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.
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.