Yep, apparently a brick and mortar bakery isn't eligible for Google Maps. Obviously bogus. I appealed over and over again, rereading the rules, watching every dumb YouTube video, fixing every minor imagined transgression I could think of and each time just got another BS automated "your business is not eligible...".
Pretty much gave up them my partner decided to try one more time. In Vietnamese.
We had both been trying, she in Vietnamese, me in English, but this time she tried it at about 10:30pm local time and apparently it got routed to a bored Vietnamese speaker in the California help center, who fixed it immediately.
So it is possible but it'll take some weird combination of luck and timing.
I think there is zero chance these companies aren't using LLMs to sort out the "desirable" customers from the undesirables. Google in particular knows almost everything about us.
You get rejected, you can just increment the version number and resubmit. It will get assigned to a different person and maybe pass this time.
All you can do it post a thread on the support forums, and nothing happen anymore;
I think for ordinary users (rather than developers or merchants), this is even worse.
It should be trivial for Google and Reddit to grandfather-in accounts which are more than 18 years old (arguably less, who created their account when they were, e.g. 5 years old?). However, I'm betting they will come up with all sorts of rationalisations as to why this is not possible, anything from the bullshit ("not technically feasible" my ass) or the self-contradictory ("an account may have changed owner"... so in violation of the ToS? And what's to stop an account from changing ownership after age verification?).
I admit I am prematurely riling myself up with indignation for something which may never happen. Maybe I am wrong and Google, Reddit, etc. take the common sense approach, but I have no hope in it.
SELECT
id,
full_name,
IFNULL(age_verified, acc_created < DATETIME_SUB(CURRENT_DATETIME(), INTERVAL 18 YEAR) AS age_verified,
FROM
google_accountsPut it in plain words. "I have been paying... they made it impossible to access stuff I paid for and made it impossible to unsubscribe."
That's textbook fraud. They'll be fined and give you your money back.
This is a defeatist comment I know, but I do feel defeated when it comes to tech companies.
Australia is famous for having very strong consumer protection laws for purchased products (physical goods). It has been discussed many times here. How does this work in the digital universe?
That changed after Australian's Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) dragged them through Federal Court for it, comprehensively winning against Steam:
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/federal-court-finds-va...
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/valve-loses-appeal-over-...
Thus the "refunds if you've not played for more than ~2 hours" policy that Steam then implemented (globally).
Probably the relevant quote to answer your question about how things work in the digital universe:
> "This important precedent confirms the ACCC's view that overseas-based companies selling to Australian consumers must abide by our laws. If customers buy a product online that is faulty, they are entitled to the same right to a repair, replacement, or refund, as if they'd walked into a store," ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court said.
Anyways, there's absolutely no such thing as "I can't stop paying for this". Just do a chargeback on your card. It's not a real problem.
I think the safest bet is to pre-renew the domains you really want to keep for as far out as you can (most registries allow you to renew a domain for up to 10 years). That way, if there is some major change to cost structures, you have a decade to either weather the storm or come up with a migration strategy.
Some bits are harder than others.
Most of my important email was migrated to a Protonmail account. With the exception with a couple of things tied to government services that don't have a path of changing your email, which sucks.
Android: Next time I switch devices I am going for GrapheneOS. Technically still an Android, sandboxed Google services and all, but a step in a better direction.
Android Auto/Waze: There's no competition here, sadly.
YouTube: Another thing that is very difficult to replace beyond just reducing my YouTube usage. I can use stuff as Newpipe or self host Invidious, but technically it is still YouTube.
Email: The most important component here is owning your domain. Then you can switch between providers. I'm using iCloud now because I can have email addresses for the whole family for very cheap and it integrates well with my Apple devices.
Search: Kagi.
Maps: I still use Google maps. The alternatives are just not as good here in Denmark.
Phone: iOS. I really want to try GrapheneOS but our government uses a national ID app which only works on official Android and iOS builds. It's very annoying to function without that app.
YouTube: Still use it as well, but with ad and sponsor blocks on computer and mobile. I have an Apple developer account and sign my own sideloaded YouTube apps.
Cloud storage: I switched to iCloud, but I keep a full local copy of everything in case I lose access to my account. I also built a home NAS and keep the movies on that. Basically anything which I don't mind losing so much.
Docs: I use Office applications primarily now instead of Google Docs.
This isn't the cop-out you think it is. Plenty of profit-making businesses have great customer service. Google's crap service is entirely on itself.
Simply because I cannot login and cancel my account?
side note, these are things I feel should be: 1. Illegal: "noreply@" addresses. My inbox is not a dumping ground and email is two way, not one way. 2. Required: phone numbers on you website, easily found, that are picked up by humans.
The article is partly about a _misuse_ of AI, and partly about just how bad the system around accounts and appeals is in general.
These kind of articles are becoming unreadable
I would be on YouTube's side here, except it's possible that their motivation is simply to avoid poisoning their dataset while they train their models off creators videos. Also, the question is how they tell apart what's LLM-generated without false positives.
Maybe there were also artificial listens fraud (it's a problem with their competitor Spotify), but we'll never know because no one who was blocked would publish that honestly.
At least in Australia, this shouldn't be a problem.
I agree there may be no other option, I'm just warning to be ready and prepare for the possible loss of "connected" (in Google eyes) accounts.
It's also the only way to stop Google from stealing your money short of going to a lawyer.
Things like this would probably not be via direct debit though
You'd also want to mail a letter to Google documenting that you're cancelling your subscription. Cancelling a payment method alone doesn't void a contract.
I doubt Google would do this. But there are plenty of trashy litigation-finance shops that buy up these abandoned contracts for pennies on the dollar and then try to collect. Even if you never give them any money, it would trash your credit for a while.
This option, in my opinion, should truly be the last resource, after exhausting (and documenting) every other route.
Very important: public routes, like Twitter Support, even better (make sure every step is traceable if the only option left is, indeed, blocking debts on your credit card).
YouTube is clamping down on AI content because they know people hate it and leave YouTube.
There is no money in generative AI. Google needs to advertise to humans and not to Rathbun.
That is why Disney cancelled the Sora deal.
It's really annoying that there is so much AI generated music on youtube. The problem though is more that you get tricked into listening to it by "creators". These people just squeeze money without adding anything positive to the game.
On the other hand it would be interesting if you could generate your own music spcifically for the mood you currently have.
> That argument is not unreasonable on its face. Artists should have rights. Their work should not be scraped, repackaged, and turned into infinite output without consent. But that is not the whole story. These companies don’t want to stop AI Music generation, they want to own it.
I'm not sure I agree with that assumption - flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business. While I disagree with a lot of what they do, I do assume that they have an interest in protecting music made by artists, not music generated as a product (though of course they also produce music like products with a lot of their human "artists").
This is questionable. Did generated code decrease the price of software products?
But also, the main claim of the advantages of code generation is that it will make software development cheaper, and will end up making software cheaper. This is currently not necessarily the case because the quality of the code generation is not really there to make actual (reliable) product development cheaper, but it helps a lot with rapid prototyping. Or as I see it, more things are being prototyped and never finished. What also factors into this is that there are not many incentives for big tech companies to lower their prices, because a lot of what they're offering are tools that we need. This is also not the case with generated music.
I think it's too early to say.
You could argue that if software development is low effort due to "vibe coding" then it doesn't have the same value as it once did. Perhaps there'll be a race to the bottom by new entrants to the market who don't need to pay a whole development team and can massively undercut the incumbents. Or perhaps the race to the bottom will be in quality along with price, but the savvy user will see the value the incumbents provide.
Universal Music Group is currently at the center of a growing legal fight against AI music platforms like Suno and Udio, accusing them of training on copyrighted music without permission. [...] The claim is straightforward. These systems learned from real artists without paying for it, and now they can generate songs that compete with the originals
Was browsing when all of a sudden my account got suspended for no apparent reason. This was a premium account too, and I had last posted a tweet last year. I would maybe comment here and there once a week.
Ok cool you suspended my account. But when I tried to access my billing details to cancel the premuim sub, I got a "Something went wrong" error.
All these big tech companies have the same billing issues after bans/suspensions. Once they decide you're persona non grata, they don't give a f about cancelling your billing.
But I assume people will have protections against this? One can just let their credit card company know to block out the next payment, or dispute the charges; I am assuming the user will have adequate proof that they aren't able to get to their subscription account.
While what Google is doing here is scummy, I'm assuming that multiple consumer reversals will make at least a minor dent to their financial reputation with the banks? Did this even need so much AI text?
I still remember how mad people were when that linkage between YT accounts and Google accounts took place, and, of course, it looks like they were right. Shitty behemoth of a company.
In that letter, you set a reasonable deadline.
If they don't respond within that deadline, you take them to a small-claims court.
I understand that us tech bros want to fix everything online, but sadly that doesn't always work. But that's not the end of all your options.
What a joke. People, start putting a license fee on your YouTube videos for AI training. Play their game.