
Why I Quit Using Google - thekyle
https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/01/09/why-i-quit-google/
======
xenator
I love that other companies have sustainable alternatives to Google services.
But these articles looks more like hype train and doesn’t really add any new
value for me.

You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another
small company that want to become another big company next day.

Probably I’m getting old but I remember times when Google doesn’t exists. We
had software for files, messages, calls, calendars etc. It was based on
different protocols, may be less secure and more naive. But it was ok for
these days.

There is life outside of Google, and always was. May be for “millenials” you
need to be brave to leave this circle, but I don't getting it. What is so
special in using other providers? Is it just... normal?

~~~
jvagner
The point of this article is to switch from one Google for a lot of services
to a disparate group of providers for same services... if one of the service
providers goes away, or is no longer palatable, only the service they provide
needs to be relocated.

Google can suspend your account and the 20-30 things you depend on them can go
away (or, at least, be unavailable in a customized fashion based on your own
data). That's less of a risk if you use different providers for different
services.

~~~
ravenstine
To make matters worse, Google isn't known for their good customer service.

~~~
creato
This is often repeated, and I believe it... but on the other hand, I've been
using google services pretty heavily for over a decade, including some paid
services, and I've never _wanted_ customer service from google over all that
time. Precisely the thing I like about google services is that their shit
works and I don't need help from them to use it.

I suppose there's a risk of account suspension as mentioned above, but I still
feel that risk is very low for me, my perception of these incidents that make
noise on social media/HN is there is at least semi-shady shenanigans involved
that trip spam/fraud/etc. alarms. I don't push those kinds of buttons, and
neither do the vast majority of people, so I think this is a non-factor for
most.

~~~
dkersten
Most people also don’t ever need customer service from PayPal, or any company
really. The point is that when you do, you’re screwed. That’s not a worthwhile
risk for important services like email. For other things perhaps it is.

And everybody thinks it won’t happen to them. Every time there is a PayPal
horror story there are comments from people whose business relies on them
saying that they don’t believe the risk is high and that it won’t happen to
them.

~~~
fluffything
I needed PayPal customer service once cause I got scammed for thousands of
dollars.

Customer support was excellent, professional and quick. I got all my money
back in 3-4 days.

~~~
dkersten
> I got all my money back in 3-4 days.

Sounds like this was as a customer. PayPal are known to have good service for
customers; most of the horror stories are as sellers (where getting bad
customer service, having your funds frozen or account closed is also a LOT
more painful than as a customer since it could sink your business).

~~~
fluffything
Yes, it was as a customer. When I sell stuff online, its either cash, bank
transfer, or Paypal "as friends", never Paypal "ware or service", because it's
super easy for sellers to get scammed by customers.

I think that's a good thing. If you are selling stuff online using PayPal, you
should be at least be big enough to afford a lawyer that helps you with
PayPal.

As a customer, however, you are often way less protected.

------
tomaszs
The same goes for Facebook. My company uses a legimate Business Account to
handle ads of our clients. Nothing shady there. Regular SMB ads. More or less
a month ago i receive an email the whole account has been blocked due to some
violations. Whole freaking account. Without any warnings. We had clear
history. And this means essencially you can close your company if you run only
FB ads because you can not create another ads account.

Eventually they recovered the account in 48 hours and wrote they are sorry.

But the thing is it does not solve the problem. You can loose your business
just by a system mistake in a second.

And it seems like there is always a way out. But there is not always. Really,
does a company of a size of a Facebook or Google care about one person or one
small business?

I had a Instagram account for 10 years with my photos and fought 6 months to
get it back after hacker takeover. Believe me i have tried everything to get
it back. And no, there was no way. There is no number you can call to fix it.

Its just so dangerous to have such single points of failure nowadays like
Facebook or Google. Both for business and personal use. Its just great to hear
a person who was able to remove it.

~~~
therealmarv
Yes you are so right. Your topic and text (single point of failure) reads for
me like a beginning of a whole article. Nowadays there are also new Fintech
banks who operate like Google and have only chat and no telephone support.
Imagine getting locked out of your bank account (because of a false positive
in an Anti Money Laundering AI) and you can reach nobody in time.

~~~
tomaszs
Exactly. Part of this problem is visible right now with PayPal, one of
greatest FinTech projects. AML lockdowns but also disputes. Lately i have read
people sell for twice the price just because one of two transations
aproximately is a fraud.

------
Mistri
Has anyone else had experience with getting their Google account suspended? I
literally use it for everything in my life, and without it I would probably
lose access to a lot. I would change away from Google in a heartbeat but it
just seems like too much effort if I can avoid getting my account suspended in
the first place.

If anyone has gotten their account suspended, what was it for and how can I
avoid it?

~~~
dredmorbius
Several times, several different accounts.

Fortunately Google is (or more accurately, was) simply a convenience for me.

I have not yet fully deactivated the several Gmail accounts I have still
standing, though those are largely inactive, and most are strictly associated
with specific nyms I'd created (one notably after a primary nym account was
suspended).

The best way to avoid having your Google account be suspended is to not have
one.

But moving to self-hosting, or increasingly, entirely offline, has been a goal
and project of the past few years.

I touch a few Google services directly:

\- Google Scholar: still amongst the best academic search engines I'm aware
of.

\- Google Ngram Viewer and Google Trends: quite useful for tracking concepts
over time.

\- Google Maps: There are times OpenStreetMap's search simply falls down _even
when specifying lat /lon coordinates directly_, Because Reasons. Google Maps
is my fallback, but I still rely on it far more than I'd care to.

\- Gmail: Secondary for several accounts.

\- YouTube: still the largest online video hosting service, though alternative
interfaces ([https://invidio.us/](https://invidio.us/)) and alternate hosts
(both centralised and federated or self-hosted) are increasingly viable.
YouTube's UI tweaks and aggressive pre-roll ads over the past several months
have been aggressively user-unfriendly.

\- Google Web Search. A very distant second to DuckDuckGo, but still necessary
for 1) date-bounded search, 2) getting overall counts of results (occasionally
useful), and 3) rare edge-cases where DDG doesn't turn up expected/desired
results (GWS is ~50% successful here).

I don't know if it's because I rely so heavily on DDG that I'm influencing its
results, but I find that both searches _and content_ that I've posted tends to
turn up high-ranked on it. I'm not as aware of this with Google.

~~~
rapnie
I like to self-host too, and there is a huge amount of awesome selfhosted [0]
software to be had.

Only problem is, you have to be willing to become a moderately good sysadmin
and spend your time doing the chores to keep your systems up-to-date. This
takes considerable amount of time. Dropping the ball once, and you may find
yourself hacked (I had this recently when being slow in updating a nginx
reverse proxy).

[0] [https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-
selfhosted](https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted)

~~~
dredmorbius
Self-hosting applies more to data. If I've got the bits, I can deploy them (or
channel them) elsewhere. If I don't, I'm SOL.

Self-hosted services -- Web, Mail, messaging, etc., -- remains more
complicated. I really wish it weren't, I've been watching projects for a
decade and more now to make it less so. I'm thinking that this won't happen.

Simply based on skills distribution, some sort of federation or clustering at
the level of 1 admin per 100 - 100k users is probably necessary. That's a
scope at which regional or interest-based community hosting becomes viable. At
the same time, it means thousands to millions of individual service providers,
a scope at which at least _some_ mechansisms of mass surveillance (state,
capitalist, non-state actor, criminal) become less viable.

Concentration is its own risk.

------
telegrammae
What's reasonable is if you want to avoid using Google services (for whatever
reason), then you do not need to be fanatical about it. Move off gradually,
one service at a time, and keep using some Google services, if you really must
- why not?

~~~
thatsenough
Because that doesn't feed into the outrage machine and drive clicks.

~~~
close04
The fact that a company is allowed to amass so much of your digital life but
then lock you out with no recourse _should_ cause outrage. It's no different
than if your landlord, your bank, or the post office decided one day to lock
you out and not even bother to give you an explanation, let alone to give you
back your money and property.

We live in a world where services like the ones Google provides aren't just
optional, they're critical for so many people. Some have less money in the
bank or home than the value of their emails, contacts, media, and whatever
else may be stored in Google's systems. Some of those things are priceless.

I agree that it's Google's right to refuse to have/keep you as a user/customer
but they should be legally forced to give you back _all_ of your data or at
the very least give a generous notice period.

~~~
buran77
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Having your data confiscated like this
is definitely outrageous and should be illegal. Right now we rely on this
being bad PR for the company doing it but that's not enough especially for the
giants. The user pays for the service by allowing the provider to monetize
their data not by forfeiting the right to even get a copy.

I'm actually hoping that some regulation will be put in place to protect users
and ensure that they never lose their data.

~~~
BuckRogers
It's because most people in my country (US) are brainwashed, supporting and
voting for things against their own self-interests like groveling at the feet
of entities like Google. They think the end user, like employees, should have
no rights, and are lucky to have what they're given. There's no fight, because
it requires less fortitude to craft a story in your mind that the dominant
force and apparent way forward (corporate domination) is somehow good, to
avoid having to do any real work in fighting the system. It's laziness,
intellectual and physical that pervades our society. Yet many of the same
people will call the French, "lazy". It's the other way around.

Prudent regulation is necessary, but a strong lobbyist group for programmers
such as a union or professional association would hurry that along much
faster. Developers are end users too, and would be the most likely source of
such a push in today's system. Unfortunately unlike lawyers, dentists and
doctors, programmers think they're too smart to get organized.

------
2ion
Who can afford for their main email account (gsuite, paid), cloud hosting (if
you use it, maybe even for business), means of payment (gpay), backup and
storage (drive) to get banned/locked without meaningful support just because
you happen to post a comment on a yt video that some googler or algorithm
found offensive/non-pc or you happened to log into your account from the wrong
IP address, city or continent?

As soon as I started travelling frequently, gmail/google was not longer an
option. You can't rely on it. Can't trust it.

That, on top of everything else is a dealbreaker.

~~~
koheripbal
The logic applies to basically ALL cloud based services.

We had our entire company profile for Indeed disabled because a couple of our
ads were commission-based positions - which only became an issue when paused
those postings (because they don't care while you're giving them money).

Their appeals process was non-existent, and they turned off everything - the
whole account - so I couldn't even post for an accountant.

Literally all cloud based companies have this danger.

------
ReverseCold
I remembered seeing this post on Mastodon, and it turns out this website
federates. My response from Mastodon is listed as a comment on this website.

The wonders of ActivityPub...

~~~
nolroz
I tried getting into Mastadon a while back but didn't manage to find decent
instances to subscribe to. There's just so many! Any advice on where to get
started?

~~~
snisarenko
Hey, I am working on a mastodon aggregator, which can help with exploring
instances and figuring out which one to join. It should be launching soon!

[https://mastodonia.club](https://mastodonia.club)

~~~
Kye
I hope you get consent from people and instances before aggregating any data
like posts and profiles. This kind of thing is _very_ unpopular on the
fediverse if done the wrong way. Meaning without permission.

~~~
snisarenko
That's a fair point. I am definitely not trying to anger the fediverse
community. I just want to make it more discoverable. I was assuming since
mastodon instances have public apis, and public "explore" feeds, creating an
aggregator was no different than creating a mastodon instance with a different
ui. I am also being pretty respectful in terms of how frequently I ping the
api. I also include contact information the user-agent that hits the api. I
would respect any instances request to stop aggregating.

Also this tool is linked directly in the mastodon documentation
[https://mastovue.glitch.me/](https://mastovue.glitch.me/)

------
Animats
I haven't used Google for anything but search in years. It just seemed
unnecessary. Mail is on Thunderbird connected to an IMAP server. Browser is
Firefox. Phone is Android minus all the Google stuff, plus FDroid. Phone mail
is K-9 mail. Maps are on ZNavi. Location provider is Mozilla. Software
development and docs are on Github. Backups are on iDrive. Videos are uploaded
to Vimeo. OS is Ubuntu LTS. Sometimes I use Discord.

A few months back, I switched my default browser to Bing, because Google was
returning too many ads above the fold.

No big deal. Just fewer headaches without Google and Microsoft.

~~~
BlueTemplar
Bing and Github are Microsoft...

------
plg
Isn't a reasonable solution to pay google for gsuite? It's $50* per year or
something? Then the "there's nobody to phone and no appeal and data could just
be _gone_" concern goes out the window.

*edit: $6 per month so $72 per year

~~~
stanferder
What stops Google from suspending a paid account, assuming they issue a pro-
rated refund for anything paid in advance?

~~~
cryptozeus
24/7 support by phone or email.

~~~
Paul-ish
Are you still a customer if you are suspended?

------
revskill
Main reason is don't seriously use Google or any social network anymore is
because of privacy. They never respect my privacy. OK, i still use their
services, but just for non-serious work.

~~~
simion314
It depends, I do not use gmail for personal/private messages just work and
login to webpages, I do not use maps or location or assistance on my phone
either, but this story still sounds scary because google has many products and
a ban on youtube(where they forced people to use google accounts) will lock
you out of everything. Part of the solution for this problem would be if you
get a ban on Youtube you can still use gmail and the other products. Other
part of the solution is to tell people what exactly they did wrong, I
sometimes got warnings from Sony that I did something against the TOS and not
to do it again but not details what I did (my son plays games on a PS4, I
tried to look into the chats he made recently but I could not find anything to
explain it so I tried the best I could to explain him to watch his language
because he could get locked out the games) and like others said some human
support would also help a lot.

------
xwowsersx
For those who don't know (I didn't), you can create and download archives of
any of your data on Google by visiting
[https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout](https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout)

~~~
mceachen
Just an FYI: if your Takeout archive fails with errors, try creating multiple
archives, with only one large service selected per archive.

My photos archive didn't even work that way, I had to create albums and back
then up one by one. But it did eventually work.

~~~
xwowsersx
Thanks for the advice

------
abhisuri97
Wouldn't it be best for google to allow you to download a takeout of all your
files in the case that your account is suspended?

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
They do, and the service is called, drum roll, Google Takeout.

[https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout](https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout)

~~~
abhisuri97
I know, but it seems from the author's post that they were just locked out
_completely_ with no option to use google takeout to retrieve their photos
etc.

~~~
rainyMammoth
The assumption is that takeout would not work anymore once you are suspended.
So unless you are proactive and takeout your data every day, you will probably
lose _some_ data

~~~
mqus
But, according to gdpr, they still _have_ your data even if you're
"suspended", so they should make it available to you.

I haven't had a suspended account yet but if google really doesn't let you
copy your data under any circumstance, they will have even more fun with the
data protection agencies.

~~~
Nextgrid
Google isn't really known for their respect of the GDPR.

------
xwowsersx
I have a Google One subscription so I pay Google for storage. Google could
suspend my account and I'd have no recourse whatsoever? I'd have no way of
getting my 10s of thousands of photos back?

~~~
K0SM0S
I hope you have backups, at the very least.

Yes, most subscriptions generally say in the ToS that the account and all
assets may be closed/deleted at the sole discretion of the provider. It's
anecdotally rare, but depending on the company (quality of customer service),
it may be irreversible, or take a long time to fix.

My personal rule is to never trust a third-party to "protect" my data; there
is no such thing in today's market and legal frameworks (unless you have a
face-to-face relationship, and even then, _backups_!)

~~~
xwowsersx
Thanks. What's the cheapest or most cost-effective way to backup all my
photos? S3?

~~~
boring_twenties
Buy an external hard drive or SSD, download the photos to it, put it in a safe
place away from your other computer stuff.

~~~
xwowsersx
That's viable for sure, but one thing I'd like is regular backups of the
photos from my phone (where most I take most of my photos). That's the nice
thing about Google Photos with Google One - all my stuff is backed up to the
cloud regularly. I understand, though, that this comes with some risk.

~~~
mceachen
I use Resilio Sync, and have tried SyncThing. Both work.

They both have an app you run in your phone, and a companion app you run on
macOS, Windows, Linux, or your NAS, and it syncs (even through a NAT) whatever
you've configured to backup on your phone to N servers.

If you're away from home, you can run it on your laptop next to you, so your
phone is backed up quickly, and then throughout the day you laptop can sync
with your home server while you're out exploring. It's nice.

I have two backups online, and an external drive I rsync to monthly then turn
off.

Before you delete your originals in Google Photo, use Takeout to validate the
files. Mine (at "original quality") were mangled.

~~~
rapnie
What made you move away from Syncthing? I plan to sync my relevant Android
dirs (downloads, Markor, photos, etc.) to my laptop and archive.

~~~
mceachen
In my setup it was slower and more resource intensive. SyncThing is open
source, though.

------
oth001
I've had a problem with trying to sign into my approved AdSense account the
past few weeks. "We encountered an error. An engineer is looking into the
issue." No way to contact them. I'm done with Google as well. I'm never going
to use a service that doesn't provide a way to contact support.

~~~
mdesq
I'm somewhat surprised Google hasn't taken the old Microsoft route of just
charging per call for support on their free accounts. MS used to be $300 way
back IIRC. Google could probably charge $500.

------
spicyramen
While I read other opinions about this article not bringing anything new that
we already know, as an Enterprise user this reminds me that the people running
Google Cloud is the same that comes from this consumer world or new grads with
0 Enterprise experience, which believe their product is perfect and user is
wrong. We just completed an evaluation of AWS, Azure and GCP and our
leadership raised this concern...which came true when opening GCP account and
support was not as responsive as AWS, or Azure. AWS and Azure I even had real
people calling us and contact us to understand our use case...I know GCP is
bring more people from Oracle and other companies which can help them change
this, in the mean time, we still will.invest in AWS, Azure and IBM

------
BuckRogers
I'm not necessarily anti-Google, but only use their services when I consider
them best of breed. That's my policy across the board. Gmail in 2004 was as
good as it got, then everyone caught up, just lately in 2019 did I find Gmail
to have gone beyond the pack again.

The ability to schedule emails in Gmail is something I've missed from Outlook
(desktop) for a long time, and it does it serverside unlike the desktop
Outlook app.

The downside to Gmail is that the default user experience is pretty poor. You
have to enable the preview pane yourself, and if you don't, you also would
have to enable the auto opening of the next email after you delete one
otherwise it takes you back to the list. Gmail's list of emails has the star
on the far left, and all other quick controls on the right. It's pretty
absurd.

But if you disable categories and the rest of Google's convoluted ideas,
enable the preview pane and set it to the compact layout, I haven't seen a
better free webmail today.

I would switch to Outlook.com just to split my email account from Youtube and
Google Maps, if Microsoft supported scheduled sends. iCloud.com would be my
first choice but they don't have a robust calendar system like Outlook and
Gmail (iOS reminders only, no email reminders). Same concern with ProtonMail
(I never saw the appeal to FastMail). Hosting my own is a non-starter because
I feel with all the competition in webmail that I really shouldn't have to,
there are good free services.

------
new2628

      I was deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem ...
      I would upload all of my family photos to Google Photos and all of my personal documents to Google Drive ...
      I used Google Hangouts ...
      My home is covered with Google Homes ...
      I have easily invested thousands of dollars into my Google   ...
    

Honest question: why should one take advice from someone showing such a
systematic pattern of poor judgement?

~~~
Spearchucker
Maybe because just a few short years ago Google was the darling of the
internet because search and chrome were better than anything else. People
believed the do no evil spin. And back then why wouldn't they?

~~~
new2628
Many of us already saw it differently back then and often had to face ridicule
when pointing out concerns with these services.

~~~
BuckRogers
I still do face ridicule. While HN might be a bit behind one of us that was
already suspicious of Google, the average developer is still loving Chrome and
will look at you like you're a maniac if you breach the topic of ditching the
browser.

------
yogthos
I setup a personal NextCloud instance on a $5 Digital Ocean last year, and
along with Fastmail, it replaced all the Google services I've been using. It
took about an hour to get up and running, it went through version updates
without a hiccup, and never gave me any trouble.

I found it to be completely hassle free, and I can highly recommend it to
anybody looking to take back control of their privacy.

~~~
awill
It's not accurate to imply this is so easy. You're now responsible for your
data, security and uptime. That means patching, backups and plenty of ops
work.

~~~
Klonoar
I agree - I've been doing this crap for 20 years, it's not "about an hour".
This is an afternoon at the least.

Context: I've done it for myself and others recently.

~~~
yogthos
I installed it using Snap and Let's Encrypt using this guide [1], and
everything worked out of the box. Been running and upgrading it since without
a single issue. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
inst...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-
configure-nextcloud-on-ubuntu-16-04)

------
danemorgan
I get the email thing. And I've actually been moving critical accounts away
from my personal Gmail for a while now.

As for the rest, the services I use, I use them because they work better than
any of the other options I have tried.

I'll admit that that amounts to as substantial number of services.

~~~
SanchoPanda
I think the key here is you have tried the other options, and importantly -
you clearly know how to set those other services up if need be. For many if
not most people, that would be entering the wild unknown.

~~~
danemorgan
Fair enough.

------
aladine
I also switched to Fastmail too. Its interface is rudimentary similar to
Google few years ago. It has full suite of services like calendar, notes,
storage...

What I like is its simplicity which Gmail may bloat with too many features.
One notable feature of Fastmail is alias: you can create other emails alias to
your main account and use that to create different rules. Super handy and
convenient. If you worry about encryption, probably ProtonMail is a better
choice. For me, Fastmail is good for my usage.

P/s: if you want to sign up for Fastmail, here is my referral link
[https://ref.fm/u12211285](https://ref.fm/u12211285)

~~~
newscracker
If you're going to plug referral links for credit, may I suggest that you
switch to significantly cheaper services that are also privacy focused? You
can choose from mailbox.org, mailfence.com, runbox.com, migadu.com,
mxroute.com, posteo.de (no own domain support), Tutanota, ProtonMail and many
more.

------
carapace
"Backups are a tax you pay for the luxury of restore."

Folks, back up your shi^H^Htuff.

------
xwowsersx
I'm not entirely clear on what Nextcloud is. Is it meant for
teams/organizations? What does the author mean by "Google Contacts → Fastmail
→ Nextcloud Contacts"?

~~~
Semaphor
It’s somewhat of a one-stop cloud service, only (usually) selfhosted. Many
prople use it mainly as Dropbox/One Drive/Google Drive replacement which works
great, but depending on what apps you install (some of those might be default
apps, others community provided), you get a mastodon client, caldav, carddav,
calendar, notes, webmail client, video chat, office document editing, media
viewer and other similar stuff. I didn’t yet manage to get it working, but
there is even a plugin that supports fulltext scan search via tesseract OCR.

All of these things work just as well for teams/orgs (including LDAP/SSO) as
they do for a single user

------
xwowsersx
I recently switched to Fastmail and I'm very happy. The web and mobile apps
are blazing fast and simple. My favorite feature is being able to add
unlimited aliases which sends/forwards to whatever address I choose. This has
enabled granular control over my inbox as I have receipts@mydomain,
bills@mydomain, finance@mydomain, etc. If I want to try some service, I might
create an alias. If they end up spamming too much, I can simply delete the
alias or apply other rules.

~~~
Semaphor
I use fastmail with my own domain, so it’s always service@domain.tld. I only
need to create aliases if I have to write them so the from/sender is correct.
And I love how fast their webmail is compared to the slowness of gmail.

~~~
xwowsersx
I too use it with my own domain. I don't get what you mean you only create
aliases if you "have to write them". Can you elaborate?

~~~
Semaphor
Sorry, "when I have to write an outgoing email to that service"

------
6ak74rfy
I was considering setting up a Nextcloud instance as a replacement for Google
Drive. I did some math and realized that I’ll be paying a lot more on that
route - 1TB on Lightsail+S3 vs Lightsail+SSD vs Google Drive. The last was by
far the cheapest.

Are there ways to bring down this cost? I know some people argue that I could
use that host for other self-hosted services to amortize cost but i don’t pay
monthly recurring fees for a lot of other things (but I do for Google Drive).

~~~
fallenhitokiri
A little bit more expensive, but IMHO a good compromise considering it’s
hosted NextCloud is [https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-
share](https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share)

I’ve been using it for a few months and my only complaint so far is that you
cannot setup your own (sub)domain but get a random one assigned that’s IMHO
not easy to remember.

------
mirimir
He's damn lucky.

Today's Google would have suspended all associated accounts.

Right?

------
tekknik
How does one leave the large corps for things like movies and tv shows? I used
google for the longest time and recently switched to apple but i’d love to
self host and buy drm free media. i’m guessing people doing this are using p2p
or something?

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milemi
I wish OP had gotten to the bottom of why the account got suspended and told
us about that.

~~~
tbodt
It is completely impossible to answer this question

~~~
milemi
I doubt that. Googling "google customer service" gives me this
[https://www.google.com/contact/](https://www.google.com/contact/) How about
starting there and telling us what happened? I don't see any mention of any
attempt to figure it out.

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paul7986
I quit using their search due to their sudden lack of ethics in the last few
years. As well as my own disgusting experience I had doing business with them
(treated me like garbage when invited to demo my tech. All their competitors I
met with around same time were professional/respectful; deal or no deal) and
then more so other stories detailing they do the same to others. Upon seeing
that I was like wow my experience wasn't fringe it's in their DNA now.

I no longer can support a company whose tagline is "Do No Evil," yet that's
exactly what they do!

~~~
freshbagels
> treated me like garbage when invited to demo my tech

Do tell this story.

~~~
paul7986
See the first comment in which I detail my experience with Google ATAP which
mirrors the OP's story. She demoed her invention in an interview with them &
they patented it without her knowledge/consent.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929)

~~~
paul7986
Some other examples of Google (Google X even) stealing from the little
guy/girl inventors & researchers...

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-
go...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-google-is-
patenting-work-he-put-in-the-public-domain/)

[https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/17/8048779/google-x-eli-
atti...](https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/17/8048779/google-x-eli-attia-
lawsuit-flux-architecture)

[https://twitter.com/ahandvanish/status/1072953071179874304](https://twitter.com/ahandvanish/status/1072953071179874304)

I've spoken with some of these people and hear there are many more examples
yet those people put it behind them or don't want to come out against the
biggest tech company. That's too bad as for too long in history those in power
and position have stolen from the rightful creators.

------
undershirt
Google Fi lets me text and call people from my computer if i lose my phone
(through Hangouts). Not sure there's a replacement for that.

~~~
avip
There's also no drop-in replacement for the G-docs suit, nor for google-play
of course. Firebase has no alternative.

Google got some pretty useful things up there.

------
WA
I’m glad I never started with Google products in the first place. Except for
search and maps, but they aren’t tied to an account.

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gfiorav
Open software does not mean non-proprietary. Free software is what your
looking for.

