Bad business practices. Once a company gets to a certain size it’s impossible to have an influence to change them. That’s what happened to Google. Long ago my main Gmail was hacked. Wasn’t my fault. I cycled passwords twice monthly and use a combination of hard to discover characters, numbers, etc. They had a system that left this open to being hacked and it was. Hacker took over emailed a bunch of crap from my address and really caused me embarrassment and headaches. But it was petty hack as they didn’t change the login so I was still able to login change the password and lock them out. Went through multiple layers and levels of escalation to get googles attention and 99% fell on deaf ears. A BBB got a low effort single line response basically saying sorry and shoulder shrugging. I attempted everything to move all my stuff from one email to another. Google said no. And firmly stood by that till this very day many many years later. I even hired a lawyer who investigated the situation and told me I’m better off just restarting everything under the new account as a suit wouldn’t make it through the legal system and could actually cause my more pain then I already went through. Like the worlds most annoying pain in the. Butt I made it a routine for 1 full year to contact their support 3 times ago. They threaten legal action if I didn’t shut up. I called their bluff and kept annoying them. When they started ignoring me I created 4 more addresses and continued pushing. When that didn’t work I created more. Till finally one day they said just start over in the new email we will give you a 20% discount to start. I had spent thousands already in movies, stadia when it was still active, music, etc. 20% is a slap on the face and I’ll be damned if I’m giving you thousands more for your own issues. Till today that account sits there gathering dust as a catch all for all spam. Figured since Google is going to force me to use it I’ll buy 2 terabytes of their disk space and fill it to brim with spam emails. From a catch all box I created. In a way it has worked to evade AI systems out there and keep companies from bugging me on my real email address. If it’s a company looking to market me products they get that address and I see none of their ads. If it’s a service I am trying out and do not plan to keep it gets that email and so on. I keep the stuff I purchased and Google keeps the crap. More recently their search engine stinks now. And I disconnected all my Google devices I had and dissolved the smart home system I had built with their devices after I learned how much data it keeps of me and what it is doing with said data. Under its founders the company was awesome. Under its current ceo it’s become evil.
