"Very possible"? More like "guaranteed". Everybody who pays the slightest bit of attention knows Google has a gigantic blind spot when it comes to thinking through the consequences of algorithms and automation. And there's no sign that the company is interested in fixing that, ever.
All jokes aside, for those who remember, it's pretty amazing what Microsoft got punished for (bundling a browser with the OS, with no other restrictions) compared to what Apple and Google get away with.
EDIT: One more thing that everyone seems to confuse is that antitrust cases should protect CONSUMER rights not PRODUCER rights. A case can be made that Google and Apple are hurting other companies by offering free services with their products but they ARE NOT HURTING CONSUMERS.
And Producer rights are affecting Consumer rights.
Without a free market, we're all worse off — the only justified monopoly is a governmental one.
All of them were started before Google even started competing with them.
Show me a company started after Google had already established a presence in a market that’s either competing with Google (and having a positive prediction) or that has thrown Google out of the market at all.
Yes, it does, that’s the entire point.
Will we still see as much innovation in 10, 20 years? For that, this part is very important.
> The simple fact of bundling is not a problem when there are choices.
Google forbids OEMs from selling custom Android forks. That’s not choice.
As said, both the EU and US consider this anticompetitive, and are investigating it. If you believe you – which apparantly are unable to use correct orthography – are more knowledged than the top lawyers of the two largest economies, then, sure, go on.
Even Google has admitted they are doing anticompetitive bundling, their defense is that it’s required to fund Android at all. That alone should say everything.
Or even just delivers parts for such a device, as was threatened with SAMSUNG and Amazon.
We tend to forget that even natural monopolies can be broken by new technology and innovation. And even big companies can be beaten by smaller ones. Microsoft tried to beat Google at search while Google was smaller and much less powerful than it is today. They couldn't, because big companies have a priority to protect their cash cows and don't necessarily have the talent or the focus required to tackle new markets (i.e. the innovator's dilemma). Google tried to beat Facebook at social. They also failed by being too conservative, while at the same time fucking their users. Can you spot a pattern?
But hammering them for bundling a browser was just plain stupid. If they didn't bundle a browser, how would people download a competing browser? You'd have had to get hold of a browser on CD somewhere and install it manually just to use the internet. How would that have been an improvement for consumers? It was a misconceived, user-hostile decision.
ftp ftp.netscape.com"Sue, how do I get that browser thingie?"
"Erm, Jane wrote it down for me... here's the Post-It"
"Thanks."
We survived OK.
I'm not aware of any popular OS that doesn't have ftp support on the main UI (except Android, which doesn't have a file management app anyways; not sure about iOS). Nautilus has ftp support. So does thunar, dolphin, konq, etc. You can type ftp addresses into the address bar in osx, iirc.
- Didn't want to open a browser one day but wanted to download the latest version of FF. Thought I'd try FTP. Ultimately gave up on trying to find the right path and Googled it.
Another time (later), I vaguely recall being at a kiosk with IE disabled in various boring ways, and I tried to see if I could download FF (just to see if it was possible) after successfully managing to open the FTP site. I might be misremembering, but I think the only reason I was able to locate the dir properly was because I'd previously made a careful mental note where it was. (It downloaded, but executables were disabled. Those sysadmins did a good job.)
> I can't do that, the hospital is within 50 miles of a school and you're banned from being within 50 miles of a school, because you commented "she's very pretty" to a picture of your 5-year-old niece and we've decided you're a paedophile.
Also, I must frankly admit my great curiosity at the fact that your last comment was posted 3.61 years ago. Alt account? Deleted comments?
It might be a very very good idea to lobby to get company policy instated that says "if the system thinks a user has gone rogue/bad, their account gets locked and all, but the data gets kept around until the user says to kill it, or for 6 months."
Because if Google thinks the account has gone bad, that's not the user saying "delete me," so the privacy policy (and associated laws) don't apply! There's nothing stopping you even stashing the data away indefinitely until the user explicitly asks for it to be killed (but that's scary).
At the end of the day though, algorithms fail, and IMO this is a practical edge-case policy glitch in the business architecture that should have been countered for.
Or does "user account gone rogue" have to be interpreted as "delete me" for crazy obscure Reasons™?
If a user's data needs to be deleted for whatever reason, simply discard the user's corresponding encryption keys. That way you can effectively wipe the user's archive without needing to touch the tapes themselves.
(Whether German data protection law applies in Google's datacenters is a wholy different story though.)
Otherwise, any kind of backups would be unlawful for a company.
I think this may have changed since that talk. I think Google still doesn't technically guarantee full deletion (who knows if someone's GC process messed up or has a bug) but in practice it happens, at least AFAIK. It is expensive. And it does take time, I wouldn't expect all my stuff to be purged until at least 180 days (the 90 days they are supposed to delete after + ~90d for the delete to fully propogate).
It also drives every engineer nuts when they're asked is your service wipeout compliant and they realize omg I can't store this data longer than x days?! shit shit shit
European Privacy Shield compliance is yet another bag of legal worms every service has to deal with. More deleting, encryption at rest, etc.
Your data may still live out on some server - but it is effectively unrecoverable.
- Automation is going to be the end of your job. Not because your job will be replaced by an algorithm, but because overuse of algorithms is leading to the collapse of trust people place in Google. Major actions like the banning of someone's Google account should never be done by algorithms. If you can't afford the humans[0], you shouldn't be in the business of holding people's valuable data.
- The support and appeals process must be human. Ever tried Microsoft's Answer Desk? Talking to humans isn't difficult even with one of your largest scale competitors, even for free tier products. Humans want to talk to humans, and Google's customer base consists of humans. FastMail ticket support? Incredible. It feels like Google isn't even trying to treat customers well in comparison.
- Google shafted 200 of their customers, and from the looks of it, this thread has another 200 ready to leave. The Guardian just picked up the story, so expect this effect to continue. One bad behavior by automation can cost you multiples of damage, especially if someone writes a blog post about the incident.
[0]Google can definitely afford the humans, especially with that princely sum they have stashed in offshore accounts.
Human decency dictates that, at the very least, someone be warned that their account is now headed for non-negotiable suspension and be given 30 days to clear out their stuff and move on.
I couldn't care less what algorithm decided what. At some point a person coded-in the rules and, for some incomprehensible reason, this person or people decided it would be perfectly fine to take the path of most damage to consumers.
Your company, Facebook, Amazon and others deserve to get hit with a massive class action lawsuit that results in equally massive financial penalties and requires corrective actions. Maybe then you'll learn how to behave like human beings.
I'm still puzzled that they take such a drastic measure automatically, without having one human checking whether the account is actually a real person's account.
I really want to see what comes out of this, if everyone gets his account reinstated and how long they had it suspended.
I had some sloppy ndk computer vision running there, maybe it triggered something? I have no idea really. It's not like you can appeal anywhere. I was very busy with other things and let it slide at the time. I got away with a very cheap lesson I guess
Naming storms like this is about rare they are. A "10 year storm" or "100 year storm" only happen once in that period. So they refer to a 10% or 1% chance that an X-year storm that would happen in any given year.
Is this cock-up is so bad that you don't expect a Google company to make a similar or more severe cock-up for DECADES? Then it's not a perfect storm. This was a common storm. In fact, I'm very doubtful it was as a "storm" inside of google at all. This is just another "whoopsie" bug fix, isn't it?
This right here is why people get the impression google thinks it's farts don't stink. Not only that you act as if this is a "perfect storm" but the arrogance it takes to design a system where just because an engineer didn't consider a use case, you're perfectly happy to assume it must be abuse.
Yes, this case will probably be fixed, but would it have been if it didn't pop up on the right back channels to get Googlers attention?
I work in Spam & Abuse and it's possible that this is the result of some clustering algorithm that was trying to take down sharders / phone buying rings. It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility (that legitimate customers would be used to shard purchases) and I'm pretty sure if the affected customers appeal they'll be reinstated, maybe with a warning. I certainly wouldn't characterize this as intentionally punishing the individuals who purchased phones on Google's part -- notice that only users who directly sent their phones to the reseller's address were taken down. Smells like automation to me.
The "deleting all their data if the appeal doesn't go through" thing is actually because of privacy policy and Google can't keep your data around for longer than 90 days give or take after your account is suspended. Again it seems heavy-handed but is more a perfect storm of big-company policy decisions with good intentions overall. Know that if you ask Google to remove your account, you'll actually get everything wiped! (That's a good thing imho!)
It really is unfortunate that FPs (or "mostly-FP"s) in Google's systems impact people so badly. FWIW for most Google services if you abuse them you usually get a service level suspension rather than your entire account suspended, probably for this exact reason.