You think you can escape my ire today, Google? You’re no better than Apple. Case in point:
Google is in hot water after banning the Google account of Andrew Spinks, the lead developer of the hit indie game Terraria. The YouTube account of Spinks’ game dev company, Re-Logic, was hit with some kind of terms-of-service violation, resulting in Google banning Spinks’ entire Google account, greatly disrupting his company’s ability to do business. After three fruitless weeks of trying to get the situation fixed, Spinks announced that his company will no longer do business with Google and that the upcoming Stadia version of Terraria is canceled. “I will not be involved with a corporation that values their customers and partners so little,” Spinks said. “Doing business with you is a liability.”
This is, sadly, a very common occurrence. Google has a long history of blocking accounts for no reason at all, without giving the affected people any recourse since the company effectively has no customer service department. These cases can be absolutely devastating, causing people to lose photos, emails, access to their business financials, and god knows what else.
We at OSNews use what was once called Google Apps for Your Domain (launched in 2006), only for us to be grandfathered into GSuite, which is now called Workplaces, which has led to a lot of frustration for me since GSuite accounts are locked out of a ton of Google services for no particular reason, and there’s no way to convert an existing Google account from one type to another. We were never asked if we wanted to be converted to the much more limited GSuite accounts. Google just did it.
In any event, I have been pondering if we should switch to something else, but it’d be a lot of work I’d be putting on the plate of someone else – OSNews’ owner.
Thom Holwerda,
I certainly don’t like doing business with google (and facebook, amazon, etc), but I’ve had to accept the futility of fighting them a long time ago. I will recommend smaller companies whenever I can but clients will often demand to go with the big monopolies (because of branding or vendor locking). For every one of me pushing them to small independent service providers, there are thousands of devs pushing them towards the big monopolies. It’s sad but what can you do? Ironically many of these huge companies, including google, have some of the worst customer support. But it hasn’t deterred the market, so what do they care.
Also don’t forget that osnews website is currently hosted by google (kinsta is reselling google services). Honestly I was disappointed when osnews moved to google services given that you can get wordpress hosting just about anywhere including smaller local companies. But as usual it’s not my call and I just had to accept it.
I don’t know that osnews would be up for it, but it would be very cool if you could have a new series covering the topic of switching away from the tech monopolies (proprietary tools & services, hosting, etc) while simultaneously making the transformation yourselves – ether self hosting, or local providers. Osnews could become an example of how to be less dependent on monopolies.
I thought they had been using word press for a while.
But titally agree that using Google for anything seems to be problematic. Outside of being forced to use quite a few of the apps on my phone from the Play Store. I have pretty much moved away from Google as much as I can. I still don’t get why companies use google accounts for some of their stuff…
It happened january 2019…
http://www.osnews.com/story/128924/what-happened-here/
I don’t remember where they were before moving to kinsta/google with wordpress, but it was obviously their custom website before. They wanted nothing to do with custom development after the breach and they settled on wordpress. It’s why I believe they haven’t been interested in trying the experimental features I’ve suggested over the years, haha. Though I still think we could make some pretty awesome features for osnews 🙂
We were hosted by a wonderful company called Endpoint and were running a custom PHP app that really had its original roots back in 2005 code, which was heavily refreshed in 2008/2009. Since I was the only person doing any maintenance of the code – which was almost entirely mine, it made sense to move to something like WP, where others could step in to assist. Now we run WP and tons of the functionality is segmented into custom extensions and we use ACF and other plugins to mimic almost all of the old functionality, Ultimately, we wanted a platform that made WP and hosting management stupidly simple. @David chose Kinsta and it’s been a great system for us, with only a few small niggles. But I’d be open to moving email from GSuite/Workspace/Whatever if there was another option that made sense. Given. that we pay nothing, it’d be tough to find another competitive solution.
I also want to note that I am personally de-Googling myself, I moved my Gmail to Hey.com and I’m off Google Photos and other services. The only one I’m struggling with is search. It’s so good. DDG and Bing just aren’t as good. I’m hoping someone else steps in there.
Have a look at https://www.qwant.com or https://www.ecosia.com. I use Qwant as default, and go to Google as last resort.
For what it’s worth, I really enjoyed the old site. Particularly the comment sorting and other comment features
If you’re not using any of the other features of Google Workspace, MXroute.com is a very cheap email alternative.
Docs and drive are harder to replace, like almost impossible to replace without self-hosting something.
The other one I recommend is Dreamhost since it’s hosting plus email for a really decent price. Their email works well enough.
Wow, MXroute.com lifetime subscription, for our little domain, would only be $99. That’s something to consider…
Jondice,
Yeah, wordpress doesn’t really have the best commenting system. I wrote two prototypes for client-side comment sorting…
http://vocabit.com/osnews/
As you’ll see the first idea was downright weird (the posts where chronologically ordered on the right hand side), haha. But I found the second really useful because you can toggle between threaded and chronological ordering while keeping the selected comment in place.
It was just a proof of concept and needed a bit more work. IMHO it would be extremely helpful to have a reply button for all comments at least in the client side GUI even if wordpress itself limits the comment depth. But this never got used anyways.
It might be converted it into a greasemonkey script…I used to use greasemonkey a lot but mozilla kept breaking scripts, so…meh.
Flatland_Spider,
Would you have suggestions if self hosting is an option?
I’ve been frustrated with “smart” mobile platforms since day one for not integrating with the standard file shares that work everywhere else in my infrastructure. To this day I still haven’t found a good solution. Everything is a an app that breaks the normal file sharing model. Traditional network sharing has been extremely invaluable to my workflow. I can open up a document regardless of what computer I’m using. With a VPN it even works remotely. It’s easy, cross platform, no need to reinvent the wheel here. It makes backups a lot easier. And yet mobile manufactures continue to fall short. I believe this is because they want to avoid competing with local solutions that a lot of consumers would end up using if their platforms game them the option.
Just signed up for MXroute for my domains based off of that. I *think* it will be a good place for what I use my domain emails for, very low usage. But on the other hand. its not the same level of service as Google/Amazon/Microsoft. I just want the best of both worlds, and I want to manage email as little as possible. There is no hell worse than maintaining email servers, even for small numbers of users.
UGGGG. Do not us MXroute.com…. The owner is nuts. Its a privately held company and he believes in a bunch of right wing conspiracies. Really regretting giving them money.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Where did you discover that?
My business does email hosting, but mostly corporate as a part of a hosting package. At $90/lifetime it’s not something I’d find profitable, to say nothing of competing with google.
“UGGGG. Do not us MXroute.com…. The owner is nuts. Its a privately held company and he believes in a bunch of right wing conspiracies. ”
So what? You do business with him not taking marriage or accepting lifetime arguing with him.
“So what? You do business with him not taking marriage or accepting lifetime arguing with him.”
I don’t want to do business with people who don’t deal with facts. Thats dangerous. I mean use the company for email? That requires a certain level of trust, and given what I found about the person behind the site ( check alt social media sites or just google his name and company, I don’t want to debate the content, its not relevant other than Its been proven wrong repeatedly) I do not trust him with that data.
I couldn’t find anything about the owner actually.
Plenty of reviews though (don’t know how many are real)…
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/mxroute.com
85% excellent
13% bad rankings,
The “bad” rankings have a consistent theme: the owner is quick to terminate accounts rather than resolve customer problems.
Take this case of a simple double billing error because the user accidentally did both automatic and manual payments.
https://www.trustpilot.com/reviews/5c49bd3d97afa10bf071a463
Even MXroute’s response confirms the facts of the complaint. It should have been an easy refund for the double charge. But instead they terminated the guy’s account saying “While user error is understandable and does occur, threatening chargeback to escalate a user error that does not impact service functionality created a scenario in which we would prefer to no longer do business with Guy”.
Good grief, that customer deserves an apology.
The service is probably fine until you need to contact support, then you roll the roulette wheel and hope your account doesn’t get terminated. Haha.
The fact that customer support is inversely proportional to a company size is logically explainable. All those companies have risen to prominence (pushing incumbents out) by utilizing economy of scale. Customer support is about the least scalable aspect of their activities because it involves human to human contact, so no wonder it’s the worst (at least until they invent Singularity :)).
Workspace accounts cannot access certain other google services (such as Nest) because of the way the accounts / sharing works, Nest has the ability to create households and invite other gmail accounts, this goes against the org policies baked into workspace accounts because typically you restrict to a domain and create groups with members.
It’s akin to saying you demand to use your Corp Active Directory account for Hotmail… the two are completely incompatible due to their structure.
Having said that, the marketing and communication around this could be better..
There are probably good reasons why Workspace accounts work like that. The problem is that they received this account type without asking for it.
I work for Google, but don’t take this as an official answer.
I think you might be right. I would guess the different terms of service agreements, and security considerations makes enabling features slower on the business offering.
For example, let’s say we want autocomplete trained on user data, and to make sure privacy is not leaked, let’s put filters for credit card patterns, etc, and a threshold of say 5000 minimum co-occurrences, so it does not pick up private stuff. However a large enough company will have more than 5000 users using internal jargon, possibly leaking this information when autocomplete was blindly enabled on them.
For this hypothetical example, it would take additional effort and more reviews to make sure things are kept private.
(Example made up of course).
I’m wondering what they’re talking about since Workspace accounts can access GCP and APIs. You know all the fun stuff.
There are tiers to Workspace, but that’s always been the case. Gsuite had tiers, and no, sane, company is going to give away the things that people will pay for.
Ok This article is an excellent occasion to ask out. What alternative to Google / Apple overpriced storage / media management services could you point out? Personal hosting is preferred but I’m also willing to pay reasonable money for online storage.
Priorities –
– seamless photo / video management on the mobile device (with automatic spill over to cloud to free up ondevice space)
– a decent gallery app that blurs barrier between on device / off device stored content
– sharing data between devices / family members.
Is it about price or privacy? Google/Apple/Microsoft offerings are dirt cheap, precisely because you “pay” them with your data. It will be difficult to compete with them on price, even when self-hosting (hardware costs money).
I’m using my own email server and Nextcloud – user experience is good but not as good as with Google/Microsoft clouds. The killer feature is privacy, of course, but there are also some other benefits.
Self-hosting is a great option but it has many pitfalls:
– It takes a fair amount of skill and effort to install, secure and _maintain_ complex systems. And Nextcloud is fairly complex if only because of the amount of services it provides and amount of data it stores. Don’t fall in the trap of an “easy” install via a WM/docker – it’s only easy until you try setting up backups, recover lost data, upgrade the system/app etc. There is no escape from learning this stuff at a fairly deep level.
– Certain services, like TURN servers required for Nextcloud Talk, are better hosted in datacenters (good network connection, static IP), so some hosting may be required. Same with the Email server as it need a clean (not black-listed) static IP and rDNS to be set.
– Self-hosting is great for your privacy (in fact it is the only way of achieving it) and good for privacy of people who trust you. However, many users will find it difficult to trust a person related to them with with their data.
– Privacy vs security. These are not the same. For example a typical smartphone is very secure but not private at all. Self-hosting is the other end. Without RAID, backup, decent quality hardware a chance of data loss is fairly high, so forget about RaspberryPi. Making the installation secure and keeping it such way is not easy either.
– opensource vs proprietary – commercial NAS solutions (apps) work quite well they are they are all about lock in and as far as privacy is concerned they are equivalent to hosted cloud services. When it comes to trust nothing beats open-source software.
– In summary: self-hosting has all issues of DIY projects. However, it is the *only* option when you need a truly private cloud.
Another option is hosting services from a small company. “Small” is the key. You pay them (usually more) for the service and that’s all. They can technically still access your data but (1) their business model is not based on that, (2) even if they do, they will be unable to combine them with your other devices, 24/7 location tracking, banking transactions, employment, medical records, phone records, emails, web/youtube/ history etc. Make sure you choose a company that doesn’t outsource their infrastructure to the big guys (Google/Amazon/Microsoft), though, as this is very common. This is an easy way of achieving a decent level of privacy but it is still based on trust. One of my VPS servers was in the Netherlands and the only long downtime (“due to technical reasons”) happened on the day of a terrorist attack – make your own conclusions.
As for services available and technical qualities (excluding privacy), it is a bit of a mix:
– Your own email sever can have a large amount of storage, separate email aliases for every service you sign up to, filters etc. But a webmail interface in e.g. Nextcloud is not as good as Gmail, and spam filtering will never be as good that in large email servers because of amount of data passing through them.
– File sharing works great but apps like photo viewers or document editors are rather limited in features and performance. They do work well enough but commercial offerings are better.
– Same with Nextcloud Talk – works great for small video conferences (up to 4 people) but the apps are a bit rough around edges and the default installation doesn’t scale to larger meetings due to performance limitations.
– Calendar and contacts – again, they are pretty good but there is some leg work needed to sync it with other clients, especially MS Outlook may be rather involving. In my use (syncing to Android phone and Thunderbird) it was reasonably easy.
– Niche self-hosted services – VPN, firewall, blog, media server, Mastodon, IRC bouncer, ddns updater, minecraft servers etc. Once you have your own server or a vps most of them a just one docker command away.
– Your own server will likely be located at your home or somewhere close to it. This means accessing it from remote locations will be slower. OTOH, it is less likely to be blocked in China and other countries with internet censorship.
This is such a great summary. I’m in a similar situation, hosting my own NextCloud+etc server at home, and experiencing similar pitfalls alongside the burden of maintenance. But I have to say the freedom of being ability to add new services on a whim, configure things exactly so, and trash everything without warning, is quite exhilarating.
Yeah I’ve been down the NextCloud rabbit hole. I just don’t have time to maintain it all. I think NextCloud is a great integrated solution, but not one I really need. I’m better off with a less is more approach where I only host the services I need and can’t trust others to provide. It does mean I trust people with my data, but in the end I’m not sure I’m not doing that by default by trying to keep up with all the security updates of a self hosted solution.
Have a look here:
https://restoreprivacy.com/google-alternatives/
https://piware.de/post/2018-05-01-android-degoogle/
Personally, except for using an Android phone I am fully degoogled. It started with DDG search more than 8 years ago but I also have no Google account anymore. Email is handled by (paid for) Fastmail (very much recommended and they do calendars and contacts too), I don’t miss *any* Google service except for an occasional translate.google.com and youtube with full protection.
No Google DNS, I use Openstreetmap, Nextcloud, Firefox, no Twitter, no FB,
The phone was the hardest part: I use a phone that can run LineageOS (Xiaomi Poco F1) but further degoogled by https://e.foundation (Thank you Gael Duval!), Together with MicroG it works perfectly fine.
I’m totally with you on this. MS Translate is pretty bad, but I use it with gritted teeth and get by (living in Finland, with terrible Finnish skills). I’ve not found any alternative to Google Scholar or StreetView (OSM is great otherwise). YouTube is sometimes unavoidable. And of course my phone runs Sailfish OS. So it’s quite possible to live without a Google account.
Big props here for Fastmail. I’ve been with them since 2015 and I have zero complaints. Their calendar/contact syncing works with both iPhones and Android devices, their mobile apps are stellar, and you even get basic static site hosting with your account (good for a CV/Résumé page, or simple file sharing). If I had to ding them for anything, it’s that they are based in Australia and subject to that country’s even-more-Draconian-than-the-US privacy laws. With that said, if you’re super concerned about email privacy there are better hosts for that situation like ProtonMail.
About the only thing better would be to run one’s own mail and CalDAV/CardDAV server on a small VPS, but who has time for that?
I haven’t found a good alternative to Google Photos. I hope somebody builds something that I can run on my own server that duplicates the functionality. I upload to pCloud and my own server using Syncthing, but it’s not as convenient and fast (sometimes the apps just fail to sync and I have to manually open them to prod them in to action).
For email I use Migadu which I can highly recommend, and use K9/Samsung Email to access them via IMAP on my phone/tablet. I previously used ProtonMail but the IMAP access required a separate program and it was slow and unreliable, also the webmail interface kind of sucked.
This is the dilemma of liberal democracy. Governments don’t want to regulate services, because it’s rightfully seen as an infringement of free speech and liberty. Instead, they allow monopolies or duopolies to appear, then pressure the corporations (Google, Visa, Facebook, etc.) to enforce their own restrictions on users’ actions. It’s something we’re seeing happen quite openly at the moment.
We end up with arbitrarily applied rules without the democratic oversight of a properly regulated industry.
I’ve come to realise that as a consumer, the only way to influence this is to pressure your democratic representative for regulation, or to avoid companies that are, or are heading towards becoming, monopolies. I’ve tried really hard with the second approach, but it’s yet to have any noticable effect.
The people I really admire are the ones who go out and offer alternative services and try to compete with the big players.
flypig,
I am in full agreement. But realistically we don’t make up a significant portion of the market and have little impact, which means the monopolies can easily afford to ignore us. Meanwhile the network effects often mean that we end up in the hands of the very monopolies we are protesting. I’ve already talked about it before so I wont go into details, but it’s like the way I was forced to replace my google-free lineage phone by my job.
I worry about sustainability. Every boom and bust cycle it’s the same story, more local businesses ceding market share to huge multinationals. This has been happening for decades and neither political party has taken on big business in a meaningful way.
I think an independent like Bernie Sanders might genuinely try follow through on something like that, but independents never win federal elections (in large part because of the electoral college). Bernie himself was compelled to run in the primaries as a Democrat in recognition of the Democratic and Republican duopoly of the federal government. Even if elected, any actions to take on big businesses would likely be stonewalled in congress, which is so heavily corrupted by corporate influence that it’s practically an extension of corporate power.
I don’t see a viable solution. 🙁
You’re right, as individuals we’re pretty powerless to fix this, but that just makes it all the more important to continue pushing for something better. In my case, mostly by going on about it at every opportunity on the Internet 🙂
The UK has similar problems with its approach to voting, and maybe this is part of the problem. I’m curious to know whether any other countries are tackling this better, but I have my doubts.
flypig,
I hear good things about the Nordic countries, but I’m not too knowledgeable about foreign politics. So I’m not really in a good position to answer that. I’m actually curious what Thom Holwerda would say about it, but he doesn’t generally get involved in the comments.
There are so many agenda issues to tackle, but it’s become clear that neither party in the US is interested in taking responsibility. Obviously I’m glad the selfish authoritarian got voted out, but I still think corporatism is going to continue getting worse. We desperately need to ditch the electoral college and even switch to rank voting to bring in new parties and fresh ideas. But I know that’s not going to happen.
@flypig
Compared to Europe the US has weak privacy and weak consumer rights law and seems to think T&Cs where you sign your rights in law away is a good thing. Fix this fix a lot of things.
My experience has been that while the EU law looks great on paper, the regulating bodies are reluctant to hold companies to account, except forhigh profile or totally egregious cases. Nevertheless I agree that consumer protection, especially when it comes to privacy, is a good thing.
@Flypig
Not every country in Europe is a member of the EU including, subject to Hail Mary legal challenges, the UK. Other countries in Europe who are also not members of the EU include Russia., Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iceland, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, San Marino, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, Vatican City.
As for the EU there are limits to EU powers as outlined in the establishing treaties governing EU competencies. EU members must be signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights and European Court of Human Rights. The ECHR is a distinct body to the EU although they share identical flags. The court is recognised by all members of the Council of Europe. Not all members of the Council fo Europe are members of the EU. EU member states also must sign up to the European Court of Justice which handles matters of EU law. The rest is down to the individual member states.
Right. I’m glad I made that clear. lol.
The US has its own ideas and culture. Some good, some bad. I have identified three policy areas needing attention (and will add a fourth “competition and monopoly law and regualtory practcie which is already seeing some movement) . The EU has been some influence at getting policy through in the US and many US citizens express popular support for improvement with these policy areas. As for whether they will be legislated and how soon or if at all I have no idea. I have no idea what legal impediments may or may not exist nor what cultural issues may or may not exist.
You know some of us have experience doing this sort of thing, and would be willing to help out if we knew there was a need. 🙂
Looks like he and the OSNEWS owner aren’t alone. This came in today:
We’ll soon delete all of your Google Play Music library and data
On February 24, 2021, we will delete all of your Google Play Music data. This includes your music library with any uploads, purchases and anything you’ve added from Google Play Music. After this date, there will be no way to recover it.
You can download your Google Play Music library and data with Google Takeout or transfer it to YouTube Music. As a reminder, with one click you can still transfer your music library, including uploads, playlists, and recommendations, to YouTube Music before February 24, 2021.
TRANSFER TO YOUTUBE MUSIC
If you have questions, we’re here for you. Check out our support resources.
The Google Play Music and YouTube Music teams
By which they presumably mean “we’ve written an FAQ, but any attempt to contact us will be routed to /dev/null”.
+1 Haha
EXACTLY!!! As there’s no link to (or infra for that matter) support, as there is to Youtube Music.
Many supposedly accidental problems from AI-driven administration could be resolved if the executives and management team were held to higher standards when their creations maim customers.
My suggestion is instant public execution: Everything goes well, here’s your bonus. You accidentally shut down a small business? Line everyone up, go ahead and grab everyone that lives to the left of these people, too. No one will want to live next to wreckless AI runners and the problem roots itself out.
The unilateral imposition of workspaces was mindless. My guess is there in an an angle there on tracking business vs personals identities for data monetization.