While I agree with the broader point that there should be avenues for someone who's account is incorrectly closed this article is pretty vapid.
There are a lot of examples of individuals who have lost access to their accounts but no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users. If I've got a 1 in 10 million chance of incorrectly losing access to my account that is very different to if there is a 1 in 1000 chance of losing access to my account. Without that context, you're basically just saying "losing access is a crap experience for the person involved" which is obvious from the outset.
> no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users
Who cares?
No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc).
> No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?"
Sadly we are applying exactly this approach to our criminal justice system.
90+%[0][1] (94% of convictions at the state level, 97% at the federal level) of cases go through plea bargaining and never reach a courtroom. Trials are often impossible for poor defendants because public defenders can only bring a fraction of their cases to trial.
People like Shanta Sweatt[0] plead guilty because the alternative is to face a much longer potential sentence at trial.
I agree with the principle, but in a world of finite resources you've got to pick your battles. The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it.
It is, unfortunately, the same in many aspects of life, including many criminal justice systems. For example, if you are wrongly convicted in the UK it is incredibly hard to get that conviction overturned. It's literally life destroying for the people affected (definitely a lot worse than losing access to your gmail account!) but apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
> The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it.
That doesn't mean the company gets to throw their hands up in the air and say "fuck it, it's too hard". We wouldn't tolerate that with our justice systems, and we shouldn't tolerate with corporations.
> apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
Remember, Google spends millions of dollars on lobbying every year as well. And that money comes from its customers, whether directly or indirectly.
And yet we don't allow for blowing off that error rate because of the number of total cases in the system. It's also possible to get a retrial or dismissal if the errors are identified.
In practice, we collectively do blow off that error rate. For example, the US has many high profile miscarriages of injustice that it hasn't meaningfully solved for decades. There are people who get jerked around the justice system that can't get the system to justify a retrial or their retrial produces the same flawed outcome, similar to how Google's systems jerk people around with little meaningful recourse. There has been plenty of public protest (and insurrection) about these issues throughout the US that indicate the system isn't working as these people are fighting their issues outside normal civic/political channels.
The US is a democracy and its citizens do tolerate this level of failure.
When assessing risks one way to look at them is to consider both the chance of occurrence as well as impact if it occurs. With many google services (esp email), the impact if it occurs is high. So the risk is still serious even if odds are low.
I largely agree, but OTOH the degree to which this is a sticking point for many people is an early warning that that this is a serious issue that Google has to solve. This problem will only get worse as Google grows. Yes it's unprecedentedly difficult to solve, but I suspect it'll become increasingly difficult to ignore. Systemic failure on this level is the CEO's job and it's disappointing to see Pichai seemingly fail to do something big about it.
There are a lot of examples of individuals who have lost access to their accounts but no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users. If I've got a 1 in 10 million chance of incorrectly losing access to my account that is very different to if there is a 1 in 1000 chance of losing access to my account. Without that context, you're basically just saying "losing access is a crap experience for the person involved" which is obvious from the outset.