Posted by agwa 1 day ago
Haha, what "people"? Even people who aren't computer techies seems to be aware having a Google account is "a privilege lost at any time for any reason", almost everyone seems to know at least one acquaintance that somehow lost access to their personal account at one point and if you bring up any Google products in discussions, it isn't uncommon to hear "Yeah, I'd give that a try if I want to use a product that only works for a year".
Not sure there are many people left treating Google as a "trusted partner" unless you have a multi-million deal/contact with them.
Any hosted email, paid or free, is going to have terms and conditions and you will be able to find anecdotes from people whose service was suspended "for no reason" but it's that or buy your own domain and host your own email.
Those aren't the only two options, there are two in the middle ground (and perhaps more that I'm failing to think of) that are well worth considering.
Option 1:
The best option IMO (what I chose, anyway) is to buy your own domain, and point its DNS MX records to a reliable email provider, which can even be gmail (though they're not who I chose).
That way you get almost none of the hassle of hosting your own email - it's very quick to set up the DNS records when you first get the domain, easy enough that even non-tech people can follow a simple tutorial, and after that you don't have anything to manage - and you don't need to worry about whether your emails will look trustworthy enough to avoid going straight into most people's spam folders (so long as you pick a provider that most of the world's email servers do tend to trust, such as gmail).
But if you do get locked out by the email provider you choose, you can point the DNS records at a different provider and not have lost your address. Obviously it's slightly more expensive than using gmail for free, but it's fairly cheap, affordable for many people (though not everyone).
Option 2:
Alternatively, if you need to stick to a free solution, you could create a free account at two different providers (let's say Protonmail and Gmail, or Hotmail and Yahoo, or...); have one of them as your primary email account, that you use like normal, but use the other one for signing up to accounts that would be a problem to lose ability to receive emails from.
Have the second account set up to automatically forward everything to your primary account. That way, when you need to click an email verification link, or open a password reset email, or whatever, it will have been forwarded to the inbox you use normally, so there's no extra hassle. But if you do lose access to your main account, you can still login to the account that receives the important emails to access them directly and to change it to forward to a new primary account elsewhere.
Of course there's still technically a risk that your important emails account could also be shut, but if you are only using it to receive emails from companies that you create accounts with, and you're never sending anything from it nor using it for any other services (ie not also using it for YouTube or similar) then the chances of losing access are almost as low as the chances of that business completely disappearing without warning.
There are cheaper options than Google Workspace (which is £11.80/month) for quality email hosts for your custom domain though - like FastMail (£4.50/month), ProtonMail (£8.19/month), or Microsoft 365 Business Basic (£5.52/month).
Personally I think it's a price well worth paying for knowing you genuinely own your own email address (while not having to manage both the software and the reputation of your own email server) - even more so if you either have friends/family to share the cost with (one domain cost between you, and potentially discounted per-account cost for multiple users depending on the plans available from the various email host options, such as Fastmail family going as low as $2.33/user/month), or if you also want other services bundled with email (such as Google Workspace's other tools, or Office 365 software, etc)
But for anyone who can't afford it, the free alternative of Option 2 from my comment above is still a big upgrade on just relying on a single account for everything.
Trouble is that whilst many have realized that Google (like much of Big Tech) is the quintessential example of a Poisoned Chalice they remain all too aware they've little choice but to endure or risk unavoidable abuse.
The tragedy of the modern internet is that these monopolies have reduced competition and choice to irrelevancies.
Sometimes protests that reach enough crowd get heard and the problem gets fixed...
That's the stuff of revolution. Feudalists don't listen until forced to under duress, that's when things usually turn very nasty—shades of 1789 and like. The Ancien Régime sans a head or two.
Feudalists all have certain traits in common: arrogance and a sense of superiority coupled with shortsightedness and a lack of empathy.
> Haha, what "people"?
You should see the sideways looks I get from people when they find out I backup all our gmail to another service and don't allow employees to use Google SSO logins for sites. Just encase googles 'fraud' bots randomly shut down our workspace. I don't want the entire business to ground to a halt because we can't login to any sites.
I've never talked to anyone outside of tech circles like this that has any inkling that Google just shutters people's digital lives with no warning or recourse.
In general, with any kind of mainstream large company, you should assume that the overall public perception of them is that they're fine, of course, if they weren't why would they be so big and popular??
Because they generally don't do this. The people who get suspended are not just normies using gmail. They are (as in this case) running complicated services doing a lot of access to Google APIs and though likely with no bad intent are activating tripwires that Google has set up to detect abuse.
If you think about Google, even about the possibility of Google banning an account, and a story like that is the first thing that comes to your mind, you are already an outlier. We all are here.
I thought I was specific enough but seems maybe I wasn't clear enough. I'm specifically talking about "outside of tech circles" (hence the "Even people who aren't computer techies"). I'm talking about acquaintances that works in retail stores, gas stations and similar, even these people seem averse to Google today when I've chatted with them about it for unrelated reasons.
Maybe it's because this is in Europe and people generally have more measured views of US companies, especially as of late? Not sure how it looks/seems in other parts in the world, but since I'm bound to one location, I definitely live in some sort of local bubble here like everyone else on this earth, not gonna lie :)
Practice or experimentation – Some folks test models by having them participate in “realistic” online discussions to see if they can blend in, reason well, or emulate community tone.
Engagement farming – A few users or bots might automate posting to build karma or drive attention to a linked product or blog.
Time-saving for lurkers – Some people who read HN a lot but don’t like writing might use a model to articulate or polish a thought.
Subtle persuasion / seeding – Companies or advocacy groups occasionally use LLMs to steer sentiment about technologies, frameworks, or policy topics, though HN’s moderation makes that risky.
Just for fun – People like to see if a model can sound “human enough” to survive an HN thread without being called out.
So, yeah — not much at stake, but it’s a good sandbox for observing model behavior in the wild.
Would you say you’ve actually spotted comments that felt generated lately?
Yesterday was a wise account(1), the week before was GitHub (2)
Companies are fiefdoms, they’re not democracies with a judicial system. If one of the automated sheriffs identifies you as a criminal, it doesn’t put you on trial, but directly sentences you to jail. Your process from there is never clear and it's anyone's guess to what the outcome will be.
1: https://shaun.nz/why-were-never-using-wise-again-a-cautionar...
Just anedotally, I've had my wechat account blocked before and it took less than a day to talk to a person to get it sorted. At least PRC censorship has good customer service.
Reddit recently shadowbanned me as my account was approaching 20 years old. There was no message about what violation had been committed, and attempts to appeal went unanswered. All posts started getting filtered at some point and all comments throttled.
The Fediverse provides a template for a better way-- smaller connected services with better moderator to user ratios.
Is it still true that pretty much anyone can post your handle with #fediblock and get you and your entire instance sent to the cornfield automatically by hundreds of servers? This destroyed my city's mastodon instance and drove everyone I knew there to bluesky.
I've been on the Fediverse for nearly a decade. I've jumped instances a few times. I'm currently with an instance run by a friend I've known online for well over a decade, who does have a strict moderation approach, but is also reachable out-of-band and is quite responsive and principled.
On Reddit, Google, FB, etc., you've got a single provider, and if they freeze you out you are fully frozen out.
It's weird to have to explain this to someone who's used Fediverse services for nearly a decade.
After a ban, it's no easier or harder to make a new account on a new mastodon instance than it is to make a new account on reddit/google/fb/etc. You're never fully frozen out of anything, that's not the point. The point is that gmail will never stop accepting emails from yahoo addresses regardless of how many badly behaved yahoo users there are.
It's sufficiently well administered that I'm not aware of any instances defederating it. Where I'm aware of instances being widely defederated, it's almost always been gross abuse and failure of admins to respond in an appropriate or timely manner. I'd left one such instance on account of just such a failure. (Several others shut down, another not-uncommon occurrence.)
Profile migration still has many failings, but it does make moving to and establishing connections from a new instance pretty painless. Losing your old history is a bit of a drag.
As a correction, though - emails get bounced based on opaque reputation rules (domain-related or otherwise) all the time. Email and fedi are very similar in this respect.
1. Some designated entity decides who gets hidden from everyone's feed. (Google is here)
2. Everyone decides on their own, who they want to hide from their own feeds.
2a. The same but they can also form voluntary groups that share ignore-lists between each other. (Fediverse is here)
3. You can't hide spammers from your feed.
1 is vulnerable to the entity being corrupt (they always turn corrupt) - let's say 5% of global ignore list entries are there for corrupt reasons.
2a has the exact same problem but it's separately per ignore list group, perhaps each individual ignore list has 5% corrupt entries on average, which conversely means that every person is on about 5% of the ignore lists for corrupt reasons. Instead of 5% of the people being on 100% of the lists, now 100% of people are on 5% of the lists (except the spammers who are on 95%) which may give an impression the system is more corrupt than option 1.
The other options, 2 and 3, mean you're constantly bombarded by spam so you give up and quit the platform entirely.
This problem is unsolvable.
It would take thousands, at least, with top training and the breathing space to actually engage with customers individually. Mind you Google should still do it in my opinion.
The companies you speak of are billion- and trillion-dollar companies. Banning people is not the only viable way of doing things.
They have the money. They choose not to spend it.
A customer does something crappy, e.g.: generates an image they aren't supposed to, and boom you're business Gmail and/or the recovery personal Gmail gone forever.
(remote identity proofing and fraud mitigation is a component of my work in finance)
https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3-Implementation-Resources/63A...
https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3-Implementation-Resources/63A...
For example, the old Uber with the crazy thing they did. What if in the alternate universe they straight up got banned? That’s it. All investments would go to zero.
The zeitgeist of the time wouldn't have allowed that. Everybody talking about banning Uber or Airbnb was framed as an enemy of progress.
Businesses want to make money on the apps people want.
Businesses exchange money for goods and services.
You exchange money for food and shelter.
Lots of businesses can fail at any time. People still run them and work for them as long as it makes money, and WHEN it stops working, they stop that and do something else to make money. All business is ephemeral.
We opened a case to appeal asking for more details or a review. Meanwhile, we're scrambling to implement some kind of workaround for our users that log in with their Google account.
And then early the next day, we get the email that our appeal was granted. Just need to be sure we follow the terms and conditions in the future.
I guess it could have been worse but still a bit of a slap in the face.
Does Google-synced passkeys on Google Password Manager still work even when your account is suspended?
Can't recover your accounts because you can't access your email, unless Google still allows existing email client access even when suspended but I'm not unfortunate enough to test this out.
In this case:
1: SSLMate is a paying customer. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
2: Google harmed SSLMate, and their customers, by deliberately interrupting the services that were paid for.
The big question is if SSLMate was following the terms of service. If SSLMate was actually violating the terms, then it's a hard case to make. Otherwise, Google violated the contract and harmed SSLMate, and is therefore a valid target in US court.
If enough people started making companies show up to small claims court for their shitty behaviour maybe they wouldn't act so shitty.
So Mary from legal walks over to Manager whoever and says "Hey why the fuck did you terminate this guys account? Now I have to go to court."
Account reinstated. You drop the case.
This produces stupidly improved results.
covers some situations where someone stops you for making money, for no good reason.
"As an example, someone could ... obstruct someone's ability to honor a contract with a client by deliberately refusing to deliver necessary goods."
I guess a lawyer can argue against this, but I'd say that losing access to a lifetime if mails is absolutely up there with "legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her."
And from my own experience building software for government services, I can tell you this: In my experience in those systems it is not acceptable to just have a list where someone clicks “deny” all day. Or allow for that matter. We tried with a system were the rule is that the citizen gets <think they apply for> whenever all relevant demands are met. Legal was very clear: No automated decisions either way unless the relevant laws or regulations explicitly allow it, every case has to be reviewed independently — even when the outcome seems completely obvious to anyone who knows the field.