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Android User Locked Out Of Google Accounts After Moving To A New City (itwire.com)
Slashdot reader troublemaker_23 shares a post from ITWire
An Android user has been locked out of his Google account apparently because he moved... The explanation offered by Google support staff was that since his address details differed, billing information with Google wasn't current and hence the user's purchases could look fraudulent... During his interactions with Google support to find out why he had been locked out, he was told that "It is our policy to not discuss the specific reasons for an account closure"...
He was initially directed by Google staff to a site where he had to scan his driver's license and credit card and told that he would have to wait 24 hours to get his account unlocked. But after this time passed, he was told that the account would not be unlocked and Google would not tell him why. He was advised to abandon his old account and start a fresh one. However, this meant he could not use the credit card that he had used on the old account...
The affected user called this "a warning to others not to put all your eggs in one basket, because these days, you have no rights over that basket whatsoever." But Friday the user posted an update on Reddit, quoting a Google staffer as saying "we routinely monitor account behavior on Google Play and take action on potentially suspicious activity. Unfortunately, in your case, your account was wrongly flagged and suspended. I have just reopened your account... I sincerely apologize for the stress and inconvenience this has caused you."
He was initially directed by Google staff to a site where he had to scan his driver's license and credit card and told that he would have to wait 24 hours to get his account unlocked. But after this time passed, he was told that the account would not be unlocked and Google would not tell him why. He was advised to abandon his old account and start a fresh one. However, this meant he could not use the credit card that he had used on the old account...
The affected user called this "a warning to others not to put all your eggs in one basket, because these days, you have no rights over that basket whatsoever." But Friday the user posted an update on Reddit, quoting a Google staffer as saying "we routinely monitor account behavior on Google Play and take action on potentially suspicious activity. Unfortunately, in your case, your account was wrongly flagged and suspended. I have just reopened your account... I sincerely apologize for the stress and inconvenience this has caused you."
he scanned his dl and credit card into a google site ??
yeah .. i think he may be in for a bit more inconvenience other than being locked out of google
I have android phone, use google mail for some things (monitoring alerts) and of course google play for free apps..but I won't give them credit card number.
Guess I won't have this particular problem
Something minimalist and ultra performant like the beOS + bitcoin of cell phone, decentralized, no user account.
It's frustrating that you pretty much have to go to the media/public and embarrass a company before they will fix issues like this. Not everyone has the time to do this, and not everyone will be able to get enough people to listen to raise a big enough fuss to get the company's attention. I wonder how many situations like this happen that we never hear about and never get resolved?
"he was told that the account would not be unlocked and Google would not tell him why."
If your account is disabled you should have every right to know why and there should always be a path to correct it. What the hell?
I'm an Apple user; if they pulled this crap with my Apple ID it would be extremely irritating; you can have a lot of money wrapped up in these accounts in the form of purchases!
"warning to others not to put all your eggs in one basket, because these days, you have no rights over that basket whatsoever."
This can not be repeated enough.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Eroding trust one step at a time.
There is no excuse for Google's behavior. I have been "locked out" by my bank a few times when I had suspicious transactions, and each time I was able to call the number on the back of my card, answer a few security questions, and get it unlocked. It never took more than two minutes to resolve ... and the transactions really were suspicious. The first time was in a bar in Lijiang when I lost a wager, and had to buy a round for the house, and the second time I was buying some prescription drugs in Tijuana.
It's kinda similar on how my credit card declared my card stolen... when I ran out of money on my phone and refilled it, it was flagged by my credit card company, therefore they declared it stolen and I couldn't do any transactions on it... off course, they tried calling me, but it wouldn't work because there was no money left on the phone for me to receive calls... I need money to make calls, I need to make a call to put money on it... so ridiculous...
He had to go public to correct the situation. Just like with security flaws, full disclosure is the only way, or it won't get fixed.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Now a days tech companies are all about creating too big to fail entities. Be it Uber, Amazon, Google, Facebook... The amount of trust we are placing on them, our dependency on them, can turn out to be dangerous in the long run.
Banks are regulated with heavy consumer protection, google is not a bank.
I reached the end of my love affair with Google long before now. "Do No Evil" sounded sincere 20 years ago, but it's pretty hollow today. It doesn't matter whether this was an accident or not. Not owning my own data is just bad medicine by any account. I won't do it.
I've wondered, instead of funding the Googles/Microsofts/Dropboxes of the world, we need to work on easily deployable mini-personal-cloud-server-in-a-box distributions. Email/webmail, iCal, rsync, with your own blog thrown in for good measure on personally controlled virtual servers is eminently doable. I mean, sure, I'm savvy enough to do this all with Debian, I've been doing mine for years. But it's got to be able to be made far more push-button that it is now. Something where you pay your $20, feed in a domain name, and you get your own personally owned cloud services. It won't keep the NSA out of your business, but it will keep people's data more firmly in their control.
Too many Internet giants have this mentality, that they don't need to give you an explanation if they close your account. You may say that the account is on their service. I say that if they want to be so central to modern life, they have a responsibility they're trying to avoid.
They've had plenty of time to come up with their own solutions, internally or as part of associations. It's time the government stepped in.
Please. Out of any company I can imagine (even including Microsoft) there is no other company that suffers from NIH than Google.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Google gets its fraud detection software up and running, and assumes everyone it finds is a fraudster. Hooray! Of course you don't give fraudsters any information about how you detected them, they'll use it against you in the future! Just a blank wall...let them eat THAT! So satisfying for the millennial developers at Google.
The idea that false positives might occur...well maybe, but it's not a problem. Locking people out of their accounts? Someone else at Google will resolve it. Google offers these accounts for free and you want quality! How about we give you a full refund instead? Cue scornful laughter. Screw anyone who sets off the detector, it's their fault for having a non-standard life.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This is another "handle things yourself" situation. I have an Android Phone. No Google Account is attached to it. Google Can't lock my Phone. Google can't track my Phone. Google can't bill me, Google doesn't know my Phone number. My phone, and the apps I have installed on it, are my business, my Contacts are stored in my OwnCloud on my system. As are my Calendar events, as are my places. I don't use Google's Location services, I use Passive GSM Beaconing and GPS. and I get my Maps from Osmand Open Street maps.
Google doesn't even HAVE support in any meaningful way. If something gets fucked up with any of the usual google services (gmail, calendar, etc) you're screwed and that's all there is to it. Short of having a friend who works for google or being a big enough public figure to shitstir there's no way to contact a human and no way to resolve the problem.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
...and the second time I was buying some "prescription drugs" in Tijuana.
If you go to Tijuana, or Juarez, or any other Mexican border towns, you will find drug stores selling name-brand prescription drugs within one block of the border. The prices are far lower than in America, because the Mexican government negotiates lower prices with pharmaceutical companies, and because of the different litigation systems. You can also buy far more stuff without a doctor's prescription. It is legal to buy most drugs and bring them into America so long as they are not for resale.
This is another "handle things yourself" situation. I have an Android Phone. No Google Account is attached to it.
I had a supervisor who started having problems with his Verizon android phone crashing frequently. Couldn't figure out why at first, but it turned out there was some aspect of the phone that would crash with no Google Account attached. He barely had any apps installed, so it was likely something that came in the ROM. No Google Account for him of course, he never made one not being a tech savvy person (he didn't even have his own e-mail address, his work e-mails went to his secretary, and any personal emails you had to send to his wife).
I doubt he would have wanted to root his phone to get rid of whatever crap was crashing (it would have been difficult to explain to him what "rooting" was in the first place), so I just showed him how to set up a Google Account (with everything turned off or forwarded elsewhere), and that fixed the problem.
Bush #43 specifically passed legislation outlawing negotiating with drug companies. There's your Capitalist free market.