get heard
| because they don't meet the requirements for federal court,
| which obviously can't be right.
| ISL wrote:
| I suspect that the major tech providers are so pervasive
| that the impacts of account-locking span all party lines.
| VLM wrote:
| The Kafka solution to this will be our terms of service
| prohibit single spacing after periods and you are in violation.
| Therefore we can terminate your account at any time of our
| choosing.
|
| Alternately we could prohibit posting in any language other
| than Latin and Klingon, or using the letter e, or accessing our
| services using any unapproved operating system (and our only
| approved OS is windows 3.11 with winsock drivers).
|
| Anyway the point is now the company can ban you for any reason
| at all. Being the wrong religion, voting for the wrong
| candidate, being the wrong race, etc.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| Not just "can", but "will". And given how effectively these
| companies are using their size and power (and m-word) to
| crush the competition, it's long past time for some anti-
| trust action.
| maclured wrote:
| Its not fair when you have to get attention on twitter before
| getting issues like this resolved. Some of us don't use twitter
| for one thing
| pavon wrote:
| Agreed. We generally allow companies to refuse service for
| nearly any reason, and in most cases this is a good policy.
| However, there are exceptions to that rule. One extreme are
| utilities which as both monopolies and essential services are
| required to do business with nearly any paying customer, and
| have strict rules processes about shutting of service for lack
| of payment. Residential rentals are another example. They don't
| hold a monopoly, but are an essential service, and as such they
| can generally choose who to do business with (although not
| quite as freely as your average business), but have strict
| legal processes they have to follow regarding evictions.
|
| I think there are online business who are essential enough that
| some consumer protections are applicable. Very few reach the
| level of monopoly that utilities have in my mind, and even
| those it isn't clear to me that they are "natural" monopoly
| like utilities, and as such other antitrust approaches may be
| more beneficial.
|
| However, I think there are a number of competitive, yet
| essential services online that deserve a legal protections
| regarding service termination. Identity providers absolutely
| fall in that category IMO - it is unacceptable for example for
| Facebook to lock your account in a manner that prevents you
| from not only using their services but every other third-party
| service which you authenticate using "Logon with Facebook". I
| think email is another that rises to this level. At a minimum
| email providers should be required to forward mail for a fixed
| period of time after choosing to stop doing business with a
| customer.
| saurik wrote:
| I think there also needs to be a law that, once you have
| accepted responsibility for storing someone else's data, that
| you can't delete it "on a whim" without offering some minimum
| retention period ok your data. As an example: a storage
| facility is allowed to stop doing business with me, but they
| legally can't just destroy all my stuff on a moment's
| notice... we have laws for minimum retention periods.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| This is in part what the GDPR mandates - that companies provide
| reasoning for how an automatic process works and also that
| there is a means to dispute that (Section 4 / Article 22)
| https://www.varonis.com/blog/gdpr-requirements-list-in-plain...
| conradfr wrote:
| But then ...
| https://twitter.com/Cleroth/status/1348036873885806596
| arendtio wrote:
| > It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer
| "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
|
| It isn't the only solution to this problem. Not using their
| products is another one. However, in some sectors (e.g.
| smartphones) it is next to impossible to not use their
| products, especially because they are build on centralized
| schemes. But regulating those things is probably harder than a
| consumer rights bill. But the downside is probably, that a
| consumer rights bill would not just affect the few large
| corporations, but many smaller ones too.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _You could of course sue Google_
|
| Unless you've waived that right when you agreed to the Terms of
| Service.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > Unless you've waived that right when you agreed to the
| Terms of Service.
|
| Which would be meaningless in the EU (I think. Possibly just
| Germany) as you can't waive that right.
| greatpatton wrote:
| It's the same in France and I think most of EU as the
| highest french court ruled that forced arbitration was
| against EU law.
| vaduz wrote:
| > It's the same in France and I think most of EU as the
| highest french court ruled that forced arbitration was
| against EU law.
|
| For consumers or businesses? Not being nitpicky here: I
| am not familiar with the French ruling, so I would
| genuinely want to know - as regulations tend to differ
| (businesses, even single sole trader ones, do not enjoy
| consumer protections). Not really relevant for the
| Terraria dev as it is his personal account that is
| banned, from the sound of it - but important.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Forced arbitration is against French law. Google cannot
| force you to go to a specific company for arbitration
| (that, conveniently enough, happens to always rule in
| their favor). It has to be explicitly negotiated between
| the two parties. This also holds true for companies. It
| has to be explicitly negotatied.
| greatpatton wrote:
| As a consumer, every time the clause is not specifically
| negotiated, it is considered "abusive" and void (for
| businesses it may be different). If as a consumer you
| negotiate a contract with an arbitration clause it will
| be enforceable however if it is a generic clause in the
| terms& condition it will not.
| KMag wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that U.S. courts
| have found that suing is a right that can't be waived by
| contract. Certainly an agreement to enter arbitration can be
| introduced as evidence against you in a a lawsuit, but any
| decent lawyer should be able to prevent an arbitration
| agreement from getting your lawsuit thrown out.
| CPLX wrote:
| That's not an accurate description of current consumer
| arbitration precedent in the US.
| thgaway17 wrote:
| You are 99.5% wrong. See Federal Arbitration Act and ATT v
| Concepcion.
| nvahalik wrote:
| > It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer
| "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies
|
| I get where you're going, but I think far more costly to them
| and advantageous for us is to simply show them that they are
| unnecessary.
|
| If we can drop them so easily, they can't pull stuff like this
| anymore. It is possible to drop Google and Facebook.
|
| They do this stuff because people _need_ them and they know
| that people won't just drop them en mass.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Oh yeah, far more easy than the government taking regulatory
| action is coordinating a massive consumer choice boycott.
|
| Sometimes, it is so abundantly clear to me that this site is
| full of former teenage libertarians who grew up and still
| haven't shed all of those ideals.
| nvahalik wrote:
| If all of the latest Facebook news can get my family to
| start questioning their usage/dependency on Facebook--I
| think it's fairly possible.
|
| There have been a number of really great projects coming
| through HN and other sites recently that are aimed at
| solving some problem that people on Facebook have: photo
| sharing, event planning, etc.
|
| Discoverability is really the only problem left.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| You are on a site called hacker news. "Former teenage
| libertarian" is practically in the name.
| [deleted]
| vonwoodson wrote:
| > drop them en mass
|
| The libertarian in me wants to believe that reputation is
| enough to make business act in the interests of the consumers
| and that personal responsibility would prevent customers from
| acting in their best interests: but we all know this is not
| true.
|
| And, I know enough to know that any public policy that
| essentially says "Everything will be fine if everyone just
| does [X]" is bad policy, regardless of what 'X' is.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| > The libertarian in me wants to believe that reputation is
| enough to make business act in the interests of the
| consumers and that personal responsibility would prevent
| customers from acting in their best interests: but we all
| know this is not true.
|
| And that's also why monopolies and giant corporations can
| and will always form in the current economic system. Crony
| capitalism is not a bug, it's a feature.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > It is possible to drop Google and Facebook.
|
| Its also _possible_ to live without electricity and running
| water. This disproportionate power model doesn 't work there
| because some people implemented regulations on them. I am
| beginning to suspect we need similar laws for this.
| [deleted]
| vkou wrote:
| If you are equating a world without Facebook to a world
| without running water, you need to spend a week camping,
| where you leave your phone at home.
|
| You'll very quickly discover why they are not at all alike.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Oh if you think running water is important, try growing
| up in a desert. You will quickly realize still water is
| enough. WTF is this line of logic?
| vkou wrote:
| 1. I'm not sure you understand what running water means.
| It's not water that flows down a river, it's water that
| comes from a tap. The whole point of running water is
| that a utility delivers it to your home, regardless of
| whether or not your town is in a rain forest, or the
| middle of a desert.
|
| 2. You'll die in three days without water. You'll
| probably be healthier if you spent three days without
| Facebook.
|
| 3. I can't collect water for myself where I live. I
| suppose I _could_ walk down to the lake, and manually
| bring up a few buckets of water, but it won 't be safe
| for me to drink. I suppose I can also go buy bottled
| water, at a ~million-percent markup. There is no economic
| alternative for me to get water, other than through the
| water pipes laid to my apartment, by my water utility. I
| am a _completely_ captive customer for my utility. My
| water utility has monopoly control of special-purpose
| one-of-a-kind infrastructure that is used to deliver
| water to my apartment. _That_ is why my utility is
| regulated.
|
| 4. Unlike with my tap water, there are plenty of
| functioning alternatives to... Whatever it is that
| Facebook does for me. If Facebook shut down tomorrow, my
| life would be mildly disrupted for a week or two, and
| then would go on with little change.
|
| On the hierarchy of needs, we have air at the top,
| followed closely by water, shelter, and food, followed at
| some distance by electricity, and way down the street,
| that we can barely make out, by grabbing a pair of
| binoculars, we will see 'Facebook'.
|
| It's just not that important.
| nvahalik wrote:
| Yes, but Google and Facebook are not public utilities, nor
| should they be.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Why not? The qualification being for public utility
| should be "is this basic infrastructure humans need to
| live now?". And the answer is yes. Facebook controls most
| of the big public speaking forums and google controls so
| much and in so many spaces that it would be foolish for
| me to even try listing.
|
| I hope in america public utilities are not only
| controlled by the government. Because where I am from
| public utilities can be publicly or privately controlled.
| As long as they are all playing by the same rules many
| private companies have made lots of money providing
| public utilities.
|
| I don't see the impediment here.
| Emendo wrote:
| In reality, there is no impediment to designating Google
| as a public utility other than the elected
| representatives making it so.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| > I hope in america public utilities are not only
| controlled by the government. Because where I am from
| public utilities can be publicly or privately controlled.
| As long as they are all playing by the same rules many
| private companies have made lots of money providing
| public utilities.
|
| Water/Sewage and Trash are typically run by the
| city/county government, although it is common for the
| actual work to be handled by a contracted company.
|
| Power, natural gas, phone, and most others is almost
| always a private company.
| timidger wrote:
| No traditional utility company does what Google has
| routinely shown to do as in the original post though.
| There's still a bill to pay and expectations of
| reasonable service (I assume if I just left my tap on and
| drew as just electricity as I could I'd eventually get
| some phone calls and massive bills) that allows these
| companies to be profitable.
|
| Google isn't at the point it needs to be nationalized,
| but something needs to be done to limit the fallout that
| occurs when users are kicked off essential services with
| no recourse.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| What's stopping the next Google from doing the same?
| Providing poor justification for bans and removal from
| platforms is by no means limited to the big companies - it's
| endemic throughout tech - we just hear about Google and
| Facebook more because they're higher visibility and are
| considered more essential.
| geofft wrote:
| Antitrust regulation.
|
| Seriously, the only reason Google is unaccountable is its
| scale. Otherwise "Google but with customer support" would
| be an obvious market opportunity. And the only reason
| losing your Google account is so impactful is that it
| controls everything from access to apps on your phone to
| your email to your calendar to being able to chat with
| friends. It's theoretically possible to vote with your
| wallet against Google, but far harder than against, say,
| Chick-fil-A, which means no boycott gets further than an HN
| comment.
|
| No startup can compete with Google for those services
| because Google can _artificially_ offer them for free, and
| for very high quality, because it 's all funded by their
| advertising business. (Not to mention that a startup would
| _have_ to "do things that don't scale" and offer real
| customer support... which also costs money.)
|
| It's not a fair market at that point - you can't say Google
| is surviving because they offer the best value to
| customers, simply because the value is so disconnected from
| the service being offered. And in the other direction,
| potential customers like me who mostly avoid Google are
| still "paying" for it in that we're still seeing (and being
| tracked by) Google ads.
|
| Every incentive mechanism behind the underlying assumptions
| of a market-based economy - that companies that provide
| more value are more likely to succeed in the market - is
| completely broken when you allow trusts like Alphabet to
| exist.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Dropping Google / Facebook is not just signing up with
| another service. You could self host your own email and
| just quit Facebook entirely.
| falcolas wrote:
| > You could self host your own email
|
| You can. I might be able to (there's a lot of crap around
| spam filtering and SPF that I'd have to fight with).
|
| My mother, father, sister, cousins, nieces and nephews?
| Not a chance in hell.
| FlownScepter wrote:
| The only people who recommend self-hosting email are ones
| that haven't tried it.
|
| We have an admin who spends a good 40% of his workweek
| doing _just_ our email servers. They are a massive PITA.
| gowld wrote:
| No, also people who host themselves and enjoy the hobby
| time and don't understand how the general public lives.
| FlownScepter wrote:
| I'm one of those people, generally, but even I'm not
| signing up to host an email server. Screw that.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I have self-hosted E-mail for myself and my family for
| years, probably close to a decade now--I lost count. It's
| a learning curve at first but once it's dialed in and
| working, there's really nothing to touch. Occasionally,
| like once every two years or so, I find my spam filter
| process crashed and failed to relaunch or something,
| causing delivery delays.
| gorbachev wrote:
| "...but once it's dialed in and working, there's really
| nothing to touch"
|
| ...until your upstream changes something.
| falcolas wrote:
| Or an opaque third party (i.e. a spam list) puts you on
| their lists.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| OK, you can lead your "resistance" to big tech your way.
|
| Meanwhile, I'll be pushing my representative for
| regulatory action.
| newswasboring wrote:
| That is a very, very limited scope for Google/Facebook.
| Almost to the point of me suspecting you are strawmanning
| it. In fact, google/facebook is so endemic to our
| infrastructure that you can literally delete you google
| account. Get it scrubbed from the internet, they will
| still track you. Identify you. And show you ads. If you
| try to block their services, some pages stop functioning.
| It is on the verge of impossible to escape them
| mrmattyboy wrote:
| The link is actually a reply to his first message... The start of
| his thread is:
| https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661841220730882
|
| The message reads:
|
| My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on
| @GooglePlay . I had just bought LOTR 4K and can't finish it. My
| @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube
| channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address
| of over 15 years.
| bnewton149 wrote:
| I'm surprised an algorithm would be allowed to block someone who
| spends so much money on Google apps and movies
| djrogers wrote:
| Personal Anecdote Time(tm).
|
| I have (had?) a Google Voice number that I started using for work
| stuff about a dozen years ago. One day 8-9 years ago, it just
| disappeared from my google account. Like gone.
|
| I go to google voice settings, and it's telling me to sign up for
| google voice. Nothing I do can get this back - my voice number is
| now just anchorless, floating in the digital sea.
|
| The crazy thing is, it still forwards to my cell number to this
| day. I can't change most settings for it, so I stopped handing
| that number out, but every once in a while I'll get an email
| notification of a new voicemail or text message to that number...
| spicyramen wrote:
| Hey Google here is a feature: account reputation, anyone doing
| business with you, has that flag enabled and human reviewers will
| be supporting them
| DesiLurker wrote:
| and pretty soon google is charging 'protection money' to all
| the victims of a hack.
| abrookewood wrote:
| 100% agree. They just keep shooting themselves in the foot.
| Unbelievable.
| deadmutex wrote:
| > anyone doing business with you
|
| If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that
| is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or
| something like that?
|
| Disclaimer: Work at Google (far from this space); opinions are
| my own.
| PixyMisa wrote:
| It's SUPPOSED TO BE pay-to-play. Google is a business. That's
| how businesses work. That's the entire point.
| lima wrote:
| Exactly. I pay for internet, water and power - I happily
| pay for my Google account if that means I'm treated as a
| customer.
|
| In fact, you _can_ pay for your Google account with Google
| One, and I do, but it may or may not stop The Machine from
| accidentally banning my account.
| sundvor wrote:
| Good point! I also subscribe to Google One; does that in
| any kind of fashion lower the chances of being hit by an
| auto ban?
| lima wrote:
| I would hope so, it would certainly be a "probably legit"
| signal. I'm annoyed I have to consider the possibility at
| all.
| lou1306 wrote:
| It is unfair from a consumer standpoint, but at least it
| would avoid Google's self-dug grave from getting deeper.
|
| From a B2B standpoint, it's just the name of the game. If a
| partner business is a strategic asset, you fast-track them.
| Imagine an advertising firm treating a multi-national
| corporation at the same (crappy) level as a small, family-
| owned company. Or, imagine Microsoft treating the US
| government and an ordinary Windows user alike. That's
| bonkers, and yet it's an apt description of how Google does
| business right now.
| tjalfi wrote:
| > If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying
| that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or
| something like that?
|
| You can't please everyone; here is how I would frame it.
|
| Stadia developers and business partners receive Enterprise
| Support.
|
| It's absurd that they aren't already doing something like
| this.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| This is the exact opposite of what Google/Apple want to do. Why
| pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thing, and
| a Google-human will listen only of the victim-human will yell
| loud enough. This is their tiering system.
|
| On the other side though, Google cannot have 1 FTE per 1000
| 'clients' (paying-humans and/or product-humans). As a 'father'
| here wrote, you stay or you go. Or at least keep the personal
| stuff out ('15years of gmail' - WHY???) and leave the app-stuff
| within Google (or Apple for that matter).
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the
| thing
|
| This is why I think Google/Twitter/FB were not that vocal
| about the section 230 business. Honestly if they got brought
| through it would be expensive for them but they have the
| money and tech potential to automate any problems that arise
| from it which would just extends their moat from any
| potential competitors even more.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, this has been one criticism of EU's Article 22...
| agilob wrote:
| It's like page rank but even worse?
| fnord123 wrote:
| I can see the Black Mirror episode already...
|
| "In the case of Johnson v Esposito where the defendant is
| claimed to have sent an email to the plaintiff wherein this
| created a detrimental page rank effect due to defendant's low
| score..."
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| Google already kind of practices this feature, it's just that
| the "reputation" part is external:
|
| _Is the public reputation of the owner of this account high
| enough that the ban will make the news?_
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Unfortunately for Google's products- sorry, users, the
| machines doing the bans don't give a damn for reputation in
| the eyes of humans.
| peterkelly wrote:
| China has this for its citizens already
| PixyMisa wrote:
| China has rather the reverse.
| jeofken wrote:
| Noting the reputation of your clients is powerful and ethical
| - the Chinese government is a monopolistic violent
| organisation, which makes its power evil
| onion2k wrote:
| The implication here is that the fix for this problem is to
| make sure it doesn't happen to anyone who does business with
| Google, as if other people aren't important enough to concern
| yourself about. That is 1000% the wrong approach, and exactly
| the sort of thinking that gets tech businesses in to this sort
| of mess.
|
| The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen
| incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved
| quickly and easily if it ever does.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The correct approach is to make sure it doesn 't happen
| incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved
| quickly and easily if it ever does._
|
| ...and if you can't make it work at a given scale, _don 't do
| your business at this scale until you can_. But that would be
| leaving money on the table now, wouldn't it? So, with no
| outside pressure, the companies at the top are the ones who
| don't care about making things work right.
| birdsbirdsbirds wrote:
| Two wrongs sometimes make a right. So 10 wrongs make 5
| rights?
|
| There is no more than 100% wrong. Saying it is 1000% wrong
| implies that you are arguing emotionally, not rationally.
|
| Rationally, it doesn't matter how google reacts to their non-
| customers. There is no obligation to treat them well. The
| correct approach for non-customers is to either become a
| customer or to switch to another provider.
|
| If somebody is wrong it is the non-customers who could fix
| the situation. Their unwillingness to change email providers
| is what enables google to keep on providing that bad service.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Saying it is 1000% wrong implies that you are arguing
| emotionally, not rationally._
|
| It means I was employing the common rhetorical device of
| exaggeration.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I think "not treating business partners like trash" is the
| absolute base minimum. If they can't get that right, what
| hope do customers have? Feels like that needs to be solved
| _first_ -- particularly if it 's an issue of scale -- then
| the customer issue dealt with afterwards, if it remains an
| issue.
| danso wrote:
| Bad time for an automated response:
| https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1358666067325968385
| tcfunk wrote:
| Eye-opener for me that I _really_ need to set up a fallback email
| address
| Chazprime wrote:
| We really need regulation for the large tech monopolies like
| Google.
|
| There's no recourse if you're suddenly locked out of your account
| short of making the news or attracting attention on social media.
| edejong wrote:
| From which legislation? The faltering nation-states?
| peeters wrote:
| Ah Google, where the first rule is "don't be evil", and the first
| axiom is "machines cannot be evil".
| Jkvngt wrote:
| OK OK OK, hear me out. How do we know this individual didn't use
| the N word?
| benlivengood wrote:
| There are some pretty straightforward solutions for this;
|
| 1. Don't use personal gmail accounts for your business.
|
| 2. Don't mix different business units on the same account. (Your
| 5-year old adsense page you forgot about probably isn't compliant
| anymore).
|
| 3. If your personal account gets banned, hire someone whose job
| it is to manage your business google accounts and don't touch
| them.
| Strom wrote:
| > _1. Don 't use personal gmail accounts for your business._
|
| A good practice but won't help with this issue. Google has a
| history of banning business (admin/paying) accounts when it
| thinks that some user (under that business domain) has an
| unrelated personal account that was banned.
|
| There have been stories here on HN describing how a small
| startup lost its Google Play account because one of their
| employees had their personal account banned for a terms of
| service violation. Then Google viewed that same person having
| an user account underneath the business account as ban evasion.
| In a puzzling move Google then proceeded to close the whole
| business account, so lots of collateral damage.
|
| It's pretty crazy stuff.
| g_p wrote:
| EU regulation 2019/1150 would seem to be the first real attempt
| I'm aware of at addressing this issue.
|
| Article 4 covers suspension and termination, with intermediary
| platforms (i.e. Google, Facebook et al) "the opportunity to
| clarify the facts and circumstances in the framework of the
| internal complaint-handling process referred to in Article 11".
|
| It also introduces a requirement to provide "a reference to the
| specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third
| party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of
| online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the
| applicable grounds for that decision".
|
| It seems these automated processes fall foul of several hurdles
| in Article 4.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| As a patriotic redblooded 'murican it really upsets me that I
| have to rely on the EU to police big-tech and fight for civil
| liberties.
| williamonill wrote:
| Simple rule: Do not use Google services for business-critical
| areas. Expect that you can lose access to Gmail, Google
| Workspace, Google One at any time without doing anything wrong.
| richliss wrote:
| I know everyone loves to give Microsoft a kicking but they have
| amazing customer support compared to Google. I've known people
| buy dodgy keys from eBay that haven't worked and have gone
| through MS support and had the key activated.
|
| A hotmail account may not be cool anymore but at least you're
| likely to be able to talk to someone if you have a problem.
| jug wrote:
| This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then
| I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services
| had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If
| they had launched it this year I would never have got one because
| chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really
| the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And
| it's not that hard to replace, but just a bother to inform some
| people and update account details.
| dankboys wrote:
| This is why I use one of the new, privacy-focused email
| providers instead. It feels like the sweet spot between
| starting my own server (headache, dropped messages) and being
| one of a billion Gmail/Outlook users (no-one cares if I don't
| get email)
| novok wrote:
| The best thing is using your own domain, then you can change
| your providers whenever you need to.
| wraptile wrote:
| > Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my
| life to Google
|
| For me it's google photos. While there are lot of great gmail
| alternatives these days there's still nothing like google
| photos unfortunately, is there?
| dannyw wrote:
| iCloud.
| mastazi wrote:
| I have my own Nextcloud instance, and the iOS Nextcloud app
| automatically saves new pics from my phone to the server. But
| that means that you have to manage your own server, so it's
| not everyone's cup of tea.[1]
|
| If you are looking for a managed solution, I suggest one of
| those that you pay for (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) since
| usually, paid services have at least some form of customer
| service and something like OP's story is less likely to
| happen.
|
| [1] Also, the cloud provider where I rent the server might
| decide to block my account for whatever reason. To minimise
| the risk, I'm planning to store daily server backups on a
| different cloud provider.
| msh wrote:
| Unfortunatly icloud does not work well unless you are all
| in on their ecosystem.
|
| I dont have a mac at the moment but have a iphone. Their
| windows application is very bad, unreliable sync and their
| web interface is missing a lot of functionality. No linux
| integration at all, but that is expected.
|
| Onedrive works well for file sync but almost have no photo
| library + editing functionality.
| 2malaq wrote:
| Yes, the good old _Don 't Be Evil_ days. I've asked so many
| people if they can remember Google's old slogan. Nobody does.
| romwell wrote:
| Their new slogan is hilarious. It's not even one slogan, it's
| three:
|
| * Respect the user
|
| * Respect the opportunity
|
| * Respect each other
|
| The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says
| "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with
| millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing
| half the features.
|
| The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a
| slogan. Isn't it the baseline expectation? It's somewhere on
| the level of "Don't steal your colleague's belongings" as far
| as slogans go.
|
| But it's the second one that is absolutely the best, and by
| that, I mean the worst. Orwell would've had a lot to say
| about it. The thing is, it has absolutely no meaning in the
| English language. What's next? Say hi to agility? Don't
| offend capital gains? Console excellence?
|
| Of course, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing has a
| mafia vibe, as Google's slogans and culture are drifting
| towards loyalty rather than standing up for what's right.
|
| --------
|
| If you want to have more fun, look at Google's Community
| Guidelines[1]
|
| Compare to The Mafia Code:
|
| * Be loyal to members of the organization. Do not interfere
| with each other's interest. Do not be an informer.
|
| --[Google: Treat our data with care. Don't disseminate NTK
| information.]
|
| * Be rational. Be a member of the team. Don't engage in
| battle if you can't win.
|
| --[Google: follow Three Values, in particular: Respect the
| opportunity.]
|
| * Be a man of honor. Respect womanhood and your elders. Don't
| rock the boat.
|
| --[Google: Do your part to keep Google a safe, productive,
| and inclusive environment for everyone.]
|
| * Be a stand-up guy. Keep your eyes and ears open and your
| mouth shut.
|
| --[Google: Discussions that make other Googlers feel like
| they don't belong have no place here.]
|
| * Have class. Be independent. Know your way around the world.
|
| --[Google: You are responsible for your words and your
| reach.]
|
| [1]https://about.google/community-guidelines/
| dbuder wrote:
| Respect the opportunity is double speak for 'we only bother
| if we can get to a position where we can use monopoly
| pricing and tactics'. It goes against 'respect the user'.
| Orwell is the right thing to invoke, Google thinks they are
| our big brother.
| petters wrote:
| A good slogan should have an inverse that is also a
| plausible slogan. E.g. "move fast and break things."
|
| Neither Google's new nor its old slogans are good according
| to this criterion.
| romwell wrote:
| > A good slogan should have an inverse that is also a
| plausible slogan.
|
| Citation needed. This seems like an arbitrary criterion
| to me.
|
| "Do not be evil" was a good slogan.
| rvba wrote:
| This is hilarious. So obvious that it was written by a non
| programmer. Since the "respect the" part repeats 3 times.
|
| Also no programmer had anything to say how bad it is. In a
| software company...
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| I can't seem to find many of your examples in the community
| guidelines
| romwell wrote:
| Well, the Mafia code isn't in the community guidelines
| yet.
|
| The rest is literally copy-pasted, Ctrl+F is your friend.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Respect the opportunity_
|
| Honestly, this reads like a Rule of Acquisition. I think
| Google may be run by Ferengi at this point.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| It's supposedly about respecting the opportunity Googlers
| have to work at a big company with resources to change
| the industry. Like, I get it, but tone deaf...
| romwell wrote:
| Not quite. It's about respecting the opportunity of
| _Google_ to _make money_.
|
| Nobody cares about "changing the industry" if it doesn't
| "move the needle". And in the end, the needle is neither
| the number of users, nor the positive impact of the
| project.
| Person5478 wrote:
| I would legit watch a Star Trek franchise that had the
| Ferengi running Big Tech.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I don't know, that clarifies a lot to me.
|
| From the perspective of an AI moderation system, all you
| have to do to be perfectly internally consistent is to ban
| all accounts that raise any flags.
|
| Friend Computer sees no Conflict if one is no longer a
| Citizen, because being in Conflict with the Computer is
| Treason.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Compare to The Mafia Code:
|
| Including that doesn't help your argument much. And apart
| from "do not be an informer" and "don't rock the boat" the
| mafia code is pretty much unarguably good advice. Employees
| should be following it.
|
| We'd all be better off if everyone was rational,
| honourable, independent and classy.
| romwell wrote:
| I thought my point was obvious, but no, it's HN and I
| have to spell out everything explicitly.
|
| The Mafia Code isn't bad because it has bad stuff.
|
| The Mafia Code is bad _because it doesn 't prohibit awful
| stuff_.
|
| The Mafia Code says nothing about _being not evil_ , or,
| for that matter, not killing your enemies, not extorting
| non-mafia people, and so on.
|
| It's all about being loyal to, and protecting the
| interests of the Family.
|
| Which is what Google aims to be - one big family, which
| will take care of all your needs, as long as you follow
| the code.
| roenxi wrote:
| The majority of the code is talking about personal values
| (working backwards up the list, I'm counting
| independence, class, worldly knowledge, being a stand-up
| guy, being observational, honourable, amenable,
| strategic, rational). The parts that deal with being part
| of a group are not that unusual either - everyone is part
| of a group and that isn't a problem. Employers all want
| to be a little like a family.
|
| If you want to argue that Google is promoting these
| values amongst it's employees that is fine; but that is a
| great idea on Google's part. It isn't strengthening your
| argument.
| amelius wrote:
| > The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says
| "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with
| millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing
| half the features.
|
| But most of all, the user is still the product.
|
| Unless by user they mean "the advertiser".
| An0mammall wrote:
| TIL the Mafia has a pretty decent, humane code of conduct.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Hypothesis: the internal operations of any sufficiently
| large organized crime group become indistinguishable from
| those of a corporation.
| tazjin wrote:
| I suspect that the primary difference is that "being
| fired" has a more literal meaning in the Mafia.
| eternalban wrote:
| The Mafia /g has teams that all do the same thing. Google
| has teams doing different things: here, in one corner, a
| team makes something benign or maybe even positive, over
| there, other "googlers" are doing suspect things, like
| putting together the [AI] surveillance infrastructure.
| They are all "googlers" but only some used to have TSCs.
| So "respect each other".
|
| Now as far as "the user", well the joke is apparently on
| GP, as everybody and their dog knows that 'on the
| internet, if the product is free, you are the product and
| not the user!'. Even dogs on internet know this, but
| alas, HN has forgotten. So, "respect the user" means
| respect the folks who are paying us to track everybody
| and their dog on the internet.
|
| Respect "the opportunity". Translation: This is a "Golden
| Time' for the few to lord it over the many! So the
| respect the user, and respect each other, and the rest
| should be grateful for having 'the permission' to use our
| platform.
|
| Hope this helps.
| rapnie wrote:
| The OR ELSE part or 'moderation procedures' probably
| didn't need to be written down.
| romwell wrote:
| > TIL the Mafia has a pretty decent, humane code of
| conduct.
|
| Towards _other Mafia people_.
|
| Which is a key point. People who aren't in the Family
| have different opinions of people on the other side of
| the tommy gun barrel and its humane usage.
| amelius wrote:
| Don't Be Evil is so stupid. It's like Disneyworld having the
| slogan "we won't kill your kids".
| romwell wrote:
| I disagree. "Evil" is a subtle point.
|
| For example, Google got a lot of flack for literally
| tracking its users' every move whether or not they consent
| to do so[1].
|
| Is it "respectful"? Is that "the right thing"? You can
| justify everything by the value that Google provides.
|
| But it's, you know... kind of _evil_.
|
| Sadly, this not something one could refer to anymore in a
| meeting discussing this issue.
|
| [1]https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0
| ecb
| daemin wrote:
| Except when a theme park ride malfunctions, maims and kills
| most of a family in a gruesome fashion. Of course then you
| cannot sue because you've agreed/signed an arbitration
| clause in the terms of service.
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| It was a funny cute thing when they came up with it cause
| they were a landmark company built on the web, breaking new
| grounds in terms of how businesses will be run in the
| future, sticking it to the establishment, etc etc etc
|
| Now they are the establishment. Their power and influence
| is on par with the US government, so it's an expectation
| that they should actually not be evil. But they fail at
| that in the most basic ways and they're not held
| accountable for it because "they're a private company, they
| can do what they want!"
| sbarre wrote:
| As someone in a similar spot with a GMail account I've been
| using since they were invite-only, I've started using Google
| Takeout to back up an archive of all my data from Google's
| services a few times a year.
|
| It's not perfect, and I'm thinking more and more about moving
| to a paid service, but this at least gives me some peace of
| mind that if one day I run afoul of Google's AI bouncers, I
| won't lose a decade of info overnight.
| echelon wrote:
| What's the best way to back up your data? Google Takeout? Is
| that easily ingestible into other email programs?
| bussierem wrote:
| As someone who recently did this, you can link a Fastmail
| account to your existing Gmail account, and it will load in
| any email data you have into Fastmail. I think from there you
| can delete your google account provided you have Fastmail all
| setup properly. It took maybe 2 minutes and was part of the
| guided setup Fastmail did for me.
| utucuro wrote:
| If you intend to keep using Google products, then more or
| less yeah, periodically. A better way is to start using
| Fastmail (for example) and have them import everything. Then
| stop using gmail.
| ratww wrote:
| I've used this project, but it's been a while:
| https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup . It's a CLI app,
| though, so it's maybe not the best solution for non-technical
| end-users.
|
| Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give
| them the password and they'll do it for you. Not the best
| solution in terms of security but might be ok if you're
| getting rid of your account anyway.
| sneak wrote:
| It's better to use Takeout than IMAP export if you're one of
| the people who, for whatever reason, have Google rewriting
| URLs in your IMAP messages (having Advanced Protection
| enabled is one such trigger, I learned).
|
| It gives you all of your mail in mbox format, which is a
| common format.
| Schnockumz wrote:
| Google was never nice.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460094
| dkersten wrote:
| I moved away from google a few years ago after putting it off
| for years because it sounded like effort. It turned out to be
| rather straightforward.
|
| I still have my google accounts, I just don't use them (except
| YouTube unfortunately). My gmail still forwards to my new
| address, but I mostly just get emails where people got their
| own addresses wrong nowadays.
|
| What I did was: I registered a domain name from a company that
| i don't use for anything else besides domain names
| (incidentally a local registrar who I trust and can call on the
| phone). I then set up a new email address (I use fastmail)
| using that domain name. Then I forwarded all my old emails to
| this new address.
|
| If someone emailed my old address, I would always reply from my
| new one, which slowly updated peoples address books. If I got
| newsletters, I would either unsubscribe and resubscribe from my
| new one or just unsubscribe. I did that very slowly and it took
| a year or so before I stopped getting any forwarded, but
| there's no rush. Don't think "oh I have to update everything at
| once". Similarly, I updated services that I still use that used
| the old email to log in on a case by case basis as I used them.
|
| You can ditch google and it's not as hard as it sounds!
| disqard wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your "phased transition" strategy.
|
| Things aren't all-or-nothing, and taking this sort of
| approach can definitely help with making such a non-trivial
| change.
| martinko wrote:
| I've been making the switch (slowly) over the past year. Had a
| gmail from the early days, when it was invite only. Now moving
| to a combo of protonmail + custom domain, and I couldn't be
| happier.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I started switching to ProtonMail for this exact reason. It's
| not that I'm doing anything that would draw a purposeful or
| legitimate ban, but they're so damn capricious that I fear
| getting my account locked because of a bug and not being able
| to undo it.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Next don't-be-evil step: Having a Protonmail account proves
| that you have something to hide! Ban!
| killtimeatwork wrote:
| I switched to a combination of ProtonMail AND using a private
| domain in my email address AND regularly syncing entire
| mailbox with my desktop client (Thunderbird). This way, if
| ProtonMail gives me grief, I just set up a new email account
| with a different provider, point domain entries to it, import
| my mailbox in there, and can continue as if nothing happened.
| perl4ever wrote:
| After thinking about it a bit, I don't see things that way.
| Gmail is _not_ the problem as far as I 'm concerned. Nor
| Chrome, etc. The problem from my pov is that the only
| alternative to Apple phones are Androids, and Android is biased
| towards the whole Google ecosystem. That's where the
| monopolistic feeling comes from for me, and if I was in charge
| of antitrust efforts, Android is what I would want to force
| them to spin off. Not sure with or without Google Maps, because
| that's the other thing that I really need and don't feel like
| there is a substitute.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Start the process of getting out right now.
|
| Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control.
| Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the
| customer - not the product.
|
| I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1],
| who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since
| 1995.
|
| [1] http://www.iki.fi/
| CuriousNinja wrote:
| Any thoughts on getting your own domain and then still using
| gmail for receive email on that domain?
| cutemonster wrote:
| Combined with regular backups (maybe to an offline client,
| using IMAP?), sounds like a good idea to me.
|
| Actually, I've been thinking about doing the same thing.
|
| But i don't know much about emails.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| I pay Apple for my email address, although I'd prefer to run
| email off my own domain.
| martin_a wrote:
| Why don't you just do it? It will cost you like one or two
| coffee a month, but the feeling of security (as in "they
| won't close my account for nothing") is worth a lot more.
| gnud wrote:
| I've had an email on a personal domain for years.
|
| But I still use my old gmail for one thing: Point of contact
| for the my domain registrar. Do you have any suggestions for
| how I can solve this?
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| In my case, I use Fastmail to provide my email.
|
| With it, I have email from multiple domains doing what I
| want. I also have a <username>@fastmail.fm which has only
| been provided to one person: my domain registrar.
|
| If you pay someone to handle your email this is a good
| approach, IMO.
| stonesweep wrote:
| Two domains registered at two different places, then cross-
| connect them at the registrars. To keep it fully
| distributed, you'll want to host one domain at one provider
| and the other one at a second one. (I do this - it's ~$10
| USD/mo for both providers email hosting and ~$10/year to
| register each email domain, usually big discounts if you
| purchase for many years at once)
|
| A second hosted email domain has an additional benefit - it
| allows you to also control your recovery (secondary) email,
| such as you'd add to your banking/financial website, etc.
| and not have any of your email options where they can be
| taken away like this post. It's trivial to have one of the
| email hosted providers do an IMAP pull from your GMail
| account, so you can still keep it around just manage it as
| an external account (such as for your Android login needs).
| eternalban wrote:
| That fi TLD and "1995" jolted a name out of the old memory
| unit: anon @penet.fi.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are
| the customer
|
| Google now sells domains, as well as email through GSuite.
|
| I use them a lot on new projects, because I find them so
| insanely convenient, but I can't help shake the feeling that
| now I'm both the product _and_ a paying customer.
|
| So I'd probably nuance your words with: "select a provider
| whose livelihood depends on your custom".
| tobijkl wrote:
| Can you access the DNS records of the domain you bought if
| your Google Account is ever locked?
| zymhan wrote:
| Not OP, but I can, since I bought the domain elsewhere
| and just point MX records at Google.
|
| If you buy a domain through Google, you should still be
| able to transfer it to another registrar.
| nottorp wrote:
| If you want to get your own domain to take control of your
| identity, do NOT under any circumstances register it
| through a hosting package. Ideally keep it separate from
| everything, including your email provider.
|
| And do NOT register it through a provider whose only
| support is Machine Learning!(tm).
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Or better yet, get the domain elsewhere. (Not GoDaddy
| either.)
|
| You can the use whatever service you want. G Suite,
| Exchange Online, roll your own, ...
| justinclift wrote:
| If recommendations are useful here, both EasyDNS
| (easydns.com) and Hover (hover.com) seem ok.
|
| I've used both over the years, though the EasyDNS UI is a
| bit harder to work with. They seem more technically
| competent than Hover though, who are decent but not
| fantastic. ;)
| laurent92 wrote:
| OVH's UI is awesome for the domain settings compared to
| all the providers I've seen (1and1, GoDaddy, Aws,
| DigitalOcean). Even at DO what has a fantastic UI, the
| settings of a domain are complicated.
| throwanem wrote:
| I can happily second the Fastmail recommendation. I self-
| hosted mail for 17 years and there's nothing I want that they
| don't do.
| krageon wrote:
| If you get your own domain, get one on a well-known TLD (e.g.
| .com, .org or your own country code). If you get a gTLD
| that's not well-known, there are some endpoints that will
| block you because your email is "not valid".
| blntechie wrote:
| Is .dev or .io considered a well-known gTLD by now? I'm in
| process of setting up email for my .dev domain.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Avoid .io; it's not reliable and raises ethical
| questions:
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20171113150544/https://ge
| tstream...
|
| [1] https://plan.io/blog/moving-from-planio-to-planiocom/
|
| [2] http://www.thedarksideof.io
| darkwater wrote:
| > [2] http://www.thedarksideof.io
|
| Wow, didn't know this story. Imperialism at its finest
| from the Anglo-saxon world (well, actually started by the
| French with slavery but that was >200 years ago, I found
| way worse the decisions took 50 years ago).
| martinsuchan wrote:
| Do not use .dev, some companies are using .dev for
| internal dev hosts and might be blocking on DNS level all
| external dev addresses.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| The sysadmins at these companies must be laid off right
| now. Same with Windows admins using .local for their AD
| domain name, now you shot yourself in the foot never
| being able to sign some services with globally trusted
| certificates.
| Macha wrote:
| What? Many of these domains date back to when there were
| like 10 gTLDs and adding a new one was a rare event.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| This doesn't mean you've ever been able to get signed
| certificates for nonexistent TLDs. If a TLD were to stop
| existing i would excuse the administrators who set up
| their systems under that domain, but if you're setting
| anything up that isn't under an available TLD you're
| doing it wrong.
| kps wrote:
| RFC2606 dates to 1999, so they've had a little time to
| migrate. tl;dr: .test .example .invalid .localhost
| pvinis wrote:
| I have a .is and .co that I hope are considered well-
| known .
| rjmunro wrote:
| Only if you are Icelandic or Colombian (respectively).
| input_sh wrote:
| .io isn't a gTLD at all, it's a ccTLD belonging to
| British Indian Ocean Territory (which I find to be
| bullshit, since those islands have no permanent
| inhabitants).
|
| That said, there are ccTLDs which behave more like gTLDs
| (like .io, .me, .fm, .gg, .cd) and are treated as such
| across much of what you do online, but whether that'll
| impact your email delivery depends on who you communicate
| with and how they treat spam.
| vaduz wrote:
| > .io isn't a gTLD at all, it's a ccTLD belonging to
| British Indian Ocean Territory (which I find to be
| bullshit, since those islands have no permanent
| inhabitants).
|
| That's not strictly true - British Indian Ocean Territory
| has _permanent_ inhabitants, just not any _native_ ones
| (never had had them, really - it was uninhabited until
| 1793). US military Diego Garcia base is there...
|
| It's bullshit for other reasons, and expulsion of
| Chagossians to build the base is a tragedy - but not due
| it being empty territory (it's not).
| andylynch wrote:
| Well they did until the British exiled them all to build
| a US naval base on Diego Garcia. And they would very much
| like to return home. The UK courts have ruled in favour
| of the Chagossians, but they are consistently ignored by
| the UK and US governments.
| akvadrako wrote:
| It's not a big deal. I've had a _.so_ domain for a decade
| and have only had to use a different email a couple times.
|
| There is a different danger however -- after about 8 years
| the annual fee went from about $15 to $60.
| diggan wrote:
| > It's not a big deal. I've had a .so domain for a decade
| and have only had to use a different email a couple times
|
| That is exactly the point krageon is making. If you have
| a .so domain (or .earth like me), you need to have a
| backup at least, so you can still access things like a
| normal human. My @gmail.com address have been used for
| this, but seems I'm gonna have to get yet another domain
| with a normal tld so I can stop using the gmail one for
| when .earth is not correctly accepted.
| aspyct wrote:
| Price changes are a concern indeed. But I think if you
| get something form your country, or a .org, it should be
| mostly fine.
|
| I've had the same .org domain for around 15 years now.
| Except for the coup we've seen last year where somebody
| tried to buy it privately (thankfully averted, I
| believe), I've see no price hike over time.
| justinclift wrote:
| > if you get something form your country ...
|
| That part is _probably_ not a good bet, as life can go in
| unexpected directions.
|
| Some country providers (eg .eu) only provide service to
| their citizens, so if you move country or otherwise
| become "not a citizen" they'll terminate your domain. As
| happened recently to the UK holders of .eu domains. :/
|
| Probably better to pick a .net/.com/.org domain, for
| (hopefully) longer term stability.
| Macha wrote:
| .eu is not a country. .co.uk holders were unaffected by
| Brexit. meanwhile .org had price caps removed and was
| nearly sold off to private capital on the promise of "we
| promise that for the first decade we will only raise
| prices by 10%/yr". I'm not so sure that a legacy TLD is a
| better bet than a ccTLD with a similar record of
| stability when we get into these long term long tail
| events.
|
| Also .org falls under US influence, which may not have
| worked out so well had you been making this decision in
| Ukraine a decade ago
| vaduz wrote:
| .eu is classified as a ccTLD [0], not gTLD by IANA, so
| for the purpose of this discussion it is one - and the
| registrar for it (EURid) requires ciitzenship of one of
| the member states to hold .eu domain. EU citizens living
| the UK can have .eu names, but no-longer-EU-citizens of
| UK do not.
|
| Very much agreed on .org.
|
| [0] https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/eu.html [1]
| https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/brexit-notice/
| justinclift wrote:
| > Also .org falls under US influence, which may not have
| worked out so well had you been making this decision in
| Ukraine a decade ago
|
| Ahhh, hadn't realised that. Though I'd suspect .com and
| .net would be in the same position as .org in that
| respect.
| Theizestooke wrote:
| This is true, I bought a .club domain and had to realise
| that some providers classify it as spam.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Things like .rocks, .guru, .club, and all those other
| recent gold-rush gTLDs have been a disaster from the spam
| standpoint*. It doesn't help that some registrars are
| complicit via allowing massive bulk name purchases, so I
| see zillions of somebody@{random-word-1}{random-
| word-2}.goldrush addresses, all with valid DKIM/DMARC.
|
| * Not to mention phishing. Is that link going to foobank
| dot com or foobank dot club?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Ironically enough, .email is considered a spammy TLD
| according to the Spamhaus TLD check.
| unixhero wrote:
| Thank you. I have been on the fence for a bit. But I will
| initiate project leave Gmail and Gdrive now. It will take me
| a year, but the deliveries and the final goal is clear.
| prepend wrote:
| What I've been slowly doing over the years is proxying all
| accounts behind addresses at my domain (that then forward to my
| gmail, natch).
|
| So at least I could redirect my accounts to a new address if
| worst happens.
|
| I've been trying to switch off gmail for a while but spam
| filtering is really hard for me.
| sneak wrote:
| Using email at a domain that you own (and thus makes you
| provider independent) is table stakes for adulting online.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Make sure you don't use any of the other services: don't post
| to YouTube from that account, don't share Google Docs, files
| etc.
| mtrycz2 wrote:
| > It was a different Google back then.
|
| No it has always been the same company, and we tried to tell
| you.
| warent wrote:
| I've been considering getting a new email address on a personal
| domain so it can be more portable and I can change providers.
|
| Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom
| domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email
| server on a NAS or RPi something?
| scrollaway wrote:
| Do not host your own email unless you really, really want to
| do that for learning purposes or something similar.
|
| You can use fastmail, or if you don't want to lose Gmail's UI
| you can use GSuite which lets you use a personal domain name.
| daitangio wrote:
| I am very happy with this https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-
| server-checks/
|
| It is a docker based email server setup very well done.
| tsujamin wrote:
| I've self-hosted with a hand-rolled postfix+dovecot, and
| later with Mailcow's dockerised mailserver (FOSS, good
| management and webmail UI, strongly recommend).
|
| More recently though I moved my personal domain to Microsoft
| Exchange Online - it's a lot less flexible than Mailcow (per-
| head licensing, but there's + addressing and catch-alls now)
| but I don't have any of the deliverability/gmail-spam-folder
| issues I used to have.
|
| Exchange P1 Online [2] is roughly the same for my single-user
| as my old DO droplet cost per month
|
| (edit: side-bonus you get an Azure AD tenant for your domain
| which is handy for SSO/IdP things)
|
| [1]: https://mailcow.email/
|
| [2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| au/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...
| blntechie wrote:
| I just recently setup Zoho and seem to be working fine so
| far. Their web mail interface is decent but I don't use it
| much.
| ahepp wrote:
| I switched from gsuite to protonmail, but I kinda wish I had
| checked out fastmail
| cocochanel wrote:
| I use Zoho with my own domains. Haven't had any issues so
| far.
| quantummkv wrote:
| Recommend Zoho as well. Their web client is insanely fast
| and filled with all sorts of power user features. The gmail
| client doesn't even compare with how slow it is.
| bartvk wrote:
| I had trouble syncing contacts and calendars on my iPhone.
| Has this been fixed? I also couldn't set up notifications
| for calendar items.
| An0mammall wrote:
| Have been using them for 5 (?) years now and I can't
| complain as well.
| jonbon2 wrote:
| Take a look at migadu.com
| demurgos wrote:
| I second this. Migadu has great support and affordable
| prices. I also like the fact that you can link any number
| of domains to your account without extra costs.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Plenty of people use fastmail and seemed to be happy. If
| you're OK with its price, I think that's a sweet spot.
|
| It's absolutely possible to host your own e-mail server on
| VPS. You'll receive mail without issues. But sending mail
| might cause issues, so unless you're OK with some delivery
| problems and spending some time to investigate, I don't
| suggest going that route.
|
| Hosting your email on NAS is problematic. You need to have
| static IP address with PTR record and most home providers
| won't offer those services for reasonable price.
| antihero wrote:
| I am happy with Fastmail!
|
| With the complete lack of accountability, support, or
| recourse the giants seem to have, it has never been more
| important to not put all one's eggs in one basket.
| insensible wrote:
| I have done exactly this with Fastmail and my own domain, and
| the experience was wonderful, as in "why didn't I do this
| years ago".
| the-smug-one wrote:
| Fastmail is Australia based, wouldn't that pose a risk with
| regards to backdoors?
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Many/most people don't see the government as a threat.
| And since you own your own domain you can migrate to
| another email provider any time you want if you
| experience they're doing fishy things.
| insensible wrote:
| I am assuming that the entire email system is a Times
| Square billboard in terms of privacy. This move gives me
| flexibility.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| Seconded
| gnopgnip wrote:
| Hosting your own email is pretty easy to get started, but
| without continuous work you will have problems getting good
| deliverability, and balancing blocking almost all spam
| without filtering out wanted email is tricky too
| gspr wrote:
| > Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom
| domains, or some OSS?
|
| I'm happy with Namecheap as my registrar and Mailbox.org for
| mail services, and have been for years (my Gmail account
| still exists and forwards the rare message it receives to the
| other one).
|
| Mailbox.org offers ordinary IMAP and SMTP access + DKIM
| signing for your domain. Hosted in Germany. Prices vary, I
| pay about EUR2/month for several GB I think.
|
| Their webmail interface is bad, but then again, I've never
| seen one that isn't. And I've never used it after logging in
| for the first time anyway.
|
| > Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or
| RPi something?
|
| It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it for something as
| critical as email. It's not that the actual hosting is hard,
| it's that more and more of the big providers are refusing to
| handle email messages from certain networks.
| gostsamo wrote:
| mailbox.org from me as well. I compared them with fastmail
| and they don't upsell on the personal domain and let you pay
| as you use storage.
|
| Both have unpleasant web accessibility experience, but it is
| not consideration for many.
| jug wrote:
| Yes, I looked around now for a provider supporting custom
| domains so I don't need to change address just because I
| change provider and came up with a few popular ones:
| Fastmail, Protonmail, Runbox. Note that Protonmail is
| "special" about their IMAP/POP3 support, only supporting
| select clients and then via a particular helper application.
|
| It's not only this issue with Google being like a wall when
| things happen, but also that I dislike their semi-AI based
| interface. While I like their good spam filter, there's a lot
| of other stuff going on there, and that without any inbox
| rules that I have set up.
| misframer wrote:
| I use Fastmail with a personal domain name.
| sargun wrote:
| Pay $25/mo for GSuite enterprise if your email matters to you.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Those can get shut down in exactly the same manner.
| sargun wrote:
| Not exactly. Their user agreement gives you a number of
| outs, and ways to get a live human.
| izacus wrote:
| Not if your account gets suspended in this way - there
| are some testimonies from people that said it locks you
| out of support and you get stonewalled too.
| rochak wrote:
| Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human
| agent? I read that Google automates the flagging and disabling of
| accounts but given how many people have their livelihood linked
| to these accounts, Google must have done something. It makes me
| scared how deep I have dived into the Google ecosystem. Time and
| time again I think about transitioning to someplace else but
| don't know how to. It seems too daunting.
| [deleted]
| chapium wrote:
| After filling out a fairly lengthy questionnaire, google
| mentions they will have someone review the issue and get back
| with you. I am on year 2 of waiting for a return call.
| izacus wrote:
| A few months ago I've seen a Googler pissed on Twitter about
| how their spouses GMail account got suspended and he got
| completely stonewalled internally as well.
|
| It seems that even Googlers themselves cannot get any human
| contact for account support.
|
| (Sadly I can't find that Twitter thread anymore.)
|
| EDIT: Found it -
| https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981
| mmc4444 wrote:
| How do you manage to get totally locked out of your account
| though: if I have backup codes, a backup email address, the
| backup code for my 2FA app... surely I am protected from
| this, right? Assuming my account doesn't get hacked and
| turned into a spambot.
|
| I am sitting here thinking of what would happen if my Gmail
| account got blocked. The disruption it would cause to me is
| enormous.
| detaro wrote:
| Why would backup codes etc help you against an account
| suspension because some random algorithm decided your usage
| pattern is suspect?
| toyg wrote:
| What is being discussed here is not "I lost the password",
| is "Google disabled my account because they have reasons".
| In the latter case, you could have the right password and
| the account would still not work.
|
| _> surely I am protected from this, right? _
|
| Nope. Google can disable you account at any time, without
| telling you why, and without giving you any appeal process
| whatsoever. No free-gmail user is in any way protected
| against this. People paying for Google Suite accounts are
| ever-so-slightly more likely to receive some support if
| anything happens, but that's it.
|
| _> The disruption it would cause to me is enormous. _
|
| This is why I'm slowly moving away from it (and everything
| Google, really). The service is extremely reliable, it
| raised the bar for email services and web UI, what they've
| done to spam is fantastic, but the possibility of losing
| such a key account and not have any recourse is now too
| terrifying to contemplate.
| [deleted]
| izacus wrote:
| It's not you, it's Google that locks you out of the account
| for vague "term of service violation" and nothing you do
| will help.
| vidarh wrote:
| > EDIT: Found it -
| https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981
|
| From recent tweets, it seems he's now leaving Google, and is
| busy retweeting stuff about people who have been fired and/or
| are suing Google. Wonder if him leaving has anything to do
| with that incident and whether it was ever resolved.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Many high-profile departures from Google seem to involve an
| incident like this, in my experience. When I was there most
| of the high-profile departures I saw were related to
| internal strife (in some cases with widely shared complaint
| posts on internal G+ or internal gdocs), management
| misconduct, or things like the company's health insurer
| refusing to cover surgeries. Then occasionally you have the
| departures where notorious abusers or sex pests are sent
| off with a severance package, like ("allegedly") Andy
| Rubin's $90m farewell gift.
|
| In my direct personal experience, I went on medical leave
| near the end of my stay there and when I came back over
| half of my team had quit and bailed for other companies or
| other orgs (largely over complaints with management).
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| At least stop signing up for new things so you don't make the
| problem worse.
|
| It is a risk. I had a problem with my Google account, and while
| I was able to find a human to email about it, they were
| completely unable to help. It was literally "you have to do the
| thing, even though it makes no sense, because that's what our
| algorithm requires" (in my case it was repurchase an old domain
| in order to prove that I owned it, so they could cancel the
| account associated with that domain. Literally makes no sense,
| but it was the only way their process could work). That was my
| "ruh-oh" moment when I realised their products are basically
| unsupported and therefore shouldn't be used in production.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to
| prove that I owned it
|
| What happens if the domain-name is repurchased by someone
| else or claimed by Sedo, etc?
| xeromal wrote:
| He's fucked and has to hope the nice new domain owner will
| help him out.
| rochak wrote:
| That doesn't seem likely.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. I pointed out to them that I might be an
| attacker and my purchase of the domain didn't prove that
| I was who I said I was. They accepted that I was the
| person paying the bills, but said they couldn't do
| anything unless I was also the owner of the domain.
|
| I figure that they either never thought through this
| process, or it was deliberately designed to make the
| cancelling process as awkward as possible. They're smart
| people, I think the latter.
|
| So if they're going out of their way to be inconvenient
| to me, I'm going to go out of my way to never use their
| stuff.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| A few comments before, I've seen someone recommending to sign
| up for an (advanced!) (Microsoft's) LinkedIn account to solve
| an issue like this one. Then I guess to solve a problem with
| LinkedIn you'll have to sign up for a Twitter account, and so
| on and so forth..?
| deanclatworthy wrote:
| Nope. My Adsense account was banned almost 9 years ago. I
| followed their appeals process, gave all the information
| required, and received automated responses every time. I
| repeatedly appealed over the last 9 years, receiving the
| automated rejections every time, until finally a few weeks ago
| for some reason they approved the appeal and my account was
| reinstated :shrugs:
| Judgmentality wrote:
| So a happy ending!
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| The system works! Just takes about a decade.
| arkitaip wrote:
| That's how long it takes to train the machine learning
| model.
| miyuru wrote:
| Disabling google accounts is whats stopping me from using GCP
| fully. what if the credit card got declined on GCP and the
| google bots decide to ban me from the whole eco system.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| When I was buying domain I immediately blacklisted Google
| Domains. I was scared about tripping something and getting
| Gmail account banned.
|
| (yes, loss from not handling a single .com domain is
| minuscule for Google - but I wonder how common is to run away
| from any Google service due to risk to entire account)
| thow-01187 wrote:
| No, this is a problem inherent to the business model
| Google/Facebook run.
|
| Stating a truism - to make a billion dollars, you either have
| to get $10 from 100M sales, $10k from 100k sales or $10M from
| 100 sales. Although each option leads to the same revenue,
| there are major implications as for the amount of support and
| attention you can spend on each customer.
|
| Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales"
| model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable
| support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal
| with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Well, TBH, it's really "$10 from 100M sales + $0 from O(7
| billion) sales."
| nmfisher wrote:
| These are literally some of the most profitable companies in
| the world. Are you honestly saying they would cease to be
| profitable if they hired a few hundred people to staff a
| customer service team?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think they would require a customer service team at least
| an order of magnitude larger than that to properly deal
| with things.
| pishpash wrote:
| Baby steps. It's not the magnitude but the attitude.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M
| sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide
| profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms,
| and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
|
| That isn't necessary though - other companies like Microsoft,
| Oracle, and SAP also have tens of millions - to billions - of
| customers all with their own support requirements: the
| solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money
| as collateral for getting to speak to a human.
|
| Microsoft charges $500 for a single business-class support
| ticket with ~8 hour return time[1] - and you get the money
| back if the ticket was not a PEBCAK issue. If you're a
| company that depends on Azure or Visual Studio or Windows
| Server then keeping $500 around just makes sense.
|
| I just don't understand why Google and other companies that
| deal with long-tail customers don't provide this as an
| option.
|
| [1] In practice, if you have an Enterprise support contract,
| the effective cost is much lower AND you get a much quicker
| response time - but there's more paperwork involved.
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| > the solution is simple: make the customer put up their
| own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human.
|
| Maybe a company at a certain scale should have a legal
| requirement to get a person on the phone for any support
| issue, full stop.
|
| All these companies will continue the race to the bottom
| unless you twist their arm. For PR, sounds like a nice job
| creator to me!
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > Maybe a company at a certain scale should have a legal
| requirement to get a person on the phone for any support
| issue, full stop.
|
| For _any_ support issue? Given the realities of running a
| business over the Internet today, that would be a waste
| of resources _and_ needlessly expensive.
|
| But I do agree with you in principle though: I think
| there should be a _legal_ requirement that anyone with a
| _dependent_ business relationship to a service provider
| should be legally entitled to human review of any
| automatic suspension decisions within a single business
| day. This shouldn 't affect long-tail businesses because
| when there's a strong dependency relationship there's
| definitely large amounts of money exchanging hands - from
| which presumably a small fraction would pay for the
| requisite support costs.
| hedora wrote:
| Microsoft (used to?) pick up the phone if you called about
| an issue with Windows. If you actually called them, then
| they lost money on your consumer Windows license.
|
| Say what you will about how crappy Win 9x was, but they
| definitely drove the average tech support load to much less
| than one call per machine.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > If you actually called them, then they lost money on
| your consumer Windows license
|
| That's why if you have an OEM license for Windows (where
| the per-unit cost is more like $40/unit rather than the
| retail $100-$300) your first-line support comes from your
| OEM, not Microsoft.
| moritonal wrote:
| You don't have to move everything, just bits (like how you
| diversify stocks or singe points of failure). Try move away
| from Chrome, or swap Drive for Dropbox.
|
| Moving an email is admitably much harder, but after five years
| I've managed to do all the major ones.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a
| human agent?
|
| File for a C&D and then, if that does not help, a court-issued
| injunction order ("Abmahnung" followed by "Antrag auf Erlass
| einer einstweiligen Verfugung"), if you're German. This works
| somewhat reasonable for Twitter, Facebook and Google.
| rochak wrote:
| I'm an Indian staying in US, but probably not for long. Given
| how many of us are there, I don't think Google India would
| have the capacity or care to hear our pleas. The only way to
| force them to build something useful is through government
| interference but I hardly feel that Indian government would
| do so.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You would need legal standing. A free account isn't your
| property.
| grumple wrote:
| Property might be the wrong word here. I suspect that you
| do have a contract of sorts with any company with whom you
| have a free account. The consideration is sharing your data
| in exchange for the account.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Even for a free account, there is a contract in place
| between you and Twitter, which Twitter can't unilaterally
| terminate without reason, especially if the "code of
| conduct" collides with the right of free speech
| (https://www.ratgeberrecht.eu/internetrecht-
| aktuell/meinungsf...)
| lima wrote:
| In Europe, GDPR has provisions about algorithmic decision-
| making, including a "Right to explanation":
|
| https://turkishlawblog.com/read/article/221/algorithms-
| meet-...
|
| I look forward to this getting used against Google and
| everyone else banning customers without explanation and/or
| recourse.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Google only takes calls for ad sales and gsuite support as far
| as I know. Beyond that shaming them on social media is the only
| way to get their attention. I used to work for a top five web
| site and even we couldn't get ahold of anyone - one day Google
| decided to start crawling us at a rate of 120k rps and it was
| killing the site by pulling ancient content that was 100% cache
| miss. No way for us to get in touch with Google officially, our
| billionaire CEO hadn't traded numbers with their billionaire
| CEO so no help there, one of the developers had a college buddy
| that landed at Google and that guy was able to use some sort of
| internal mailing list to get them to drop the crawl rate down
| to 20k rps.
|
| (Microsoft is just as bad - their sales people can't be
| bothered to talk to anyone who isn't a partner, but that worked
| out great for me, I wasn't really feeling azure and it made a
| great excuse to not consider them. One of their sales people
| did leave me a VM three or four months later but we had already
| chosen another vendor by then).
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Google One comes with phone support
| Smerity wrote:
| In the past I had written about my experiences with
| crawling[1], from accidentally getting banned by Slashdot as
| a teenager doing linguistic analysis to accidentally DoS'ing
| a major website to being threatened with lawsuits.
|
| The latter parts of the story were when I was part of Common
| Crawl, a public good dataset that has seen a great deal of
| use. During my tenure there I crawled over 2.5 petabytes and
| 35 billion webpages mostly by myself.
|
| I'd always felt guilty of a specific case as our crawler hit
| a big name web company (top N web company) with up to 3000
| requests per second* and they sent a lovely note that began
| with how much they loved the dataset but ended with "please
| stop thrashing our cache or we'll need to ban your crawler".
| It was difficult to properly fix due to limited engineering
| resources and as they represented many tens / hundreds of
| thousands of domains, with some of the domains essentially
| proxying requests back to them.
|
| Knowing Google hammered you at 120k requests per second down
| to _only_ 20k per second has assuaged some portion of that
| guilt.
|
| [1]: https://state.smerity.com/smerity/state/01EAN3YGGXN93GFR
| M8XW...
|
| * Up to 3000 requests per second as it'd spike once every
| half hour or hour when parallelizing across a new set of URL
| seeds but would then decrease, with the crawl not active for
| all the month
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| With some planning we could have accommodated the 120K rps
| rate and more, but just out of the blue it caused a lot of
| issues, the database shards for historic information tended
| to be configured for infrequent access to large amounts of
| historic data, their access completely thrashed our caches,
| etc. We did want Google to index us, if there had been an
| open dialog we could have created a separate path for their
| traffic that bypassed the cache and we could have brought
| additional database servers into production to handle the
| increased load, we even had a real time events feed that
| updated whenever content was created or updated that we
| would have given Google free access to that so they could
| just crawl the changes instead of having to scan the site
| for updates, but since they would not talk to anyone none
| of that happened.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think returning http status code 429 (=too many requests)
| or 5xx should work. Google claims to respect it. And it's not
| like they have choice really: the server is refusing to
| provide the content. Additionally, serving such an error
| should be as cheap or cheaper than a cache hit.
| vidarh wrote:
| Spend ~$5 of Google Adwords, and chances are you'll have
| someone calling you regularly trying to talk you into using
| it more - at least that's my experience. In the past it's
| been a pain to get them to stop bothering me.
|
| If I have an issue with Google, I might try starting an
| adwords campaign and ask to speak to supervisors when their
| sales calls comes through, and see if there's an in along the
| way of "we _would_ spend more, but you see you 've done X
| that needs to be resolved first".
|
| My other approach - not tried it on Google, but it worked
| very well on DHL and Uber so far - is to sign up for
| LinkedIn's premium subscription and use that to Inmail a
| bunch of VPs/SVPs and set out my grievance. My experience so
| far is that you need to find someone high enough up to be
| under the illusion - from lack of customer contact - that
| everything is well. They often seem to be shocked to hear
| that customers hit the wall, and get approached rarely enough
| that it's a novelty for them to help out (as such, it'll
| probably stop working if everyone starts doing this...)
|
| With DHL in particular I got an SVP to get his assistant to
| light a fire under the customer service operation by telling
| them said SVP wanted to be kept up to date on how it went,
| and Cc'ing said SVP and me on the e-mails. A package they
| "could do nothing about" because it was supposedly on a boat
| back to the US, magically appeared in my office one business
| day later after it was located in a depot 5 minutes from my
| office (I wish I could say that was the first time DHL has
| told me a package was somewhere completely different to where
| it actually was)
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Both are outrageously good ideas and I sincerely hope not
| too many people read your comment so it doesn't become
| blocked!
| vidarh wrote:
| Thankfully these companies are big enough that the supply
| of SVPs and VPs is near endless. In fact, with DHL my
| biggest effort was wading through the list to find the
| people I thought most likely to reply. Of three messages
| I wrote, two replied and offered to help.
| TavsiE9s wrote:
| Do not rely on Google for anything but search. Even for that
| there are alternatives.
| kgersen wrote:
| so the guy filled the Stadia dev form:
| https://stadia.dev/intl/en_us/apply/
|
| but used a gmail account instead of pro email account (that's not
| a good move on his part here).
|
| and then he still can't get help from Stadia ?
|
| Possible but very hard to believe.
| [deleted]
| newbie578 wrote:
| I just want to know why is no one willing to hold Google and
| Apple accountable?
|
| Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront
| Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and
| why is the only solution to blow up on social media?
| tjalfi wrote:
| Asking Sundar this type of question could get your organization
| banned; Google has been known to do this[0].
|
| [0] https://www.cnet.com/news/how-cnet-got-banned-by-google/
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale...
| Terretta wrote:
| I've never been _unable_ to chat with an Apple rep.
|
| Have had no problems reaching people about dev accounts, but
| also no problem even about consumer subscription services with
| unusual challenges, such as wanting to merge music or app
| libraries belonging to two different Apple IDs. (Can be done,
| an self-serve easy way and an Apple-performed hard way.)
|
| In earlier HN thread, someone said "Devs would be more than
| happy to pay $300/yr to be able to talk to someone!"
|
| My guess is an HN survey would suggest devs prefer to be
| outraged at Apple's $100/yr -- despite it being a price point
| at which you get to talk to people.
| merb wrote:
| apple support is shit, even if you can talk with an rep.
| their first level basically tries to stop you going down the
| levels, the second level basically just forwards you. most of
| the time it's not even the people, it's basically their
| stupid system where you have your dedicated rep, but the only
| way to contact him is by using a stupid form/voice which
| sometimes prints stupid error message and you have no idea if
| it gone trough. also if there is a mistake in the system and
| they have no clue about it you are lost or you need to pay
| tons of money.
| judge2020 wrote:
| It all depends on what you're trying to do. I accidentally
| stayed subscribed to Apple Arcade. A day after the charge,
| I called, and the first rep I talked to was able to stay on
| the phone and cancel+refund the subscription.
| merb wrote:
| yeah the easy things work, but once you run into
| something that is not common it gets hairy pretty quickly
| notyourday wrote:
| > Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge
| confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this
| happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?
|
| Journalists like access. Confronting Sundar and making him feel
| ambushed even for a second means they won't get the access for
| the rest of their career.
| teddyh wrote:
| If journalists are bothersome, they lose their access. How
| would journalists "confront" anyone if they can't get a foot in
| the door?
| syshum wrote:
| Because they are not really Journalists, they are extensions of
| the PR Dept.
|
| This is dubbed as "Access Journalism" but it is not really
| Journalism at all.
| stalfosknight wrote:
| You could credibly accuse Apple of many things, and I say that
| as an unashamed Apple fanboy. But making it basically
| impossible to reach a real human being by phone via AppleCare,
| or in person at your local Genius Bar if you prefer, is not one
| of them.
|
| You get what you pay for.
| aritmo wrote:
| We only hear the celebs that got their accounts suspended.
| Imagine how many others are stuck and have nowhere to talk to.
| ycombigator wrote:
| _purge intensifies_
| nobodyshere wrote:
| I'd easily pay for a personal gmail account which has all the
| privacy protections on and also 24/7 access to customer support
| via chat and phone. Sadly most of that is only provided for
| business accounts.
| p410n3 wrote:
| Google one gives you support it says. I had an issue with
| gpay once and the support chat was available and seemingly
| working.
|
| But when your account is suspended that doesn't really help
| you eh
| rexf wrote:
| Yeah I wonder if there would be a tier of Google One that
| comes with "we won't ban your account". Assuming
| users/customers are operating in good faith, they cannot
| get banned even if an automated check flags them.
|
| For example, someone got banned from Ads for paying with
| Apple Credit Card
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841586
|
| I'm obviously not a fan of paying for protection, but peace
| of mind for your online identity is worth $X/month. Not to
| mention search, email, maps, etc. has way more than $0/mo.
| utility.
| tempest_ wrote:
| Yeah nothing says we value our customers(product) like a
| good ol protection racket
| curiousgal wrote:
| I pay $6/month for a single user workspace to get that peace
| of mind. I don't understand why someone would entrust their
| digital live to a free service.
| SahAssar wrote:
| I've had to deal with googles support for Google
| Apps/GSuite/Google Workspace (or whatever they call it now)
| and in many cases it's not much better than no support.
| Often the people you could get on the phone had no overlap
| with the people that could help you and even when they
| could help you they had no sense of urgency and some pretty
| critical issues could take weeks to get a proper answer.
| imagine99 wrote:
| You have to understand that this is SINO (service in name
| only), an offering that is there on paper to satisfy
| procurement requirements of businesses ("Does this product
| offer this service with that SLA? If yes, you can buy it.
| If not, you can't"). That doesn't say anything about the
| efficacy of this service. In fact you will find that it
| isn't very useful (I've only had to use it once, but still,
| useless and frustrating, not much different from talking
| with GPT3). Many if not most enterprise software vendors
| have SINO offerings, Microsoft and VMware are just two I
| experienced personally that provide you with certain 24/7
| telephone support lines which will not do anything but
| waste time until the next morning (if you're lucky) where
| you might be able to get an escalation. So if you're buying
| ESXi hoping that VMware might help you fix a pink screen at
| 2 in the morning, you are mistaken. But management will be
| able to tell everybody "yes, we have a 30 minute SLA on
| this with the vendor". Sure.
|
| Lastly, you might also find that you will not be able to
| access the support options anymore if you have real
| problems or once your account has been locked for whatever
| reason. There are several services like this out there and
| I have seen it happen once at an old company: Provider
| locked a whole group of users out of the platform because
| of "suspicious login activity" on the admin account (admin
| was overseas). To access the support page you had to login
| first. Which you couldn't. Because it was locked. Took
| three weeks and snail mail (!) to get access to the
| platform back. Cancelled right after.
|
| I would be extremely surprised if paying $6/month meant
| that your experience was different. Not that it shouldn't
| be, mind you, of course it should. I'm just saying it
| likely won't, so don't bet on it...
| seastonATccs wrote:
| Google Gsuite/Workspaces has an SLA.
| hedora wrote:
| If that's what you want, I recommend fastmail.
|
| For storage, I've successfully reached human tech support at
| synology and backblaze.
| comp_throw7 wrote:
| The customer LTV required to justify providing live support
| for a wide-market B2C product is non-trivial.
|
| But if you actually care that much, why not just pay for
| Google Workspace? The cheapest tier is $6 a month and gets
| you access to more or less what you want. (n.b.: I'm not
| making any representations about the quality of the support
| that you'd receive, only that it's available. I don't work at
| Google.)
| imagine99 wrote:
| Sorry, how does paying for Google Workspace prevent you
| from getting your account locked and not being able to do
| something about it? I do believe that to login to the admin
| back-end and to contact support in the first place, you
| need to log in with your Google account.
|
| Also, their support is... not exactly useful. I had to use
| it once a couple years ago (a feature wasn't working, I
| forgot which one) and all they could offer where excuses
| and "we take XY very seriously" and "thanks for bringing
| this to our attention". They never fixed it, of course.
|
| Google has excellent engineers who crank out amazing stuff
| with a passion. Google is however shockingly bad in
| converting these things into something of lasting value,
| supporting and improving the excellent seeds they have/had
| (just look at the famous Google graveyard). As money is no
| object for Google, you can only come to the conclusion that
| all this is done on purpose and even purposely sinister.
| They focus on their ad business as that has a ROI that
| blows literally any other product in existence out of the
| water. And they just don't bother with anything else
| anymore. I mean, why would you spend your days toiling,
| building and maintaining stuff earning a decent (but not an
| obscene) wage if you had an ATM, nay a dozen, that just
| shoot free money at you all day like crazy. I can
| understand it, but it's still sad, from a societal
| perspective ("make the world a better place" etc. etc.).
| josephg wrote:
| Is there a good reason to keep using gmail? I've only got
| good things to say about Fastmail - which is paid, reliable,
| faster than gmail and private. And they're reinvesting some
| of their revenue into making better standards for email.
|
| I haven't needed to contact support, but I think they have a
| manned tech support email address too.
| imagine99 wrote:
| There is no other service with feature parity on the UI
| alone out there. I've searched one for ages and would
| switch the whole org over in a New York minute if there was
| an (ideally open-source) "copy" of the Gmail UI available
| as front-end for one of the other mail servers. Features we
| can't do without nowadays are tagging; advanced filter and
| forwarding rules; split inbox with tabs for ads,
| newsletters, social media; support for multiple domains
| (10+) and dozens of aliases per user which you can easily
| switch between; 30 sec undo after sending an email; send
| later function; snappy UI that's not from the 90s.
|
| Also, unfortunately Gmail/Gsuite is very cost-effective for
| us. We've looked at ProtonMail which seemed nice and
| potentially worth supporting but they would have cost us
| probably ten times or more what Gsuite costs (for email
| service only!) thanks to having to buy a ton of add-ons to
| get feature parity (they actually do charge extra for
| pretty much each custom domain and alias you want to use).
| And buying 100 GB of storage costs an eye-watering
| $120/month ($1.99 on Gsuite). I really don't know why their
| pricing is so weird. I know they can't probably scale as
| well on storage but adding aliases does not cause any
| measurable additional cost for them...
|
| Anyway, if anyone decides to make a Gmail UI clone with a
| reasonable spam filter and pricing that's at most 2x what
| Google charges: Please let me know, I will migrate 120 new
| users to you within a couple weeks (not much on a grand
| scale but it's what I can offer...) :-)
| Closi wrote:
| I think Office 365 / Exchange / Outlook has all of that
| for around 2x the cost. Possibly missing automatic email
| categorisation, but it does sort into 'focussed' and
| 'general' buckets.
|
| Plus you get an absolutely fantastic desktop app on
| Windows & Mac.
|
| And for that you also get full Microsoft Office desktop
| apps included too.
| hedora wrote:
| I think Fastmail ticks all your boxes except the split
| tab for messages and ads. Not sure about pricing. They're
| cheap enough for my use case.
|
| The UI is much better than the gmail one, and the mobile
| apps are excellent. It supports tags or folders,
| depending on user preference (I prefer folders, so this
| is a huge advantage vs gmail.)
|
| The spam filter is much better than gmail's, at least for
| my account. Over the same corpus (my email went to both
| during a transition period), they both let zero spam
| through, but gmail was incorrectly blocking 10-30% of
| incoming email until I disabled its spam filter.
| imagine99 wrote:
| I will look into it. Thanks.
| nunodonato wrote:
| are you kidding? Gmail UI is absolutely horrendous! I
| haven't used it in 4 months, and last week had to go
| there and was shocked and the mess it is. I guess I'm
| spoiled by Fastmail, which is actually fast, efficient
| and clean.
| imagine99 wrote:
| Sounds like I'll have to check out Fastmail :-) However,
| please bear in mind that if you've got to switch over a
| whole organisation, you'll have to keep UI friction to a
| minimum. Users who have used Gmail for almost a decade
| (our Outlook, for that matter) will be extremely hesitant
| to be dragged over on to a new service. I guess, a fully
| featured mail server doing all the work in the background
| while offering you a front and that looks like OWA, Gmail
| or $UI would be ideal (pipe-dream, I know, but wouldn't
| it be great?). Still, I get what you're saying and I'll
| look into it. Do you have any experience with Fastmail
| for business? Can it be branded and used with different
| domains and aliases without paying through the nose?
| antihero wrote:
| > can't do without nowadays
|
| You can.
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| I must be your opposite because for me the Gmail UI is
| the WORST part of Gmail.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| And also they have programmable filters (Sieve) and auto-
| expiry settings for folders (delete mails in this folder
| after N days unless also in another folder).
| bogwog wrote:
| If you're going to switch email providers to something like
| Fastmail, be smart about it and register a custom domain,
| and pay a little extra to hook it up to your new account
| (unless Fastmail lets you do it for free).
|
| Just get a domain like `Smith.com` and then use the email
| `John@Smith.com`. Then it doesn't matter if you're using
| Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail, etc. You can switch to a
| different company whenever you want (to get the best rate,
| avoid abusive terms, bad service, etc) without having to
| update your business cards, websites, online accounts, etc.
|
| You'll still need to have a way to back up your old
| messages though.
| josephg wrote:
| I recommend everyone does this; not just if you switch to
| fastmail. Having your email identity tied to a particular
| service provider is a terrible idea. Email will probably
| be with us until we die; and chances are very high you
| won't want that particular email service provider for 60
| consecutive years.
|
| I used gmail with a custom domain for years before I
| finally decided to move to fastmail, which made the move
| pretty painless. That said, when I set it up gsuite with
| a custom domain was free. I don't think thats the case
| any more.
| sofixa wrote:
| Don't you get that with Google One? Never tried the support,
| but it says there's chat (2-3mn response time) and email
| support (24hrs or less)
| RL_Quine wrote:
| I'd love my inexplicably banned ebay account back, or at least
| have an explanation rather than "there is no appealing this
| ban".
| bussierem wrote:
| A totally fair point but in this case I wouldn't consider
| "famous person" being the shocking part of this. The shocking
| part, as others in the thread have pointed out, is that this is
| a _business partner_ of Google 's.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| As usual, some Googler browsing HN will reactivate his account,
| everyone will forget and Google won't change a thing to his
| unbanning process.
| Svip wrote:
| Makes you wonder whether that _is_ their unbanning process.
| [deleted]
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| Hopefully, more devs will do what this dev is (said to be)
| doing.
|
| > Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled.
| My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving
| forward.
|
| Of course, it's very difficult for small devs to do this. It
| takes an already solid business to be able to stand up like
| this. As always, I think this is the only way for Google to
| change, but I don't think it can happen.
| thetanil wrote:
| I think it's also probably easy to do this with stadia since
| it's effectively 0 users. What would he say if steam treated
| devs like google does?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Many smaller devs have pivoted to leverage alternative
| platforms like Itch, Epic Games Store, Game Pass, etc
| alongside Steam for monetization, and some have ditched
| Steam entirely based on complaints with Valve's developer
| relations and pricing. Valve seems unlikely to ever make
| any concessions to win back the hearts of smaller
| developers, but they _did_ panic once Epic Games Store and
| other storefronts started capturing exclusives for large
| titles by offering big studios a reduced cut (20-25% in
| some cases) to keep them around.
|
| Another way to look at this: Valve's treatment of
| developers (not nearly as bad as Google, to be clear) is
| mostly tolerated because of Steam's inertia and market
| share. Google is acting like Stadia has inertia and market
| share when it has neither.
| [deleted]
| kingbirdy wrote:
| His post implies he's dropping support for all Google
| platforms, presumably including Android, where Terraria is
| consistently one of the top selling games. That seems like
| a much more difficult decision.
| brmgb wrote:
| If Valve treated game developers like Google does, Steam
| would have followed the path of Stadia which is failing
| despite being technically a good product.
|
| That's my personal take on the current situation: despite
| owning one of the largest digital store, Google sucks at
| being a publisher. The actual automated ban is mostly
| inconsequential. Every large publishers have technical
| issue from time to time. What's unique to Google is that
| you can't effectively contact anyone to have them sorted
| out.
|
| If you are an indie dev with a track record and works with
| Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch with a
| company representative.
| astrange wrote:
| Valve does treat game developers poorly, and it can't be
| fixed because their no-internal-structure setup means
| nobody can actually change anything at the company.
| They're bad at dealing with Japanese content, if you get
| a reviewer who decides it's "more gross anime shit" (as
| millenials like to do) they ban your game sight unseen
| with no appeal. Kind of a problem when the newer younger
| people into anime aesthetic are also the ones making all
| the LGBT content.
| adnzzzzZ wrote:
| As an indie dev I disagree very heavily with this. Games
| like Hentai Nazi
| (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1183970/Hentai_Nazi/)
| are allowed to be on the store because they're generally
| very permissive, as long as you're following the laws
| that they have to follow because they're in America. If
| you're making games with sexual content and characters of
| questionable age (as many of these banned anime games
| do), then it's reasonable that some of them will get
| banned, since Valve has to obey the law.
| astrange wrote:
| Yes, those are ironically more likely to make it through
| because it makes it look like they're following through
| on their promise to not moderate any store content. It's
| all luck though, we don't know what never made it in.
|
| Actual foreign developers who don't speak English don't
| have as much luck explaining themselves as indie irony-VN
| devs and can't fix problems if Valve sees a picture of an
| anime and decides it was questionable sexual content when
| it wasn't.
|
| (Often it does still work out, some of the VNs had some
| really out there actual sexual content because they're
| weirdos and the work was improved by removing it for
| Steam/Nintendo platform so
| cableshaft wrote:
| > If you are an indie dev with a track record and works
| with Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch
| with a company representative.
|
| Yep. I worked for a small video game publisher with only
| four people in the entire company and we had a designated
| account representative at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft
| we could (and did) contact when we had issues.
|
| Might be harder as an indie dev, but if you have any
| track record, like you said, I'm sure they know someone
| they can contact.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| We were a really low volume AWS customer. We had an
| account representative.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > technically a good product.
|
| Do you mean with technology or something like
| "technically it could have worked in the market"? Because
| if its the latter then I disagree. Its a service on which
| my entire library can disappear, I have to pay full price
| + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play
| on TVs). I have no idea who this is for.
| brmgb wrote:
| > Do you mean with technology or something like
| "technically it could have worked in the market"?
|
| Yes, I mean the technology. I played cyberpunk on it. It
| worked really well (better than I expected a streaming
| service to work).
|
| > I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe
| buy new hardware (to play on TVs).
|
| You just need to pay the game to play in 1080p. The pro
| tier is if you want 4k and comes with free games. You can
| actually play free to play games like Destiny 2 for free
| on Stadia.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know however.
| Google marketing was terrible.
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| Your mileage may very depending on a variety of factors.
| I got a free Stadia kit (controller + Chromecast Ultra)
| for being a YouTube Premium/Music subscriber, and decided
| I'd give a good and honest attempt at playing through a
| full game on Stadia.
|
| I played through Superhot and the best I can say is
| latency is impressive given it's beaming my inputs to a
| server, rendering, and beaming the frames back to me
| (though still not as good as just playing locally). But I
| had some horrible issues. Several play sessions had to
| end because my internet was being unreliable, as home
| internet tends to do. Not sure if someone started
| streaming Netflix or what, but that's kind of the issue
| -- I don't want someone else doing something on my
| network to be able to affect my gameplay session. Or if
| my ISP is just experiencing high traffic, or if the
| internet in my neighbourhood goes out, etc. There's so
| much that can and does go wrong, even if it's 99.9%
| reliable, that's not near enough for a video game.
|
| Thankfully the game I was playing wasn't particularly
| time-sensitive, if it started lagging I could stop for a
| second and the game doesn't move forward (that's just how
| Superhot works, for anyone who isn't familiar). But I was
| seeing on the front page of the store you can buy Celeste
| and I just could not imagine playing a precision
| platformer like that with the bit of latency that exists,
| plus the possibility I get a lag spike and by the time it
| catches up I'm already dead and restarting the segment.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > You just need to pay the game to play in 1080p...pro
| tier...4k and comes with free games
|
| This has to be the most bizarrely conceived product
| strategy ever. I know I am not a gamer, but... who is
| this targeting?
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > I have no idea who this is for.
|
| It's for Google, trying out rent-seeking in a consumer
| channel with high fixed costs
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| It's interesting you don't consider Android one of Google's
| platforms.
| 3327 wrote:
| Good on him. Takes courage and an established product to do
| this.
|
| Good example of standing up.
| WA wrote:
| > Good example of standing up.
|
| But he won't pull Terraria from the Play Store I guess.
| Because he has no choice unless he wants to wreck his
| business.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| That's actually an interesting point. If it is tied to
| the same Google account, will he still get money from
| apps sold through the play store? Can he pull an app from
| the play store if he cannot even log in?
| dathinab wrote:
| He is a private person.
|
| The games are published by an indie game studio.
|
| Normally this is done over an separate, non personal,
| account. Sometimes even multiple non personal accounts
| for multiple products.
|
| So RE-LOGIC's Google account should not have been
| affected.
| chmod775 wrote:
| The Play Store Terraria is a different publisher. It's
| likely not his decision to make - and he shouldn't care
| considering that makes dealing with Google on that front
| is not his problem.
|
| Also the revenue of the PC version should be roughly 4x
| all of the mobile versions combined (twice the amount of
| units sold, double the price).
| codetrotter wrote:
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.and.gam
| es5...
|
| Still there as of yet.
|
| But maybe he means that he won't be pushing any updates
| to Google Play?
|
| Current Version 1.4.0.5.2.1
|
| Updated December 8, 2020
|
| Requires Android 4.4 and up
|
| Time will tell I guess
| exikyut wrote:
| Google Play / Android != Stadia
| dathinab wrote:
| > Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is
| canceled. My company will no longer support *any of your
| platforms* moving forward.
|
| Emphasis mine.
|
| But isn't Terraria "complete" in the sense that maybe
| besides some bug fix there won't really be any updates
| anymore? (But potential successors to Terraria??)
|
| Also given that it's about "moving forward" I highly
| doubt they will revert any existing support.
|
| But their next game(s) might very likely not ship on
| Google Play (but potential alternative App stores).
|
| In the end I guess their main marked is anyway Steam
| followed by the consoles (Switch, Playstation, XBox).
|
| I just wonder if they sell more on GooglePlay or on the
| Apple App Store?
| ajford wrote:
| The Android port appears to be published by 505 Games and
| Codeglue, and more recently Pipeworks, according to
| Wikipedia.
|
| It's likely that the primary devs have little to no
| control of that port, including the ability (and possibly
| ip rights) to take it down.
| exikyut wrote:
| Oh, right. Completely overlooked that bit.
|
| I agree with you. It certainly will be interesting to see
| how this works out...
| gambiting wrote:
| Play Store isn't struggling for content. Removing
| terraria from it has zero impact on Google's bottom line.
| Stadia on the other hand very much is - removal(or
| cancellation) of an extremely popular indie game from the
| platform just accelerates its inevitable demise,
| something that will very much hit google's bottom line.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Even if they haven't said it out loud, Google has already
| decided to cancel Stadia, so unfortunately cancelling a
| game for it will have zero impact on Google.
| seankimdesign wrote:
| > Google has already decided to cancel Stadia
|
| I believe you were going for hyperbole, but it reads more
| like misinformation instead. Please reconsider saying
| misleading shit like this, especially on HN.
| delecti wrote:
| Google closed one of their first party Stadia game
| development studios. They haven't decided to cancel
| Stadia as a whole yet, at least not publicly.
| moron4hire wrote:
| We've seen the playbook often enough. If you think they
| aren't going to close it down in 3 years, you're wasting
| money.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > "If you think they aren't going to close it down in 3
| years, you're wasting money."
|
| and
|
| > "Google has already decided to cancel Stadia"
|
| mean entirely different things. Of course people _expect_
| Stadia to get cancelled, but to claim they 've already
| decided to cancel it is disinformation. It's a blatant
| lie. Don't spread fake news.
| delecti wrote:
| Stadia hasn't gotten a dollar from me, and won't. I
| _absolutely_ think it 'll be gone by then, but that's not
| the same thing as "has already decided to cancel".
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Unfortunately this opens the door to unscrupulous devs
| publishing their own knock-off versions - or even
| repackaging the official Terraria Windows game and passing
| it off as their own work (resource/asset swaps, etc).
|
| My impression from reports I've read about all the major
| App Stores is that they won't put much effort into
| processing violation notifications or takedown requests
| when the publisher or developer filing the complaint
| doesn't have an account of their own on the store - even
| less when they're banned (like how Terraria's devs were) -
| so it could be weeks or even months and the publisher of
| the knock-off or pirated copy gets to keep all the money
| they've made provided they've transferred it out of their
| payment account, I think?
| viraptor wrote:
| > repackaging the official Terraria Windows game and
| passing it off as their own work
|
| Those would be easy to take down due to code/asset reuse
| and name reuse. You don't need to be an author on the
| platform to file DMCA reports. Otherwise, there are
| already lots of actual Terraria clones by different
| names.
| hedora wrote:
| If that happens, they should sue Google for dealing in
| counterfeit goods.
|
| They'll have a ridiculously strong case.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Another way of putting it: if a 3rd party published a
| Mario game on Playstation, do you think Nintendo would
| hold back just because they are not also there?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Amazon deals in counterfeit goods all the time and
| there's still been no substantial changes to how they
| deal with it either.
|
| If you sue a behemoth like Google or Amazon, they'll
| likely gladly make a settlement with you that's
| considerably greater than the actual damages because they
| value the NDAs and lack-of-PR damage from the inevitable
| Wall St. Journal headlines...
| gnopgnip wrote:
| The difference there is Amazon is not creating copies
| like you would with software
| rawbot wrote:
| The Stadia version is the one cancelled. I doubt Google
| doesn't have a tougher screening process for games for
| Stadia, since they are the ones running the game. It is
| highly improbable that a knockoff game will land on it.
| gambiting wrote:
| Yep. Also the approval process on Stadia is very complex
| and you need to set up so.much.stuff. It's not like their
| playstore where you can release almost anything. Even if
| you have an already fully working game on Stadia, just
| the process of meeting all technical requirements and
| setting up the pages on the backend and all the hooks can
| take months. It's far too much effort for something that
| wouldn't even go through the submission process, or if it
| did it would be removed immediately.
|
| Same reason why you don't see knock offs on Playstation -
| the approval process is complex, very long and pretty
| costly.
| BunsanSpace wrote:
| Not really, Terraria has already been ported to all
| systems, including Android.
|
| the amount of people using Stadia that don't have access to
| a device that could play terraria is likely very small.
| [deleted]
| sf_rob wrote:
| Agreed about small devs, but other small devs also have to
| make countless decisions about which platforms/products to
| use for their app/platform/website. At the very least, Google
| should be worried that a good tie-breaker is "Is it a Google
| platform?".
| Hamuko wrote:
| Or the @GoogleStadia Twitter account will forward this to
| someone who knows about it. The Stadia Twitter account is
| uncharacteristically active on customer support for a Google
| product.
| Shorel wrote:
| Twitter seems to be the worst platform ever created to get
| customer support.
|
| If any entity requires a huge amount of Twitter followers to
| get support, count me out.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| I think twitter is last time I checked (looking at
| guidelines maybe 3/4 years ago) pretty amazing for customer
| support, even if you drop the fact that well-followed
| people might get better support. The expected reply time
| for twitter support queries is on the order of minutes.
| Compare that to phone or email customer support on many
| platforms.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This was for a short period a two or three years ago, no
| longer.
|
| Now, unless you are high follower count, they will reply
| asking you to DM and give you a hold.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| That's no longer the case. In my experience, most
| companies have stopped responding to complaints on
| Twitter. They have a set playbook now which asks you to
| DM them and then sends you a holding message.
| criley2 wrote:
| It's no different than pre-internet. Complaining publically
| has been around since TV, it's a staple of local news to
| have "exposes" on bad local businesses to shame them when
| they won't do right privately. Before that it was radio.
| Before that it was newspaper. Before that, it was just
| gossip.
|
| Humans have been using social pressure to right wrongs....
| for millenia.
|
| Twitter is nothing more than a common social square.
| londons_explore wrote:
| People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a
| minefield of:
|
| * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his
| account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to
| confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)
|
| * Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing
| their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all
| other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a
| single-service ban is very hard to implement)
|
| * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer
| needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no
| longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing
| service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
|
| * Stolen/shared accounts. All it takes is one evil browser
| extension to steal your user account cookie and go on a
| spamming spree. Figuring out how it happened is near impossible
| (user specific logs are anonymized). Usually just resetting the
| users logins doesn't solve it because the malware is still on
| the users computer/phone and will steal the cookie again.
|
| * Falsely linked accounts. Some spammers create gmail addresses
| to send spam, but to disguise them they link lots of real
| peoples accounts for example via using someone elses recovery
| phone number, email address, contacts/friends, etc. In many
| cases they will compromise real accounts to create all these
| links, all so that as many real users as possible will be hurt
| if their spamming network is shutdown.
|
| * Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee
| with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't
| even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without
| being able to see the account private data, the employee
| wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
|
| * Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't
| like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no
| logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what
| happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing
| an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to
| drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the
| page so it looks totally normal.
|
| Yes, it's solvable, and Google should put more effort into it,
| but it's hard to do.
| georgebarnett wrote:
| Many other companies of similar size manage to provide
| customer service just fine.
|
| This is a solved problem - you just have to be willing to
| realise that magic AI sprinkles aren't the answer.
|
| As for cost - this continual stream of screwups is costing
| them a ridiculous amount of goodwill and future business.
| It's probably the best ad for AWS there is.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I suspect they don't have the combination of strict privacy
| so employees can't look into the account, massive spam
| potential, and billions of users...
| georgebarnett wrote:
| Amazon, Microsoft and Apple have similar numbers of users
| and there are no issues getting in touch with them.
|
| Google chooses this path, it's not forced on them.
| himinlomax wrote:
| > * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-
| longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the
| data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of
| providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be
| delayed.
|
| That's absolutely not how GDPR works.
| kevingadd wrote:
| I'm no expert on Google and I don't have a PhD but from my
| time working there (and my time working at other internet
| services companies), multiple of your assertions here are
| false or absurd.
|
| Child porn detection and enforcement literally does not work
| that way. I'm not sure how you even think that would work.
| How do you think the algorithm gets trained? Humans feed data
| into it. All the major social media companies (Facebook, etc)
| have paid human moderators that have to screen flagged
| content in many cases to determine whether it is illegal and
| then escalate to the relevant staff or authorities, and in
| some cases this is a legal requirement.
|
| The GDPR one is especially ridiculous. Why would you be
| required to delete a user's data the moment you suspend their
| account? That's utterly absurd, it completely eliminates the
| user's recourse in the event of an error. No reasonable human
| being would interpret the laws that way and the relevant
| regulators (yes, GDPR is enforced by humans) would never
| require you to do that.
|
| Google already has measures to deal with malware on machines,
| typically temporary or permanent bans of the hardware and/or
| IP address. They don't have to permanently delete your gmail
| account to lock out Chrome on a single malwared PC. If you've
| ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network
| you've probably seen Google Search throw up the 'automated
| traffic' warning and block you for a bit.
|
| Being able to review conduct of an account (i.e. browse logs)
| is not "blanket access to your account" and neither is being
| able to examine the details on why the account was banned and
| reverse them. The account owner could also authorize the
| employee to access their data - any time you talk to a
| Customer Service representative for a company, you're doing
| this.
| andruby wrote:
| > due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service
| ban is very hard to implement
|
| Now that sounds like a technical problem that could be
| solved!
| jusssi wrote:
| A GSuite admin can set domain-wide policy and per-user
| exceptions on what Google services the GSuite domain users
| can use.
|
| Of course, there's some stuff you can disable that
| completely breaks how you'd expect e.g. Android integration
| to work with that account.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Indeed - and they have made a little headway here...
|
| * You can be banned from Google Pay and all payment based
| services, yet still have a Google account which works for
| free services. There are lots of gnarly corners and bugs
| for users in this category, since any call to a billing API
| will fail. Want to use google Meet for a video call? You
| can't because that calls Google Voice to check your balance
| for phone calls, and that fails... You can end up on this
| list if your bank tells Google that they have evidence of
| committing fraud for example.
|
| * Adwords can be banned separately. Usually done for
| accounts who abuse the "$100 of promotional credit"
| things... Prevents use of paid chat in youtube as a side
| effect.
|
| * Various Youtube features can be banned separately from
| the account. Used for copyright strikes etc. Causes side
| effects like for example Google photos can't sync videos as
| part of an android backup because it's the same backend and
| rules.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Doesn't seem an issue at all for almost every other company
| in the world.
|
| Only seems to be an issue for companies like Google who
| ideologically don't provide any way to talk to a human and
| escalate. Amazon manages to have some of the best customer
| service in the world while operating on similar scales with
| far more things that can go wrong.
|
| There is no excuse.
| exikyut wrote:
| 3 completely different points:
|
| 1. Ignore the downvotes. The reality (poor customer service
| perception) is what it is. Objectively looking at the problem
| and what can be done about it, without cynically assuming
| it's impossible, is the most practical focus going forward.
| Thanks very much for this insight, it was really interesting
| to read.
|
| 2. I've noticed various glitches and bugs over the years with
| various services - two I can remember right now are a)
| misspelling a search then clicking "did you mean" won't
| update the titlebar (been watching this one since ~2012), and
| b) accidentally sending an in-progress draft from one device
| will cause followup edits made on another device to sent to
| /dev/null. Well... I look at the kind of time-wasting junk
| input that makes it into Issue Tracker, I look at random app
| feedback, etc, and _I know my feedback is never going to be
| seen_. I can understand why things need to impact 10K people
| to be noticed. I thought I 'd ask you: what's a good
| recommendation here?
|
| 3. Extremely specific question that I happen to be worrying
| about at the moment :) - I wasn't sure which Google account I
| wanted to use to play with GCP some months ago so I ended up
| enabling billing on more than one account using the same
| card. I have an idea I'd like to play which would call for a
| new account (since it would be tied to a YouTube channel) and
| would require me to use the same card yet again. All of this
| would be staying within the free tier, but I still wonder if
| I shouldn't run data takeouts first...? (I can't deny that
| the current state of Google services feels a bit like Russian
| roulette with extra servings of superstition - what doesn't
| kill your account, makes it stronger, or something??)
| mqus wrote:
| > * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-
| longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the
| data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of
| providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be
| delayed.
|
| This is simply wrong since the account is always "banned" and
| not "deleted". So the data is still there, not providing it
| is going _against_ GDPR. Evidence for this is all the
| accounts that were unbanned and still had their data. Make
| the account read-only for all I care but don 't think for a
| second that this data has to be deleted immediately (It
| definitely does not, there are reasons and reasonable ways
| for data to be retained for some time)
|
| > * Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any
| employee with blanket access to your account. That means they
| couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these
| accounts - without being able to see the account private
| data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad
| accounts.
|
| But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough
| attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
|
| > * Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who
| doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually
| there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help
| identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF
| file containing an illegal image, then trick them into
| clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside
| the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
|
| So simultaneusly you can look at the image to ban the account
| but can't look at it to unban it? I get that the first one is
| done by algorithms and the second one presumably is not but
| calling this a privacy issue is laughable since you don't
| have to look at the content in the first place.
|
| All of your points don't adress the issue of "The user does
| not even know why he was banned" at all. Luckily there are EU
| laws in the pipeline for that.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough
| attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
|
| Having 10 highly paid long-tenured engineering employees
| who can look at small parts of a users account data is
| clearly better than having 10,000 call center workers be
| able to access user private data.
|
| The end result is high profile incidents get handled in a
| way that it would be too risky to do for everyone.
|
| Even with the small pool of engineers, there are
| incidents[1] where user data is used inappropriately. Would
| you make this pool larger?
|
| [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-
| stalked-teen...
| Closi wrote:
| Or how about this: when the engine triggers a ban it just
| notes the reason for the ban in the database, and then
| tells the user why the ban happened?
|
| I don't see why all the reasons above mean basic
| transparency can't happen.
| [deleted]
| exikyut wrote:
| Sadly this would make the system utterly trivial to
| gamify. Google have multiple billion accounts (Chrome has
| 2B users). I use "utterly trivial" here because "XYZ is
| likely" type events that might occur at xxx,xxx users
| translate to "sheer overwhelming force of statistics"
| when you get to x,xxx,xxx,xxx users - if you have 100,000
| users and just 10 people successfully figure out how
| something works internally, scaling that to 1,000,000,000
| users increases that pool of 10 people itself to 100,000.
| And a pool of 100,000 proactive and interested people is
| more than enough to create several thousand cottage
| industries, lots of competition, then one or two emerge
| at the top and become an exponential force, etc etc etc.
| anticensor wrote:
| > Or how about this: when the engine triggers a ban it
| just notes the reason for the ban in the database, and
| then tells the user why the ban happened?
|
| > Sadly this would make the system utterly trivial to
| gamify
|
| There is a reasonable middle ground that would make
| gamification harder and at the same time satisfy less
| abusive users. You can disclose the sanction immediately,
| would need to add a short but variable delay before
| disclosing the underlying reason, to prevent abusing from
| abusing the system repeatedly.
| yut43 wrote:
| > * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in
| his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to
| confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)
|
| If you had experience with this, you would know that you just
| described the polar opposite of how that process works in the
| United States. Federal law requires human verification as
| part of the mandatory NCMEC reporting process. If you're
| employed by Google and have that impression of how it works
| it means the green badges doing the work aren't known to you,
| which isn't a huge shock since TVCs are barely one step above
| disposable barcode at Google.
|
| Source: I've forensically verified enough child exploitation
| in the course of tech employment to make me thoroughly and
| irredeemably despise humanity as a species. (Fighting
| insurance to pay for therapy I now need, against their will,
| was fun too.)
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Even if all of that is completely true, failing to engage in
| any form of communication with a business partner whose
| services you cut off without any notice is reprehensible.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Communication is one thing, but not having any appeals
| process other than hoping a social media post goes viral
| enough for Google to take action is ridiculous.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-
| longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the
| data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of
| providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be
| delayed.
|
| I do not think GDPR works like that. You can absolutely store
| information pertaining to "why" questions because that is
| still a service they will be providing. Also, whenever they
| restore some's service they give data back. So they have
| obviously not deleted the data.
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