To me, the key takeaway from this article isn't the fate of these relatively few specific people. They did something that was (probably) wrong and Google's response might have been disproportionate, but was arguably their right and close to reasonable.
What should be concerning to most people is that almost everybody depends on so many of Google's (and other companies) services in the cloud and you can have your entire life removed with absolutely zero recourse unless you get media attention. Google doesn't even offer human customer support if your account gets banned and you want to throw $50 or $100 in their face to speak get somebody's undivided attention for just 5 minutes to resolve the issue.
That's the real issue.
Yeah Google, we understand you cant provide free customer service for the entire internet and deal with every crazy person's complaints. But charge a reasonable fee and give desperate people a realistic way to talk to somebody over life-changing problems. Even Google's paid services are often very flawed in this regard.
I totally see your point: this could be prone to abuse. But it's still light years better than the alternative of not offering any support at all to desperate people.
There are people whose companies and lives get totally destroyed when Google randomly bans them from one of their services and then there is literally no way to get in touch with anybody at Google unless you somehow manage to get media attention.
We're all smart and realistic here: we understand that Google can't offer free tech support for the entire world and deal with every crazy person out there. That's why charging a nominal fee is suggested. Should it be $1, $5, $25 or more? I don't know. But there has to be some way to reach out to a reasonable and smart human being at Google for critical issues.
Absolutely. It is sad that people in hn are condoning this act.
FTA:
Obviously, this is a pretty shady arrangement on all the participants’ parts, and it does warrant a response of some kind from Google.
Buying things discounted that are discounted because you say you'll adhere to certain Terms of Service and then violating those Terms of Service will have consequences.
It's discounted if you hold up your side of the deal and if you don't, then this is what's going to happen.
> Buying things discounted that are discounted because you say you'll adhere to certain Terms of Service and then violating those Terms of Service will have consequences.
That's fine. Terminate contracts with these users then, or sue them for your losses. But throwing away their data is a step too far. It's like finding out that your bank doesn't want to do business with you any more but also that they aren't going to give you your money back.
Google could give these users a data dump, at least.
A Terms of Service violation is a civil matter. Even the courts don't punish contract violators; they only require damages to paid to make the damaged parties whole. Punishments are reserved for crimes, are supposed to be proportional, and you're entitled to justice judged by your peers.
A digital death sentence is the right term for this. In what way is this proportional?
How is Google justified in doing so much more for so much less?
Because this isn't punitive in the search of justice or anything like that. It's just: "You made a deal that said I could do this if you did that. You did that. I did this."
Of course, I happen to love it because scalpers are a blight upon the nation. But that's just me.
Will happily defer to you if you're a lawyer, but no one stopped anyone from transferring a device. An associated service was stopped, and I'm fairly certain that's allowed.
If you're not a lawyer, though, your opinion is as good as mine on law - which is to say, it's worth nothing.
FFS. If you're going to participate in an organized ring to deprive people of buying a scarce item so that you can flip it to your ring leader for a profit so that the ring leader can then mark it up and sell it for considerably more then you deserve what's coming to you.
This isn't just about reselling an individual phone. They knew full well what they were doing was shady.
From a cursory search, I found absolutely no mention of such a law, and the strictest I found is that, in certain states, it's illegal to resell tickets at the venue site. Not only would it be pretty much impossible to enforce such a law, but it goes against other laws like the first sale doctrine mentioned above.
