I’m getting sick of the “take no responsibility for human or computer mistakes by creating automated processes where fixing the mistake manually can’t be done or hurts a KPI”.
FedEx lost my package. Apparently there’s no process to flag it missing without being able to physically scan the missing item (???). It’s permanently marked as “out for delivery”, so all of their systems tell you everything is fine and actively work against you ever reaching a human.
Meanwhile the sender has an automated system that checks the FedEx tracking number, sees “out for delivery”, and does the same thing. Even when I do reach humans at both FedEx and the sender it’s obvious they can’t do anything except sympathize with the situation.
I feel like I’m part of some sort of psychological experiment at this point.
> Maybe I should actually try to vote with my wallet and switch to that iPhone, move my files from Google Drive to iCloud or Dropbox, and migrate to Fastmail. But I know Google can afford to simply not care.
Companies will quite literally treat you like dirt and people continue to use them. I understand there are certain things you're locked into (I very much use android despite google; not like there's much choice in a duopoly) but if they've already shown they don't care about you and you still use google search, chrome, gmail, GCP, storage, etc then that's on you.
Why would they change when you're willing to pay despite their crappy practices?
Life pro tip (I believe that everyone should do this):
- Buy a domain and set up a custom email that represents you like firstname@firstlast.com - you own this domain and email address and no company, with the exception of your registrar maybe, has any control over it or authority to take it from you.
- Set up a dummy gmail/proton/whatever acct with a random address - this address will never be used or exposed publicly but it will represent your online email hosting acct.
- Forward your custom email address to the email provider address and configure the web client to send from your custom address.
- set your provider email account up in a local client like outlook that allows you to create a local backup.
- continue watching your previous account and updating your accounts to your new lifetime address. At some point, you should be getting minimal emails to the old account, then you can forward it to your new one.
The idea here is that you've decoupled your identity (your email address) from your webmail provider (gmail)
So google inexplicably cuts your access. Now what?
No problem. You have a local backup of all your emails in outlook. You repeat the process with a different service like proton (or a new gmail acct) with a new dummy email. Then you set the new acct up in outlook and drag all of the emails from your old acct in to the new one you haven't missed a beat. You're still sending and receiving emails to/from the same address and you can access all your historical emails in the new hosting acct because you migrated/synced them all over locally in outlook.
Losing access to your email identity is arguably one of the most catastrophic scenarios you can think of in terms of being online. This guards against that about as much as possible. It doesn't cover other services like voice and stuff but you can follow similar strategies for things like documents and files.
Not to address the author of the article specifically, but only all readers generally....
I would suggest that the moment you chose to have a critical dependency on someone else's services, it becomes incumbent on you to have a disaster recovery plan should that service suddenly become unavailable to you. How formal or intense such a plan is may depend on if you're an individual or a small/mid-sized business that's too small to command the respect of your vendor in the event of a problem (real or imagined on the part of the vendor). You have to take a defensive approach to these relationships even if part of the reason you buy these services is not to worry about such issues: you may have moved and transformed what you have to worry about, but you have not freed yourself from any worry.
We can hand-wave that away muttering about, "most people won't understand"... but at the end of the day it's the modern, connected world we live in and failing to be properly educated about that world is fraught with peril. Those that respect that reality will do better than those that don't.
Slightly OT, but since it was mentioned in the article, only slightly:
> A silver lining is that with the new line, I was able to get a new iPhone 15 for almost free after bill credits.
No, you just got free financing on the phone. If you compare their contract plan rates to their prepaid plan rates, you're paying more over the course of your contract for the same plan.
While people like to scream and lose their mind about who the president is and what they're blathering on about today it's this situation that I never see any politician talk about in a meaningful way and I never see get attention. This situation impacts the average person and has the potential to impact the average person more than who the president is at any given time. Because at least with governmental politics there is actual recourse.
Until we demand that our government begin to prioritize consumer rights against these modern-day robber barons this kind of stuff will continue to happen. Unfortunately until it happens to you nobody seems to care. Often times the person that happens to gets blamed because their actions definitely must have caused this.
This would actually be a fairly simple thing for the FTC to correct if they wanted to. They're already empowered to do this kind of stuff and wouldn't need any new powers granted to them. They could simply say when an account is suspended or disabled or you are banned including a shadow ban that you must provide the specific details of what caused the ban and what specific provisions were violated in the terms of service. Because when you're the size of Google you effectively are a monopolistic common carrier. So being able to say something like we can do this at any time for any reason is not appropriate at that scale. Because denying you access to phone service is denying you access to a basic utility.
It would actually be interesting to see state boards of utilities begin to pull things like this under their control. This would give enormous consumer rights to people. Because while your landline carrier can deny you service and remove your service they must have very strict documented reasons for that and there is an actual transparent appeal process as part of it. Filing an appeal and not being able to be part of the appealed discussion is not an appeal at all.
Was the number used to sign up for, and receive communications from credit card companies? Is the ban related to signing up for +100 cards?
https://www.dannyguo.com/blog/my-credit-and-debit-card-colle...
IANAL, but my understanding is that EU Digital Services Act (DSA) protects EU consumers against this lack of transparency for moderation/bans.
https://freedomhouse.org/article/eu-digital-services-act-win... "Providers of hosting services, including online platforms, now have an express legal obligation to provide clear and specific statements of reasons for their content moderation decisions. The DSA also empowers users to challenge such decisions through an out-of-court dispute settlement mechanism."
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/16/24074933/european-union-d... "When it comes to content moderation, sites will have to provide a reason to users when their content or account has been moderated, and offer them a way of complaining and challenging the decision. There are also rules around giving users the ability to flag illegal goods and services found on a platform."
That's exactly why I have been de-Googling for the past year. I have lost all trust in Google. I still use some of their products, but I make sure I never got in a situation where losing my Google account means losing important data or getting myself into serious trouble.
Folks, do not use Voice for anything critical. It has all the hallmarks of a "destaffed" project - no significant updates in years, nobody even bothers to rename it every 6 months. For all we know it's a purely volunteer effort at Google, like Reader was shortly before it got canned. I only use it in the cases where I need to leave a phone number and I know I'll get spammed.
This is why I export my emails to my laptop on a regular basis with GYB (https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back) even though I am a paying Google for Business customer.
The real controversy here however is the dependency on a US phone number for securely transacting in so many ways. Carriers barely can hold onto a number for you with SIM swaps and there is no such concept as "owning" a phone number
This guy is lucky they only banned his Google Voice account.
Years ago I lost an entire Yahoo! account with paid hosting for my side gig at the time along with years emails because I apparently broke their ToS by asking a question deemed inappropriate on Yahoo! Answers.
If you use Google services eventually this is going to happen, its common and widespread and they aren't interested in fixing the problem. You never get an answer as to what you did wrong and likely it was just an algorithm error anyway. Avoid anything of substance on a google account and what you do use assume it could disappear tomorrow.
This is actually fairly terrifying, I have used google voice for around 15 years myself (since acquisition), and use it as my main inbound line for multiple numbers actually. After verizon screwed me too circa 2009, I treat cell phones like burners, and really only use GVoice as my main inbound. It is all my mfa, sms, professional identity number, etc, and has always been solid as such as I use it with a paid gsuite I run my life out of too.
If they terminated my voice, I would be very much up a creek, and something I've considered as google tends to graveyard services enough and I can't imagine it is still high on anyone's give a shit list there.
I'd be curious if anyone else uses a like methodology with another service out there today. I've looked for alternatives over the years, and find really none for my needs for everything Google Voice provides and the android integration I use.
Is there a simple small claims court approach to this that would serve as a more convoluted way to actually access support from Google and other large companies?
I feel like if this happened to me I wouldn't even try getting in touch with Google support, having had enough experience myself and read enough of these stories to know it would be a frustrating waste of time.
But if there was a legal hack to do it that forced them to reply and cost them more money, even if it cost me some, it might be worth it in cases where the downsides (like losing your phone number of 15 years!!) are so high.
This is why I ported my Google number away years ago, and I'm happy I did so. That said, phone is considered a utility, and I"m puzzled why Google Voice isn't regulated as such by now.
I went back to using my cell number for exactly this reason. My Google Voice number still works, but I don't want to risk it getting locked out for no reason.
I have stopped using Gmail, Google One, and Google Voice.
I still use photos, contacts, and calendar, but I frequently do takeouts of all those and can handle it if they die.
It's trouble I just don't need. But I'm guessing Google doesn't notice if a few of us leave, so why should they change?
Damn, that one hits close to home.
I have a custom domain for my email + a docker instance running Thunderbird, configured to keep an up-to-date local copy of my gmail. So if I lost access to gmail, it'd be a pain in the rear, but I wouldn't really loose that much.
But I hadn't thought much about my google voice account. That's the phone number I usually give out, although some friends and family do have my verizon number.
I suppose I need to figure out how to make regular backups of my google voice messages also.
I use Google Voice with my number after having left the US for Europe. I don’t need any of the Voice features and could rely on VoWiFi when roaming instead, except maintaining even the most basic line in the US was costly, at least the last time I checked a few years back. Any idea if this has changed in any way? Are there any plans that cost little to none that won’t be cancelled with little use?
I have been using Google voice for 10+ years, and it's always been something that concerns me. I've been worried about Google either banning me or dropping the service. Does anyone know of a good alternative, I'm happy to pay for something but the main thing is it needs to be able to work from the browser like Google voice.
>Sure I never paid for Google Voice, but Google never gave me an option to pay for it.
Pretty sure you can pay for Google Voice: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9229433
While this sucks, I know that my free Google accounts (including Voice) could go poof at any time and I don't really have recourse. For this reason, my Google Voice number is only used for likely spammers.
It's also part of my sales pitch or "branded email" to web clients: "You don't want to operate your business on a free email address".
He was also targeted by Google's automated system? Odd, he was not so lucky.
> My only worry has been that it seems like another product that Google could easily decide to kill off and send to the Google graveyard at any moment.
I feel the same way about Blogger, and I even had a page on Blogger that was banned after I signed in on their Android app. This was around 2020-2021 and I only requested a manual approval by an email button IIRC, that got that page back up as fast as it got taken down.
It is sad that Google Voice and Blogger are neglected enough for this to happen.
Thankfully when I signed up for Google Voice I had a few friends send me text messages and none of them came through. I wrote it off as unreliable and never thought about it again. Scary to think I almost let myself become reliant on a Google service back when I was naive enough to think that was a good idea.
My strategy for this class of issue is paying Google. I pay for Google Apps (now rebranded to workspace). I have so much of my life tied up into the Google Ecosystem I see no problem paying per month for their services. This also provides me a number to call when shit doesn't work.
I've a very simple rule after multiple bad experiences dealing with google products: I'm never going to pay for any google service or product ever again. If its free I'll use it, and make sure i can move my data off it when (not if) they decide to shutter it.
Try jmp.chat, you can use an XMPP client to receive phone calls and sms.
I use the following services:
- phone number: jmp.chat and a textnow number as backup
- email: fastmail
- search: kagi
- map: apple map
Welcome to the club! My Adsense account was banned years ago with no explanation or anything. They even stole my balance. I've heard of similar horror stories of people losing years worth of email and other data with no recourse. As machine learning algorithms become more widespread, expect this to become even more common with a lot of services. Whether paid or free, you're just a number and can be disabled at anytime whenever their flawed algorithms flag you for any reason. I've been actively switching away from Google as much as possible and encourage others to do the same. For email, I use custom domain (still hosted on old Google Apps) so I can switch whenever needed.
The author should consider himself lucky. Just one google service has been suspended. I got my account banned for no reason and lost access to more than 10 years worth of emails, documents, single sign ons to different apps, etc.
Only invoking GDPR and the ownership of a domain name allowed me to regain access and restore email service. Without GDPR I would've got nothing at all.
the best way to get customer service is to be famous and tweet about it. Getting famous is the hard part.
And at the end of all that he still doesnt know why he was banned. And this was a paying customer. What a truly despicable company google is.
Yeah, this is a nightmare scenario for me and why I moved off of Google Voice after using it nearly my entire adult life (shoutout GrandCentral!). Google is just not reliable anymore.
Yet another Google account/service-banning horror story. For this reason, I proactively migrated off Gmail earlier this year to Fastmail. Very happy that I did.
The only important thing I have left on Google now is 15 years of Location History. I'm still figuring out where to move that to.
That sucks. Another non-dissenting voice silenced.
Yet another "Google did this evil thing to me ..." article
He should be more mad, in my opinion.
It’s ludicrous that Google can simply kill your phone number and nobody bats an eye. It’s such a fundamental part of life at this point.
At the minimum, users should get a “We are no longer willing to provide you service. You have two weeks before service will end. Please switch your number to another provider if you want to keep it.”
Other than non-payment, are there other phone companies that simply disable your account without warning and without giving any reason?
I can imagine something like, "You are required to live in this geographic range, but the majority of the time you are outside of it.” Or “You are too expensive to continue to support” or any number of other things. But man, no warning, no reason, no recourse, disappear your phone access? That’s just plain bad.