Gmail

[Dave2002]

I am beginning to dislike Google and Gmail with an absolute vengeance.

Is there any way of contacting some form of customer service?

I don't want to pay the wretched company anything so that they can trawl my data or gather more than they have already.

Now I can't access email - I can't reset the password - verification codes sent to the mobile phone don't come - the whole thing is an absolute shambles!

I auppose it's possible there has been a hack on one or more of my accounts.

The 2nd factor authentication which is supposed to "protect me", simply seems to be a way for that organisation to gather even more information about me, accounts I use, devices I use etc.
OK - it's not only Google which does this - most of the tech companies do this - which is OK if one has absolute trust in one or more of these organisations, but why on earth should we have such trust?

There is every evidence that Tech firms are not trustworthy, either because of various forms of criminal activity, or simply because of poor proceduces and poor software.

[richardfinegold]

Sorry you are having problems. Did you have the pew saved one one of your devices? What happened exactly?

[Dave2002]

Sorry you are having problems. Did you have the pew saved one one of your devices? What happened exactly?

I'm gradually fixing things. However this doesn't necessarily mean that I think that Google shouldn't be severely criticised. Essentially there was a deadlock problem, severely exacerbated by travelling abroad recently. As I was travelling my email inbox was filling up faster than I could delete all the junk stuff that I don't want. I figured that on my return it would be possible to fix this, but this turned out to be very hard as Google would not let me proceed without 2nd factor authorization, and it may have kept sending a code to the very device which had the problem. Totally awful system design. OK - in the deadlock situation a solution is to remove one of the constraints, but in this case I could not remove data from the one device fast enough, and the alternative of paying Google more for storage (i.e. more than nothing) did not appeal. I don't want to pay an external organisation to "store" my data, knowing full well that it's highly likely to use it for commercial gain. Just about every bit of data that organisations like Google keep is somehow processed, correlated etc. Whether that data/information is passed on to commercial organisations, organised criminals, or governments I do not know. Indeed, even if were not deliberately passed on, it would always be possible that some other malcreant could hack into the data storage - and that has happened for example with Apple and other tech companies.

That's bad enough, but why should I pay to let them do that?

Sadly other organisations are not necessarily any better - e.g. Apple, Amazon.

OK - I know I may be a "voice in the wilderness" and that most likely I don't actually have so much data that I really do want to keep, or keep very private, but I feel that too many people are far too trusting of software and technology. The best way to not let data get out of control is to never use a computer to store or pass on really critical data, but also be aware that companies like Google are good at correlating different pieces of data to build up a bigger picture.

For example - you might read in a help file - "If you don't want your camera on, go to the settings and turn it off". A devious sofware developer would just write code which left the camera and all the tracking on, but turn off the indicator light which "shows" that the camera is not working. So the way to turn off the camera - apart from removing it internally, is to cover the lens with tape or paint. Similarly if there's a device with a microphone don't believe it won't listen all the time. It may be "off" but it may just be carrying on monitoring you and the environment without indicating that it's doing that. One way to detect that kind of behaviour is to notice if there's a significant power drain - but in the limit most people who don't have technical knowledge or specialist equipment will not be able to tell whether many of the devices we currently use are spying on us, and indeed who is doing the spying, and for what purpose.

[Sir Velo]

For example - you might read in a help file - "If you don't want your camera on, go to the settings and turn it off". A devious sofware developer would just write code which left the camera and all the tracking on, but turn off the indicator light which "shows" that the camera is not working. So the way to turn off the camera - apart from removing it internally, is to cover the lens with tape or paint. Similarly if there's a device with a microphone don't believe it won't listen all the time. It may be "off" but it may just be carrying on monitory you and the environment without indicating that it's doing that. One way to detect that kind of behaviour is to notice if there's a significant power drain - but in the limit most people who don't have technical knowledge or specialist equipment will not be able to tell whether many of the devices we currently use are spying on us, and indeed who is doing the spying, and for what purpose.

Highly unlikely for the simple reason that every competitor will rip apart and analyse any new product from a rival. If such spyware was inbuilt into the system their IT guys would know about it and publicise it such that said company would be faced with a total PR disaster, along with massive regulatory fines.

[Pulcinella]

I have a gmail account primarily as a back-up for my icloud account but also as I seemed to need one to access Google Docs, which is used by our choir committee.
What I hate is that I seem to get copies of every message: one goes into the archive as well as the inbox. Deleting from the archive deletes from the inbox too: madness!
I'm looking forward to coming off the committee soon, and then I'll have a grand tidy up and delete session.

[Dave2002]

Highly unlikely for the simple reason that every competitor will rip apart and analyse any new product from a rival. If such spyware was inbuilt into the system their IT guys would know about it and publicise it such that said company would be faced with a total PR disaster, along with massive regulatory fines.

I don't think it's highly unlikely at all. Spyware can be constructed in such a way that it doesn't operate all the time, which makes it much harder to detect. What you are suggesting though is that if such code were deliberately built into software systems that the creators of such code would know, and some of them would eventually tell others - and that would have a social competitive effect. Also you mention regulatory fines - but that implies a very high level of conformance to regulatory rules, and real penalties for anyone who steps out of line. In software misuse there are almost no rules - as in wars. It's only when the software misuse is detected and then there are consequences for the person or organisations concerned that regulatory rules have any benefits. Think about VW and the emission testing scandal. We might think of that as a one off - it'll never happen again - but this kind of thing will happen over and over, and we will have little idea where the problems are actually coming from.

[Mal]

I have a gmail account primarily as a back-up for my icloud account but also as I seemed to need one to access Google Docs, which is used by our choir committee.
What I hate is that I seem to get copies of every message: one goes into the archive as well as the inbox. Deleting from the archive deletes from the inbox too: madness!
I'm looking forward to coming off the committee soon, and then I'll have a grand tidy up and delete session.

That's very strange! For my sins, I'm locked into Google with a chrome box as my main computer and gmail my main email service, for over a decade, and I've never seen such duplication. Is there a filter in place? There's a "skip to archive" checkbox. Maybe Google is thinking "OK, put it in the archive but the user still needs to know it has arrived so we must also mention it in the inbox."

https://support.smartsourcedit.com/hc/en-us/articles/215769898-How-to-Automatically-Archive-Emails-in-Gmail

[oddoneout]

I read SirV's comment to mean that the publicising would come from outside the company - from rivals unpicking the product.
As you say regulation has its limits. "Rules are made for breaking" and if a business considers the payoff is worth the risk it will be tried.

[Pulcinella]

That's very strange! For my sins, I'm locked into Google with a chrome box as my main computer and gmail my main email service, for over a decade, and I've never seen such duplication. Is there a filter in place? There's a "skip to archive" checkbox. Maybe Google is thinking "OK, put it in the archive but the user still needs to know it has arrived so we must also mention it in the inbox."

https://support.smartsourcedit.com/h...mails-in-Gmail

That's a thought!
I'll investigate (later, as the late HM might have said ) or maybe ask the choir secretary (or someone else who uses gmail a lot) to take a look.

[Dave2002]

That's very strange! For my sins, I'm locked into Google with a chrome box as my main computer and gmail my main email service, for over a decade, and I've never seen such duplication. Is there a filter in place? There's a "skip to archive" checkbox. Maybe Google is thinking "OK, put it in the archive but the user still needs to know it has arrived so we must also mention it in the inbox."

https://support.smartsourcedit.com/h...mails-in-Gmail

Interesting. I have been recommended Chromebooks recently so I thought I'd investigate, and now have a very cheap one. Part of my thinking was that if I lost in during travels it would not be such a great loss - having cost only around £120. It isn't very good, but is adequate for some purposes. What I find really confusing - is that I am at sea in knowing what Google considers to be data/storage which it has allocated to me. I also have an Android phone (Samsung/Google), and I have wondered if Google is trying to backup data from the phone, and that's eating into my allowance. I really don't want all the phone details "backed up" nor all the photos backed up automatically. I'd very much prefer to only have things backed up if I know what they are. However, I do want some data/photos etc. explicitly backed up to locations where I know what and where they are. So now I have (at least) three devices which seem to rely on Google - the Chromebook and the mobile phone - as well as any other computers which use gmail as a mail accocunt.

The rise of large email messages hasn't helped either - and I've noted this over many years. Way back many email messages were small "Meet you at 6pm - RAH - concert tonight", but now email messages can be of the form "Please look at the attached PDF document relating to our recent design deliberations" - and the PDF document may contain large images. Also way back large incoming email message were blocked, but that depended on the recipient's email provider - a problem for sending out the same file to many users, as some would receive the messages, others wouldn't. Nowadays it's not impossible to send an large email message with (say) 8Mbytes of data to most of the intended recipients. Also during the pandemic period, some of us were interested in news from around the world, so receive newspaper emails - on a daily basis - and then of course there is the dreaded Spam.

All of these changes in systems and user behaviour, have resulted in what someone I once knew quite well would have called "the laws of unintended consequences".

Things are really getting complex, and often not always helpful. Note also that the increase in processing speed and the larger storage capacity of modern systems are also not helpful. Someone with a fast modern computer and a lot of storage can send out data across networks much faster than some other user's systems can cope - and a consequence of that is that a strategy of deleting unwanted incoming data does not work, as it may be impossible to delete data faster than it arrives. This is, of course, the basis of denial of service attacks, but it can arise simply because of other less sinister changes. In my case simply travelling abroad for a short period caused a problem as I was unable to cope with the flood of unwanted data fast enough while in nomadic mode using the devices I had available.

[Sir Velo]

I read SirV's comment to mean that the publicising would come from outside the company - from rivals unpicking the product.
As you say regulation has its limits. "Rules are made for breaking" and if a business considers the payoff is worth the risk it will be tried.

Exactly so!

Apart from the fact that it would be breaking every conceivable GDPR law, the risks of being found out and then have the massive PR disaster that would follow would make even Google think twice about incorporating such surveillance into its products. .

What they will do, and what every business does these days, is to make it as hard as possible to turn off all the systems which "legitimately" allow it to monitor users' activities.

[Dave2002]

I read SirV's comment to mean that the publicising would come from outside the company - from rivals unpicking the product.
As you say regulation has its limits. "Rules are made for breaking" and if a business considers the payoff is worth the risk it will be tried.

It takes quite a lot of effort to investigate a software/computer system. Sure - some rival companies might try to reverse engineer and check on the code of their rivals, but it may be more likely that discovery of any problems - either deliberate or accidental - may be communicated by people discussing the issues socially - for example in a pub or restaurant. Then the significance that there is something worth checking leaks out.

There are sometimes "mistakes" which aren't discovered for a long while. I remember one discussion of a mistake in ICL hardware - which arguably led to a useful outcome. A processing device was noted as being an asynchronous circuit [consequence - operating faster ...] but the designers eventually admitted that they didn't know it was an asynchronous circuit. It was designed as a synchronous (clocked) circuit, but somehow in the development the clock line wasn't connected. I can't remember the details exactly, but they may have been surprised that it worked so well, and I guess faster than expected. There can be problems with asynchronous circuits - races and hazards - which mean they don't work properly - and lead to unpredictable outcomes. In the case of the particular circuit, an analysis was done later to show that the circuit was in fact capable of working well when operated asynchronously, and indeed faster than a clocked circuit. This wasn't malicous behaviour on anyone's part - simply an accident - which as it happened had no adverse consequences, and a discovery of how to make some circuits go faster.

Rival companies working on products in the same market place probably can't afford to spend a lot of time and effort reverse engineering other company's products in the hope that they can discover something useful. It does happen, and of course governments and firms working with military equipment may decide to do this, but it's costly.