
Google reverses its ‘digital death sentence’ for Pixel phone resellers - drewg123
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/18/google-reverses-its-digital-death-sentence-for-pixel-phone-resellers/
======
captainmuon
I would understand it if they kicked the customers out of their webstores for
physical products. Or if they forbade reselling via license, and had a
contractual penalty (where permissible by law). But closing your email
accounts? Google (the company that sells phones) and Google (the company that
hosts all your digital life) are only incedentally the same entity. It's like
your power company also sells toasters, and you resell a toaster on ebay,
which they dont like, and then they cut your electricity in retalliation.

It's like if Alphabet bought a company running tollways, and they banned you
from using their streets.

~~~
doubt_me
Also even if you have more than enough sufficient information to get a lost
Gmail back. Send them your state issued drivers license and ID and birth
certificate. It is still not enough to get my account back.

What do I honestly do in a situation like that? (After 2 years of failed
recovery attempts, hunting down google employees on social media and their
work or personal emails)

I got one single Google employee to respond to a help thread I posted on the
Gmail help forums. He responded with a question that was already answered in
the original post. And it took me 6 months to get there.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Sue them under wiretapping laws to release the information and redirect the
emails to a domain you control. It is a federal crime to interfere with
communications.

I'm considering suing Apple under the same laws for blocking messages sent
from iPhones to my phone number (you can never truly deregister from iMessage.
Apple still silently destroys group messages sent to you).

We need to get more serious about the idea that you can't legally withhold
correspondence meant for someone else. These tech companies think they're
immune from telecom laws but I am not sure the courts would agree.

~~~
m3rc
There was a class action about the bullshit Apple pulls with iMessage but I
don't remember how it resolved.

~~~
ryao
[https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-
imessage](https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage)

~~~
m3rc
I know the steps, the class-action was because even after doing all that
iMessage would still not properly deregister numbers, and then a memo was
leaked revealing that Apple purposefully didn't solve the problem because it
lead to people returning to iPhones after trying Android devices

~~~
0x6c6f6c
I'd actually love to see the source on that, if you have it

~~~
m3rc
[http://www.macrumors.com/2014/11/11/apple-lawsuit-
imessage-i...](http://www.macrumors.com/2014/11/11/apple-lawsuit-imessage-
issue/)

here's the lawsuit, I can't find a definitive source on any memo so maybe that
was just unfounded rumors

------
chrisper
Yes, great. But if you are not able to get news coverage about your problem,
then you are out of luck?

Yeah, sorry, Google. I once trusted you, but now I am migrating away from
everything Google (except search).

~~~
kels
The fact that it has to be a covered by news really sucks.

I ran a website that got our AdSense account shut down for what Google claimed
was invalid clicks. I never clicked on our ads and we made little money from
AdSense (we had other ad networks). Since my personal Gmail account was used
as a backup email my personal account's AdSense account was also banned. They
won't reinstate either account or give any more details.

I don't use any Google Cloud services because I'm afraid that all of my
accounts would get shut down for any reason and I would lose all of that data.

~~~
1propionyl
Search is the one you should really stop using when possible. I've found
DuckDuckGo's general search to be only okay, but bang patterns are very
helpful since I usually want to search stack overflow or another site directly
anyhow.

Google search quality has dropped drastically. Any attempt to look up a
technical issue results in StackOverflow inconsistently in the top 5, with
maybe 20 different shitty mirror sites.

Google has lost their magic. I'm actively migrating away from their services
at this point.

~~~
Semaphor
> Google search quality has dropped drastically. Any attempt to look up a
> technical issue results in StackOverflow inconsistently in the top 5, with
> maybe 20 different shitty mirror sites.

Are you logged in? Maybe their learnt wrong things about you? (For me swiftkey
has that problem, had to switch away from it as the more it learnt, the worse
the suggestions would become)

Search is the one thing I still need from google. Technical things result in
50% stackoverflow and 50% blog posts or forum posts of people discussing the
same problem. For things with multiple meanings google usually gets the right
one. I'd love to use DDG, but whenever I try it, I end up having to use bangs
to get what I want.

------
bit_logic
Google needs to realize that their services (such as Gmail) are critical to a
lot of people. I understand why they don't want to offer free support for a
free product, they would get flooded with useless support requests. However,
they need to offer a paid support option. Something like $25 per support
request call. This would reduce the calls to only truly urgent and necessary
issues.

It's possible to get something similar using Google Apps and a custom domain.
But they need to start offering paid support for the free services
(@gmail.com) as well.

~~~
jseliger
_Google needs to realize that their services (such as Gmail) are critical to a
lot of people_

Google will realize this when a) people pay for them and/or b) people start
leaving the platform.

There are options for paid, supported email, like Fastmail and others. They
probably have .01% of the userbase Google does.

~~~
omg_ketchup
Are you saying Google loses money on gmail? I can't see that being possible.
It displays ads. It harvests incredible amounts of information, on "users" as
a whole and individual users. It's a treasure trove of data on how people
engage with each other, businesses, etc. It's a stepping stone into the large
Google ecosystem where you can and do pay for things.

Gmail is just as valuable to Google as it is to any individual user. I'm not
sure why people's gmail accounts would ever be banned. If people do something
illegal, prosecute them. Even if they're found guilty, it's not like the court
is going to delete their email address or take away where they live.

This feels like an episode of Black Mirror.

~~~
scott_karana
It wasn't illegal, per se: just against their terms of use.

Probably much harder to litigate than criminal activity, so I can vaguely
understand the use of banhammers, even if they were clearly unwarranted in
this case.

------
digi_owl
The whole thing reeks of overly aggressive automation. And while Google has
reverted these cases, i fear they have not changed their automation to match.

I am right now looking at two stories of people that has trouble with Google
because of some security system or other has picked up "oddities" in the
payment activity.

~~~
honkhonkpants
Which part of the automation failed? It appears to have identified with
perfect accuracy an organized ring of phone scalpers. I think their account
abuse team should be roundly congratulated.

~~~
m3rc
Why should a scalper even be punished by having their email shut down? That's
not a service connected to the phones.

------
Animats
I just don't see the need to depend on Google for anything. They have a good
search engine, even though it's ad-choked. (Search for "credit card".) But for
everything else, there's an alternative. IMAP for mail, paid backup services,
Github. I don't even have Google enabled on my Android phone; at initial
power-up, when it asked for a Gmail sign up, I clicked "later" and then
deleted the "first time" program.

Google went bad a few years ago. Google had to pay $500,000,000 to DoJ to
avoid criminal prosecution in the "sportsdrugs.com" case.

"Federal agents created www.SportsDrugs.net, designed to look “as if a Mexican
drug lord had built a website to sell HGH and steroids,” Mr. Whitaker said in
his account of the sting… At the agents’ direction, Mr. Whitaker said he
signaled his illegal intent to Google ad executives, including Google’s top
manager in Mexico. As a tape recorder ran, he walked Google executives through
the illegal parts of the websites. He said he told ad executives that U.S.
Customs had seized shipments, for example, and that one client wanted to be
“the biggest steroid dealer in the United States.”"

"Mr. Page, now Google’s chief executive, knew about the illicit conduct, said
Mr. Neronha, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island who led the multiagency
federal task force that conducted the sting. “We simply know from the
documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what
was going on,” he said in an interview after the August settlement…".

Never forget this.

[1]
[http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_journal_takes_us_inside_th....](http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_journal_takes_us_inside_th.php)

------
xiaoma
Sadly, it appears Google has abandoned their former motto, "Don't be evil".
This is completely sociopathic and amoral and a human had to have approved the
action.

It's overwhelmingly likely that without the massive media backlash, Google
would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise
defenseless customers. I don't say this lightly and it pains me to say it but
they need to be regulated.

~~~
kllrnohj
> This is completely sociopathic and amoral and a human had to have approved
> the action.

How is it sociopathic and amoral to ban scalpers?

> Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise
> defenseless customers.

Defenseless doesn't mean innocent, and there's no evidence that these users
were falsely accused or otherwise innocent of the violations they committed.

~~~
xiaoma
Innocent? No company that uses a double Irish tax structuring scheme to avoid
paying billions has _any_ right to cast guilt on consumers who legally
purchase phones and take advantage of minor arbitrage opportunities.

If you truly feel that wiping those people's personal communications records
and blocking their email is a reasoned response then I sincerely hope you are
never in a position of power.

~~~
kllrnohj
> Innocent? No company that uses a double Irish tax structuring scheme to
> avoid paying billions has any right to cast guilt on consumers who legally
> purchase phones and take advantage of minor arbitrage opportunities.

That has no bearing on the issue at hand. Just because entity A is guilty of X
doesn't magically make entity B innocent of Y.

~~~
xiaoma
If powerful entity A is guilty of X on a massive scale and then punishes
weaker entity B for engaging in X on a small scale it makes A even more
contemptible.

For your reference:

A = Google

X = Arbitrage

B = Users who bought and resold Pixels.

Y = X / 10^9

------
viridian
Good to hear. I think the whole event was a net good for everyone, based on
how many HN commenters responded to the news by offloading as much of their
data off google servers as possible.

Glad to see google doing good by undoing their own evil.

~~~
massysett
I've been thinking of switching to Fastmail; email is important and I'm not
too happy leaving it with a company that owes me nothing.

~~~
zachlatta
You could also sign up for Google Suite on your personal domain.

I used to be on Fastmail and started running into serious deliverability
issues. I'd send emails that'd never be received and people would send me
emails that'd never show in my inbox.

I spent a month trying to get their support to figure out what was wrong, but
the response was just "there's nothing wrong" the entire time.

Used to love Fastmail, but can't recommend it to anyone that depends on their
email.

~~~
brongondwana
can you tell me the ticket number? I'd love to look into what happened there.
Too late for you, but maybe we can make sure things are easier for the next
person.

~~~
zachlatta
Ticket 796081. Also ran into lots of trouble with calendar. Other tickets I
had trouble with that weren't resolved were 706457, 611829, 598481, 564293,
and 541661.

------
xbmcuser
If you are scamming or cheating someone dont use your real email. If you do
then you should be willing to loose access to that account.

~~~
throwaway420
To me, the key takeaway from this article isn't the fate of these relatively
few specific people. They did something that was (probably) wrong and Google's
response might have been disproportionate, but was arguably their right and
close to reasonable.

What should be concerning to most people is that almost everybody depends on
so many of Google's (and other companies) services in the cloud and you can
have your entire life removed with absolutely zero recourse unless you get
media attention. Google doesn't even offer human customer support if your
account gets banned and you want to throw $50 or $100 in their face to speak
get somebody's undivided attention for just 5 minutes to resolve the issue.

That's the real issue.

Yeah Google, we understand you cant provide free customer service for the
entire internet and deal with every crazy person's complaints. But charge a
reasonable fee and give desperate people a realistic way to talk to somebody
over life-changing problems. Even Google's paid services are often very flawed
in this regard.

~~~
bagacrap
Screwing up someone's life and then charging money for customer service sounds
a lot like extortion.

~~~
throwaway420
I totally see your point: this could be prone to abuse. But it's still light
years better than the alternative of not offering any support at all to
desperate people.

There are people whose companies and lives get totally destroyed when Google
randomly bans them from one of their services and then there is literally no
way to get in touch with anybody at Google unless you somehow manage to get
media attention.

We're all smart and realistic here: we understand that Google can't offer free
tech support for the entire world and deal with every crazy person out there.
That's why charging a nominal fee is suggested. Should it be $1, $5, $25 or
more? I don't know. But there has to be some way to reach out to a reasonable
and smart human being at Google for critical issues.

------
alyandon
It's good to see my paranoia about depending on a single cloud provider is not
entirely misplaced. Losing access to my Google account because of some
virtually unaccountable automated process would suck but at least I do
frequently export my contacts, email, drive, etc and back that data up to
other providers.

The driving force for my mistrust of depending on one cloud provider for
everything was getting burned by a hosted email service that I used for
everything. Since I didn't control the domain I had no recourse. Taking the
lesson learned, I moved to a privately owned domain for my critical stuff and
now I can instantly point to another provider (or my own server) of choice.

------
bit_logic
I'm trying to think of an alternative ecosystem that allows similar level of
convenience to the Google ecosystem. Here's the best I could think of: (NOTE:
this is for the AVERAGE user, so nothing complex like buying a custom domain)

\- Fastmail for email

\- Dropbox for data sync/storage

\- Switch to iOS devices

My reasoning is that companies focused in one area (such as email or storage)
and offering paid accounts will be much more responsive to any issues since
it's their core business. And for iOS, it's because there's the option to go
to any Apple store and get immediate support for anything. For example, if I'm
suddenly locked out of all my Google Play purchases, I'm SOL. With Apple
purchases, I can at least go to an Apple store and there's a chance of getting
it resolved. That in-person human contact option is very very important and
something Google doesn't offer at all.

~~~
ivm
I have been using exactly this setup for over 3 years (6 years of Dropbox) and
I'm very happy with it. It would be great to somehow sync Fastmail and iCloud
contacts and calendars but I'm ok with Apple's platform lock currently.

------
kchoudhu
I'm sure the potential for a first sale doctrine smackdown in the courts had
nothing to do with this.

------
thirdreplicator
This is so 1984 it's disturbing. I'm a hardcore Google fan with tons of photos
of my children saved to their cloud. All of my business-critical, financial,
and personal messages are stored up there. Losing access to all that is like
losing your basic human rights. It's scary how dependent I am on this one
company for being able to participate in the modern world....

------
jwebb99
Why does Google care if I resell my Pixel phone? Seriously, does anyone know?

~~~
notatoad
They don't care if you resell your pixel phone to a friend or put it on
craigslist. They care if you and a thousand other people are being paid to
purchase stock for an unauthorized reseller.

Google (and any other product company) wants their products to be sold through
authorized channels only so they can manage distribution, keep pricing
consistent, and ensure that the devices are legitimate and have not been
tampered with before sale.

Customers receiving phones with malware pre-installed is a real problem for
companies like oneplus and xaiomi who don't clamp down on unauthorized
resellers.

~~~
yladiz
That's a fair point, but the only reason this kind of thing happened is
because they purchased their phone via Google from their Google Account, and
the consequence, their account being disabled, is really out of proportion
with the act of selling the phone to a reseller. I think it would be more fair
for Google to limit the ability to purchase products in the future for people
known to have done this, but significantly unfair/burdensome to disable their
account as their account potentially has their entire life on it. It would be
akin to the power company deciding something you did was "bad" and turning off
your power, or your landlord kicking you out because of something "bad" they
didn't like, regardless of your "bad" action.

------
intrasight
Great that they did so, but as others are pointing out, with this snafu Google
has pointed out a major flaw with having all your eggs in one basket with a
company that lacks Chinese Walls between their subsidiaries. As it is unlikely
that there will be any regulatory changes, the prudent course of action is to
spread your eggs around.

------
jliptzin
It is terrible that you can't get any help from a human unless you make a big
stink and are lucky enough to get press coverage about your issue. PLEASE,
please let us pay you money so that we can talk to a human when the products
that we depend on, and our businesses depend on, become inaccessible to us.

------
simosx
If it was not publicised that much, the accounts would remain suspended.

Many who use AdSense get their accounts suspended and have almost no chance to
figure out what happened and overrule the suspension. When their domain gets
blacklisted due to a suspension, they can never use AdSense again.

------
pejrich
Can someone explain the scheme to me? I don't quite understand it. I buy a
phone from Google, then ship it to NH, they sell it in NH and I make a profit?
How? How could it possibly be enough to make it worth it?

------
gengkev
Years ago, when Google+ was first launched, you had to enter your birth date
to create a Google+ profile. But my friends and I were under 13 at the time,
and a few friends had their accounts disabled due to their age. There was a
minor fuss about this online, including from people who had accidentally
clicked the wrong birth date. (Though they did re-enable accounts if you sent
them ID or made a $0.05 credit card purchase.)

As for me, though, I was terrified at the thought that my account could have
been disabled, had I entered my actual birth date. Even back then, I had a
fair amount of data stored on my Google account. The incident was enough to
get me to start downloading data from Google Takeout once in a while.

It's been a while since my last backup, though. I hope this incident serves as
a wake-up call to both me and everybody who "owns" a Google account. I also
wish that Google would allow at least some disabled accounts to download their
data from Takeout: that would make me feel just a little bit safer.

------
tmptmp
Imagine Google/Apple/Microsoft or any such big business controlling your home
appliances via their IoT enabled devices. They can literally kill you by
disabling these devices (e.g. room heaters, refrigerators etc) in the time of
need. Be warned, say no to "IoT by big corps". I hope, enough people get
educated about the dangers posed by this.

------
hd4
This should be a massive wake-up call for anyone using Gmail (i.e. 99% of
those who come to HN), and at the very least we should diversify away from
using purely Google products, i.e. consider Outlook for business/banking-
related emails.

There's no point in trusting them after they did this once, even if they may
have reversed it. The fact is they _did it once_.

------
johansch
I guess I never really "trusted" Google as much as I trust most (rich and
leading) nation states to handle my identity trustfully, providing a suitable
mechanism (this is often quite expensive) for dealing with clerical or
automatic mistakes in a mostly decent way, etc.

I've been a Gmail user since 2004 and have since (like everyone else, more or
less) tied my online life around it. I don't care that much for backups
(honestly, I don't store that much super memorable data in the google cloud -
I have a separate, offline backup system for that stuff.)

What I do care for is the availability of my personal gmail as a fallback
authentication mechanism for these hundreds of online services I've signed up
for during the past years. I would recommend anyone who uses Chrome and its
password manager to use the recipe at [https://github.com/megmage/chrome-
export-passwords](https://github.com/megmage/chrome-export-passwords) to get a
list of sites and corresponding passwords. I just printed mine out (all eleven
pages). Don't bother storing it on a local drive - it's just another fat
target to be stolen.

Up next is going through all those services to see which is critical or non-
critical, and how I can get into them if I no longer have access to my primary
gmail address. Facebook is probably a big one for most people. (Annoyingly - I
tried to add my mobile phone number to FB recently, but at a first attempt I
couldn't get it to just be a rescue number, rather than a rescue + spam
messages via sms number.)

Some services allow multiple email addresses - for that I guess something like
Microsoft's free outlook.com service could be suitable.

I'm also considering removing my credit card details from my Google Account.
Seems like you're much more likely to be a target of their automated policing
if there's actual money involved. (If they don't want stuff like this to
happen, maybe they should invest a little more in that dirty annoying customer
management area.)

------
nikital
A lot of people in the comments recommend getting a personal domain, but
doesn't that just move the single point of failure to the registrar? For
example, quoting NameCheap's TOS: "In the event of termination [..], You agree
[..] that Namecheap may take control of any domain name associated with the
terminated Services." ([https://www.namecheap.com/legal/universal/universal-
tos.aspx](https://www.namecheap.com/legal/universal/universal-tos.aspx))

A single company can still wipe your online identity. Is there any solution
for that? Maybe getting a domain directly from ICANN somehow?

~~~
Mythanar
Just use joker.com or other registrars with sane terms of service. Namecheap
(together with GoDaddy et al.) is really close to the bottom of the barrel,
and should not be used as a representative example of what good registrar
should look like.

------
oolongCat
Can someone explain what happened to google. I mean, it was once a company so
many of us looked up to and now little by little its becoming the "evil" in
their own mantra "don't be evil".

~~~
DannyBee
Time and growth.

Pretty much every company in the world makes choices, little by little. Some
set of people pretty much always disagree with those choices. If you make
enough choices in a enough of a period of time, over a wide enough area,
congratulations, you've now annoyed a lot of people :)

(IE even if Google was to do literally everything that hacker news people
want, in the optimal order and way, it would just be some other forum where
people are complaining.).

As companies become larger in scope, the number of choices they make, and the
likelihood those choices will upset _distinct_ groups of people, grows.

Sadly, pretty much the only thing you can really change is how long the cycle
really is.

IE even if you make PR-optimal (for lack of a better term, i mean the choices
that upset the smallest set of people) choices, you'll probably just upset
3-5% of people instead of 10-15%. So you get 15 or 20 years instead of 5.

At some point, people become upset enough, go to the next thing, and the cycle
repeats.

You can see this happen in pretty much any group of people, not just
companies. Companies are just larger so the timescale is smaller.

All of this is also compounded by the fact that larger companies deal with
positive and negative PR campaigns for and against them, which helps change
opinion faster one way or the other.

People love to blame shareholders, governments, or whatever, but truthfully,
that is just about them disagreeing with the decisions. Look at it from the
other perspective - if you did the opposite thing, now those currently-happy
people would just be the people who are annoyed. It doesn't change anything,
just swaps the set of people. Maybe that set is smaller, but again, that just
changes the timeframe.

It's pretty much impossible to be universally loved and large, for any serious
length of time, unless you aren't doing anything (again, applies to more than
just companies)

~~~
Cacti
Oh give me a break. This isn't some inevitable outcome of physics. They
purposefully chose growth at the expense of customer support because it
enabled them to accomplish more things that they wanted to do. They looked at
the nearly infinite margin of their developed product and figured, hey, even
if they lose 5% of that due to shitty customer support, 5% approaching
infinity is nothing. And they moved on.

Google chose this route because it was the easiest route to take.

------
libeclipse
I've got to say, Google is one of my favourite companies, but when things like
this happen it makes me question if we should allow a single corporation to
have this much control over our lives.

------
dsrajapaksha
I see a lot of comments suggesting FastMail and other email service providers
with custom domains. Can someone explain how FastMail differs from Microsoft
Office 365 Plans like Business Premium which allows custom domains and
exchange because to me Microsoft seems to be the better option with Office
suite and OneDrive storage. I'm skeptical thinking whether Microsoft could
also ban a paid user's account like this without any prior warning or export
option.

------
apapli
"Google may be within its right to take an action — perhaps ban violators from
buying more phones or ask them to export their data and move to another
provider — but it shouldn’t have the right to completely shut off someone’s
digital life instantly, with no warning."

While I don't disagree with the authors position here, if TC want to be seen
as a source of quality journalism they really should ensure their
"journalists" keep their personal opinions to themselves.

~~~
whyagaindavid
look at 1 for a more thorough analsis

crowd-sourced inventory acquisition program using the consumer Google site. It
instructed people to buy phones from the Project Fi site and list the dealer's
NH address as their "home address" so phones would be shipped directly to the
dealer. The buyers were then paid enough to make a profit on the transaction
(probably helped by the fact that NH has no sales tax), and the New Hampshire
dealer would later resell the phone at a markup

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/google-bans-users-
inv...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/google-bans-users-involved-in-
pixel-phone-resale-scheme-later-relents/)

~~~
apapli
your point being?

------
Animats
This is why you should not use Google free services for anything important.
Google could turn them off tomorrow. You have no contractual guarantee against
that.

Do mail through IMAP. All your devices can sync to a IMAP server. The IMAP
server built into Android isn't bad at all. Use Thunderbird on desktops and
laptops. Most ISPs offer free IMAP. Or you can get your own domain and use
IMAP from a server on it. No ads, too.

~~~
lostlogin
Search is fairly important and competition just isn't as good.

~~~
Animats
IMAP has search. Tap the magnifying glass icon on the Android client.

~~~
lostlogin
I was unclear and was referring to web search sorry.

------
whyagaindavid
Whether is it password or privacy or news bubble the general population is
down with ‘Fatigue’ that hn-geeks advice. They just are overburdened.
[https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/10/security-
fatig...](https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/10/security-fatigue-can-
cause-computer-users-feel-hopeless-and-act-recklessly)

------
jussij
> The violation, in a nutshell, involved consumers who bought their phones
> from Google’s Project Fi mobile operator, then shipped them to a reseller in
> New Hampshire, a state with no sales tax.

That looks a lot like Google's own tax minimization/avoidance policy, except
they do it on a worldwide basis.

------
tn13
For anyone who uses email a lot (most tech people do) it is a bad bad idea to
let Gmail keep all those emails for you. I have Google Apps account with
periodic archives setup to DRopbox. If google bans me I have to only change
the mx addreses and move to something else.

~~~
bdcravens
Very true, but imagine the amount of services you wouldn't be able to get into
(Facebook, Twitter, Github, etc)

~~~
marcosdumay
He won't lose any service just by changing his MX record. (Or, at least, won't
lose any after the DNS cache everywhere clears.)

------
cfv
I don't like this; their general MO has always been google giveth, and google
can take it away. Introducing inconsistency can only lead to more people
trying to disagree post-facto with google, and eventual lawsuits

------
jwtadvice
All of your data from the smart phone service, however, is still going to be
available for government surveillance purposes. This makes me unlikely to buy
this product - from a reseller or not.

------
talideon
You know what's ridiculous? Google's EMEA HQ is in Ireland, yet they're not
selling them here. Instead, we have to pretend we're in the UK or order though
a reseller.

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flippyhead
It's things like this I wish there was an open source, self hosted gmail clone
that's approximately as good as the real thing.

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socrates1998
This really made me realize how much I need to find a way to backup stuff and
move away from Google free products if I need to.

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balls187
Holy smokes, google was wiping Gmail accounts?

I'm glad they reversed their decision, but damn, it's time to move off Gmail.

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endgame
One of my projects for this weekend is to move off GMail for my main email
address. It's too much of a risk.

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noja
What kind of authorisation is needed for someone at Google to close a user's
account?

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ocdtrekkie
You are making the mistake of assuming any human intervention is required.

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achalkley
They probably saw a spike in searches like "How to migrate from Gmail"

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chinathrow
Whith stunts like that, Google risks to be regulated heavily. If they continue
to pull stuff like that again, I really wish them the regulators on the front
porch by now.

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petre
This is silly. I will never buy anything from Google.

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whyagaindavid
BTW, Google did not _ban_ them from life using gmail; the people who lost the
accounts may OPEN new accounts?

