It’s ludicrous that Google can simply kill your phone number and nobody bats an eye. It’s such a fundamental part of life at this point.
At the minimum, users should get a “We are no longer willing to provide you service. You have two weeks before service will end. Please switch your number to another provider if you want to keep it.”
Other than non-payment, are there other phone companies that simply disable your account without warning and without giving any reason?
I can imagine something like, "You are required to live in this geographic range, but the majority of the time you are outside of it.” Or “You are too expensive to continue to support” or any number of other things. But man, no warning, no reason, no recourse, disappear your phone access? That’s just plain bad.
People today laugh at "Ma Bell," but at least you could go to a local office and sit at a desk in front of someone who could actually fix your problem, no matter how ludicrous it was.
I once lived in a four-story apartment building. When I moved from the second floor to the fourth floor, I called to have my phone transferred. The person on the phone said there is no fourth floor in my building. This wasn't a new-build. It was over 100 years old, and was converted into apartments decades earlier. But the woman on the phone couldn't do anything because the computer said there were only two floors.
I walked down to my local Bell office, and sat down at one of those battleship green desk with a woman and told her my story. She said, "Oh, yeah! I know that building. I drive by it every day. Is it nice inside?" Then she pushed some buttons on the computer, and the next day a guy with a gold-and-blue striped hardhat showed up and rewired the punchboard.
You can't even call Google for help with Google Voice, let alone talk to someone who knows your neighborhood.
If anything it is a paid service that can at least justify shutting down by no longer taking your money.
It's not impossible. The people at Google choose not to have customer service in order to maximize profits, rather than do the right thing.
Google has enough money to provide customer service. Customer service isn't going to bankrupt Google.
The issue isn't phone companies vs tech companies. It was always about support and the belief that tech companies would be transparent, supportive, fast, 'user-first'.
Governments, bodies outside of corporations are the only thing that can hold corporations to task. We've been very busy de-toothing them.
A free phone number. That comes from a company notorious for no customer service.
It’s not at all justified behaviour. But it isn’t unexpected and it’s irritating that it will probably take other peoples’ resources, i.e. public resources, to resolve.
I would hope they would provide a port out at minimum since it was never "their" number to begin with?
I'm wondering what can I realistically do to protect myself from Yahoo screwing me over. Not gonna lie, setting up my own email domain sounds like a chore. Entry number 9274 on the list of things that will just take one evening and marginally improve my life.
It is Google’s phone number.
What is ludicrous is not having a federal US identity verification API such that phone numbers are not the end all be all.
Or that if the US government wants to use phone numbers for identity verification, they enact legislation to provide legal protections from losing it.
But I think leaders like the extrajudicial ability to nuke someone’s life if they need to. Same with bank accounts and know your customer laws that can lock you out for unknown reasons.
You wouldn’t want people to have access to a constitutionally protected electronic money account. Then they have less fear. And if you are someone important, then you contact someone in your network to help you out.
Edited to add: Also, it’s not true that phone numbers are only so important because of identity verification. That is one reason, but solving that doesn’t let my children’s school call me if Google shuts my number down, just to give one example.
Edited to add again: It’s unclear to me now if the FCC actually requires Google to release the number or if Google voluntarily does it (eg to avoid problems with the FCC getting more involved).
FedEx lost my package. Apparently there’s no process to flag it missing without being able to physically scan the missing item (???). It’s permanently marked as “out for delivery”, so all of their systems tell you everything is fine and actively work against you ever reaching a human.
Meanwhile the sender has an automated system that checks the FedEx tracking number, sees “out for delivery”, and does the same thing. Even when I do reach humans at both FedEx and the sender it’s obvious they can’t do anything except sympathize with the situation.
I feel like I’m part of some sort of psychological experiment at this point.
And even if it does eventually get straightened out, it will be weeks and weeks until you get the replacement (or original). This has happened to me with very time sensitive things where I paid for expedited shipping. Well the re-shipment went out via slow-boat ground, and they wouldn't send it out until the original was fully returned to sender. And ... no refund on the expedited shipping.
Companies will quite literally treat you like dirt and people continue to use them. I understand there are certain things you're locked into (I very much use android despite google; not like there's much choice in a duopoly) but if they've already shown they don't care about you and you still use google search, chrome, gmail, GCP, storage, etc then that's on you.
Why would they change when you're willing to pay despite their crappy practices?
- Buy a domain and set up a custom email that represents you like firstname@firstlast.com - you own this domain and email address and no company, with the exception of your registrar maybe, has any control over it or authority to take it from you.
- Set up a dummy gmail/proton/whatever acct with a random address - this address will never be used or exposed publicly but it will represent your online email hosting acct.
- Forward your custom email address to the email provider address and configure the web client to send from your custom address.
- set your provider email account up in a local client like outlook that allows you to create a local backup.
- continue watching your previous account and updating your accounts to your new lifetime address. At some point, you should be getting minimal emails to the old account, then you can forward it to your new one.
The idea here is that you've decoupled your identity (your email address) from your webmail provider (gmail)
So google inexplicably cuts your access. Now what?
No problem. You have a local backup of all your emails in outlook. You repeat the process with a different service like proton (or a new gmail acct) with a new dummy email. Then you set the new acct up in outlook and drag all of the emails from your old acct in to the new one you haven't missed a beat. You're still sending and receiving emails to/from the same address and you can access all your historical emails in the new hosting acct because you migrated/synced them all over locally in outlook.
Losing access to your email identity is arguably one of the most catastrophic scenarios you can think of in terms of being online. This guards against that about as much as possible. It doesn't cover other services like voice and stuff but you can follow similar strategies for things like documents and files.
There's an easy way to address this that a lot of people overlook. Seriously, I'm not being snarky or sarcastic in what I'm about to say. A lot of people seem to really not considered this. Use a calendar.
Every major desktop OS includes calendar software, I believe, as does every major mobile OS.
Create a calendar on one of your devices and when you do something like buy a domain, but an annual recurring event named something like "renew domain" that will be due a couple weeks for the domain expires.
Get in the habit of taking a look at the calendar every day. Most also allow you to assign alerts to events to further ensure you won't miss it.
Yeah, this is great until you lose control of your home because you forgot to pay the mortgage or whatever. What then? The bank owns your home. So, obviously, you should never buy a home with a loan, right? A mortgage is a good solution, but its got its faults too.
I would suggest that the moment you chose to have a critical dependency on someone else's services, it becomes incumbent on you to have a disaster recovery plan should that service suddenly become unavailable to you. How formal or intense such a plan is may depend on if you're an individual or a small/mid-sized business that's too small to command the respect of your vendor in the event of a problem (real or imagined on the part of the vendor). You have to take a defensive approach to these relationships even if part of the reason you buy these services is not to worry about such issues: you may have moved and transformed what you have to worry about, but you have not freed yourself from any worry.
We can hand-wave that away muttering about, "most people won't understand"... but at the end of the day it's the modern, connected world we live in and failing to be properly educated about that world is fraught with peril. Those that respect that reality will do better than those that don't.
What we really need is legislation to regulate big tech services as the utilities they really are.
In the west, I should not need to check that my utility or email provider is trying to screw me over. I should be able to rely on clean water coming out of the tap all the time, with minimal effort (paying fair bills) on my part.
The provider cannot claim that is would be too expensive, or that it would scale worse - that's a solvable problem. If it is more expensive, then that's the true cost that just has to be paid. Yes, the company cannot just dump your waste in the river. Yes, the company cannot just deactivate an email account with sending a paper letter.
Would any other provider take away your number without explanation, nor allow you to talk to a human?
At a minimum, Google needs to be regulated.
If you need to receive a call to a particular number, it having a(n indefinite) disruption can mean you're going to have a bad day. Tech products aren't as mature as e.g. money and food
In 1999, you could freely choose not to have a cellphone, because payphones were abundant. As cellphones became more popular, payphones disappeared; meanwhile, other services such as banks began to require you to have a number that could receive SMS messages. As smartphones reached mass adoption, it became a safe assumption that most people could access an android or iphone app, and support for other paths (such as a web browser) began to decrease, even for essential services.
I can freely choose to watch videos on YouTube or not, and freely refuse to do so if I don't like it. But I also realize that by YouTube merely existing and being popular, it creates a gravity well. Creators stay on YouTube because their audiences are there, and viewers stay there because the channels they follow are there. By merely existing, the oxygen available to other potential services that I could freely choose is reduced.
I can choose not to drive a car, but the choice of many other people to drive cars results in roads, services, and cities designed to meet their needs, rather than mine. This reduces my freedom to opt out of car ownership. And if McDonalds didn't offer a car-only 24-hour drive-thru, there would be unmet demand by hungry people late at night that might provide enough business for another company to open a 24-hour cafe. As it is, McDonalds services enough of that demand, and if the non-drivers have no midnight food options, it's their fault for being too small of a market to be worthwhile.
The dynamics of these gravity wells is important to acknowledge, and I think it does create a responsibility on the operators of these services to their customers beyond that of someone freely using their service by uncompelled choice. Because they are, to some degree compelled, and the compulsion comes from the existence of that service removing oxygen from the competitors that would have otherwise appeared to meet those needs. The model of "I'm voluntarily offering you a service that you otherwise wouldn't have had; it's my right to simply choose to stop offering it to you" is too simple.
(Edit: But practically speaking, I do think what you say is good advice and I don't disagree with it. I'm only objecting to the moral philosophy behind it. Kind of like I agree that pedestrians should wear bright clothing and reflective stripes to avoid getting hit by cars at night, even though it's the drivers' moral responsibility to not hit those pedestrians).
> A silver lining is that with the new line, I was able to get a new iPhone 15 for almost free after bill credits.
No, you just got free financing on the phone. If you compare their contract plan rates to their prepaid plan rates, you're paying more over the course of your contract for the same plan.
Until we demand that our government begin to prioritize consumer rights against these modern-day robber barons this kind of stuff will continue to happen. Unfortunately until it happens to you nobody seems to care. Often times the person that happens to gets blamed because their actions definitely must have caused this.
This would actually be a fairly simple thing for the FTC to correct if they wanted to. They're already empowered to do this kind of stuff and wouldn't need any new powers granted to them. They could simply say when an account is suspended or disabled or you are banned including a shadow ban that you must provide the specific details of what caused the ban and what specific provisions were violated in the terms of service. Because when you're the size of Google you effectively are a monopolistic common carrier. So being able to say something like we can do this at any time for any reason is not appropriate at that scale. Because denying you access to phone service is denying you access to a basic utility.
It would actually be interesting to see state boards of utilities begin to pull things like this under their control. This would give enormous consumer rights to people. Because while your landline carrier can deny you service and remove your service they must have very strict documented reasons for that and there is an actual transparent appeal process as part of it. Filing an appeal and not being able to be part of the appealed discussion is not an appeal at all.
I grew up before number portability. Let me tell you that phone number portability is among the greatest visible government mandated boons in my lifetime (though I suspect there many other less visible ones). The fact that the user in question in this post was able to reassign his phone number at all is basically a modern anti-corporate miracle.
I don't really mean to detract from your point. Certainly much more could and should be done. But we have to acknowledge that, miraculously, more than nothing has already been done.
I think you're misunderstanding why this happens. Banning without a clear explanation or shadow banning users is a feature, not a bug. It grants platforms the ability to arbitrarily make decisions about who can use their platform without having to apply a consistent standard that would be questioned and challenged.
Governments don't want to change this because it benefits them. It means when they're able to tell a platform to ban a user and that user can be banned for "violating the ToS", instead of telling the truth and saying the user was "banned on order of the government".
The reason why governments don't care about this issue is because no one with power would benefit from this transparency.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/10/02/biden-ftc-antitrust-...
Imagine what could happen if the modern-day robber barrons end up on the president's cabinet, making policy decisions.
Oh, wait… https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2024/08/19/trump-...
https://www.dannyguo.com/blog/my-credit-and-debit-card-colle...
That's a good hypothesis! But I have a strong preference for email over SMS for communication from companies, so I receive almost no texts from credit card companies. It's pretty much limited to an occasional authentication code for logging in (since TOTP-based two-factor is so unfortunately rare).
To be clear I’m not saying it’s ok. Google should make it right and then invest in a scalable way to not keep doing this.
https://freedomhouse.org/article/eu-digital-services-act-win... "Providers of hosting services, including online platforms, now have an express legal obligation to provide clear and specific statements of reasons for their content moderation decisions. The DSA also empowers users to challenge such decisions through an out-of-court dispute settlement mechanism."
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/16/24074933/european-union-d... "When it comes to content moderation, sites will have to provide a reason to users when their content or account has been moderated, and offer them a way of complaining and challenging the decision. There are also rules around giving users the ability to flag illegal goods and services found on a platform."
The real controversy here however is the dependency on a US phone number for securely transacting in so many ways. Carriers barely can hold onto a number for you with SIM swaps and there is no such concept as "owning" a phone number
Years ago I lost an entire Yahoo! account with paid hosting for my side gig at the time along with years emails because I apparently broke their ToS by asking a question deemed inappropriate on Yahoo! Answers.
How can ANY question have been too inappropriate for Yahoo! Answers? That was a true treasure of the web RIP Am I Gregnant?
If they terminated my voice, I would be very much up a creek, and something I've considered as google tends to graveyard services enough and I can't imagine it is still high on anyone's give a shit list there.
I'd be curious if anyone else uses a like methodology with another service out there today. I've looked for alternatives over the years, and find really none for my needs for everything Google Voice provides and the android integration I use.
My "one number" was ported from a telco, and has lived at this paid service, with customer support, for over six years now. One side affect of this is, because it started out as a telco number, on't blackball it like they might other VoIP numbers.
Now all my SMS OTPs, real SMS, MMS, and transcribed voicemail all go to my email, which I consider impossibly convenient - real-time, but not dependent on a SIM card
Outgoing calls are through the built-in Android SIP client [0], and so show up as my one number (and are recorded by defualt in my single-party consent nation)
Incoming calls are forwarded to my SIM (for reliability).
All in all, it works pretty well. There was a series of outages around 2019 or so, but that's been the worst of it. And the benefits of getting SMS to my home country during international travel, and calling too, for no extra charge, is worth it to me. Though given your setup, I doubt I have to tell you about why it's so handy
[0] This was removed... I dunno, a few years ago? But I currently use a BlackBerry KeyOne that never made it past 8.1, because the battery life, repairability, and keyboard are exactly what I want.
Edit: Just took a look and their pricing is very reasonable. I’ve been de-Googling my life over the past year specifically out of fear of what happened in TFA as I realized I was relying way too heavily on them and I have zero trust left in Google. I didn’t port my GV number to the cell provider because it works for most things and it’s more convenient. This looks like a solid option and would only cost me a dollar or so a month at the amount I use that number.
I hadn't thought much about using android as a sip client raw, I forget it does that and never have used to know how good it is, but I'll take your word for it as usable. The rest is just having a suitable sms method to respond through it like a cell phone as natively as possible. Not sure I'd like dealing with sms as email fully.
Back around 2015 I was using switch.co for my business, which was pretty awesome for like $15 a month. I setup a full IVR with voice prompts, had a great android client, web client, pretty much did everything too. Sadly they seem to have went poof when last I went looking for google voice alternatives, but was thinking of using them again for my personal line too.
I'll certainly keep voip.ms in mind for if/when google puts the axe to voice finally.
I feel like if this happened to me I wouldn't even try getting in touch with Google support, having had enough experience myself and read enough of these stories to know it would be a frustrating waste of time.
But if there was a legal hack to do it that forced them to reply and cost them more money, even if it cost me some, it might be worth it in cases where the downsides (like losing your phone number of 15 years!!) are so high.
I have stopped using Gmail, Google One, and Google Voice.
I still use photos, contacts, and calendar, but I frequently do takeouts of all those and can handle it if they die.
It's trouble I just don't need. But I'm guessing Google doesn't notice if a few of us leave, so why should they change?
I have a custom domain for my email + a docker instance running Thunderbird, configured to keep an up-to-date local copy of my gmail. So if I lost access to gmail, it'd be a pain in the rear, but I wouldn't really loose that much.
But I hadn't thought much about my google voice account. That's the phone number I usually give out, although some friends and family do have my verizon number.
I suppose I need to figure out how to make regular backups of my google voice messages also.
I ended up signing up for a $10/mo unlimited calls and texts plan from US Mobile with 2 gigs of data. If you use their low cost plan you can get the same for a little cheaper or you can cut down the number of calls, texts, and data per month and get it down as low as around $5/mo I think. For me the $10 was worth it and means I’ll always have data when traveling back to the US as well without buying a temporary data eSIM like I usually do so that cancels out some of the cost for me.
So far it’s worked fine for me since I got back home outside the US, though I don’t use it much and usually keep the eSIM disabled so it doesn’t burn battery looking for a network it won’t find (plan doesn’t have roaming so it’ll always search). Also I don’t get the ability to get messages on my computer like with Google Voice, so I ended up keeping my GV line instead of porting it just in case I didn’t end up liking the idea.
I’ll probably keep using my GV number as my main US number for now until I see if I want to stay with the mobile plan, but $120/yr seems reasonable to have a non-VOIP US number available to me and data when I travel home once or twice a year. There are other prepaid plans you can use as well, but it seemed like they all bottomed out around the $10/mo mark.
I think you need to physically be in the US when you buy the service on any of these prepaid carriers to connect to the network once and activate the eSIM, but after that you can use it on only wifi or even cell data from your main line anywhere.
jmp.chat doesn't really fill me with confidence, but it might be an option in an emergency.
ed: however, unlike Google Voice it does not appear this service supports SMS/MMS so it's for sure not a one-to-one replacement :(
It _seems_ that Asterisk supports SMS, but from the wording I can't tell if they mean only in Europe or what https://docs.asterisk.org/Configuration/Applications/Short-M...
Pretty sure you can pay for Google Voice: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9229433
While this sucks, I know that my free Google accounts (including Voice) could go poof at any time and I don't really have recourse. For this reason, my Google Voice number is only used for likely spammers.
It's also part of my sales pitch or "branded email" to web clients: "You don't want to operate your business on a free email address".
> My only worry has been that it seems like another product that Google could easily decide to kill off and send to the Google graveyard at any moment.
I feel the same way about Blogger, and I even had a page on Blogger that was banned after I signed in on their Android app. This was around 2020-2021 and I only requested a manual approval by an email button IIRC, that got that page back up as fast as it got taken down.
It is sad that Google Voice and Blogger are neglected enough for this to happen.
> And I directly pay Google by subscribing to Google One, YouTube Premium, and Google Workspace (just for my custom domain email).
[...]
> I subscribe to a Google One plan. I knew that one of the more understated benefits is the ability to get live support from an actual person, [...] When I brought the conversation back to the Google Voice suspension, they were unable to access the ticket that was created when I submitted my appeal.
I use the following services:
- phone number: jmp.chat and a textnow number as backup
- email: fastmail
- search: kagi
- map: apple map
Only invoking GDPR and the ownership of a domain name allowed me to regain access and restore email service. Without GDPR I would've got nothing at all.
1: I just noticed that Takeout now offers a scheduled export option, including cloud-to-cloud transfers, so I am definitely going to turn that on
This has magically unbanned me in less than two days. In contrast to two months of tweeting, emailing support, nagging my google eng friends and even support folks via linkedin.
This doesn't really matter to Google; they offer uniform service regardless of means. Maybe if you're a big advertiser it helps; but as a paid GSuite customer, I got no real help when I asked either --- yes, someone answered the phone, but they can't even put in a feature request; and when my employer was acquired and wanted to integrate the two GSuites, that's not possible either; my employer had a small number of accounts so sure, ignore them, but the acquirer is large enough that I would have expected support requests to result in at least a roadmap entry.
The only reliable way to get support from Google is to have an employee champion your issue.
The only important thing I have left on Google now is 15 years of Location History. I'm still figuring out where to move that to.
Anyway, roundabout way of saying: self-"hosting" years of location history works for me directly on my phone, no first- or third-party service needed. If you don't need a big tech product that uploads everyone's location to generate traffic info, it's going to be a learning curve (it's chock full of features, so getting around the UI can be tricky) but I can recommend OsmAnd. Also hearing good stories of OrganicMaps but don't know if they do gpx tracking or displaying
Importing should be a matter of figuring out how to convert whatever format Google uses into GPX files, which are just XML files with coordinates and timestamps in them. I'm confident someone will have made a converter given how ubiquitous as well as simple gpx is, if this is the route you want to go or try
