Global bans "seem" to be new. I've read many stories of shell scripts randomly permanently banning android developers for life from their platform, but those stories always involved being banned from the play console and so forth, not being banned from search / maps / gmail / youtube / etc.
It seems to be news that if you tell people in public youtube comments that you vote for Trump, or whatever it is they're enforcing today, google will fight back by disabling your thermostat or whatever.
Global bans are not new. They were standard a decade ago. The reason is due to the structure of the various spam/abuse industries that plague any service that allows user generated content. What happens is this:
1. Accounts get harder to create as signup security improves
2. Black/grey-market account sellers come in and start creating accounts that get bought by spammers/fraudsters.
3. Spammer/fraudster abuses an account on service X, it gets locked for service X. They sell the accounts _back_ to the seller, who then resells the account once again with a note that it can't be used for YouTube or whatever.
4. Different spammer/fraudster buys the account, abuses it on a different service, goto step 3.
Their systems have some notion of why accounts were suspended or blocked, and the tech does support individual service level blocks. But they weren't used much back then because the pattern of a user being bad on one service and then being bad on every other service was too strong.
The problem of false positives was well known a long time ago, and the noise:FP rate is very good - if a script accidentally disabled good users with even quite low volume the people in question would be on Twitter or HN within hours making articles like this one, which did get noticed. So false account blocks were pretty rare.
Back then and still now, I think Google need to make it easier to handle this situation. Strong end-user support in these situations is hard because genuine fraudsters will happily file support tickets and socially engineer support to get their accounts back - I even witnessed auto-generated pleas to support once. They were quite convincing individually, only when you saw a few thousand of them with re-arranged sentences all begging for help with identical language was it clear they were spam. However they could still make it a lot easier, and in particular, could improve Google Takeout to be easier to use (e.g. automatically uploading the backups to various non-Google services).
Why are accounts suspected of TOS violations not simply put into read-only mode instead of shutting out users completely? If the identity/authorisation of the user is not in doubt it makes zero sense to not let people download their data before closing the account.
This simple change would fix all the consumer related horror stories with zero cost to Google. In fact it would become cheaper for Google because people would stop pleading with them.
Also, why is there no one-off paid support option that covers the cost of a human checking evidence and is expensive enough to deter mass abuse by fraudsters? Why is there no option to provide a photo ID upfront so that there is always a last resort to check whether a user is who they say they are?
Read only mode would make sense for content that's truly private, or which can be made private. Nothing stops them allowing Google Takeout for disabled accounts, heck maybe they do these days.
Paid support:
1. the optics of false positives being held to ransom to get their account back is terrible. Giving the money back isn't always easy (credit cards support this sometimes but many users don't have them). And this is made worse by:
2. many accounts aren't easily verifiable. People imagine that every Google/FB user puts their entire life on these accounts. A very small number do. For those, expensive ad-hoc processes could maybe increase the account verification rate by a little bit. But most accounts that get disabled are accounts with fake names, that use exclusively one service, etc. It's extraordinarily difficult to come up with reliable ways to verify the identity of the holder of accounts that required no identity to sign up.
Right, but removing an offending comment can easily be done indepenently of any other action against the account.
>the optics of false positives being held to ransom to get their account back is terrible.
That's true and I had that thought as well, but it's clearly the lesser evil compared to stories of people losing irreplaceable data.
>many accounts aren't easily verifiable.
True, but as I said, users could be given an option to make their account easily verifiable.
How much are accounts currently worth on the market? It seems that making the recovery procedure more expensive than the worth of the account should resolve that issue. At the same time legitimate users are probably willing to invest some money in order to recover their account.
For example offer a $20 option to send a registered letter to an address provided by the user. Then Google can check if: 1) The name on the credit card matches the name on the account, 2) a given address hasn't been used too often, 3) the identity check done by the postal service (checking if the recipient actually has a given name) succeeded.
This won't be a perfect solution and there are definitely edge cases for which it won't work (in countries without registered mail, if someone doesn't have a credit card, etc.). But it should be able to cover the majority of cases where legitimate accounts have been locked.
However that's basically what phone verification does. In case of suspicion someone has to provide their mobile phone number. It's texted with a code and a counter increased. The same number can't be used over and over. Unlike credit cards, the assumption of universal mobile phone access (amongst people who have internet access) is very strong. It works very well. In this case, the account was shut down without this being possible, which is only used normally for very clear cut cases. Don't assume the full story is public.
This is a problem that is largely solved at government scale, which is what Google is now, and there's no reason not to take advantage of existing infrastructure to do so.
My point is there are limits that what private companies can do. Stretching the boundaries like that is sure to cause a strong regulatory reaction at some point.
And we are free to complain and vote to change those rules. Guess what happens then?
I do love these sorts of arguments. There is a modern expression that goes "f* around and find out". Like Standard Oil did.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Sherman-Antitrust-Act
When you have governments using Google logins or schools communicating with parents via Facebook groups, or state broadcasters reporting on Twitter as news, then the line between private company and public utility has been crossed.
The worst is that they are certainly keeping your data, because they never throw anything out, while they are preventing you from getting to it.
That is theft, pure and simple.
The issue seems to me that it's a global ban.
If Google only locked you out of the functionality you seem to have violated somehow, it would still be a viable strategy to use their services.
Imagine losing the ability to comment or upload videos on YouTube because you wrote something offensive or published a video with copyrighted materials.
Potentially bad for YouTube creators, but definitely not dangerous for normal users which also use other services.
Reports like this were the reason why I removed almost all Google services from my life a few years ago, but I wouldn't have done it if the bans had been granular.