Google support fail hits game developer

Scote64 wrote: ↑ A familiar story to everyone who has encountered a brick wall of automated support failure from companies like Google.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/08/ ... adia_port/

More worrisome than the "automated support failure", IMO, is the general idea that some kind of unknown TOS violation can completely cut you off from your e-mail, documents, office workspace, potentially also your phone, login access to your computer, etc. all in one fell swoop.

I personally have become negative on the idea of being all-in on Google -- I've moved away from using Google Drive / Docs and am also in the process of transitioning my personal e-mail over to my own domain name.

FWIW, here's the exact same problem from Apple: https://globalnews.ca/news/7631117/appl ... p-apology/

Apple closes developer's account because his app supposedly violated their terms for "fraud and dishonesty". Developer has no idea what they're talking about, tries repeatedly to contact Apple, gets nothing but automated denials. Until Global News contacts Apple, and they say "oops, sorry, our mistake".

This is scary. Rather than worrying about privacy, I think we should be talking about Data control & ownership. Is anyone successfully running their own self-hosted cloud?

kramer1 wrote: ↑ This is scary. Rather than worrying about privacy, I think we should be talking about Data control & ownership. Is anyone successfully running their own self-hosted cloud?

It's certainly a concern that you could lose your Google (or Apple) account at any time due to some arbitrary mistaken (or intentional) action by the company, and lose everything associated with that account.

But if you have forgotten that, you should be thankful that incidents like this remind you! When you are dependent on another party offering a service, you should always keep in mind that it could disappear at any time. The company could go out of business, get bought up by another company with a different policy, decide to block or be blocked by an entire country, make a major commercial change and decide to charge a high fee or not offer your service at all any more. They could have an accident and lose all your data and say "oops, too bad, sorry about that". You are especially vulnerable if it's a free service, in which case you have no recourse because you have technically lost nothing of value. Even if you paid for the service and the company may be violating an implied or actual contract, are you really going to go to the extent of suing them, only to discover legal weasel words in their service agreements that cover them for any outrageous failure to hold up their end?

Take this as a wake-up call to always back up everything, and don't get overly dependent on one service without alternatives.

For me the greater concern is the developing tendency to have automatic application of drastic policies by dumb automated routines that frequently get it wrong, and then have appeals to a human unavailable or ignored.

Scote64 wrote: ↑Apple closes developer's account because his app supposedly violated their terms for "fraud and dishonesty". Developer has no idea what they're talking about, tries repeatedly to contact Apple, gets nothing but automated denials. Until Global News contacts Apple, and they say "oops, sorry, our mistake".

The lack of recourse there is scary too, but at least that developer didn't (seem to) get all his e-mail, access to documents, etc. cut off (he is not in an "all eggs in one basket" situation to the same extent)

kramer1 wrote: ↑ This is scary. Rather than worrying about privacy, I think we should be talking about Data control & ownership. Is anyone successfully running their own self-hosted cloud?

Lots of people do that (there is a "self-hosted" subreddit that is very active). I have a NAS for home use (and many people open those to the Internet via a VPN, to use as a personal cloud) but I am now using Microsoft 365 / OneDrive as a Google Drive / Google Docs replacement, in the hope that being a paying customer entitles me to more support.

I agree with you in general that data control and ownership is probably a bigger priority than privacy -- for me, this is especially true for e-mail, where it is really hard to be fully "private" due to the nature of the system. The thought of losing access to my e-mail (the archives, or control of my e-mail address) is scary.