It’s ludicrous that Google can simply kill your phone number and nobody bats an eye. It’s such a fundamental part of life at this point.
At the minimum, users should get a “We are no longer willing to provide you service. You have two weeks before service will end. Please switch your number to another provider if you want to keep it.”
Other than non-payment, are there other phone companies that simply disable your account without warning and without giving any reason?
I can imagine something like, "You are required to live in this geographic range, but the majority of the time you are outside of it.” Or “You are too expensive to continue to support” or any number of other things. But man, no warning, no reason, no recourse, disappear your phone access? That’s just plain bad.
It’s ludicrous that Google can simply kill your phone number and nobody bats an eye. It’s such a fundamental part of life at this point.
People today laugh at "Ma Bell," but at least you could go to a local office and sit at a desk in front of someone who could actually fix your problem, no matter how ludicrous it was.
I once lived in a four-story apartment building. When I moved from the second floor to the fourth floor, I called to have my phone transferred. The person on the phone said there is no fourth floor in my building. This wasn't a new-build. It was over 100 years old, and was converted into apartments decades earlier. But the woman on the phone couldn't do anything because the computer said there were only two floors.
I walked down to my local Bell office, and sat down at one of those battleship green desk with a woman and told her my story. She said, "Oh, yeah! I know that building. I drive by it every day. Is it nice inside?" Then she pushed some buttons on the computer, and the next day a guy with a gold-and-blue striped hardhat showed up and rewired the punchboard.
You can't even call Google for help with Google Voice, let alone talk to someone who knows your neighborhood.
Yup - the cost of the service does not matter, the dependency the service creates is what matters. Making someone dependent on a service is especially easy when it's free, and the incentives to do so are usually to create dependencies for the sake of data collection or upselling some other service.
If anything it is a paid service that can at least justify shutting down by no longer taking your money.
It's so absurd that we used to complain about customer service from phone companies etc. and fled them for tech companies whose business models are defined by being scaled so high that customer service is impossible for them to offer.
And millions of people decided to make a company with no customer service their primary phone provider because it is free. Free comes with tradeoffs.
It's not free. It's no cost, but it's not free.
Considering the costs involved in a project the size of Google Voice, providing customer service isn't going to change the economics enough to make it unprofitable.
The complaint was about a corporation not holding up its promises to customers or looking to defraud them of pennies, dollars or in this case access.
The issue isn't phone companies vs tech companies. It was always about support and the belief that tech companies would be transparent, supportive, fast, 'user-first'.
Governments, bodies outside of corporations are the only thing that can hold corporations to task. We've been very busy de-toothing them.
I don't know, after getting screwed by AT&T who kept sending me bill after bill long after I had left, and dealing with their could-not-care-less human customer service, I think I'd have a really hard time deciding which I'd prefer. I think the evilness level is going to be very dependent on each situation.
I've never had a bad customer service experience with a phone company, cable company, etc. I believe others have, but I'd rather take my chances not being an outlier customer service anecdote with them than rely on Google where customer service isn't an option period.
Similar problem with email addresses. Tons of stuff relies on it, and providers can shut it off at will. Which is why I use my own domain - at least I can move it to another provider if I get shut down. But that has its own limitations and is not reasonable to expect a normal person to deal with.
Agreed. I got my own domain and moved off gmail because of this, but I can’t afford the time to help support everybody else doing that. (I do encourage them to at least move to a paid provider, though.)
While rare, there have been cases of people losing their paid-for domains too - because a company wanted them and had a lawyer convince the registrar that it should really be theirs (obviously exaggerating), or because the registrar made an error and accidentally put it back on the market etc.
These cases are super rare though, Google users getting rekt are much more frequent, that's for sure!
People forgetting to renew happens frequently too. Now what's more rare, Google banning someone for no reason or a person forgetting to renew and losing its domain?
Also forgetting to setup 2FA with the registrar, forgetting to setup whois privacy on the domain, forgetting to turn on transfer locks. Domains with their short term leases and meant-to-be-easy transfers between/among too many lowest common denominator, cost cutting providers and a technical standard/backend ripe for easy accidental dox leaks are an interesting case of almost built to cause social engineering attacks, in too many different ways.
Not that any of the alternatives to DNS have yet proven to be half as reliable, but it's still fascinating how DNS is both simultaneously our best and worst hope for identity "ownership" on the current internet.
> ludicrous that Google can simply kill your phone number and nobody bats an eye
A free phone number. That comes from a company notorious for no customer service.
It’s not at all justified behaviour. But it isn’t unexpected and it’s irritating that it will probably take other peoples’ resources, i.e. public resources, to resolve.
At some point people were laughing at me because I'm using Yahoo as my main email address, but honestly, I'd rather have two "super important" accounts (Yahoo mail and Android gmail) rather than just one that gets me banned from everything in case AI decides it wants to fuck up my day.
I'm wondering what can I realistically do to protect myself from Yahoo screwing me over. Not gonna lie, setting up my own email domain sounds like a chore. Entry number 9274 on the list of things that will just take one evening and marginally improve my life.
Register a domain and throw some $ at migadu and it's pretty straight forward. Super cheap too if you don't really send or receive a ton of email traffic. (Ie. Their micro plan)
given their email limits i feel that they are a bit expensive. there are plenty of services for $3-5 per month that have better limits (except the unlimited addresses and domains, that's really good, if you need it). and if i look at their micro plan, 200 incoming mails per day is not enough for me alone given all the mailing lists that i am on, as is a limit of 20 out. that's hardly practical.
a cheaper alternative is purelymail. their advanced pricing charges you per email and for used storage, but 1000/100 emails per day will only cost you $35 a year depending on the sizes of the emails you receive.
I had a site with 15+ years of stats and one day I needed something from it and the google analytics site says that it doesn't exist anymore, because... they deleted it. They sent some emails about it that some regulation or whatever bullshit, but that's it. No answer from me since I wasn't checking that mail...puff, your virtual belongings just got eradicated/nuked. Fn cesspool of a company.
> It’s ludicrous that Google can simply kill your phone number and nobody bats an eye.
It is Google’s phone number.
What is ludicrous is not having a federal US identity verification API such that phone numbers are not the end all be all.
Or that if the US government wants to use phone numbers for identity verification, they enact legislation to provide legal protections from losing it.
But I think leaders like the extrajudicial ability to nuke someone’s life if they need to. Same with bank accounts and know your customer laws that can lock you out for unknown reasons.
You wouldn’t want people to have access to a constitutionally protected electronic money account. Then they have less fear. And if you are someone important, then you contact someone in your network to help you out.
It’s actually not Google’s phone number, as evidenced by the fact that he could have gone to the FCC and gotten it back if Google refused to release it to him.
Edited to add:
Also, it’s not true that phone numbers are only so important because of identity verification. That is one reason, but solving that doesn’t let my children’s school call me if Google shuts my number down, just to give one example.
Edited to add again: It’s unclear to me now if the FCC actually requires Google to release the number or if Google voluntarily does it (eg to avoid problems with the FCC getting more involved).
IANAL, but according to the Reddit post mentioned in this thread, the number isn't yours:
"Consumer Google Voice is not a FCC-regulated Local Exchange Carrier, and you have no explicit nor implied rights to the indefinite use of Google Voice telephone numbers."
"If you want to port the number out of the suspended service, you can file a FCC Consumer Complaint, asking for the number to be unlocked for porting out. These complaints get reviewed by Google's legal department. FCC complaints will NOT get your Google Voice service restored, as there is no regulation requiring Google to offer free service."
That’s interesting. Very unclear to me whether it says what you think it says. The emphasis seems to be on Google Voice service, not the number itself. I would expect the FCC complaint asking for number porting to go nowhere if Google didn’t believe they were required to release the number for porting.
Yeah, like I said, I'm not a lawyer, but I zeroed in on "you have no explicit nor implied rights to the indefinite use of Google Voice telephone numbers" in particular, for intent.
This is just a Reddit post and not a legal document, but the post is effectively the crowdsourced findings from a heck of a lot of Google's victims who have tried a number of different tactics.
Many many years ago I received a phone number from a conventional carrier and then ported it into Google Voice. I wonder if there is a (legal or technical) distinction between that and "a Google Voice telephone number"?
My google voice number predates Google buying a VOIP service where I had my number, and then killing that service and giving me google voice. So, it's not really google's number either.
Sorry, I should not have assumed that Google voice numbers provided for free are portable. Or at least not immediately released back to the pool of available numbers.
It is a free service, so I expected to not have any right to it.
I also feel like my only use for phone numbers for many years has been identity verification. If I lost access to it, I could be reached via multiple other communications avenues, but I can only get 2FA SMS sent to my phone number for many services, including government websites.
That’s certainly a wise expectation, but that doesn’t make it right that the company can do that, whether you pay them or not. The fact that the FCC recognizes your right to the phone number you’ve been using (regardless of payment) is instructive.
Edited to add: from other comments, the FCC requiring them to release the number might actually be wrong. It’s possible that it is just Google being wise themselves to avoid trouble.
> but that doesn’t make it right that the company can do that, whether you pay them or not.
Yes, I just wanted to highlight that the focus on fixing this vulnerability should not have anything to do with Google, but rather elected leaders doing their job to protect everyone in society. Similar to blaming banks for closing accounts for seemingly no reason.
The incentives align for everyone to play dumb, as incompetence at this scale can dissolve responsibility/accountability via complexity/laundering that can systematically benefit a select few.
I’m getting sick of the “take no responsibility for human or computer mistakes by creating automated processes where fixing the mistake manually can’t be done or hurts a KPI”.
FedEx lost my package. Apparently there’s no process to flag it missing without being able to physically scan the missing item (???). It’s permanently marked as “out for delivery”, so all of their systems tell you everything is fine and actively work against you ever reaching a human.
Meanwhile the sender has an automated system that checks the FedEx tracking number, sees “out for delivery”, and does the same thing. Even when I do reach humans at both FedEx and the sender it’s obvious they can’t do anything except sympathize with the situation.
I feel like I’m part of some sort of psychological experiment at this point.
Yeah, this is especially maddening because drivers are just people, and people can easily make mistakes (or in some cases, straight up steal the package).
And even if it does eventually get straightened out, it will be weeks and weeks until you get the replacement (or original). This has happened to me with very time sensitive things where I paid for expedited shipping. Well the re-shipment went out via slow-boat ground, and they wouldn't send it out until the original was fully returned to sender. And ... no refund on the expedited shipping.
> Maybe I should actually try to vote with my wallet and switch to that iPhone, move my files from Google Drive to iCloud or Dropbox, and migrate to Fastmail. But I know Google can afford to simply not care.
Companies will quite literally treat you like dirt and people continue to use them. I understand there are certain things you're locked into (I very much use android despite google; not like there's much choice in a duopoly) but if they've already shown they don't care about you and you still use google search, chrome, gmail, GCP, storage, etc then that's on you.
Why would they change when you're willing to pay despite their crappy practices?
Also, even if switching away doesn't send a message to Google. Why would you rely on products that you consider a risk? I didn't switch away from Google because I thought it was a huge financial blow, but because I didn't want to have anything important to me deleted with no notice.
Life pro tip (I believe that everyone should do this):
- Buy a domain and set up a custom email that represents you like firstname@firstlast.com - you own this domain and email address and no company, with the exception of your registrar maybe, has any control over it or authority to take it from you.
- Set up a dummy gmail/proton/whatever acct with a random address - this address will never be used or exposed publicly but it will represent your online email hosting acct.
- Forward your custom email address to the email provider address and configure the web client to send from your custom address.
- set your provider email account up in a local client like outlook that allows you to create a local backup.
- continue watching your previous account and updating your accounts to your new lifetime address. At some point, you should be getting minimal emails to the old account, then you can forward it to your new one.
The idea here is that you've decoupled your identity (your email address) from your webmail provider (gmail)
So google inexplicably cuts your access. Now what?
No problem. You have a local backup of all your emails in outlook. You repeat the process with a different service like proton (or a new gmail acct) with a new dummy email. Then you set the new acct up in outlook and drag all of the emails from your old acct in to the new one you haven't missed a beat. You're still sending and receiving emails to/from the same address and you can access all your historical emails in the new hosting acct because you migrated/synced them all over locally in outlook.
Losing access to your email identity is arguably one of the most catastrophic scenarios you can think of in terms of being online. This guards against that about as much as possible. It doesn't cover other services like voice and stuff but you can follow similar strategies for things like documents and files.
This is great until you lose control of your domain because you forgot to pay it or whatever. What then? Whoever owns your domain owns your email address. It's a good solution but it's got its faults too.
> This is great until you lose control of your domain because you forgot to pay it or whatever.
There's an easy way to address this that a lot of people overlook. Seriously, I'm not being snarky or sarcastic in what I'm about to say. A lot of people seem to really not considered this. Use a calendar.
Every major desktop OS includes calendar software, I believe, as does every major mobile OS.
Create a calendar on one of your devices and when you do something like buy a domain, but an annual recurring event named something like "renew domain" that will be due a couple weeks for the domain expires.
Get in the habit of taking a look at the calendar every day. Most also allow you to assign alerts to events to further ensure you won't miss it.
As I implied elsewhere, how does anyone manage to keep their house? I mean what if you forget to pay your mortgage?
How does anyone keep their job? What if you forget to go to/do your work?
How does anyone keep the electricity flowing/put food in the refrigerator/keep gas in the gas tank of their vehicle/maintain their internet access/etc./etc./etc.
If something is important to someone, they'll take whatever steps are necessary to keep/maintain it.
A calendar isn't a bad idea, but I assume GP has ways of making sure they do all those other things. What's different about a domain registration?
Just like domain expiration grace periods. The person you're responding to isn't wrong in that the bank will also absolutely come for your house if multiple attempts don't reach you. It may be exaggerated but registrars are happy to sell you more stuff and always (in my experience with various providers anyway) send announcements, reminders, and notices even if, granted, they won't do as much effort as a bank
People also don't seem to have trouble holding onto other things in life with recurring fees
I think you missed the word “before” in their comment.
Miss a mortgage payment and the mortgage holder will try to contact you through many channels. If that fails and you keep missing payments and they decide to evict you, that process takes a while and will include even more attempts to contact you including printed notices left at your house.
Miss renewing your domain and you will probably get email from the registrar about it, but if you didn’t have the foresight to set up a filter to whitelist those it might look like spam and you might miss it. You then only find out when your domain stops working.
Also mortgage payments are typically monthly. When you have to do something monthly it is a lot easier to remember than things that are yearly, especially yearly things that aren’t associated with a holiday or other special day.
>I think you missed the word “before” in their comment.
Nope. Didn't miss that at all. What is it that the kids call it these days? "Adulting?" It really ain't that hard.
Then again, perhaps I'm some sort of superman, or maybe paying my bills on time is my super power.
Somehow I've managed to pay all my bills, keep up my house and renew multiple domains for decades. And it wasn't even hard to do. I have a whole bunch of payments I need to make that aren't simply monthly payments of equal size -- and yet I manage to do so without issue.
Do you think that's unusual or uncanny and folks shouldn't be expected to manage their financial affairs competently? Is that your point?
Then again, millions of others seem to do that just fine too. As I said previously: If it's important to you, you tend to make sure it gets done.
If you (or anyone else) is unwilling or unable to do so, then you should hire an accountant to take care of it for you. Or not.
Regardless, I take care of myself without issue. If you and/or others cannot or will not, that's a you problem.
I'm impressed that you are able to keep track of so many things over an extended period, considering that apparently 3.5 hours are long enough for you to forget a question that you asked.
Let's recap.
You:> A calendar isn't a bad idea, but I assume GP has ways of making sure they do all those other things. What's different about a domain registration?
where "all those other things" are paying a mortgage, going to work, paying utility bills, getting food, putting gas in your vehicle, etc.
2.5 hours later, HeatrayEnjoyer responded:
> Those examples have tangible real world effects before they become permanently irreversible.
An hour later you then said:
You:> And losing access to your email/other domain assets doesn't have "tangible, real world effects"?
At this time, a mere 3.5 hours after your question you seem to have forgotten that you asked it. If you had remembered that they were answering your question, which to remind you (in case you've forgotten it again over the course of reading this comment) was how do people make sure they do those other things yet forget to handle domain renewal.
You would then have realized he's not saying that losing a domain doesn't have tangible, real world effects. He's explaining that the difference is the timing of those effects.
In fact many people do sometimes forget to do those other things. But those other things are all easy to correct with little or no negative consequences when they forget so the penalty is small for not developing an ironclad system to never forget them.
For example if they forget to pick up groceries on the way home from work and then the next morning find that they don't have food for breakfast the consequences might be something like they have to skip breakfast that day if they don't have time to go out for food before they have to be at work.
>I'm impressed that you are able to keep track of so many things over an extended period, considering that apparently 3.5 hours are long enough for you to forget a question that you asked.
>Let's recap.
Let's not.
>In fact many people do sometimes forget to do those other things. But those other things are all easy to correct with little or no negative consequences when they forget so the penalty is small for not developing an ironclad system to never forget them.
Sucks to be them, then I guess.
Perhaps you've forgotten to do something important while you were making unsupported statements about what I know/don't know/remember/don't remember and blathering on about something or other?
I'll keep using my (apparent) super powers to be a responsible adult. Perhaps others should try it instead of whinging about forgetting important things.
Well then, if your failure to understand HeatrayEnjoyer's comment is not due to overlooking the word "before" and not due to forgetting they were answering a question you asked, what is the explanation?
This thread weirds me out because not paying a domain has the effect of first receiving alerts and then not receiving mails anymore. People who manage to miss both probably didn't need the address in the first place.
>This is great until you lose control of your domain because you forgot to pay it or whatever. What then? Whoever owns your domain owns your email address. It's a good solution but it's got its faults too.
Yeah, this is great until you lose control of your home because you forgot to pay the mortgage or whatever. What then? The bank owns your home. So, obviously, you should never buy a home with a loan, right? A mortgage is a good solution, but its got its faults too.
Related: .NL domains will warn you if they detect you're still being sent email after the domain expired. I think they do some analysis on' who's looking up your MX records. Of course, there's also the usual grace period
Might as well buy a 10 year discounted domain registration if it's your name. You'll be using it in 10 years anyway and it will be a good investment with the discount and inflation.
Not to address the author of the article specifically, but only all readers generally....
I would suggest that the moment you chose to have a critical dependency on someone else's services, it becomes incumbent on you to have a disaster recovery plan should that service suddenly become unavailable to you. How formal or intense such a plan is may depend on if you're an individual or a small/mid-sized business that's too small to command the respect of your vendor in the event of a problem (real or imagined on the part of the vendor). You have to take a defensive approach to these relationships even if part of the reason you buy these services is not to worry about such issues: you may have moved and transformed what you have to worry about, but you have not freed yourself from any worry.
We can hand-wave that away muttering about, "most people won't understand"... but at the end of the day it's the modern, connected world we live in and failing to be properly educated about that world is fraught with peril. Those that respect that reality will do better than those that don't.
You are right that this is wise, but it's too much to ask the average user to do. At least in the US, most people lack the technical literacy to do anything but depend on big tech.
What we really need is legislation to regulate big tech services as the utilities they really are.
That we can just rely on some basic, useful properties is, in my mind, one of the key differences to "third world countries". I don't need to check if my tap water has lead in it because I know that I won't, so I can use this time more effectively to "increase the GDP". I've lived in Vietnam for a year and learned there how impactful these guarantees can be. It is absolutely possible to deal with the problems, but especially in sum it wastes a lot of time and money.
In the west, I should not need to check that my utility or email provider is trying to screw me over. I should be able to rely on clean water coming out of the tap all the time, with minimal effort (paying fair bills) on my part.
The provider cannot claim that is would be too expensive, or that it would scale worse - that's a solvable problem. If it is more expensive, then that's the true cost that just has to be paid. Yes, the company cannot just dump your waste in the river. Yes, the company cannot just deactivate an email account with sending a paper letter.
> I should be able to rely on clean water coming out of the tap all the time, with minimal effort (paying fair bills) on my part. [...] If it is more expensive, then that's the true cost that just has to be paid.
Thankfully all these tech products are services you can pay for to be reliable!
It's an interesting perspective to compare the different economies, but the pain point isn't so much classic products you pay for but the ones you rely on without having any say about your access because you're the product being sold. Being the product means Google etc. need to make it work for 98% of the people, the default cases, because otherwise they lose a lot of people that could have made them money (from app developers' transaction cuts, advertisers paying for impressions, etc.) as well as to prevent that a competitor can easily do better, but it doesn't mean they lose sleep over losing your custom specifically. It's not tied to any tangible amount
An individual's value is very variable, especially when they try to avoid a dependency on these tech products and essentially only cost money because they make minimal use of it. People like me are the easiest to cut off, and that's where a society's dependency hurts: I am not here by choice, I actually need this (e.g. a transport app from an app store to buy tickets or unlock vehicles or request rides: I need at least one of these to reasonably get around in a city and there is no alternative)
"it becomes incumbent on you to have a disaster recovery plan should that service suddenly become unavailable to you." -> It's already hard when you are a seasoned IT professional. I don't know a single person in my family who has the faintest idea where to start, even if I've lectured them several times on this topic.
the only protection against losing a phone number is to have a second phone number and alternative communication channels. with friends and family that works just fine. with businesses it doesn't. most of them only allow me to specify one number. and if they use that for 2FA, you may be stuck if the number is lost.
Yet this is a somewhat backwards way to think if you want society to work. You don't put in 6 hours a day in your own garden to ensure backup food exists, right? Instead we set up systems of regulation and production to ensure we can Instead focus on our own specialization.
There's more than one store, and more than one payment method. If all else fails, it's easy to borrow/share, and succesful purchases can last a little while. There's redundancies and async operations throughout
If you need to receive a call to a particular number, it having a(n indefinite) disruption can mean you're going to have a bad day. Tech products aren't as mature as e.g. money and food
I understand the philosophy of where you're coming from, but I think it is blind to an important dynamic. This isn't just a matter of freely choosing to depend on someone else's service, take-it-or-leave-it. We live in a world of two-sided markets, where the mere existence of a popular service starts to reshape the world, altering the choices available to you.
In 1999, you could freely choose not to have a cellphone, because payphones were abundant. As cellphones became more popular, payphones disappeared; meanwhile, other services such as banks began to require you to have a number that could receive SMS messages. As smartphones reached mass adoption, it became a safe assumption that most people could access an android or iphone app, and support for other paths (such as a web browser) began to decrease, even for essential services.
I can freely choose to watch videos on YouTube or not, and freely refuse to do so if I don't like it. But I also realize that by YouTube merely existing and being popular, it creates a gravity well. Creators stay on YouTube because their audiences are there, and viewers stay there because the channels they follow are there. By merely existing, the oxygen available to other potential services that I could freely choose is reduced.
I can choose not to drive a car, but the choice of many other people to drive cars results in roads, services, and cities designed to meet their needs, rather than mine. This reduces my freedom to opt out of car ownership. And if McDonalds didn't offer a car-only 24-hour drive-thru, there would be unmet demand by hungry people late at night that might provide enough business for another company to open a 24-hour cafe. As it is, McDonalds services enough of that demand, and if the non-drivers have no midnight food options, it's their fault for being too small of a market to be worthwhile.
The dynamics of these gravity wells is important to acknowledge, and I think it does create a responsibility on the operators of these services to their customers beyond that of someone freely using their service by uncompelled choice. Because they are, to some degree compelled, and the compulsion comes from the existence of that service removing oxygen from the competitors that would have otherwise appeared to meet those needs. The model of "I'm voluntarily offering you a service that you otherwise wouldn't have had; it's my right to simply choose to stop offering it to you" is too simple.
(Edit: But practically speaking, I do think what you say is good advice and I don't disagree with it. I'm only objecting to the moral philosophy behind it. Kind of like I agree that pedestrians should wear bright clothing and reflective stripes to avoid getting hit by cars at night, even though it's the drivers' moral responsibility to not hit those pedestrians).
Slightly OT, but since it was mentioned in the article, only slightly:
> A silver lining is that with the new line, I was able to get a new iPhone 15 for almost free after bill credits.
No, you just got free financing on the phone. If you compare their contract plan rates to their prepaid plan rates, you're paying more over the course of your contract for the same plan.
While people like to scream and lose their mind about who the president is and what they're blathering on about today it's this situation that I never see any politician talk about in a meaningful way and I never see get attention. This situation impacts the average person and has the potential to impact the average person more than who the president is at any given time. Because at least with governmental politics there is actual recourse.
Until we demand that our government begin to prioritize consumer rights against these modern-day robber barons this kind of stuff will continue to happen. Unfortunately until it happens to you nobody seems to care. Often times the person that happens to gets blamed because their actions definitely must have caused this.
This would actually be a fairly simple thing for the FTC to correct if they wanted to. They're already empowered to do this kind of stuff and wouldn't need any new powers granted to them. They could simply say when an account is suspended or disabled or you are banned including a shadow ban that you must provide the specific details of what caused the ban and what specific provisions were violated in the terms of service. Because when you're the size of Google you effectively are a monopolistic common carrier. So being able to say something like we can do this at any time for any reason is not appropriate at that scale. Because denying you access to phone service is denying you access to a basic utility.
It would actually be interesting to see state boards of utilities begin to pull things like this under their control. This would give enormous consumer rights to people. Because while your landline carrier can deny you service and remove your service they must have very strict documented reasons for that and there is an actual transparent appeal process as part of it. Filing an appeal and not being able to be part of the appealed discussion is not an appeal at all.
> I never see any politician talk about in a meaningful way and I never see get attention.
I grew up before number portability. Let me tell you that phone number portability is among the greatest visible government mandated boons in my lifetime (though I suspect there many other less visible ones). The fact that the user in question in this post was able to reassign his phone number at all is basically a modern anti-corporate miracle.
I don't really mean to detract from your point. Certainly much more could and should be done. But we have to acknowledge that, miraculously, more than nothing has already been done.
> They could simply say when an account is suspended or disabled or you are banned including a shadow ban that you must provide the specific details of what caused the ban and what specific provisions were violated in the terms of service.
I think you're misunderstanding why this happens. Banning without a clear explanation or shadow banning users is a feature, not a bug. It grants platforms the ability to arbitrarily make decisions about who can use their platform without having to apply a consistent standard that would be questioned and challenged.
Governments don't want to change this because it benefits them. It means when they're able to tell a platform to ban a user and that user can be banned for "violating the ToS", instead of telling the truth and saying the user was "banned on order of the government".
The reason why governments don't care about this issue is because no one with power would benefit from this transparency.
Until we demand that our government begin to prioritize consumer rights against these modern-day robber barons this kind of stuff will continue to happen.
Imagine what could happen if the modern-day robber barrons end up on the president's cabinet, making policy decisions.
I'm the first to dogpile on the Democrats in a lot of areas but I feel they have done very well with the FTC in the past 4 years and it is a shame they did not do a good job at highlighting their accomplishments. This short-lived era of attempting to hold corporations accountable is likely done though now that Republicans are in complete control.
I'm well aware of it, but if it can be undone entirely on the first day of the next admin, then it's not progress, it's band-aids and we've had too damn many band-aids from the Democrats for decades. Are band-aids good? Sure. Are they a replacement for a cast and splint? No.
Power shifts back and forth all the time and despite whether they have an R or a D beside their name how they view a particular issue seems to be very fluid on their political beliefs of the moment. Also considering that 80% of the government is reelected at the federal level every two years. If the people cared it would change. Politicians primary goal is to continue to remain in power the problem is that the people are not unified enough in having their expectations conveyed and then sticking to them.
Even outside of that the FTC is fully empowered to implement the protections that are needed right now without congresses involvement or the president. It's certainly not as strong as passing a law but they have the authority to regulate this stuff. As do state level utility boards.
I don't know how to make people care until it happens to them. Maybe someone on the inside who feels like we do that there should be better consumer protections around this will start banning some very popular politicians or other very famous people who can bring wide scale attention to this problem. I fear without the attention of someone famous getting knocked off and having to fight to get it back there will never be a change.
>Even outside of that the FTC is fully empowered to implement the protections that are needed right now without congresses involvement or the president.
You do realize that the FTC chairman serves at the pleasure of the President, right? As such, the new President (or more likely his Heritage Foundation lapdogs) will decide what the FTC can and cannot do.
If it's within the executive branch, the head of that branch (who is that again?) has broad authority to do whatever they want, and Congress' (given that a "veto-proof" majority on any bill is so unlikely as to be impossible) and/or the populace's only recourse is through the Federal courts -- assuming you have the time and money to pay for lawyers and wait for your appeal to be denied by SCOTUS, then you're done.
That's a good hypothesis! But I have a strong preference for email over SMS for communication from companies, so I receive almost no texts from credit card companies. It's pretty much limited to an occasional authentication code for logging in (since TOTP-based two-factor is so unfortunately rare).
I imagine it's not, but can also see automated systems flagging the number as being the recipient of messages for over a hundred different financial institutions.
Maybe not but I bet that this many unique credit card emails eventually tripped over some threshold in a risk model. It’s too hard to adjust the model for one person, and putting in an exception for this one person means they take on additional risk if that person then goes on to actually do bad things.
To be clear I’m not saying it’s ok. Google should make it right and then invest in a scalable way to not keep doing this.
IANAL, but my understanding is that EU Digital Services Act (DSA) protects EU consumers against this lack of transparency for moderation/bans.
https://freedomhouse.org/article/eu-digital-services-act-win...
"Providers of hosting services, including online platforms, now have an express legal obligation to provide clear and specific statements of reasons for their content moderation decisions. The DSA also empowers users to challenge such decisions through an out-of-court dispute settlement mechanism."
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/16/24074933/european-union-d...
"When it comes to content moderation, sites will have to provide a reason to users when their content or account has been moderated, and offer them a way of complaining and challenging the decision. There are also rules around giving users the ability to flag illegal goods and services found on a platform."
That's exactly why I have been de-Googling for the past year. I have lost all trust in Google. I still use some of their products, but I make sure I never got in a situation where losing my Google account means losing important data or getting myself into serious trouble.
Folks, do not use Voice for anything critical. It has all the hallmarks of a "destaffed" project - no significant updates in years, nobody even bothers to rename it every 6 months. For all we know it's a purely volunteer effort at Google, like Reader was shortly before it got canned. I only use it in the cases where I need to leave a phone number and I know I'll get spammed.
This is why I export my emails to my laptop on a regular basis with GYB (https://github.com/GAM-team/got-your-back) even though I am a paying Google for Business customer.
The real controversy here however is the dependency on a US phone number for securely transacting in so many ways. Carriers barely can hold onto a number for you with SIM swaps and there is no such concept as "owning" a phone number
This guy is lucky they only banned his Google Voice account.
Years ago I lost an entire Yahoo! account with paid hosting for my side gig at the time along with years emails because I apparently broke their ToS by asking a question deemed inappropriate on Yahoo! Answers.
If you use Google services eventually this is going to happen, its common and widespread and they aren't interested in fixing the problem. You never get an answer as to what you did wrong and likely it was just an algorithm error anyway. Avoid anything of substance on a google account and what you do use assume it could disappear tomorrow.
This is actually fairly terrifying, I have used google voice for around 15 years myself (since acquisition), and use it as my main inbound line for multiple numbers actually. After verizon screwed me too circa 2009, I treat cell phones like burners, and really only use GVoice as my main inbound. It is all my mfa, sms, professional identity number, etc, and has always been solid as such as I use it with a paid gsuite I run my life out of too.
If they terminated my voice, I would be very much up a creek, and something I've considered as google tends to graveyard services enough and I can't imagine it is still high on anyone's give a shit list there.
I'd be curious if anyone else uses a like methodology with another service out there today. I've looked for alternatives over the years, and find really none for my needs for everything Google Voice provides and the android integration I use.
Oh hey, I've seen people like you. and it prompted me, several years ago, to do something similar with Voip.ms.
My "one number" was ported from a telco, and has lived at this paid service, with customer support, for over six years now. One side affect of this is, because it started out as a telco number, on't blackball it like they might other VoIP numbers.
Now all my SMS OTPs, real SMS, MMS, and transcribed voicemail all go to my email, which I consider impossibly convenient - real-time, but not dependent on a SIM card
Outgoing calls are through the built-in Android SIP client [0], and so show up as my one number (and are recorded by defualt in my single-party consent nation)
Incoming calls are forwarded to my SIM (for reliability).
All in all, it works pretty well. There was a series of outages around 2019 or so, but that's been the worst of it. And the benefits of getting SMS to my home country during international travel, and calling too, for no extra charge, is worth it to me. Though given your setup, I doubt I have to tell you about why it's so handy
[0] This was removed... I dunno, a few years ago? But I currently use a BlackBerry KeyOne that never made it past 8.1, because the battery life, repairability, and keyboard are exactly what I want.
I ported my cell number to Google Voice about 8 years ago when I moved out of the US, and it’s always been detected as a VOIP number and annoyingly blocked by services that block those. I ended up getting a cheap prepaid cell plan with voice/sms over WiFi support the last time I was in the US just to have a number to use for SMS verifications and anything else that blocks VOIP numbers. I wonder if the service you’re using is doing something different than GV or you just got lucky with the VOIP detection.
Edit: Just took a look and their pricing is very reasonable. I’ve been de-Googling my life over the past year specifically out of fear of what happened in TFA as I realized I was relying way too heavily on them and I have zero trust left in Google. I didn’t port my GV number to the cell provider because it works for most things and it’s more convenient. This looks like a solid option and would only cost me a dollar or so a month at the amount I use that number.
Thanks for the tip with voip.ms! Interesting, usually most voip providers for what I would like require more than 1 user, hadn't really found anyone with all the features that would sell to an individual.
I hadn't thought much about using android as a sip client raw, I forget it does that and never have used to know how good it is, but I'll take your word for it as usable. The rest is just having a suitable sms method to respond through it like a cell phone as natively as possible. Not sure I'd like dealing with sms as email fully.
Back around 2015 I was using switch.co for my business, which was pretty awesome for like $15 a month. I setup a full IVR with voice prompts, had a great android client, web client, pretty much did everything too. Sadly they seem to have went poof when last I went looking for google voice alternatives, but was thinking of using them again for my personal line too.
I'll certainly keep voip.ms in mind for if/when google puts the axe to voice finally.
Is there a simple small claims court approach to this that would serve as a more convoluted way to actually access support from Google and other large companies?
I feel like if this happened to me I wouldn't even try getting in touch with Google support, having had enough experience myself and read enough of these stories to know it would be a frustrating waste of time.
But if there was a legal hack to do it that forced them to reply and cost them more money, even if it cost me some, it might be worth it in cases where the downsides (like losing your phone number of 15 years!!) are so high.
This is why I ported my Google number away years ago, and I'm happy I did so. That said, phone is considered a utility, and I"m puzzled why Google Voice isn't regulated as such by now.
I went back to using my cell number for exactly this reason. My Google Voice number still works, but I don't want to risk it getting locked out for no reason.
I have stopped using Gmail, Google One, and Google Voice.
I still use photos, contacts, and calendar, but I frequently do takeouts of all those and can handle it if they die.
It's trouble I just don't need. But I'm guessing Google doesn't notice if a few of us leave, so why should they change?
I have a custom domain for my email + a docker instance running Thunderbird, configured to keep an up-to-date local copy of my gmail. So if I lost access to gmail, it'd be a pain in the rear, but I wouldn't really loose that much.
But I hadn't thought much about my google voice account. That's the phone number I usually give out, although some friends and family do have my verizon number.
I suppose I need to figure out how to make regular backups of my google voice messages also.
I use Google Voice with my number after having left the US for Europe. I don’t need any of the Voice features and could rely on VoWiFi when roaming instead, except maintaining even the most basic line in the US was costly, at least the last time I checked a few years back. Any idea if this has changed in any way? Are there any plans that cost little to none that won’t be cancelled with little use?
I’m in the same boat. When I was just recently back in the US, I looked for the cheapest prepaid cell phone plan that could activate a line with an eSIM from their app for instant sign up and supported WiFi for calls and texts. My reason was to have a “real” US number for SMS verifications that block VOIP services like Google Voice which causes me headaches.
I ended up signing up for a $10/mo unlimited calls and texts plan from US Mobile with 2 gigs of data. If you use their low cost plan you can get the same for a little cheaper or you can cut down the number of calls, texts, and data per month and get it down as low as around $5/mo I think. For me the $10 was worth it and means I’ll always have data when traveling back to the US as well without buying a temporary data eSIM like I usually do so that cancels out some of the cost for me.
So far it’s worked fine for me since I got back home outside the US, though I don’t use it much and usually keep the eSIM disabled so it doesn’t burn battery looking for a network it won’t find (plan doesn’t have roaming so it’ll always search). Also I don’t get the ability to get messages on my computer like with Google Voice, so I ended up keeping my GV line instead of porting it just in case I didn’t end up liking the idea.
I’ll probably keep using my GV number as my main US number for now until I see if I want to stay with the mobile plan, but $120/yr seems reasonable to have a non-VOIP US number available to me and data when I travel home once or twice a year. There are other prepaid plans you can use as well, but it seemed like they all bottomed out around the $10/mo mark.
I think you need to physically be in the US when you buy the service on any of these prepaid carriers to connect to the network once and activate the eSIM, but after that you can use it on only wifi or even cell data from your main line anywhere.
I have been using Google voice for 10+ years, and it's always been something that concerns me. I've been worried about Google either banning me or dropping the service. Does anyone know of a good alternative, I'm happy to pay for something but the main thing is it needs to be able to work from the browser like Google voice.
I've been pondering something based on twilio or similar, but haven't found anything. Don't really need the web calling, but web sms would be useful at times.
jmp.chat doesn't really fill me with confidence, but it might be an option in an emergency.
While this sucks, I know that my free Google accounts (including Voice) could go poof at any time and I don't really have recourse. For this reason, my Google Voice number is only used for likely spammers.
It's also part of my sales pitch or "branded email" to web clients: "You don't want to operate your business on a free email address".
He was also targeted by Google's automated system? Odd, he was not so lucky.
> My only worry has been that it seems like another product that Google could easily decide to kill off and send to the Google graveyard at any moment.
I feel the same way about Blogger, and I even had a page on Blogger that was banned after I signed in on their Android app. This was around 2020-2021 and I only requested a manual approval by an email button IIRC, that got that page back up as fast as it got taken down.
It is sad that Google Voice and Blogger are neglected enough for this to happen.
Thankfully when I signed up for Google Voice I had a few friends send me text messages and none of them came through. I wrote it off as unreliable and never thought about it again. Scary to think I almost let myself become reliant on a Google service back when I was naive enough to think that was a good idea.
My strategy for this class of issue is paying Google. I pay for Google Apps (now rebranded to workspace). I have so much of my life tied up into the Google Ecosystem I see no problem paying per month for their services. This also provides me a number to call when shit doesn't work.
> And I directly pay Google by subscribing to Google One, YouTube Premium, and Google Workspace (just for my custom domain email).
[...]
> I subscribe to a Google One plan. I knew that one of the more understated benefits is the ability to get live support from an actual person, [...] When I brought the conversation back to the Google Voice suspension, they were unable to access the ticket that was created when I submitted my appeal.
I've a very simple rule after multiple bad experiences dealing with google products: I'm never going to pay for any google service or product ever again. If its free I'll use it, and make sure i can move my data off it when (not if) they decide to shutter it.
I tried kagi for a while. Did you ever notice that kagi image search is just a wrapper around google image search? The results are exactly the same, just in a slightly randomized order.
I didn't use google's image search for a long time so I don't know that. But I think kagi pays to use google's data as one of their source. So it's possible the image search results are the same. However the different order/ranking is what separated kagi and google.
Welcome to the club! My Adsense account was banned years ago with no explanation or anything. They even stole my balance. I've heard of similar horror stories of people losing years worth of email and other data with no recourse.
As machine learning algorithms become more widespread, expect this to become even more common with a lot of services. Whether paid or free, you're just a number and can be disabled at anytime whenever their flawed algorithms flag you for any reason. I've been actively switching away from Google as much as possible and encourage others to do the same. For email, I use custom domain (still hosted on old Google Apps) so I can switch whenever needed.
The author should consider himself lucky. Just one google service has been suspended. I got my account banned for no reason and lost access to more than 10 years worth of emails, documents, single sign ons to different apps, etc.
Only invoking GDPR and the ownership of a domain name allowed me to regain access and restore email service. Without GDPR I would've got nothing at all.
Every one of these threads serves as my bi-annual[1] reminder to invoke the Takeout <https://takeout.google.com/> for fear that some AI process goes rogue and nukes my account
1: I just noticed that Takeout now offers a scheduled export option, including cloud-to-cloud transfers, so I am definitely going to turn that on
Find google data protection officer email. State your request to get the data with a mention of escalation to the Irish Data Protection Officer if no action is taken within a reasonable timeframe.
This has magically unbanned me in less than two days. In contrast to two months of tweeting, emailing support, nagging my google eng friends and even support folks via linkedin.
Are you an Irish citizen? Or can anyone contact the Irish DPO because Google is “based” there for taxes or whatever? I’m wondering if I can use this as a US citizen.
This doesn't really matter to Google; they offer uniform service regardless of means. Maybe if you're a big advertiser it helps; but as a paid GSuite customer, I got no real help when I asked either --- yes, someone answered the phone, but they can't even put in a feature request; and when my employer was acquired and wanted to integrate the two GSuites, that's not possible either; my employer had a small number of accounts so sure, ignore them, but the acquirer is large enough that I would have expected support requests to result in at least a roadmap entry.
The only reliable way to get support from Google is to have an employee champion your issue.
Yeah, this is a nightmare scenario for me and why I moved off of Google Voice after using it nearly my entire adult life (shoutout GrandCentral!). Google is just not reliable anymore.
Yet another Google account/service-banning horror story. For this reason, I proactively migrated off Gmail earlier this year to Fastmail. Very happy that I did.
The only important thing I have left on Google now is 15 years of Location History. I'm still figuring out where to move that to.
I didn't even know Google had this feature until people complained about it tracking you by default. I've always used OsmAnd for navigation and had automatic trip recording turned on as a gimmick, on rare occasions it would be interesting to look back where I went wrong and got rerouted or where the new road runs exactly to put it on OpenStreetMap. Now, with also some ten years of history, it actually makes for an exceedingly interesting plot of where I've been (around town as well as globally). I'm surprised OsmAnd manages to render millions upon millions of line segments from all the gpx files in a single map view
Anyway, roundabout way of saying: self-"hosting" years of location history works for me directly on my phone, no first- or third-party service needed. If you don't need a big tech product that uploads everyone's location to generate traffic info, it's going to be a learning curve (it's chock full of features, so getting around the UI can be tricky) but I can recommend OsmAnd. Also hearing good stories of OrganicMaps but don't know if they do gpx tracking or displaying
Importing should be a matter of figuring out how to convert whatever format Google uses into GPX files, which are just XML files with coordinates and timestamps in them. I'm confident someone will have made a converter given how ubiquitous as well as simple gpx is, if this is the route you want to go or try
Thanks for the tip about OsmAnd! Google maps is one of the last Google services I use because for some reason Apple Maps doesn’t support directions/navigation in the country I live in even though it has full maps and even traffic. Just installed the iOS app and while it does look like the UI will take a little getting used to, this looks like a solid option!
Oh, on iOS the app is quite different afaik (and, when I last used it, much more limited). I somehow was expecting an Android device, sorry. There may be better options for iOS (though my impression is that most FOSS mobile things happen on Android)
It’s ludicrous that Google can simply kill your phone number and nobody bats an eye. It’s such a fundamental part of life at this point.
At the minimum, users should get a “We are no longer willing to provide you service. You have two weeks before service will end. Please switch your number to another provider if you want to keep it.”
Other than non-payment, are there other phone companies that simply disable your account without warning and without giving any reason?
I can imagine something like, "You are required to live in this geographic range, but the majority of the time you are outside of it.” Or “You are too expensive to continue to support” or any number of other things. But man, no warning, no reason, no recourse, disappear your phone access? That’s just plain bad.