People consider google as a trusted partner whereas it is designed as a retail factory. Mass serving of millions and protectioms whose false positives can destroy the lives of thousands. Still they are statistically correct. Nuking everything instead of the offending service? Convenient fir them. Unavailable support reps? Convenient for them? Meaningless automated answers? Convenient for them. Its not a solid system that has defects, it was designed that way. Their unavailability and abrupt cruelty does not serve as cost optimisation, it serves as liability optimisation.
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.
I know more people than not who have gmail as their primary email.. the one that _every_ other account and bank and government service sends out to. It's not exactly well known that there are challenges for account recovery etc.
"Not sure there are many people left treating Google as a "trusted partner" …"
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.
I...think you may be in a bubble if you believe this.
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??
I mean most people and business treat google as a "trust partner".
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.
Bad publicity isn't very convenient, and a human-powered customer support centre wouldn't be immensely expensive for them. Seems like an odd strategy to not care at all.
But when it comes to large enterprise customers, they are the ones who matter, they bring in the real money and they are the ones who will get dedicated support teams. That's what they pay for. The normies and smaller businesses who don't. They're not going to push the needle of public image for Google.
All these platforms go for scale. They can't have individualized relations with people and have the rentability of a drug lord, especially when said people aren’t part of some world-scale enterprise who provides a sizeable chunk of their revenue. If they catch one good person for every bad one they eliminate, it’s seen as an unfortunate side-effect, a necessary cost, and they’re fine with it.
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.
This is so true. That's why I always say it's better to choose smaller companies with whom you can still get in touch with a human being, not just a chat bot. I went with Tuta Mail and haven't looked back: quantum-safe encryption, no tracking, no ads. Plus, with my domain I can have as many aliases as I like.
A few years ago google blocked my youtube red / premium account for spam even though the account was only used to watch videos. Not only did they wipe the account the wiped access to the payment page so I couldn't even cancel membership for months, dealing with robotic messages (you get to appeal every 3 weeks) all while being charged. Oh I also had Google One which promised in person support but they couldnt do shit because YT different team. I ended up cancelling the credit card. Earlier this year, I got a random message that my suspension was reversed and the original suspension was in error.
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.
The problem here is not just Google, but huge companies in general that operate at a scale where algorithms are the only viable way to sufficiently keep abuse under control.
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.
If your concern is being mysteriously cut off from communities by capricious and inscrutable moderators then all the Fediverse offers is an opportunity to experience that over and over indefinitely. I've never encountered a community less interested in accountable moderation.
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.
There are basically three options that someone designing a social platform has to choose from:
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.
The Fediverse has multiple hosts. And the option to host your own should you choose to do so.
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.
The problem here is not just Google, but huge companies in general that operate at a scale where algorithms are the only viable way to sufficiently keep abuse under control.
The companies you speak of are billion- and trillion-dollar companies. Banning people is not the only viable way of doing things.
100 people vastly underestimates both the complexity of the GCP landscape and the relentlessness of the daily fraud onslaught, and you don't know what the false positive rate of humans is vs that of the algorithms.
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.
This will probably become a major problem with the Gemini APIs in enough time.
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.
The example in this blog post, they did something recommended by Google and still got banned. Based on that, I'm not sure their built in moderation tools are enough insurance.
It can be super hard to moderate before an image is generated though. People can write in cryptic language and then say decode this message and generate an image the result, etc. The downside of LLMs is that they are super hard to moderate because they will gladly arbitrarily encode input and output. You need to use an LLM as advanced as the one you are running in production to actually check if they are obscene.
Like Uber drivers' using their girlfriends' ID verification because they have a criminal record, you can also just cut in some random guy to borrow his ID for another chance. There should be plenty of dudes available willing to sell an ID verification for cheap in poorer countries but there's also plenty in wealthy countries because very few anywhere were ever going to have a Google developer account in the first place.
Some of us started long long ago, Android 1.0 time, when Google seemed like a different company. Their first blogs didn't mention splitting your personal google account from your developer account. I never heard of anyone getting banned. Oh boy, things have changed!
Heh, I have been wondering about this for a very long time. The walled garden toll booth is too strict.
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.
Isn't it simple? You do it because it makes money.
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.
It doesn't matter. As long as you can spam people with crap like popups and notifications easier than on the web, we will still see all those unnecessary 'apps' that could just be a web page.
Isn't it already quite bad? I remember HN post about small company where employees' private accounts got terminated for "due to a prior violation or an association with a previously-terminated Google Play Developer account".
We had ours unexpectedly blocked and we were just using it for a "Login with Google" button. The only explanation was the vague "You did something against our terms and conditions." We hadn't done anything. Our use case is nothing beyond the "Login with Google" button.
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.
My AdSense account was suspended three times because I had an exclamation mark in my ad. I closed my account after that. I am certain Google still tracks my account as "potential fraud" to this day.
It's insane. They have the tooling to automatically lock my account because an ad doesn't follow the rules, but can't tell me while I'm making the ad? Why even let people submit invalid ads? What is the point of making it easy to sign up for adwords if new users are automatically banned in an hour?
Readit News
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.
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.
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??
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.
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...
2: https://x.com/vmfunc/status/1978079375183536440
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
Businesses want to make money on the apps people want.
Businesses exchange money for goods and services.
You exchange money for food and shelter.
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.