Given Google's reputation for avoiding any type of direct customer support, I'm perplexed as to why they are trying to do this.
It's one thing to offer an online product suite without any support, it's a completely other thing to offer a product that is as heavily regulated as banking services.
They're probably not going to earn any significant amount from providing a checking account. I can only assume that they're after the transaction data itself (looking for patterns, etc.), but I find it hard to believe that the payoff would be large enough to endure the pain that is the current regulatory environment surrounding banking. Especially when you're notorious for avoiding personal interactions.
Urban parts of the US are subsidizing large rural areas. Almost all plans are 50 state plans, which means you're paying to install and maintain cellphone coverage for mostly corn fields or forests in the middle of nowhere.
For costs to come down, you'd need people to adopt single-state or two/three state plans on the East/West coast. But starting such a network would be prohibitively expensive. For example an "only California" plan could likely be very inexpensive and comparable to Europe.
Nobody wants such a plan. I'd buy a 3 state plan - but the 3 states I need covered are different from my neighbors. Most people in the US have some family member living in a different state, and that state must be in their 3 state plan. Then there is the fact that I also need all the states in between in case I drive - I'd pay extra for the national plan (preferentially including Mexico and Canada) just so I don't have to figure out which route I can drive on my yearly road trip.
However, I was wondering: How good is the LTE coverage across the U.S? Germany has really bad coverage, even along the Autobahn and train tracks with high traffic. And Germany is pretty small when compared to the U.S
> For costs to come down, you'd need people to adopt single-state or two/three state plans on the East/West coast.
That's interesting because VoiceStream/T-Mobile used to offer that exact plan in various clumps of states. They were called "Neighborhood Plans" and varied by area. In my case, I had a three-state plan covering Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. $50/month, as I recall, for 3,000 minutes, 3,000 SMS, included long distance, roaming across all of those states, and some amount of data that I can't remember. The northeast had a similar one for Maine down to part of Virginia.
In the early 2000s, that was a screamingly good deal. Those plans got dumped by the mid-2000s in favor of "unlimited nationwide roaming" and "free long distance to everywhere" and now we don't even think about where our devices work and what it does or doesn't cost to call a given number (or about "calling" in general because I see so many people on cheap mobile service forums who only want a data plan and "I don't need any voice minutes"). I can now get an unlimited-everything plan that works across the entire continental US network of a major LTE carrier for $25-40/month (depending on how many people are in my virtually-constructed "Party"), so at least costs have come down from where they used to be.
It always blows my mind how that whenever you go anywhere in the world, you can get amazing mobile plans (data and call / sms) for $10-$30 dollars per month.
Probably has something to do with the size. I'd imagine covering a country like Denmark or Ireland is considerably easier and cheaper for a smaller company then covering the US would be.
It's worth it if you travel internationally as you can just show up in (nearly) any country and not get gouged on data. Also, that price isn't bad for the U.S.
I also use Google Fi, albeit the $10/gb plan, so my monthly bill is usually around $50-$60. The real reason I stick with it, even though I could get slightly cheaper plans elsewhere, is for international travel. I don't even travel internationally often at all, and I don't consider myself a foodie or world traveller or anything like that. But work is sending me to Taiwan in a couple weeks and it's nice knowing that I'll be able to land and have the same data and text rates as back home. Same for when I went on a cruise to Mexico with my family earlier this year. We landed, Google Fi sent me a text saying "give us a sec." And then a few minutes later I was online, without me having to do anything. Most cellular companies make you pay out the ass in international roaming costs, or if you have an unlocked phone you can get a local sim. The closest company to match this policy is T-Mobile, but their international data is capped at 256kbps unless you pay more.
I got great experience with Google One support. Obviously if you're only using free services and not paying anything, you're not going to get great support.
Yours is absolutely an exception. I also have Google Fi, but I had to create a second Google account in order to get it.
I had Google Wallet years back. At one point while I was traveling, I lost my debit card and thankfully had my Google Wallet card as a backup. I was able to transfer money to the card from my checking account, though I only moved over what I needed for short periods of time. This resulted in multiple movements of money to my Google account, which in turn resulted in Google flagging this as suspicious and preventing that account from using Google to pay for anything (I couldn't even purchase via the Play Store even if I selected my non-Google debit/credit cards as payment methods). They asked for verification of who I am, and I supplied the correct documents to them multiple times. Each time I was told that those documents did not suffice with no explanation as to why they were not reauthorizing my account nor why the documents I sent them weren't up to their standards. Just "Nope, go away."
For some dumb reason I insisted on proceeding with signing up for Fi, and found it super easy to just create a new Google account specifically for that. I've been increasingly uneasy about the longevity of this account because of that experience and realize now that it was probably foolish to migrate my phone service to a company that had already fucked me, but c'est la vie.
The measurement of customer service experience is not when someone can follow "if (X) then (Y)" with a customer on a phone. Rather it is when the CS person needs to resolve something that does not have "if (X) then (Y)" step in the manual.
My first thought when I read this was all the horror stories of people's Google accounts being closed for no obvious reason, and with no recourse (other than going viral on social media and hoping a Googler notices.) Imagine that happening with your bank.
I'm sure existing banking laws will restrict them from algorithmically banning people like this, but their reputation is bad enough to keep me away. It's the same reason I'll never use Google Domains or Google Fi - my domains and phone number are too important to lose access to.
Do something that generates a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report (generally, stuff that looks like money laundering) and your bank will cut you loose, and they aren't legally allowed to disclose why. Running a marijuana dispensary? Forget about a bank account.
Sure. But with Google you will lose your bank account by making a comment on youtube livestream.
It was here on HN few days ago. Streamer asked people to spam the chat just like in twitch, youtubes automated systems banned viewers who obliged locking them out of all google products, gmail etc.
Now imagine losing also your banking due to things like that.
Just like one diversifies their investments, clearly it pays to diversify services you use as well. Which is the exact opposite message companies like Google push: "use us for everything, it will be convenient!" Until you lose everything in one fell swoop.
I do not comment on google platforms at all because I’m so stuck with gmail due to making an account when it came out and I was young then. Whenever I have a choice I avoid their products.
I’m even avoiding publishing hobby stuff on Play Store nowadays as a bad submission due to error will, you guessed it, lead to total ban.
Just as you said this works against their interests. As consumers we must diversify.
Not diversify, just stay away from any provider with multiple services, poor customer support, and a penchant for banning accounts for code of conduct violations.
Losing an email address or even access for some time will cost me money. Gmail isn't good enough that I'd risk my business over google code of conduct.
But any of those negative attributes could apply to any provider at any point in the future, even if they don't now. Best to actively avoid all your eggs in one basket to the extent possible.
> In the United States, FinCEN requires that an SAR be filed by a financial institution when the financial institution suspects insider abuse by an employee; violations of law aggregating over $5,000 where a subject can be identified; violations of law aggregating over $25,000 regardless of a potential subject; transactions aggregating $5,000 or more that involve potential money laundering or violations of the Bank Secrecy Act; computer intrusion; or when a financial institution knows that a customer is operating as an unlicensed money services business.
Just getting a $10k transfer doesn't sound like it'd trigger any of those.
Well, the bank might cut you off if you do some really weird stuff with money. Google tends to shut down your access to everything in their ecosystem for minor and arbitrary reasons, like commenting with emoji on a lifestream, or logging in to GMail after a few years and setting a mail forward.
In 2019 is loads easier for cannabis business than it was in 2014. There are state charter banks and CU that will take the business but it's a high fee account. (Pun intended)
It might seem perplexing when imagining a American bank, but from the perspective of Swedish banks, it make perfect sense. Any direct contact with customer is a cost center. Dealing with people, dealing with physical cash, checks, just having a office in city areas. It is all just very expensive. It is much cheaper to just have an online service with online products that get processed without human involvement.
The result in Sweden is almost 40% less offices in the last 10 years and only a handful in existence that handle physical cash. Customers are a bit less satisfied but you can't really live in Sweden without having a bank account so what are people really to do but accept the change. Banks profits are up so the trend is likely to continue.
Banks in the US run back and forth on this, and probably always will. Less locations saves money. However locations mean places where your customers come in and you can sell them "add-on". A lot easier to talk to someone about their car insurance when they are already coming in every week anyway.
> I'm perplexed as to why they are trying to do this.
Money, as always.
>They're probably not going to earn any significant amount from providing a checking account.
That depends on specifics of the accounts and how they work. It's possible to make a lot of money off of just temporarily holding someone else's cash. Transfer firms like Moneygram make most of their cash off of interest on other people's money when it's being "sent" from one location to another.
>I can only assume that they're after the transaction data itself (looking for patterns, etc.)
This is the correct answer. The more data they can aggregate and cross-correlate, the more accurate their derived conclusions about the spending habits, psychology, and behavior of people can be. The more accurate those are, the more control, power, and money Google will have. I'm sure they don't "intend" that it will be used for anything unethical, but presently there are no laws forbidding them from doing anything at all with it as long as it's derived data.
The overall effect of them doing this research is similar to a twilight zone plot... imagine a psychologist discovers a principle within the human mind that exists within everyone.
When used, this discovery very strongly influences the target to buy whatever is on offer, to the level almost of a compulsion. Use of this knowledge is undetectable, but allows anyone who knows it to sell anything to anyone for any price they choose (within reason).
As much as I enjoy Twilight Zone comparisons, it is pretty hyperbolic to claim that Google is working toward the equivalent of mind control rays because they are obsessed with consumer data. People’s lack of openness to advertising attempts is going to continue to be a barrier to ads being perfectly effective, whether or not Google has banking data on top of Gmail data and regardless of how specifically targeted the ads are.
People will still have free will (to the extent they ever have) no matter how individually tailored ads get.
You're missing the main thrust of their effort. It's not to individually tailor ads, it's to study consumer behavior to the point where they discover what actions they can take to cause the effect they want.
The idea is similar to the reason gas stations have loyalty cards... they're not so loyal customers get discounts, it's because they can sell that data to companies wanting to analyze spending habits.
If Google can use its expertise to cross-correlate data from financial services like it does other sources, that fills in a link in the chain, from money going into the consumer's pocket to money coming out in a purchase.
Gas stations already know that e.g. (making this example up) someone who buys gas at a certain time of the morning has a X% chance to also buy a breakfast donut if they buy a coffee. They get this from statistical analysis of the data from loyalty cards.
So all the gas station has to do if they want to make some amount of money from the people who buy donuts is to trigger the behavior - provide free coffee or coffee at a discount at a certain time of the morning, and at the same time add a few cents to the price of donuts. In exchange for a loss on the coffee, they get a very high likelihood of making extra money by manipulating consumer behavior, and likely the consumers don't even know it. That percent advantage is worth dollars.
Google wants to correlate consumer data to the point where they know all the things that trigger when people spend. Other corporations will pay gigantic amounts of money for that service, because it's a bankable return for them. There's no guessing whether (going back to my example) free coffee in the morning will cause better sales of donuts, because they know as opposed to guess.
Google filling in all the blanks in its chain of data sources means that they'll be able to correlate things like "During a three paycheck month, men age 30-45 tend to put that extra disposable income in their checking account for use on a mix of necessities and luxury items.". If a company selling luxury goods wants to know when they should saturate men age 30-45 in a given market with ads to drive sales temporarily up 65%, Google can sell them that information.
Just knowing when specific people will have the ability and interest in buying something they're selling lets them avoid spending money on advertising, shipping, or even producing goods that won't easily sell. That's a huge advantage in the market over another company that has to guess when and what kind of advertising will be effective.
The consumer targeted by this will not know... they'll just be more likely to buy a particular product when they happen to have the money to do so because the sellers will be subtly increasing the coverage of ads or targeting those ads to the demographic involved during that time period, and those ads can manipulate as well using sex, rhetoric, or any of the other techniques advertising knows about.
Being more certain (even if not 100%) what will happen in the future translates into money and power.
I used to think to the same thing, that is until I saw the selfish ledger video. Yes, of course we have free will but I have a difficult time trusting a company that would put out something like this.
They are front-ending the bank. It can drive value on the banking side and make customers stick to the Google service side.
Think of things like communications with banks. If you could send me statements or notifications securely to Google Drive or GMail, that saves the bank money and drives value on the Google side.
Banks and credit unions do this already. Your average credit union with a few hundred million in deposits is paying a provider to run all of the web and IVR services.
> I'm perplexed as to why they are trying to do this.
... really? Google is the Consumer Intelligence Agency. All they want is all of your data on how you're spending your money, so they can sell more ads.
There's no other lofty goals here but more access to how you and your money moves.
For the health care data, Google goes through that data as it goes through any data that is hosted on GCP. Yes we are storing data for them and providing services ontop of it, but that is what cloud does. See:
Strictly less harmful. At the two banks I've dealt with, the worst someone with login credentials would be able to do is view my transactions and move money between the accounts I already hold. Initiating any kind of transfer out requires knowing the entire account number, which the web interfaces hides, and would send me email warnings besides.
Meanwhile, the account number alone is good enough to initiate a wire or EFT with no prior notice.
Every time I read another headline like this (and the healthcare one from yesterday) think of that scene from the Matrix. I realize it's not exactly a perfect metaphor, but nonetheless I have visions of an Agent Smith character saying something like this:
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify Google and Amazon and Facebook and I realized that you're not actually businesses. Every business on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. A disease, a cancer of this planet.
Below replacement birth rates in 1st world societies seem to disprove the idea that humans inevitably expand to the point of environmental collapse.
Further, having as many children as the environment can support, regardless of the consequences for the environment or its destruction, is natural for nearly every life form. Look at invasive species like Asian carp or zebra mussels.
> As new data emerge, however, many scientists now believe sperm counts have indeed fallen—and continue to fall. As a story in GQ noted earlier this year, a widely cited study published in 2017 by researchers from the Hebrew University and Mount Sinai’s medical school found that among nearly 43,000 men from North America, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia, sperm counts per milliliter of semen had declined more than 50 percent from 1973 to 2011. And not only that, “but total sperm counts were down by almost 60 percent: We are producing less semen, and that semen has fewer sperm cells in it,” wrote the GQ contributor Daniel Noah Halpern. When Halpern asked several scientists why, they presented a united front: It was the unprecedented amount of chemicals now routinely entering the human body.
Ironically, that's the exact definition of a business in modern neoliberal growth capitalism. Grow grow grow, consume all resources, eat all competition. "Natural equilibrium with the environment"? Please...
I don't get the downvotes, it's painfully obvious that any company that is not on an exponential growth path is a failure in today's world. And the opposite, a failed company (uber & co) on an exponential growth path is almost praised as a divinity.
There is no end game, we need more superfluous gadgets, faster things, smarter things, for what ? God knows, but it seems we can't do without it. We won't stop until we're forced to.
> it's painfully obvious that any company that is not on an exponential growth path is a failure in today's world.
I dramatically disagree with that characterization. VCs and the startup world think that it's "growth or failure". There are a massive number of businesses where stable is fine (though mild growth would be preferable). You just don't hear about them.
> Order is the tide of creation, but yours is a species that worships the one over the many. You glorify your intelligence because it allows you to believe anything. That you have a destiny. That you have a right. That you have a cause. That you are special. That you are great. But in truth... you are born insane.
Sears took the same approach starting over 100yrs ago of bundling a bunch of disparate services - clothes, tires, appliances, etc. At the time it seemed equally all consuming.
We’re basically seeing another iteration of this now with Amazon, Google and Facebook
They had some bumbled early attempts to get online that probably were held up as examples of why their retail business would succeed. Sears was a co-founder of Prodigy the online service and had a web store on it in the late 80s/early 90s.
Besides the privacy risks with full on moving your banking to Google, I think another big issue is when they decide this product isn't profitable any more, and/or some other department in Google comes up with banking 2.0 and you end up having to move all your bill payments, auto draft, etc back out.
If we thought killing Google Reader was bad, killing your bank app would be even worse.
One hundred years from now, while Google surveils us 24/7, psychologically brainwashes us from birth, and sends the occasional Google drone to terminate users who violate ToS, you'll still have people on Hacker News bitching about Reader.
I didn't want to include the much longer list, if we look to more recent events, Google Play Music is in the process of being replaced by Youtube Music, but with way fewer features.
I was also a Google Wallet user, and they killed it, Google Notebook, I'm sure I can keep going if I try to remember for a few more minutes.
I still can't get over how they killed Wave while it was still extremely in beta. It didn't hurt users in the same way, but I think it clearly demonstrates their terrible decision making.
Google could've easily occupied the space where Slack, WhatsApp, etc currently exist. They had the technology, they had the team with a vision for a new standard of internet messaging. Instead they just pulled the plug within months.
I was a big fan of Wave but all other history suggests to me that Slack would still have wiped the floor with them due to factors outside of the immediate product teams' purview.
Yeah I'm not sure what Google's value add is. It might be like how Simple Bank was partnered with BBVA to run the back end (before BBVA straight up bought them).
This increasing spread of FAANG companies across all domains in an attempt to keep customers completely contained in their ecosystem reminds me of the megacorps in the Shadowrun universe. We are not too far away from the point where national law does not apply to them any more. It is certainly already hard to make tax laws stick. And all the googlers that are proud to slave away for that particular overlord remind me of the sarari men.
Rather than some sort of intentional cyberpunk dystopia I think in part what we are seeing is some pressure by American tech companies to emulate Chinese tech companies such as Tencent. One app to rule them all, perhaps would make a good catch phrase. Some of it is a mix of offense and defense, just trying to copy each other and expecting zero margin while preventing a loss in market share.
The national law avoidance, tax avoidance, are both being dealt with by EU. Google is being incredibly cagey about how much of a material impact this is going to have on their business. I don't believe they are complying with GDPR, among other things. Google / Alphabet has basically handcuffed themselves and thrown out the keys in the EU vivisection room.
If you examine Google / Alphabet's position in the US, they went from being the most frequent visitor of the Obama White House (something like weekly visits) to be vilified by the far right, the far left, and the center. The customers that still trust Google have been left largely in the dark and don't read the news.
I've been negative on Google for about a decade now, arriving to the party far in advance of everyone else. I saw the tricks they were pulling back then when they were celebrated.
Yesterday's story about Google working with Ascension was extraordinarily shocking. There are, of course, serious privacy issues, and that dominated the headlines. What is truly appalling is that Google is using their artificial intelligence / machine learning work to help a major healthcare company "extract more revenue from patients" (WSJ.)
Google has veered so far off course, one wonders if Larry Page and Sergey Brin may be suffering from head injuries or dementia, or just drowned themselves in their own hubris. It starts to sound a lot like OpenAI, where there tech firms believe they are going to do something so substantial, are execute above and beyond what anyone else is capable of, that the entire world is there's for the taking.
It is more likely that these companies will cease to exist, by a wide margin. With or without regulators. The more pots they stick their hands in, the less consumers will trust them. We already see it here on hn, people no longer bother to try new Google products because we don't believe those products will still be around in a few years. What happens when the early adapters reject your products?
Won't happen until these companies can field their own drone armies, until then the people with the guns will always have the last word and tech companies don't have the social clout to raise a human army.
No, it's setting themselves up for breakup, an it's the FAAG, Netflix is not engaging in these shenanigans. Sad to say, you would think the most corrupted of the FAANGs would be the entertainment company, but they are the most pure of them all.
Zero-burden-of-proof state government edict (an Indiana tax warrant) based entirely in fiction caused them to throw up their hands and say “there’s nothing we can do!” as they took $150 for Chase’s lawyers’ time and handed the remainder over to Indiana in full.
Unfortunately, even Google would concede and hand over the money because it's backed by Citi-Group. Financial institutions listen to court and state orders blindly.
So a State government, using lawful authority, for taxes owed ordered Chase to hand over your money, and you frame this as Chase "stealing" your money? I'll acknowledge the $150 fee that you ultimately pay is high, maybe even unreasonable, but I feel like your original post was a little disingenuous nonetheless.
Your own explanation of events reads like you tried to ignore a tax liability until you gave them no choice but to seize it. If you believed it was erroneous you should have worked with the State of Indiana to resolve the error (or create a payment plan saving $150 in fees).
There was no tax liability, no taxes owed. That’s where the “based entirely in fiction” part comes from. States do not have lawful authority to invent nonexistent tax liabilities and seize property in any amount they make up, which is what Indiana attempted here.
Chase charged me $150 to rubber-stamp an illegal seizure of my account. They were entrusted with the funds and they seized them on behalf of a third party which had no legitimate claim to them.
Sounds like Chase stole my money—and charged me to do it.
So you're claiming you never lived in Indiana, received no correspondence from the State of Indiana on a potential tax liability, and absolutely no warning that they were planning on seizing your account?
I am unable to see why your comments are being downvoted. Even if you owed money I do not see how state can compel your bank to hand over your personal wealth to recover that. They should employ the exact same methods as some other business might use to collect their debt, going to court should be the last step.
Thanks for the warning and I will never do any business in state of Indiana.
> They should employ the exact same methods as some other business might use to collect their debt, going to court should be the last step.
They said above the state had a warrant. So they did what you wanted them to do, went to court, got a warrant and forced the bank via legal edict to hand over the money.
You can also find tons of evidence of major tax warrant scams hitting Indiana. I wouldn't be surprised if Chase got a letter from the scammer, with a deposit account number, and a link to an official public tax warrant URL.
It sounds like you aren't considering the possibility that Indiana did not have a legitimate reason to confiscate the money, such as a numerical error on a tax form, which has happened to me.
I did acknowledge that. That's why I said they should have worked with the State to resolve the error, rather than ignore it until a seizure was required.
Seizures are expensive for the state too. If you're working with them on the tax liability (inc. disputing it) they likely aren't going to go the seizure route as a first port of call.
There are situations where the mail that the State sends does not properly reach the taxpayer. I suppose if they confiscate the funds and then are open to swift resolution of the error, that's not so bad, but I'm surprised they don't choose wage garnishment or some other way of contacting the taxpayer before just "surprise, the money is ours!"
In this argument, that point does not matter. OP said that Chase stole money from them. That is not true; banks lawfully complying with government orders is not theft. Banks, or really any private business, do not protect you from the government.
So... Chase is, in your imaginary world, supposed to refuse a lawful court order because this person claims that they don't actually owe the money? Hey, maybe Chase could even pony up for a legal defense fund! I mean, why wouldn't they?
When a private company tried to lay a claim to my account, BoA told them to go stuff themselves.
I understand that a court of law is different, but that does not mean that the court has acted ethically or logically-- they have only acted officially.
If your money was stored non-digitally, it would be a bit more difficult to confiscate, such as if it were in a safe that I privately maintained offsite somewhere.
Out of curiosity, are you also one of those Westerners who also criticizes China for being authoritarian?
It's because I'm trying to understand the logic of those who feel like just because an action has been performed by a certain government, it therefore must be logical and ethical 100000% of the time.
I could point to examples of times where private organizations defied specific government orders because they felt the order was unjust, but I have a feeling this wouldn't be a sufficient argument for you.
>Out of curiosity, are you also one of those Westerners who also criticizes China for being authoritarian?
Wow.
>It's because I'm trying to understand the logic of those who feel like just because an action has been performed by a certain government, it therefore must be logical and ethical 100000% of the time.
I literally never said that. Not once in any of these comments. Are you even replying to the right person?
>I could point to examples of times where private organizations defied specific government orders because they felt the order was unjust, but I have a feeling this wouldn't be a sufficient argument for you.
So, in your mind, Chase should perform their own investigation of this man's taxes before complying with the court order? This is really what you think?
Ummm... no, we have police for that. Of course, the police do not have access to anything and everything in any place at any time, which is why they sometimes need to go through the court in order to compel private entities to assist.
honestly, have you thought through anything that you're saying? How do you imagine any of this could possibly work in the way you imagine? You literally expect every subject of a warrant to conduct their own internal investigation as to the validity of said warrant, even though they have absolutely no right to not comply.
it's so unreasonable that it's comical; I don't even know why I continue to respond. You live in a fantasy land.
> Zero-burden-of-proof state government edict (an Indiana tax warrant)
"Zero-burden-of-proof state government edict" describes the property tax bills every single homeowner gets in the mail and is expected to pay. Pay your taxes.
No; property taxes require a burden of proof: you must own property. That property must be assessed in some way.
In this instance I had no tax liability whatsoever. Zero. No business operations whatsoever in or touching or with their state. Indiana invented numbers out of thin air. Most of a year later I got the money back from Indiana as they agreed on this point (after they skimmed about $1k for “collections fees” incurred as a result of their illegal seizure).
Chase was happy to oblige them with a rubber stamp.
So really it was Indiana that stole your money, with Chase charging (Indiana) $150 for legal fees. The situation still sucks, but Chase doesn't come out looking so bad.
And there is almost no way to talk to a human and get access back. I like Google's services, but I think their ability to deny service with no recourse is shameful. If I lost my gmail account with my last fifteen years of emails, linked to ask my other online accounts, plus all my documents and all my photos in drive, I'd be totally lost.
Perhaps it is time to export all your emails and start forwarding any new emails to a backup email service. As well as backup any documents regularly to another service or personal drive.
As far as opening a google checking account goes I think I will be avoiding that one. Diversifying my critical online services might in some sense be a higher security risk, but safer from it all being wiped out in one go.
I've already setup a domain in front of Protonmail so I have email under my control. My next step is to use an email client to fetch all my emails under IMAP so I have them outside of any cloud service.
I'm working on this right now. Google's level of control over my ability to communicate online is really scary. If I lost my gmail account because of a perceived TOS violation I would lose access to many of my accounts, and have to go through a huge inconvenience of going to physical stores, calling during business hours and submitting ID, etc. to reset passwords.
If I had known back in 2002 what I know now about what Google would become I never would have joined the Gmail beta.
> If I had known back in 2002 what I know now about what Google would become I never would have joined the Gmail beta.
100% agreed. It was cool at the time. Now Google has so fundamentally changed and I don’t trust them with my data anymore, but it is a Herculean task to move everything off Gmail. Literally hundreds of accounts are bound to my Gmail.
I’d sue them next day in State court for interference with my business contracts. Having a billion dollar data center in Iowa the judge has a lot of leverage.
I don't think it would fly. Google would just argue you agreed to that in the terms of service. Plus it would be slower and more expensive than just getting Google to reinstate your access, even if you had to fly there in person to beg them.
I've been unable to access my google account for over two years. Their automated processes are never able to confirm my identity, and any humans I do manage to communicate with tell me to use the automated systems.
I don't even care about my dignity any more, I'll beg for it back in person.
At the very least, you should be running isync[1] to keep a local copy of your emails. Losing access to future emails would still be devastating though.
It is a bad idea to use vanilla gmail account for critical purposes. I highly recommend coughing up some money and getting a gsuite account. Once you do that all these problems disappear. You also get support and the fact that you are spending money tells Google that you are a serious user.
No, outsourced call center with no escalation path doesn't qualify as support for anything but the most basic issues. Google 'support' means bitching on HN, getting upvoted, and having an engineer take notice and actually poke at it.
> the fact that you are spending money tells Google that you are a serious user.
No, it signals that you are reliant on them. This means they can treat you as a second-class citizen from the free users! This recent issue happened to one of my clients (not anyone in this thread), https://support.google.com/voice/thread/3818693?hl=en . Note, paid users can't request a free Google Voice account, have to pay for the same thing on Cloud Voice now.
We had similar issues in the past where we couldn't delegate users from a Google Business panel inside our G Suite domain, we had to maintain personal GMail accounts to add business managers.
I've been a reseller of this shit, deeply regret it. When it works for our clients, it works fine. When it doesn't, we're just as screwed with getting support as anyone else. I switched my primary accounts to Fastmail and O365, and haven't looked back.
G Suite is now clearly oriented to companies, and the differences in tools compared to free accounts make sense in that context. Google cannot deploy to corporate customers tools that are not properly tested yet, and that they cannot guarantee will be supported for a long time.
They use free users as beta testers and to see if ideas stick. They can't deploy those to actual customers.
Anecdotally, I've called g suite support as a "business" with one user about issues I've had with non-covered Google products like Android and gotten either good support or a referral to another support agent who solved my problem. No idea if I'd have gotten referred to someone as helpful without paying.
You're better off just dropping Google altogether.
Paying for GSuite doesn't eliminate any of the problems (they'll still ban you, spy on you, have relatively poor support, etc.) and many of the alternative services are simply better anyway.
I manage my company's G Suite account, and their support hasn't impressed me. We were initially unable to set up DKIM. The page to generate the DNS record kept returning a strange error code. I talked to support they were friendly and apologetic, but the issue took months to fix. Every time I followed up I was told they hadn't even heard back from the engineers, which gave me the impression that the support department doesn't have much pull in the organization.
I am so glad I transitioned from Google services in 2012 (mostly spurred on by the domestic spying stuff). I did a dump of all my Gmail account and could not be happier (Gmail's IMAP implementation is hopelessly broken rubbish).
I used Dropbox and now MEGA to sync photos off my phone, but I copy all that stuff to my NAS and backups. I use Drive for some things, but I wouldn't be screwed if it went away. I disable almost all the major Google apps on my Android phone and hope to switch out to Lineage + miniG soon.
I use a self hosted TTRss currently (Google Reader was garbage and it dying was really good as I realized what good RSS readers were actually like).
I need to set a reminder to do more regular Facebook exports/backups. No one should be in the situation where a single provider killing your access means you loose a huge chunk of your content. Self hosting has its own problems and yes, a lot of people don't have the knowledge/means/time to do it, but man I'm glad I made it a priority.
My phone number is still on Goolge Hangouts. I need to find a better solution for that as well.
Nope, still Hangouts. I'm so confused on the difference and their offerings now that I will probably avoid changing it until I can port my number off of it entirely.
I keep no email on Google. I have a Linux box that pulls down all email, for all my families email accounts, and stores it locally. Then we use Thunderbird and access it via IMAP. It is then easy to back it up with everything else onto external drives and my Backblaze account.
With what is going on with big internet players censoring and deplatforming people, why would one trust these people with your money.
The bank won't close your account if your child put an emojy on a youtube comment while using a tablet. The proper response is to block your YT account but Google forced merged your accounts.
> That's already how fraud protection works in the majority of banks.
Yes, but what bank has the surface area of google? If I do something in a an area that has _literally nothing_ to do with banking ( say google stadia ) that a bot thinks is fishy - will I have all of my funds locked up over that mistake?
A bank might suspend your checking account if it detects suspicious financial transactions on the account. The goal here is (ostensibly) to protect the account owner.
Google, as per the precedents it has repeatedly set, could suspend your checking account for participating in a stream on YouTube and following the streamer's instructions to spam chat with emotes in order to vote on his path through the game, as happened to Markiplier and his followers. That's far beyond what anyone should consider reasonable risk for being able to access their bank account.
The bank might suspend your card until you clear it up (and my bank is much lighter touch, granted after having blocked my card a dozen times), it doesn't close your account and lock you out of all your financial services.
> That's already how fraud protection works in the majority of banks.
That's not the entire story. Not only do banks have tons of regulations that they have to follow, a concept of "algorithm determined that we shutdown the account and we can't explain to you why" does not exist there.
Because of a nationality I hold, I often get some vague replies from financial institutes or online payment gateways when processing my transactions or credit that due to some "internal" or "unknown" reason their service is unavailable. That's mostly a workaround for EU anti-descrimination laws.
If you typically have a help line, possibly also a physical bank to go to, and if not, you'd reach out to the OCC (https://www.occ.treas.gov/about/index-about.html) and your problem will get solved real fast
Anytime I have issues with a bank account I walk into a brick and mortar and talk to someone in person. My Amex has a number on the back and I speak to a person.
Not even sure how to call google. Google Maps has issues with father in laws address. They also have some made up city name near where Ive lived on and off for 30 years, not a single person calls it that. Amazon hides their number or changes the location on their website frequently.
I think it was more than just an emoji in a comment but happy to be shown otherwise.
Someone was violating youtubes rules about posting repetitive comments. You can't post the same thing over and over on youtube without running into problems.
They ban entire accounts that are not paying. We've had reasonable (not great by any means) service with some of their paying products.
And paypal locked an account of mine for something like 10 years (based on nothing). Wasn't worth the fight, but was randomly contacted to claim my money oddly.
What point is being advanced here? That it is ok, or at least inconsequential that Google can lock you out of services that you rely on? Or that we should be happy because Google is "reasonable" here?
I have purchased a domain and used it to underpin a fastmail account; personally, I don't share in your line of reasoning and don't want to continue to trust Google.
1) The statement that google deleted someones accounts because they used emoji's in a comment or comments is 100% a lie. Let's be crystal clear about this.
2) If you aren't paying you are not the customer - you are the product. Is this not obvious to folks?
If you pee in google's pool they are going to kick you out. You don't make them much money (they make money on volume) and if you annoy lots of their other users and violate their written policies they have an economic incentive to eject you from their ecosystem. Every MINUTE they spend dealing with you is profit lost - so they are probably NOT going spend a lot of time dealing with you.
If you want control - buy your own domain and point it to where you want to. Or pay someone for email. Or do both, I think those are all great ideas.
But the lies about an emoji in a comment being the reason someone's account is banned are very annoying.
"They ban entire accounts that are not paying" isn't a hard-and-fast rule either; I wouldn't risk anything you can't afford to be cut off from stored monoculture-style in Google's ecosystem, whether or not you're paying, if it's absolutely critical to you. Regardless of whether they apply a different account risk model, the checking thing is experimental and I definitely would recommend against handing it money you can't afford to lose.
Your point on Paypal is valid, and people dealing with Google checking are making a risk calculation like people dealing with Paypal do (but of course, one would hope that over time, the offerings improve; Google entering this market new should be offering something better than Paypal).
People are building entire mission critical business on google (GCP etc) that they can't afford to be cut off from. You can pay $250/month for one hour support. If it truly is mission satirical you can pay $60k/month and get 24/7 support.
Agreed though - if you are not paying and are the product in their system - then you are definitely at risk.
The article says "with accounts run by Citigroup Inc. and a credit union at Stanford University". If the accounts are run by these partner banks, maybe that means you will be able to contact the partner bank's customer service when stuff like this happens.
Then what's the point? Just get a normal bank or credit union account and be done with it. Why leave your financial future in the hands of a company with zero customer support or care?
Presumably they'll add some kind of innovative feature so it isn't just a traditional checking account.
If you don't think those features will be worth it because you don't think Google is good at customer service, then I guess that's for you to decide for yourself. I don't really see how it's relevant to my comment, though.
> The whole-account "ban" was a common anti-spam measure we use.
It's strange to me when someone restates the misbehavior as though it's a justification. If someone is abusing commenting, block them from commenting, sure. Don't disable all their other products. If someone is abusing two products, disable their whole account, then? Sure, if you want. That reduces the false-positives by about a square factor (0.1% -> 0.0001%)
Would this have turned out well if Markiplier wasn't a well known streamer that had worked closely with google on an interactive youtube special? It's worth noting that the appeals were initially denied and the people banned got a "case closed, nothing we can do" response.
YouTube is full of shit. They're in a hurry abandoning the unprofitable "you" in YouTube and replacing it with will smith driven garbage.
YouTube's denials about why it happened are again dumb, and a chat ban in YouTube should in no way affect the rest of your Google account. Just acknowledging that it happened isn't a good explanation.
"Ya our rules are dumb and on manual review we were still stupid assholes"
It's also impossible to get ahold of anyone at YouTube and YouTube's "ya we manually reviewed it and fucked up" is just another admission that their pile of a system just doesn't work.
I'm moving away from Google and any other provider like them. These incidents only impress the need to do it faster. I can't risk having my business and life ruined because of a youtube algorithm with no one behind the wheel.
I recommend everyone else do the same. Just the idea that YouTube chat bans would connect to other portions of the account means google is not interested in you. Every interaction with them is a threat to your digital well being where your whole account can be banned. It's totally unacceptable given the position they're in.
And it can all be manually reviewer and you'll be told to go fuck yourself and if you aren't markeplier or whoever you have no recourse.
I'm cancelling my Google One sub and Fi shortly, sadly after being incredibly impressed with roaming coverage.
Google needs to do more than a Reddit comment. This is the second time you have done this, and you supposedly seriously damaged a few of the people involved (I'm guessing they are SOL in terms of that, and I don't want to be SOL). "Oops" only cuts it the first time.
So I worked at Google when Google Plus rolled out. What was contentious at the time internally was the Real Names policy. This was all Vic Gundotra's doing. He routinely gave the example of not wanting to interact with someone called "Dog Turd".
I think we have ample evidence that people want pseudonymity. People like to segment parts of their lives without their prospective employer being able to look up what you said and possibly take things out of context. So as much as people outside complained, trust me there was a ton of internal dissent about this too. This was back before leaking for a political agenda became widespread in the Trump era.
Anyway, agree or disagree with the Real Names policy it presented a far larger problem. If some automated system decided your name was "fake" your entire account including Youtube, Gmail and so on got locked.
Whoever signed off on this was utterly insane and should've been fired. While we're at it, fire anybody who suggested it as being a good idea.
I remember looking for a photo storage solution for my sister at the time. Google Plus had unlimited storage but you had to "upgrade" your account to a Google Plus account. I, as a Google engineer, could not in good conscience recommend this approach because I had no idea what might trigger a global lock on her account.
Google Photos came from the wreckage of this shit show and is actually a good product. This happens when you start addressing user needs and concerns rather than trying to push your own agenda. What agenda? Google wanted a single account for everything where everyone was logged into search as this would allow search to be personalized (better). Or at least that was the theory. Larry talked a lot about the desire to get people signed in to Google search.
I'm utterly dependent on my Gmail address to the point where I probably won't use any future Google service just to diminish my risk of some new product triggering a global lockout, which as an ex-employee I now have limited ability to rectify.
Google should NEVER have taken the route of a global lock out. Trust is broken. So my chances of using this banking service is literally zero.
Yesterday I signed up for Proton mail to start splitting off my data from Google. The announcement that they are now vacuuming up health data without patient consent is unacceptable. Had Google made this announcement at the time of the Wells Fargo scandals they probably would've had my business but my trust in them is near zero at this point.
> What was contentious at the time internally was the Real Names policy. This was all Vic Gundotra's doing. He routinely gave the example of not wanting to interact with someone called "Dog Turd".
To me, this is stunning. IMO, Facebook beat MySpace because of their real name policy. However IMO this was because it enabled discoverability which got the network past a critical point. If I'm on a social network, I want to instantly know who friends and acquaintances are.
Saying "real names are good because I don't want to talk to someone with a silly screen name" is a complete misunderstanding of the product. It's not about the personal preferences of power users, it's about casual users being able to use the network reasonably efficiently.
Sure you can ask users to link accounts or whatever, that's part of the puzzle, but getting the network going is literally the problem you're trying to solve. Understanding how real names fit into the puzzle is pretty important.
I'm not stunned that you disagree with real names. I'm stunned that (apparently) no-one tried to convince you why it was a good idea beyond the preference of some hypothetical power-user.
As for global lock-outs ... yeah. Google isn't the only game in town, when it comes to email and data hosting. They're the only game in town when it comes to drunken comments on silly political videos (or my cat sitting on my keyboard as a livestream runs, or some accidental cut and paste error or whatever else will upset them). If I have to pick one, I'll keep watching Youtube and I'll take my serious business elsewhere, I hope Youtube is making a ton of money for them.
> I'm utterly dependent on my Gmail address to the point where I probably won't use any future Google service just to diminish my risk of some new product triggering a global lockout, which as an ex-employee I now have limited ability to rectify.
I've never thought of it that way. That's hilarious.
Reading this whole thread has made me realise I really need to at least back up my ~15 years of gmail emails somewhere else. I don't care much about the rest but that would be a killer.
Very interesting. It is pretty much how many people imagined it to have taken place.
> Larry talked a lot about the desire to get people signed in to Google search.
I don't do that and still use the search engine from time to time. It is really annoying, since you have no control about settings, that could very well be controlled by a cookie.
Google just plainly started putting business interest above user interest. I even doubt the intention of wanting to provide a better service. Or at least not for the "customers" that visit the page to search.
The intention was pretty transparent from the start. And there is a reason this intent is probably only communicated internally.
I think the problem with Google is mainly the leadership, which changed profoundly with the success of Google in my opinion. Almost as if they don't even know why they were successful in the first place.
This is China Social Credit System level of control. I would NEVER EVER use such a service. Its just too much of control in one place for a private company.
This actually terrifies me and I have recently be pondering if I should switch from my gmail to something else to secure my accounts. I worry one day they will say something like, sorry you used an adblocker on Youtube that is against our terms now you are cut out from your gmail. I do hope one day legislation is made giving consumers some protections. Until then I would like to find an alternative email provider, even a paid one, and get off of gmail.
This already exists to an extent on the other end of the transaction. Payment processors like Stripe are too ubiquitous to not have some level of oversight.
Some bot had flagged me as suspicious, and as a result
- I couldn't take any Lyft rides, and my company only subsidizes lyft.
- I couldn't rent a car on Getaround
- I couldn't rent a scooter on Skip, one of two providers in SF at the time
My mobility was severely hampered. I almost couldn't close on my house in time because my insurer of choice at the time also used Stripe.
To add insult to injury, Stripe's customer service absolutely refused to address the issue, flat out ignoring it. They claimed the issue was on the vendor side and to follow up with the vendor directly. It was only when I left a poor review on Google did they follow up with me within 2 hours, lifting the ban. For someone unfamiliar with the idea of a "payment processor", this may have never been resolved since the company "Stripe" is never visible during the transaction.
It is completely ridiculous if you think about the fact that they created a system where people can spam emojis, then banned them for doing it. If you don't want people to do something so easily filtered, just don't let them do it in the first place.
I have my entire photo in my iPhone synced to Gphotos. I also ran the "Free space" in my iOS GPhotos app to free up space. Now I am afraid of locking out of Google and my photos are gone.
I'm interested in why Google is partnering with Citi, assuming the rumors are true. Citi is notorious for having some of the worst tech amongst the churning community (churning is when you sign up for credit cards/bank accounts solely for the signup bonus which are ludicrously valuable in comparison to the ongoing rewards/perks of having the account; after the bonus is obtained you close the account and reopen it later once you are once again eligible for the signup bonus).
I originally thought the adage was a joke, but it really isn't. I signed up for a Citi checking account (purely for the signup bonus) and they have two interfaces for transferring money to other banks. One looks new but outright doesn't work. The other looks old, but does work. 90% of the links on the Citi account dashboard point to the new/non-functional interface. The other 10% point to the old/functional interface. All of the confirmation emails received for transferring money were clearly generated by a very, very old system (plain text HTML with spaces/asterisks used to space out content).
I also literally could not find the routing number for my checking account on their website. I had to use the live chat to ask for it.
On the other hand, maybe this is exactly why they are interested in partnering with Google. If the bank agrees that they are loosing on the technology side, it would definitely make sense (at least on the boardroom PowerPoint) to partner with one of the leading tech companies.
Is there a history of people who went from entrepreneurship -> industry -> became rich -> opened a Bank? In older times these would be loan sharks but have other industrialists done that?
And is this the best use of the mountains of cash that these companies (google-apple-facebook) have hoarded?
Financial services as a whole are inherently a large part of the economy so it's reasonable to see why they're going after it. Warren Buffet attributes a large part of his success to his insurance interests and the capital (to invest) made available to Berkshire Hathaway via the float.
So what happens if I'm posting too many emojis on youtube? [1]
I know I'm losing my email account as well all my personal data on Google Drive and in Google Photos. Am I also going to lose my bank account if I'm careless enough to bank with Google?
I am surprised Google hasn't started Business Card similar to Amazon Business Card (5% cash back on AWS and Amazon Purchases). Businesses that use Google Ads (and Google Cloud) are far higher compared to who maintain a business account on Amazon.
Wouldn't data on Business Purchases be higher in value?
Higher in value to what? Consumer transaction data would be a valuable data set for purposes of targeted advertisements. Seems one hand washes the other.
I don't know this but I presume advertisement revenue from users is larger compared to revenue from B2B ads. Or at least that is my basis for why consumer transaction data would be more valuable as a supplement to advertisement targeting.
Imagine having your entire life ruined (not being able to purchase food, pay your rent and or bills on time, etc) because you merely WATCHED a video that politically doesn't align with the majority of their employees? You are practically asking children to watch over your money at that point.
Wondering why it took Google so long to want to get there. The data mining that will occur on these checking accounts is valuable to their ad business.
However, if they add some revolutionary features to it, happy to join. Or, they could just buy Revolut.
Count me out. I already stay away from them as much as possible (ProtonMail over Gmail, DuckDuckGo vs Google search, I never log in to youtube and on Android where you are required I always use incognito, etc., etc.). No way in hell I am going to give Google of all companies my complete financial transaction records so they can "analyze" it and sell it to someone. I'm sure my bank probably already does it but I'd rather them do it (smaller local bank) than have Google in possession of that information.
I've made the switch to invidio.us, which let me import my subscriptions from YouTube. I love that you can switch out YT comments for Reddit comments, as well as the minimalistic appearance in general.
Temporarily disregarding the other concerns, I much more trust Google's security since they have the option to require a security key to login (Advanced Protection Program), no other bank I know of can do that for their customers' accounts. Having no phone support could also be seen as a positive to prevent social engineering, assuming you can get support over email or live chat.
For the same reasons I don't want Facebook to have a new crypto currency, just, no. While this isn't as bad... I just don't see this as particularly good. I, personally, think more people should favor smaller, local banks and credit unions over the large national banks as it is.
The first time I tried to break the cycle with Google was for NYE 2011, but Gmail was impossible to get rid of at the time. The last redesign has meant that I literally more than prefer Thunderbird nowadays, and it's no longer considered weird to not want e-mail/Facebook/etc on your phone, so I'm aiming to dump Gmail for real for 2020.
Since they killed off so many services pretty much the only thing else that I use is Google Cloud. Current plan is
- Disposable account for my phone until I replace it a new phone that has no identifying marks shared with the old account. Probably create a new disposable account for the replacement phone and disable sync
- Otherwise unused Gmail account to own the gcloud stuff
- Delete my domain, move e-mail to pretty much doesn't matter any more, I'm back to where the only thing I actually need is POP3. It's insane that somehow this happened but it did. It's 1998 all over again
I switched to iCloud as my primary email account and use Mail on macOS and iOS. Good enough for how I use email.
GMail is an awful experience these days and would consistently bury important messages (to me anyways) in the tabs/buckets (or whatever they're called) no matter how many times I would drag them back to Inbox/Primary.
297 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadIt's one thing to offer an online product suite without any support, it's a completely other thing to offer a product that is as heavily regulated as banking services.
They're probably not going to earn any significant amount from providing a checking account. I can only assume that they're after the transaction data itself (looking for patterns, etc.), but I find it hard to believe that the payoff would be large enough to endure the pain that is the current regulatory environment surrounding banking. Especially when you're notorious for avoiding personal interactions.
Maybe my experience is one of the few exceptions but I know a bunch of people who also had a great experience with customer support by Google.
$70/m for a mobile plan seems ridicilous.
If you don't use more than a gig or two a month, that's close to one of the cheapest plans around. There are some cheaper prepaid plans, though.
Check out this map:
https://i.redd.it/2b7uoxjoprqz.jpg
For costs to come down, you'd need people to adopt single-state or two/three state plans on the East/West coast. But starting such a network would be prohibitively expensive. For example an "only California" plan could likely be very inexpensive and comparable to Europe.
However, I was wondering: How good is the LTE coverage across the U.S? Germany has really bad coverage, even along the Autobahn and train tracks with high traffic. And Germany is pretty small when compared to the U.S
That's interesting because VoiceStream/T-Mobile used to offer that exact plan in various clumps of states. They were called "Neighborhood Plans" and varied by area. In my case, I had a three-state plan covering Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. $50/month, as I recall, for 3,000 minutes, 3,000 SMS, included long distance, roaming across all of those states, and some amount of data that I can't remember. The northeast had a similar one for Maine down to part of Virginia.
In the early 2000s, that was a screamingly good deal. Those plans got dumped by the mid-2000s in favor of "unlimited nationwide roaming" and "free long distance to everywhere" and now we don't even think about where our devices work and what it does or doesn't cost to call a given number (or about "calling" in general because I see so many people on cheap mobile service forums who only want a data plan and "I don't need any voice minutes"). I can now get an unlimited-everything plan that works across the entire continental US network of a major LTE carrier for $25-40/month (depending on how many people are in my virtually-constructed "Party"), so at least costs have come down from where they used to be.
It always blows my mind how that whenever you go anywhere in the world, you can get amazing mobile plans (data and call / sms) for $10-$30 dollars per month.
The US could institute a similar regime that'd permit state/local carriers to exist and compete.
Google One is a 2$/month subscription that gives you 100GB storage in Drive and Google Support. The support has been instant and quality so far.
I had Google Wallet years back. At one point while I was traveling, I lost my debit card and thankfully had my Google Wallet card as a backup. I was able to transfer money to the card from my checking account, though I only moved over what I needed for short periods of time. This resulted in multiple movements of money to my Google account, which in turn resulted in Google flagging this as suspicious and preventing that account from using Google to pay for anything (I couldn't even purchase via the Play Store even if I selected my non-Google debit/credit cards as payment methods). They asked for verification of who I am, and I supplied the correct documents to them multiple times. Each time I was told that those documents did not suffice with no explanation as to why they were not reauthorizing my account nor why the documents I sent them weren't up to their standards. Just "Nope, go away."
For some dumb reason I insisted on proceeding with signing up for Fi, and found it super easy to just create a new Google account specifically for that. I've been increasingly uneasy about the longevity of this account because of that experience and realize now that it was probably foolish to migrate my phone service to a company that had already fucked me, but c'est la vie.
I'm sure existing banking laws will restrict them from algorithmically banning people like this, but their reputation is bad enough to keep me away. It's the same reason I'll never use Google Domains or Google Fi - my domains and phone number are too important to lose access to.
This already happens, a lot.
Do something that generates a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report (generally, stuff that looks like money laundering) and your bank will cut you loose, and they aren't legally allowed to disclose why. Running a marijuana dispensary? Forget about a bank account.
They weren't taking a political stance. If Wikileaks supporters had used their own credit cards Wikileaks could still take donations by credit card.
It was here on HN few days ago. Streamer asked people to spam the chat just like in twitch, youtubes automated systems banned viewers who obliged locking them out of all google products, gmail etc.
Now imagine losing also your banking due to things like that.
I do not comment on google platforms at all because I’m so stuck with gmail due to making an account when it came out and I was young then. Whenever I have a choice I avoid their products.
I’m even avoiding publishing hobby stuff on Play Store nowadays as a bad submission due to error will, you guessed it, lead to total ban.
Just as you said this works against their interests. As consumers we must diversify.
Losing an email address or even access for some time will cost me money. Gmail isn't good enough that I'd risk my business over google code of conduct.
Proton mail it is.
I’d you have ever deposited more than 10k in cash or received a 25k+ wire, you probably has a SAR created for that transaction.
> In the United States, FinCEN requires that an SAR be filed by a financial institution when the financial institution suspects insider abuse by an employee; violations of law aggregating over $5,000 where a subject can be identified; violations of law aggregating over $25,000 regardless of a potential subject; transactions aggregating $5,000 or more that involve potential money laundering or violations of the Bank Secrecy Act; computer intrusion; or when a financial institution knows that a customer is operating as an unlicensed money services business.
Just getting a $10k transfer doesn't sound like it'd trigger any of those.
To reduce the threat of Apple from siphoning folks away from Android and thus disintermediating their advertising business.
That's the reason they went into Android and Chrome and half-baked subscription services: to defend the advertising business.
Nearly everything Google does out loud that's not GCP is ultimately motivated by the need to defend, sustain or grow the advertising business.
The rest of what they do gets a lot of media attention but comes close to being a rounding error by comparison to ... the advertising business.
The result in Sweden is almost 40% less offices in the last 10 years and only a handful in existence that handle physical cash. Customers are a bit less satisfied but you can't really live in Sweden without having a bank account so what are people really to do but accept the change. Banks profits are up so the trend is likely to continue.
2. They have the computing and engineering power to optimize pretty much anything beyond where it is today.
3. User/Business Data
Money, as always.
>They're probably not going to earn any significant amount from providing a checking account.
That depends on specifics of the accounts and how they work. It's possible to make a lot of money off of just temporarily holding someone else's cash. Transfer firms like Moneygram make most of their cash off of interest on other people's money when it's being "sent" from one location to another.
>I can only assume that they're after the transaction data itself (looking for patterns, etc.)
This is the correct answer. The more data they can aggregate and cross-correlate, the more accurate their derived conclusions about the spending habits, psychology, and behavior of people can be. The more accurate those are, the more control, power, and money Google will have. I'm sure they don't "intend" that it will be used for anything unethical, but presently there are no laws forbidding them from doing anything at all with it as long as it's derived data.
The overall effect of them doing this research is similar to a twilight zone plot... imagine a psychologist discovers a principle within the human mind that exists within everyone.
When used, this discovery very strongly influences the target to buy whatever is on offer, to the level almost of a compulsion. Use of this knowledge is undetectable, but allows anyone who knows it to sell anything to anyone for any price they choose (within reason).
That's what Google is trying to build.
People will still have free will (to the extent they ever have) no matter how individually tailored ads get.
The idea is similar to the reason gas stations have loyalty cards... they're not so loyal customers get discounts, it's because they can sell that data to companies wanting to analyze spending habits.
If Google can use its expertise to cross-correlate data from financial services like it does other sources, that fills in a link in the chain, from money going into the consumer's pocket to money coming out in a purchase.
Gas stations already know that e.g. (making this example up) someone who buys gas at a certain time of the morning has a X% chance to also buy a breakfast donut if they buy a coffee. They get this from statistical analysis of the data from loyalty cards.
So all the gas station has to do if they want to make some amount of money from the people who buy donuts is to trigger the behavior - provide free coffee or coffee at a discount at a certain time of the morning, and at the same time add a few cents to the price of donuts. In exchange for a loss on the coffee, they get a very high likelihood of making extra money by manipulating consumer behavior, and likely the consumers don't even know it. That percent advantage is worth dollars.
Google wants to correlate consumer data to the point where they know all the things that trigger when people spend. Other corporations will pay gigantic amounts of money for that service, because it's a bankable return for them. There's no guessing whether (going back to my example) free coffee in the morning will cause better sales of donuts, because they know as opposed to guess.
Google filling in all the blanks in its chain of data sources means that they'll be able to correlate things like "During a three paycheck month, men age 30-45 tend to put that extra disposable income in their checking account for use on a mix of necessities and luxury items.". If a company selling luxury goods wants to know when they should saturate men age 30-45 in a given market with ads to drive sales temporarily up 65%, Google can sell them that information.
Just knowing when specific people will have the ability and interest in buying something they're selling lets them avoid spending money on advertising, shipping, or even producing goods that won't easily sell. That's a huge advantage in the market over another company that has to guess when and what kind of advertising will be effective.
The consumer targeted by this will not know... they'll just be more likely to buy a particular product when they happen to have the money to do so because the sellers will be subtly increasing the coverage of ads or targeting those ads to the demographic involved during that time period, and those ads can manipulate as well using sex, rhetoric, or any of the other techniques advertising knows about.
Being more certain (even if not 100%) what will happen in the future translates into money and power.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish...
Think of things like communications with banks. If you could send me statements or notifications securely to Google Drive or GMail, that saves the bank money and drives value on the Google side.
Banks and credit unions do this already. Your average credit union with a few hundred million in deposits is paying a provider to run all of the web and IVR services.
... really? Google is the Consumer Intelligence Agency. All they want is all of your data on how you're spending your money, so they can sell more ads.
There's no other lofty goals here but more access to how you and your money moves.
And also for those who reject adblockers and are happy to see google roaming through all their financial transactions (and health information [1])
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-s-secret-project-nightin...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/cloudblog.withgoogle.com/topics...
https://cloud.google.com/solutions/healthcare/
(I'm a Googler, opinions are my own)
Meanwhile, the account number alone is good enough to initiate a wire or EFT with no prior notice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/05/23...
I cannot see how you can not be happy about that. This is definitively not a lie or something.
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify Google and Amazon and Facebook and I realized that you're not actually businesses. Every business on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. A disease, a cancer of this planet.
Further, having as many children as the environment can support, regardless of the consequences for the environment or its destruction, is natural for nearly every life form. Look at invasive species like Asian carp or zebra mussels.
Or they're a warning sign of it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/10/sperm-cou...
> As new data emerge, however, many scientists now believe sperm counts have indeed fallen—and continue to fall. As a story in GQ noted earlier this year, a widely cited study published in 2017 by researchers from the Hebrew University and Mount Sinai’s medical school found that among nearly 43,000 men from North America, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia, sperm counts per milliliter of semen had declined more than 50 percent from 1973 to 2011. And not only that, “but total sperm counts were down by almost 60 percent: We are producing less semen, and that semen has fewer sperm cells in it,” wrote the GQ contributor Daniel Noah Halpern. When Halpern asked several scientists why, they presented a united front: It was the unprecedented amount of chemicals now routinely entering the human body.
On that note, a faang oozing into banking should absolutely raise antitrust questions.
There is no end game, we need more superfluous gadgets, faster things, smarter things, for what ? God knows, but it seems we can't do without it. We won't stop until we're forced to.
I dramatically disagree with that characterization. VCs and the startup world think that it's "growth or failure". There are a massive number of businesses where stable is fine (though mild growth would be preferable). You just don't hear about them.
-- Starship Troopers 2
We’re basically seeing another iteration of this now with Amazon, Google and Facebook
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14363093
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9780632
Google could've easily occupied the space where Slack, WhatsApp, etc currently exist. They had the technology, they had the team with a vision for a new standard of internet messaging. Instead they just pulled the plug within months.
+ Those with Amazon Prime and Google
+ Those with only Google
+ Those banned from Google
¹ ymmv.
The national law avoidance, tax avoidance, are both being dealt with by EU. Google is being incredibly cagey about how much of a material impact this is going to have on their business. I don't believe they are complying with GDPR, among other things. Google / Alphabet has basically handcuffed themselves and thrown out the keys in the EU vivisection room.
If you examine Google / Alphabet's position in the US, they went from being the most frequent visitor of the Obama White House (something like weekly visits) to be vilified by the far right, the far left, and the center. The customers that still trust Google have been left largely in the dark and don't read the news.
I've been negative on Google for about a decade now, arriving to the party far in advance of everyone else. I saw the tricks they were pulling back then when they were celebrated.
Yesterday's story about Google working with Ascension was extraordinarily shocking. There are, of course, serious privacy issues, and that dominated the headlines. What is truly appalling is that Google is using their artificial intelligence / machine learning work to help a major healthcare company "extract more revenue from patients" (WSJ.)
Google has veered so far off course, one wonders if Larry Page and Sergey Brin may be suffering from head injuries or dementia, or just drowned themselves in their own hubris. It starts to sound a lot like OpenAI, where there tech firms believe they are going to do something so substantial, are execute above and beyond what anyone else is capable of, that the entire world is there's for the taking.
It is more likely that these companies will cease to exist, by a wide margin. With or without regulators. The more pots they stick their hands in, the less consumers will trust them. We already see it here on hn, people no longer bother to try new Google products because we don't believe those products will still be around in a few years. What happens when the early adapters reject your products?
[0]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM
Now imaging your checking account also got disabled because some bot decided that you looked suspicious.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWaz7ofl5wQ&feature=youtu.be
Your own explanation of events reads like you tried to ignore a tax liability until you gave them no choice but to seize it. If you believed it was erroneous you should have worked with the State of Indiana to resolve the error (or create a payment plan saving $150 in fees).
Chase charged me $150 to rubber-stamp an illegal seizure of my account. They were entrusted with the funds and they seized them on behalf of a third party which had no legitimate claim to them.
Sounds like Chase stole my money—and charged me to do it.
Thanks for the warning and I will never do any business in state of Indiana.
They said above the state had a warrant. So they did what you wanted them to do, went to court, got a warrant and forced the bank via legal edict to hand over the money.
https://www.in.gov/judiciary/admin/2651.htm
It has problems:
https://cbs4indy.com/2019/08/15/state-automatically-issues-t...
https://www.theindychannel.com/news/call-6-investigators/cal...
You can also find tons of evidence of major tax warrant scams hitting Indiana. I wouldn't be surprised if Chase got a letter from the scammer, with a deposit account number, and a link to an official public tax warrant URL.
Seizures are expensive for the state too. If you're working with them on the tax liability (inc. disputing it) they likely aren't going to go the seizure route as a first port of call.
I understand that a court of law is different, but that does not mean that the court has acted ethically or logically-- they have only acted officially.
If your money was stored non-digitally, it would be a bit more difficult to confiscate, such as if it were in a safe that I privately maintained offsite somewhere.
It's because I'm trying to understand the logic of those who feel like just because an action has been performed by a certain government, it therefore must be logical and ethical 100000% of the time.
I could point to examples of times where private organizations defied specific government orders because they felt the order was unjust, but I have a feeling this wouldn't be a sufficient argument for you.
Wow.
>It's because I'm trying to understand the logic of those who feel like just because an action has been performed by a certain government, it therefore must be logical and ethical 100000% of the time.
I literally never said that. Not once in any of these comments. Are you even replying to the right person?
>I could point to examples of times where private organizations defied specific government orders because they felt the order was unjust, but I have a feeling this wouldn't be a sufficient argument for you.
So, in your mind, Chase should perform their own investigation of this man's taxes before complying with the court order? This is really what you think?
Hey! That guy is in your restaurant. Hold him down before we get there. If you don't comply then you are in contempt.
honestly, have you thought through anything that you're saying? How do you imagine any of this could possibly work in the way you imagine? You literally expect every subject of a warrant to conduct their own internal investigation as to the validity of said warrant, even though they have absolutely no right to not comply.
it's so unreasonable that it's comical; I don't even know why I continue to respond. You live in a fantasy land.
"Zero-burden-of-proof state government edict" describes the property tax bills every single homeowner gets in the mail and is expected to pay. Pay your taxes.
In this instance I had no tax liability whatsoever. Zero. No business operations whatsoever in or touching or with their state. Indiana invented numbers out of thin air. Most of a year later I got the money back from Indiana as they agreed on this point (after they skimmed about $1k for “collections fees” incurred as a result of their illegal seizure).
Chase was happy to oblige them with a rubber stamp.
As far as opening a google checking account goes I think I will be avoiding that one. Diversifying my critical online services might in some sense be a higher security risk, but safer from it all being wiped out in one go.
If I had known back in 2002 what I know now about what Google would become I never would have joined the Gmail beta.
100% agreed. It was cool at the time. Now Google has so fundamentally changed and I don’t trust them with my data anymore, but it is a Herculean task to move everything off Gmail. Literally hundreds of accounts are bound to my Gmail.
and any judge can tear that to shreds if they are sympathetic to the implementation
I've been unable to access my google account for over two years. Their automated processes are never able to confirm my identity, and any humans I do manage to communicate with tell me to use the automated systems.
I don't even care about my dignity any more, I'll beg for it back in person.
Or just go with an email provider that isn't auditing your behaviour
[1] http://isync.sourceforge.net/
No, outsourced call center with no escalation path doesn't qualify as support for anything but the most basic issues. Google 'support' means bitching on HN, getting upvoted, and having an engineer take notice and actually poke at it.
> the fact that you are spending money tells Google that you are a serious user.
No, it signals that you are reliant on them. This means they can treat you as a second-class citizen from the free users! This recent issue happened to one of my clients (not anyone in this thread), https://support.google.com/voice/thread/3818693?hl=en . Note, paid users can't request a free Google Voice account, have to pay for the same thing on Cloud Voice now.
We had similar issues in the past where we couldn't delegate users from a Google Business panel inside our G Suite domain, we had to maintain personal GMail accounts to add business managers.
I've been a reseller of this shit, deeply regret it. When it works for our clients, it works fine. When it doesn't, we're just as screwed with getting support as anyone else. I switched my primary accounts to Fastmail and O365, and haven't looked back.
I've been meaning to migrate to Exchange/o365, it's in my backlog of projects that I'm procrastinating.
They use free users as beta testers and to see if ideas stick. They can't deploy those to actual customers.
Paying for GSuite doesn't eliminate any of the problems (they'll still ban you, spy on you, have relatively poor support, etc.) and many of the alternative services are simply better anyway.
I manage my company's G Suite account, and their support hasn't impressed me. We were initially unable to set up DKIM. The page to generate the DNS record kept returning a strange error code. I talked to support they were friendly and apologetic, but the issue took months to fix. Every time I followed up I was told they hadn't even heard back from the engineers, which gave me the impression that the support department doesn't have much pull in the organization.
I used Dropbox and now MEGA to sync photos off my phone, but I copy all that stuff to my NAS and backups. I use Drive for some things, but I wouldn't be screwed if it went away. I disable almost all the major Google apps on my Android phone and hope to switch out to Lineage + miniG soon.
I use a self hosted TTRss currently (Google Reader was garbage and it dying was really good as I realized what good RSS readers were actually like).
I need to set a reminder to do more regular Facebook exports/backups. No one should be in the situation where a single provider killing your access means you loose a huge chunk of your content. Self hosting has its own problems and yes, a lot of people don't have the knowledge/means/time to do it, but man I'm glad I made it a priority.
My phone number is still on Goolge Hangouts. I need to find a better solution for that as well.
I use it myself :)
With what is going on with big internet players censoring and deplatforming people, why would one trust these people with your money.
That's already how fraud protection works in the majority of banks.
The surface area for misclassification is much larger in Google’s case as they close down the entire account without any mechanism for appeal.
Yes, but what bank has the surface area of google? If I do something in a an area that has _literally nothing_ to do with banking ( say google stadia ) that a bot thinks is fishy - will I have all of my funds locked up over that mistake?
A bank might suspend your checking account if it detects suspicious financial transactions on the account. The goal here is (ostensibly) to protect the account owner.
Google, as per the precedents it has repeatedly set, could suspend your checking account for participating in a stream on YouTube and following the streamer's instructions to spam chat with emotes in order to vote on his path through the game, as happened to Markiplier and his followers. That's far beyond what anyone should consider reasonable risk for being able to access their bank account.
That's not the entire story. Not only do banks have tons of regulations that they have to follow, a concept of "algorithm determined that we shutdown the account and we can't explain to you why" does not exist there.
Not even sure how to call google. Google Maps has issues with father in laws address. They also have some made up city name near where Ive lived on and off for 30 years, not a single person calls it that. Amazon hides their number or changes the location on their website frequently.
Someone was violating youtubes rules about posting repetitive comments. You can't post the same thing over and over on youtube without running into problems.
They ban entire accounts that are not paying. We've had reasonable (not great by any means) service with some of their paying products.
And paypal locked an account of mine for something like 10 years (based on nothing). Wasn't worth the fight, but was randomly contacted to claim my money oddly.
I have purchased a domain and used it to underpin a fastmail account; personally, I don't share in your line of reasoning and don't want to continue to trust Google.
1) The statement that google deleted someones accounts because they used emoji's in a comment or comments is 100% a lie. Let's be crystal clear about this.
2) If you aren't paying you are not the customer - you are the product. Is this not obvious to folks?
If you pee in google's pool they are going to kick you out. You don't make them much money (they make money on volume) and if you annoy lots of their other users and violate their written policies they have an economic incentive to eject you from their ecosystem. Every MINUTE they spend dealing with you is profit lost - so they are probably NOT going spend a lot of time dealing with you.
If you want control - buy your own domain and point it to where you want to. Or pay someone for email. Or do both, I think those are all great ideas.
But the lies about an emoji in a comment being the reason someone's account is banned are very annoying.
Your point on Paypal is valid, and people dealing with Google checking are making a risk calculation like people dealing with Paypal do (but of course, one would hope that over time, the offerings improve; Google entering this market new should be offering something better than Paypal).
Agreed though - if you are not paying and are the product in their system - then you are definitely at risk.
If you don't think those features will be worth it because you don't think Google is good at customer service, then I guess that's for you to decide for yourself. I don't really see how it's relevant to my comment, though.
And Markiplier posted an UPDATE video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhb4CvOtEeo
(I'm a googler, opinions are my own).
It's strange to me when someone restates the misbehavior as though it's a justification. If someone is abusing commenting, block them from commenting, sure. Don't disable all their other products. If someone is abusing two products, disable their whole account, then? Sure, if you want. That reduces the false-positives by about a square factor (0.1% -> 0.0001%)
YouTube's denials about why it happened are again dumb, and a chat ban in YouTube should in no way affect the rest of your Google account. Just acknowledging that it happened isn't a good explanation.
"Ya our rules are dumb and on manual review we were still stupid assholes"
It's also impossible to get ahold of anyone at YouTube and YouTube's "ya we manually reviewed it and fucked up" is just another admission that their pile of a system just doesn't work.
I'm moving away from Google and any other provider like them. These incidents only impress the need to do it faster. I can't risk having my business and life ruined because of a youtube algorithm with no one behind the wheel.
I recommend everyone else do the same. Just the idea that YouTube chat bans would connect to other portions of the account means google is not interested in you. Every interaction with them is a threat to your digital well being where your whole account can be banned. It's totally unacceptable given the position they're in.
And it can all be manually reviewer and you'll be told to go fuck yourself and if you aren't markeplier or whoever you have no recourse.
Fuck that shit.
Google needs to do more than a Reddit comment. This is the second time you have done this, and you supposedly seriously damaged a few of the people involved (I'm guessing they are SOL in terms of that, and I don't want to be SOL). "Oops" only cuts it the first time.
I think we have ample evidence that people want pseudonymity. People like to segment parts of their lives without their prospective employer being able to look up what you said and possibly take things out of context. So as much as people outside complained, trust me there was a ton of internal dissent about this too. This was back before leaking for a political agenda became widespread in the Trump era.
Anyway, agree or disagree with the Real Names policy it presented a far larger problem. If some automated system decided your name was "fake" your entire account including Youtube, Gmail and so on got locked.
Whoever signed off on this was utterly insane and should've been fired. While we're at it, fire anybody who suggested it as being a good idea.
I remember looking for a photo storage solution for my sister at the time. Google Plus had unlimited storage but you had to "upgrade" your account to a Google Plus account. I, as a Google engineer, could not in good conscience recommend this approach because I had no idea what might trigger a global lock on her account.
Google Photos came from the wreckage of this shit show and is actually a good product. This happens when you start addressing user needs and concerns rather than trying to push your own agenda. What agenda? Google wanted a single account for everything where everyone was logged into search as this would allow search to be personalized (better). Or at least that was the theory. Larry talked a lot about the desire to get people signed in to Google search.
I'm utterly dependent on my Gmail address to the point where I probably won't use any future Google service just to diminish my risk of some new product triggering a global lockout, which as an ex-employee I now have limited ability to rectify.
Google should NEVER have taken the route of a global lock out. Trust is broken. So my chances of using this banking service is literally zero.
To me, this is stunning. IMO, Facebook beat MySpace because of their real name policy. However IMO this was because it enabled discoverability which got the network past a critical point. If I'm on a social network, I want to instantly know who friends and acquaintances are.
Saying "real names are good because I don't want to talk to someone with a silly screen name" is a complete misunderstanding of the product. It's not about the personal preferences of power users, it's about casual users being able to use the network reasonably efficiently.
Sure you can ask users to link accounts or whatever, that's part of the puzzle, but getting the network going is literally the problem you're trying to solve. Understanding how real names fit into the puzzle is pretty important.
I'm not stunned that you disagree with real names. I'm stunned that (apparently) no-one tried to convince you why it was a good idea beyond the preference of some hypothetical power-user.
As for global lock-outs ... yeah. Google isn't the only game in town, when it comes to email and data hosting. They're the only game in town when it comes to drunken comments on silly political videos (or my cat sitting on my keyboard as a livestream runs, or some accidental cut and paste error or whatever else will upset them). If I have to pick one, I'll keep watching Youtube and I'll take my serious business elsewhere, I hope Youtube is making a ton of money for them.
I've never thought of it that way. That's hilarious.
Reading this whole thread has made me realise I really need to at least back up my ~15 years of gmail emails somewhere else. I don't care much about the rest but that would be a killer.
> Larry talked a lot about the desire to get people signed in to Google search.
I don't do that and still use the search engine from time to time. It is really annoying, since you have no control about settings, that could very well be controlled by a cookie.
Google just plainly started putting business interest above user interest. I even doubt the intention of wanting to provide a better service. Or at least not for the "customers" that visit the page to search.
The intention was pretty transparent from the start. And there is a reason this intent is probably only communicated internally.
I think the problem with Google is mainly the leadership, which changed profoundly with the success of Google in my opinion. Almost as if they don't even know why they were successful in the first place.
Some bot had flagged me as suspicious, and as a result
- I couldn't take any Lyft rides, and my company only subsidizes lyft.
- I couldn't rent a car on Getaround
- I couldn't rent a scooter on Skip, one of two providers in SF at the time
My mobility was severely hampered. I almost couldn't close on my house in time because my insurer of choice at the time also used Stripe.
To add insult to injury, Stripe's customer service absolutely refused to address the issue, flat out ignoring it. They claimed the issue was on the vendor side and to follow up with the vendor directly. It was only when I left a poor review on Google did they follow up with me within 2 hours, lifting the ban. For someone unfamiliar with the idea of a "payment processor", this may have never been resolved since the company "Stripe" is never visible during the transaction.
I originally thought the adage was a joke, but it really isn't. I signed up for a Citi checking account (purely for the signup bonus) and they have two interfaces for transferring money to other banks. One looks new but outright doesn't work. The other looks old, but does work. 90% of the links on the Citi account dashboard point to the new/non-functional interface. The other 10% point to the old/functional interface. All of the confirmation emails received for transferring money were clearly generated by a very, very old system (plain text HTML with spaces/asterisks used to space out content).
I also literally could not find the routing number for my checking account on their website. I had to use the live chat to ask for it.
A non paywalled (but different) article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/13/google-ch...
And is this the best use of the mountains of cash that these companies (google-apple-facebook) have hoarded?
There's also the Japanese model of group companies centered around a bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu
I know I'm losing my email account as well all my personal data on Google Drive and in Google Photos. Am I also going to lose my bank account if I'm careless enough to bank with Google?
[1] https://www.insider.com/markiplier-youtube-fans-heist-lost-a...
Wouldn't data on Business Purchases be higher in value?
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
However, if they add some revolutionary features to it, happy to join. Or, they could just buy Revolut.
Since they killed off so many services pretty much the only thing else that I use is Google Cloud. Current plan is
- Disposable account for my phone until I replace it a new phone that has no identifying marks shared with the old account. Probably create a new disposable account for the replacement phone and disable sync
- Otherwise unused Gmail account to own the gcloud stuff
- Delete my domain, move e-mail to pretty much doesn't matter any more, I'm back to where the only thing I actually need is POP3. It's insane that somehow this happened but it did. It's 1998 all over again
GMail is an awful experience these days and would consistently bury important messages (to me anyways) in the tabs/buckets (or whatever they're called) no matter how many times I would drag them back to Inbox/Primary.