I Can No Longer Recommend Google Fi - <AUTHOR> https://onemileatatime.com/google-fi-review/ <comment><USER2> The lede here is somewhat burried:

"From what I've since learned, if a card in your Google Pay is stolen, or someone uses your Payments account fraudulently, or anything happens that leads to a security flag being raised, it can lead to your Google Payments account being frozen.

...

If you can't use Google Payments, you can't pay for Google Fi

This, fundamentally, is why I can't suggest anyone use Project Fi anymore.

...

Getting this fixed is actually impossible, and I say that as someone who really, truly, loves solving problems and has made a living off getting phone agents to want to help me.

We have submitted copies of his ID four times, my ID twice, multiple photos of credit cards, and various credit card statements. We've talked to agents and supervisors at Google Payments and Google Fi. No one is empowered to do anything, and even a well-intentioned agent doesn't get the same answer from the "security department" twice.

I've since found hundreds of comments and Reddit threads from people having similar experiences, with almost zero positive conclusions.

The only suggestion of a solution we've been given is that he abandon both his email address and phone number of the past twenty years and start fresh."

<comment><USER3> This is a general issue with google. If their system decides it doesn't like you, then you're out of luck. You'll never get them to fix it.

<comment><USER4> This is also a problem with Square, and Stripe, and Paypal ... it's an unsolvable fraud/scammer problem.

Basically, if there was customer support that could fix the problem, then skilled scammers can get money and control out of them. They can do it a lot better than you can get your stuff re-enabled, they know just when to say what to whom.

Verizon just accepts the inefficiency, and also over-charges random customers, sometimes hands over control of a phone number to a scammer so they can get auth codes over SMS, has clueless support, etc. Google hasn't accepted this way of the world yet (but in scaling up the support has necessarily become disempowered).

It is very frustrating. It's a nature of things going mass-market. Just a few people, everything can be nice. Too many people, scams and fraud become big problems.

<comment><USER5> I believe these issues could be solved by actually taxing corporations and providing the service they clearly so desperately need.

An /actual/ (inter)national ID and Identity verification service. One where disputes about identity and authorization can be escalated somewhere that makes sense, to the jurisdictions issuing these IDs.

Ideally someone should be able to go to a police station (locally for local IDs, if on vacation/out of hometown in liaison between departments) and have their identity verified in a trusted way, and that verification reported as pass/fail to a third party whom is asking.

This would also be the way of officially disputing fraudulent uses of identity; they would be reported via the same actions, but as a customer initiation (and statement of legal testimony taken in a case that would then be opened and reported to the involved parties).

BTW, such a system SHOULD also include address resolution, for physical mail, voice, and electronic services (any sub-name actually).

I would LOVE to only update my address in ONE place when I move, instead of trying to remember everyone I've ever given it to.

<comment><USER6> I don't have a physical address (I move approximately every 3 weeks). I don't have a phone number (I move country every 3 weeks and need a new SIM each time).

I have so many problems with online authentication it's not funny.

So yeah, I'd love a global system of identification, but please let's not tie it to an address or phone number

<comment><USER7> Passport number along with cryptographic authentication similar to Estonia's ID card. I believe this satisfies the need for authentication of all citizens at a global scope.

<comment><USER8> Not everyone has passports let alone valid ones.

And getting one for people can be difficult as many people especially older ones don't have supporting documentation e.g. birth certificates and so can't prove identity.

<comment><USER7> You can't function as a citizen of a country without identity documents. Passport national ID cards, in my opinion, the optimal solution to the problem. Issuance can be streamlined, and cost can be absorbed for those who can't afford it.

Society requires foundations.

<comment><USER9> > You can't function as a citizen of a country without identity documents.

Sure you can. Identity documents exist more to prevent (the "wrong") people from functioning as citizens than to enable people to do so.

<comment><USER10> If you look young, how can you even buy alcohol or cigarettes (in my countries case even energy drinks) or get in a club? In my country each citizen must have an identity document - either a passport or ID card (drivers license doesn't count). I can't see it any other way as you need to ID yourself in stores (in the mentioned case if you look young and want to buy alcohol/cigarettes/energy drink), post office when receiving package, getting drivers licence, opening bank account, getting loans etc.

<comment><USER11> > If you look young, how can you even buy alcohol or cigarettes (in my > countries case even energy drinks) or get in a club?

It is possible to go your entire life without ever doing any of those things, or having any desire to. And as a general rule, it's the people who _are_ of legal age who least care to do them. Also, some countries don't have age restrictions on such things to begin with (or don't enforce them at all).

> post office when receiving package

Who goes to the post office to _receive_ a package? They come to you, and are then satisfied by the fact that they delivered the package to the address on the label.

> getting drivers licence

This a major reason why this is pointless. If you're going to have an ID, how do you identify yourself to get the ID? It's fully circular. You can't prove who you are unless you can already prove who you are, in which case you already have an ID.

In the US a large percentage of the population don't have passports. When you get a driver's license, they nominally ask you for some other ID, most of which (e.g. birth certificates or company/school IDs they have no way to authenticate) are trivially forged and useless at proving the person is who they say. Because it has to be that way -- you can't make having an ID a condition of getting an ID.

The whole idea is silly. Identity is context. If you create an email address with Google, you set a password. Then Google knows you're the person that email address belongs to because you're the one with the password. Your government "identity" has nothing to do with it, nor should it.

> opening bank account

The _only_ reason banks care about this is that the government requires them to. Otherwise they would be completely satisfied to give you a numbered account with no person's name attached and simply put a hold on your deposits until after they've cleared, as they do for most anyone regardless.

> getting loans etc.

To get a loan what they care about is whether you're creditworthy, not what your name is. Prove that you have a job and a history of paying back debts, or post some collateral, that's what they want.

One system by which they automate this is to have credit reporting agencies that aggregate this information and associate it with your name, but there is no inherent reason it has to be done that way -- and some good reasons not to. See Equifax data breach.

<comment><USER10> > It is possible to go your entire life without ever doing any of those > things, or having any desire to. And as a general rule, it's the people who > are of legal age who least care to do them. Also, some countries don't have > age restrictions on such things to begin with (or don't enforce them at > all).

Yes it is possible but you are describing outliers. Which first world country doesn't have age restrictions on alcohol or tobacco?

> Who goes to the post office to receive a package? They come to you, and are > then satisfied by the fact that they delivered the package to the address on > the label.

Envelopes and small packages (which fit) are left in mail box. In order to get everything else you have to go to your post office. Courier services deliver package to you personally and they don't leave it at your doorstep so anyone can steal it.

> This a major reason why this is pointless. If you're going to have an ID, > how do you identify yourself to get the ID? It's fully circular. You can't > prove who you are unless you can already prove who you are, in which case > you already have an ID.

I don't really know how it is done today but in theory you could prove it by taking DNA/fingerprints at birth and registering accordingly.

> The only reason banks care about this is that the government requires them > to. Otherwise they would be completely satisfied to give you a numbered > account with no person's name attached and simply put a hold on your > deposits until after they've cleared, as they do for most anyone regardless.

We are talking about reality not a situation where government regulations doesn't exist so there is no way of having a bank account if you don't have some sort of ID.

> To get a loan what they care about is whether you're creditworthy, not what > your name is. Prove that you have a job and a history of paying back debts, > or post some collateral, that's what they want.

This is just plain wrong, they care about the identity in case you stop paying so they can go after you.

P.S. You also need ID to own property, companies etc. I can't deny that if you are living in the middle of woods off grid you might get by without an ID but if you are an average person you will need an ID eventually.

<comment><USER11> > Yes it is possible but you are describing outliers. Which first world > country doesn't have age restrictions on alcohol or tobacco?

In many parts of the US the restrictions are not actually enforced, or you can prove your age using non-government-issued identification.

I also dispute your assertion that people who don't drink or smoke are outliers. The majority of people don't smoke and a large minority don't drink. In some major cultures and religions drinking is outright prohibited.

> Envelopes and small packages (which fit) are left in mail box. In order to > get everything else you have to go to your post office. Courier services > deliver package to you personally and they don't leave it at your doorstep > so anyone can steal it.

In the US they leave it at your doorstep so anyone can steal it, because in practice hardly anybody actually steals it. Who is going to risk federal prison or getting shot by the homeowner over a mystery box which is probably just a $25 bulk pack of shampoo?

> I don't really know how it is done today but in theory you could prove it by > taking DNA/fingerprints at birth and registering accordingly.

This doesn't work for anyone who is already an adult, and isn't already being done for newborns so won't work for them either, which means you've got more than a hundred years before something like that could be used without having living people it doesn't work for. It also fails permanently for anyone born and raised in another country.

On top of that, it _still_ isn't solving the unsolved problem, which is identity theft. You can't use DNA or fingerprints over the internet (they're trivially forged if you control the reader), so they're just going to issue you a card or a PIN or some other thing you can use and then someone can steal/hack/forge it and impersonate you. Being able to prove your DNA doesn't disprove that you're the person who used your card+PIN to buy $50,000 in already-provided goods and services, or pay for an email account used to send spam etc.

> We are talking about reality not a situation where government regulations > doesn't exist so there is no way of having a bank account if you don't have > some sort of ID.

We don't have mandatory national ID cards either. If the proposal is to make a policy change to improve things, let it be the one that doesn't double down on a bad idea.

Also, around a quarter of Americans and half of people in India don't actually have a bank account, largely because they don't have any money to put in it and can't afford the fees that come with not having a minimum balance. So they get paid in cash, or something they immediately convert to cash, and pay for everything with that.

> This is just plain wrong, they care about the identity in case you stop > paying so they can go after you.

That is why they require collateral. If you take out a mortgage they put a lien on the house. If you don't pay, they take the house. If you're on a beach in Argentina with a million dollars in cash in a briefcase, what does the bank care as long as the house sells for more than they're owed?

> P.S. You also need ID to own property, companies etc.

There are millions of people who _don 't_ own real property or companies, or even cars.

And even then, it doesn't require a national ID -- they all exist without it. They even predate modern identification. Because all of those things are local. If you want to transfer property, you go to a notary. The notary will want to know who you are, but that doesn't mean national ID. They could just take a picture of you and keep it for their records, or accept a non- government ID or an oath from a person known in the community that you are who you say you are.

Centralized identification is at the same time unnecessary and actively harmful.

<comment><USER10> > In the US they leave it at your doorstep so anyone can steal it, because in > practice hardly anybody actually steals it. Who is going to risk federal > prison or getting shot by the homeowner over a mystery box which is probably > just a $25 bulk pack of shampoo?

Nearly 1/3 of of people in USA have experienced package theft and it is only a federal crime if you steal USPS packages not Fedex/DHL/UPS etc.

> That is why they require collateral. If you take out a mortgage they put a > lien on the house. If you don't pay, they take the house. If you're on a > beach in Argentina with a million dollars in cash in a briefcase, what does > the bank care as long as the house sells for more than they're owed?

I can get a personal loan without any kind of collateral as long as i have X income. Credit cards doesn't have collateral as well.

Honestly, i feel that we live in different worlds - i cannot fathom not having an official ID as there are occasions where i must have it (voting, travel, banking as well as government e-services where you can use bank login or your ID card certificate to identify yourself). There isn't a lot of press or reports from Personal Data Watchdog about somebody doing monetary damage from using other people data, in fact our ID numbers (like SSN) in some cases are public knowledge. I am not saying that our system can't be abused but right now i feel like it works just fine and i wouldn't want it any other way.

<comment><USER11> > Nearly 1/3 of of people in USA have experienced package theft and it is only > a federal crime if you steal USPS packages not Fedex/DHL/UPS etc.

That statistic is from a survey done by Comcast as a precursor to trying to sell you a home security system. That is not a reliable source.

And stealing a non-USPS package is still a state crime, so the main difference is whose jail you sit in. Unless you manage to steal something which is actually worth a lot of money, or is involved in interstate commerce etc., in which case welcome back to federal prison.

> I can get a personal loan without any kind of collateral as long as i have X > income. Credit cards doesn't have collateral as well.

These are small loans, in which case the collateral is your job. They verify where you work, so if you don't pay they know where to find you. The only way to avoid them finding you is to quit your job, which they don't expect to be worth it for you to do over such a modest amount of money. Notice that the interest rates on those kinds of loans are dramatically higher -- because of the risk that they're wrong. If it was really your identity doing most of the work you would expect the interest rates to be much closer to those for loans with more substantial collateral.

> There isn't a lot of press or reports from Personal Data Watchdog about > somebody doing monetary damage from using other people data

According to DOJ statistics, more than 17 million people in the US are victims of identity theft per year.

> Honestly, i feel that we live in different worlds - i cannot fathom not > having an official ID as there are occasions where i must have it (voting, > travel, banking as well as government e-services where you can use bank > login or your ID card certificate to identify yourself).

You feel that way because you live in a place where having an official ID is required to do everything. That isn't a law of nature, it's just a law of the place you live. It's completely reasonable to do things a different way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Google Fi won't restore service or allow your number to be ported out until > the bill is paid, so around and around we go.

I'm surprised this is legal. Number portability isn't something phone companies offer out of the kindness of their heart; it's required by law. Does the law really allow them to hold the number hostage as part of a payment dispute?

EDIT: Nope, this is illegal:

> Once you request service from a new company, your old company cannot refuse > to port your number, even if you owe money for an outstanding balance or > termination fee

[https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/porting-keeping-your- ph...](https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/porting-keeping-your-phone-number- when-you-change-providers)

I looks like the OP should file a complaint (and if necessary sue?) over this point.

Indeed, this is so clear cut it makes me doubt the OP's story. Does Google Fi say they do this anywhere?

<comment><USER12> This Reddit thread concluded that because a T-mobile account was suspended for non-payment and the number is unportable while suspended that the customer was out of luck.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/4wotw8/tmobile_won...](https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/4wotw8/tmobile_wont_let_me_port_my_number_due_to_overdue/)

I don't see how that matters legally. The FCC requirement doesn't make portability conditional on some account status defined by the carrier. But IANAL.

<comment><USER13> Since T-Mobile holds the primary numbers for Google Fi accounts, going from T-Mobile to Fi legally isn't a port, just a change in T-Mobiles billing system.

<comment><USER7> Yes. You'll want to force a port from Google to AT&T or Verizon, and then back to T-Mobile if that's who you want to end up with.

If your port is delayed or denied, file a complaint with the FCC, as this starts the regulatory review clock ticking.

<comment><USER14> Does that clock still tick with the government shutdown?

<comment><USER15> IANAL but I assume so. It's just the enforcement that would wait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google is, fundamentally, an engineering company. Despite their size and breadth, they still don't understand customer support. Their approach is to use software to solve problems, and they insist on doing so even when it's clear that software isn't up to the task.

Unfortunately, customer support is a hard problem. Despite all of the advances in NLP, I still abhor automated customer support systems when I have a complex issue. Just let me talk to a human.

Google long ago ran the numbers on providing human customer support and realized it's not the sort of ultra-scalable business function that they like to invest in. Rather, they'd like to believe that they can build software systems that don't require human customer support. As an end user, this feels like too much hubris and not enough empathy. It may work from the perspective of a product manager looking at percentages on a dashboard, but it sucks as someone in the real world trying to get something done with one of their products that's not functioning as it should.

I use the full suite of Google Products, including Project/Google Fi. This article describes one of my nightmares— getting locked out of my Google account. I'm fortunate that I have good friends that work at Google that could help out in such a worst-case scenario. This blogger is fortunate, too. Undoubtedly, some Googler will read this post and help them out.

But the average person isn't so lucky. If you're Jane or Joe Schmoe in Middle America, you're going to be screwed when your Google account goes haywire. I've had friends whose Google accounts have gotten into weird states that prevented them from using Google services for no obvious reason. I suspect this is due to an unfortunate consequence of Conway's Law [1] at work in Google's identity implementation.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)

<comment><USER17> I don't think engineering is the problem here. As an example, Toyota, a very engineering-driven company, is also famous for customer focus.

I think the problem is that Google is mostly about selling users' eyeballs to their real customers, advertisers. That's not a business of making individual users happy; it's essentially statistical in nature. With a search engine, if something works for 80 or 90% of people, that's great. If it's bad for the rest, well, tough luck for them. It's very hard to go from that to seeing each individual as valuable and important.

<comment><USER18> it costs $xxK to buy a car. It costs 0$ to use Gmail, Drive, Youtube, etc. These two are not gonna have the same level of customer support. Fi is a paid service, and I do expect it to have a better support (which in my own experience, they do), but to compare Google as a whole to Toyota doesn't seem fair.

<comment><USER19> Your parent's point though is that with the free offerings, you're not the customer. Google's advertisers are.

With the paid offerings you _are_ the customer and comparing Google's CS to Toyota's or anybody else's is entirely fair.

<comment><USER18> To which I agree. Fi should and (normally) does have much much better customer support than average free Google products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Stories like this make me incredibly wary about the future of my Google account. I've been using it for almost twelve years. It has a copy of every photo/video I've taken for almost eight years. It's what I use to download apps, listen to music, and pay for things, and get around. I'd be absolutely devastated if I suddenly lost it. I've been planning for a while now a sort of contingency plan where I regularly backup my emails and photos, but from what I've read even that's difficult to do.

<comment><USER21> Every time a comment like this comes up I say the same thing: Your email address is very very valuable and everything in the digital world is tied to it one way or the other. Own the domain so you can port it to another provider. Keep a copy of your emails somewhere - a mail app on your laptop?

If you use drive, sync it fully to a laptop.

It's not just Google, any service - paid or free, can and will shutdown your account. It's something you have to assume will happen to you - not just some random stranger on the internet. I don't know about you but I definitely don't want to deal with losing all my digital documents, pictures and most important all my accounts by losing my email address.

No one should be complacent about this.

<comment><USER22> You know, I currently use my own domain for email.

Maybe I am paranoid, but I worry about that when I die, my domain will expire, and then someone will register that domain and set up email accounts with it.

They would be able to access so many services that I would have left open after my death. I still don't know how to handle this apart from leaving a fund to someone I trust to have my domain renewed for a few more decades after my death.

<comment><USER20> You don't even need to die for this to be an issue. Your registrar could just screw up and sell your domain to someone else. Or your registrar could have a security breach resulting in your domain being transferred. There's a myriad of ways the "own your domain" solution could fail, so it's really about which risks you're willing to take.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I have thought about this as well.

One of the reasons I am in the process of moving all of my domains to Gandi is because they appear to be the only reputable domain registrar that supports U2F. I take security extremely seriously when it comes to my domains.

<comment><USER23> > One of the reasons I am in the process of moving all of my domains to Gandi > is because they appear to be the only reputable domain registrar that > supports U2F.

I use Gandi and am quite pleased with their security settings. Not only is my account secured with an absurdly long password, I have U2F enabled and I have enabled the IP restriction list so that authentication only succeeds when coming from one of them. They even fixed my only quibble. In the past, if I logged in with valid credentials but from an unlisted IP, the error message would say "you're coming from an IP that's not permitted." Now the message for all types of failures--bad password, wrong IP, incorrect TOTP code--is the same so an attacker can't confirm valid credentials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I abandoned Fi after a trip to western Europe, where I was billed for 6 GB of usage in a single day on one of my data-only SIM cards, despite that the device the SIM was installed in (a 4G hotspot) registered only 200MB of usage that day.

Support was completely unhelpful, and after escalation reported back that the Fi team has zero visibility into chargebacks from their carrier partners and ergo could not diagnose the cause of the usage discrepancy. The lack of accountability on Fi's part, in addition to various annoyances (handset tendency to select Sprint coverage despite poor performance; handset tendency to override manual carrier selection to the detriment of service reliability; generally worse reliability and coverage than my previous carrier) led me to move back to Verizon. I pay an arm and a leg for my service, but at least it's highly reliable and available.

<comment><USER25> I just went to western Europe (Germany specifically), and spend 15 Euros for phone service there. It's simple: I just bought a SIM card at a shop (O2) and put it in my Verizon phone. I got a prepaid card that had unlimited text/calls (within Germany only), and 3GB of data, which was far more than enough for my 2 weeks there.

Cellular service is much cheaper in Europe than in the US, so you might as well take advantage of it. International calling plans for American phones are horrendously overpriced.

Of course, the downside is that I couldn't call or text anyone in the States, but who cares? That's what apps are for. I was able to talk to and message friends/family in the US using Facebook messenger and LINE. While on my hotel's free WiFi, my VoIP calls cost me nothing.

<comment><USER26> My son will be traveling to Europe this summer for a school trip. He'll be spending time in 6 or 7 different countries (UK, France, Germany, Switzerland and a couple more I can't remember right now)

Is there a better option than Fi for this type of trip?

<comment><USER27> Definitely get a cheap sim card wherever he lands. The EU abolished all roaming charges for data and calls so he'll be able to use whatever data and calls he has in all EU countries.

Some countries have extremely good value pre paid sim cards with 20 gigs of data often coming in under €20 a month.

<comment><USER28> No roaming charges between members of EU. So, if he lands first in UK, don't buy the sim from there

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Companies like google shouldn't be allowed to just ban someone's account and leave it at that. We actually need to regulate how OUR data is handled and managed by companies. Google thinks just because they provide an email service, they own all the emails in their service. This should not be the case and with all our reliance on cloud services, we need to be assured that our accounts are safe and we won't be denied access over stuff that isn't in our control.

<comment><USER30> Email is a federated system.

If you don't like how Google handles it, run your own mail server.

<comment><USER31> That's kind of a ridiculous statement these days. It's a bit like saying "Worried about e coli contamination in your food? Run your own farm."

These days, running a mail server is a complicated business, and the very fact that you ARE running your own server makes it much, much more likely that all the _other_ mail servers consider you a spam relay unless you are very, very careful about how you have configured things.

<comment><USER32> This is a pet peeve. SMTP goes to insane lengths to ensure that messages are never lost, but spam filters have broken those guarantees. I don't manage my own SMTP server, but my mail is hosted on a personal domain not backed by GMail, and I can never be sure if it has been delivered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I just traveled to Japan, the Phil, Bulgaria, San Francisco, and Boston without having to change sim cards or worry about my data situation. I'm going to keep it until someone else can do the same at a lower price.

<comment><USER34> Why not T-Mobile?

<comment><USER35> TMO only gives 2G internationally which, while it doesn't sound terrible, it ends up being unusable in practice. Your experience may vary though I guess.

<comment><USER36> T-Mobile's throttling does a great job of highlighting how bloated a lot of modern websites have gotten.

The last time I tried using it overseas, text-heavy sites like HN loaded almost as fast as normal. Reddit was mostly usable, but certain subreddits were painfully slow due to image-heavy custom styles. But try to load an article from a typical news website, and the connection would time out before it managed to render anything.

<comment><USER37> It's not a horrible solution though. I'm kind of cheap, I don't want to pay for unlimited data. So I have an inexpensive plan with T-Mobile that gets throttled. But I can still have some internet access for free once I go over my limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> She should sue Google. Serious response. This kind of thing is bullshit, and she has a legal right to have the number ported, especially if she's been willing to pay the bill and has not been able to due to Google's technical problems.

File a lawsuit for the value of the time she's had to spend on it and an order to show cause or temporary restraining order type motion for them to release the number to her.

It's too bad the legal system is so intimidating to people because more people doing this might one day wake companies up a little.

Needless to say this doesn't contradict the advice to not use the service in the first place.

<comment><USER39> I have no idea what you just said. To understand that I need to see a lawyer, pay hundreds of dollars to be told what my right is, and how I can proceed. Then probably invest thousands of dollars in a lawsuit. At least that's how I see it. Unless there is an app that you click a button and you sue Google for free that I don't know about.

<comment><USER38> I mean, you could look up those things and read a few blog posts and then do them. I'm not a lawyer either it's not that complicated.

You have to do a little research to figure out how to use the subway system or buy a car too. It's just another system, isn't this a board full of people who've taught themselves how to handle extraordinarily complex rules based systems?

There's something about legal stuff that makes people freeze up. Go to the courthouse, ask them, sign up for whatever volunteer lawyer help desk program they have (they almost always do) and figure it out. Takes an afternoon or two.

Use Google. Harness the enemy's powers against them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This really hits home. Probably 99.999% of users won't have issues with Google's products / services, but if you're one of the unlucky few, you're helpless.

All you can hope for is to make enough noise on the internet to get a Googler's attention. None of the normal escalation channels work.

My issues with Project Fi / Google Store were not resolved via their online chat, nor their phone support, nor emails to their product support, nor any of my posts on their product support forums, nor any tweets at various Google accounts.

Only after a blog post received attention on Reddit did I get a call from head of support who was able to resolve my issue.

</comment><comment><USER41> She's definitely right that the quality of their support has tanked. I've had significant connection issues where people on other carriers have none and their support personnel sent me useless boilerplate questions after I requested support. They then followed up with a multi-page incoherent trouble shooting doc that seemed aimed at their own engineers. One of the worst support experiences I've had, even from Google.

When I first signed up they had fantastic support, now it's worse than what I expect from Comcast.

<comment><USER42> She _

<comment><USER41> Ah, you're correct. I mistook the top poster here, iandanforth, as saying they were the author. Edited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I had a few unsuccessful back and forths with different Fi agents about an issue, and after a couple of weird remarks, I developed the theory that first level agents get their performance scores penalized every time they escalate an issue. I would have them go through the same script over and over for over an hour, and even sometimes admit that I had an issue, but refuse to press that button. I have no hard evidence, but that was my read from the conversations, and would explain the bad support experience overall.

<comment><USER44> Close, but not quite. Call centers are designed to make the general support (tier 1) agents effectively flesh and blood robots. These are jobs that might start at $10 an hour if you're lucky, have little training, and typically very high turnover rates. Even if you get a competent/experienced agent who has literally seen your problem a thousand times and knows that step 3 of the script will always fix it, they will be penalized if they skip the first two steps. Likewise, they will be penalized if they transfer you to tier 2 until they get to the step in the script that says, "transfer to tier 2." It doesn't matter if you've had this exact problem 5 times before and every instance required tier 2. Doesn't matter if you were just talking to another agent who ran the whole script and screwed up your transfer. The only way you might get lucky is if you're lucky enough to have some kind of open case or note on the account that instructs them to transfer you directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > We have submitted copies of his ID four times, my ID twice, multiple photos > of credit cards, and various credit card statements. We've talked to agents > and supervisors at Google Payments and Google Fi. No one is empowered to do > anything, and even a well-intentioned agent doesn't get the same answer from > the "security department" twice.

This was my EXACT experience with the google store. And Google Cloud gold level support. And google payments.

Google just doesn't make good products. I am consistently astounded at how SHITTY the google home is. It STILL can't make a to-do list.

The Google store sold me a defective pair of headphones. But the defect was due to a design flaw, so the headphones broke AGAIN after they sent me a new one. I then replaced my phone on warranty. Same headphone defect.

So I was going through about one pair of headphones a month for four months[0]. I kept doing it because I enjoyed wasting google's money and abusing their bureaucracy, but I also REALLY wanted a working pair of headphones. Just a total nightmare. I once lost my tempter at the poor guy on the phone, and his response was: "Don't worry about it. You are handling this way better than I would."

0: Sometimes two!

</comment><comment><USER35> Despite everything else said, I've gotta say that there's no better feeling than touching down in a new place, turning on your phone, and having it _just work_.

No stupid voip apps. No managing prepaid balances. No switching sims. Just direct dial and go.

Fi service is incredible for the mobile roaming alone and I'm not quite sure why nobody else can do it. I love it so much and it's my favorite product. It makes a measurable positive impact in my life.

<comment><USER46> Is that not normal with other carriers? I've made multiple trips abroad and aside from an occasional delay of a few minutes, my phone just works wherever I go.

<comment><USER47> For many carriers the roaming costs are so outrageous you may as well pretend that it is not an option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm going through something similar with Lyft. I got a new pixel phone, had to re-setup my account in an airport added my cards, and was unable to hail a ride due to some "oops, there was a problem, try again" error with both the cards I entered. That was 9 months ago. To this day, I've been unable to use Lyft, and I can't get anybody to really look at the issue.

I'm not sure why they don't want to take my money, but for now, I just use Uber. Hopefully they won't decide they hate met too.

<comment><USER49> Please look up information about Uber's business practices and don't use them. A few minor technical problems are _nothing_ compared to how bad Uber is. Disclaimer: Austin resident who is still mad at both of them for all the massive lies they published all over the city and the huge amount of our money and time they wasted with their stupid campaign to not have to fingerprint drivers.

<comment><USER50> > "A few minor technical problems"

If they're literally unable to use a service because of a glitch, it's not a "minor technical problem".

<comment><USER49> So? There are plenty of other alternatives anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I've been trying to get Fi to resolve a billing issue.... I'm stuck in a loop with support where they keep asking me for a security code, then the next day they'll respond back saying it expired and they need another one. The codes only seem to be valid for 30m, so I don't have any idea why they keep asking for them...

</comment><comment><USER52> Came here to echo the drop in service quality complaint. I joined Fi in the early days. The first time I called in it was about some rather complex (to me) networking issues where the phone was rejecting a WiFi direct connection because it couldn't detect internet service on the other side or some such. I could swear I was talking to a network engineer - he was super helpful and very technical. And that was the guy who just picked up the phone, no escalation needed!

Fast forward a few years and I had a minor question about a special promo they were running, connected to an offshore support team with broken English and copy/paste template responses that may as well have come from a chatbot.

</comment><comment><USER53> I can. I don't want to take away from Google's user hostile practices etc., but Fi is kind of a must have for people who travel overseas frequently but don't stay in a particular country long enough to subscribe to the local mobile system.

You can almost always find a better local deal that works great if you don't move around too much, but Fi is a fantastic "common denominator". Since I've had it I've traveled to...maybe 15 countries in Europe, Central America and Asia and it's worked amazingly well and turned otherwise expensive roaming charges or juggling of sims into normal operations.

It has a weird kind of "global citizen" feel to it that I've never felt any other way. Step off the plane, turn your phone off airplane mode and you're good to go.

Driving across Europe and I received "welcome to <country>" while using Google maps just like driving across the U.S. where it says "welcome to <state>".

It's also pretty cheap, even if you blow your usage caps and try to go unlimited (Google will cap the charges at some point).

If you stay in one place or travel abroad rarely, I'd say skip it, you can get a local provider with more service cheaper. But if you might end up in an unknown country and just don't want the hassle, it's pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER54> Google Fi sucks, it's way too expensive. The last several years have seen an explosion of MVNOs, mobile virtual network operators. I use Mint Sim and get 3gb LTE/month with unlimited talk and text, and unlimited throttled internet after the 3gb, for $15/month.

<comment><USER55> Are there any downsides to Mint? I thought I was getting a pretty good deal with t-mobile, but damn, $15 a month is pretty tempting.

<comment><USER56> Only two things I noticed when comparing on their website. 1) lock in contracts, and 2) they piggyback off the T-Mobile network while Google Fi dynamically uses the best of 3 networks. Otherwise seems like a pretty frugal option.

<comment><USER24> >they piggyback off the T-Mobile network while Google Fi dynamically uses the best of 3 networks

This happens only in theory, not practice with Fi. As a Fi launch customer that stuck with Fi through late 2017, Sprint (and later US Cellular) service was always terrible and frequently unusable, no matter what metro area I used it in. My experience improved dramatically when I just kept my Nexus device around as a spare, and moved my primary SIM to an iPhone, where it was permanently locked to using TMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'm a bit concerned about all the people here that tell they've been using Google services for decades and are afraid to loose their pictures/documents/etc... I mean how is giving such control over your data to one company a good idea in the first place ? I'm not saying that in patronizing way, but this should not be considered as normal behavior. I think that Google has already access to way much more data than it should and I really wouldn't want to hand them my phone bill. Even if you're not concerned about your privacy (and I really think you should), centralizing everything will only make problems worse if something happens with this one service, should it be Google, Apple or anyone else.

</comment><comment><USER58> I can understand why people criticize it, but I personally like Fi. The multiple carriers give me coverage in areas I don't expect it like Maine islands or the Sangre de Cristo foothills, and the price is reasonable if not the lowest available.

Additionally, the one time I've had to contact support, I had an email reply in 27 minutes.

Throw in perks like the seamless international support (if you travel internationally at all this is tremendous) and the data SIM for an iPad, and I've been pretty happy with the service.

That could all change the next time I need support if they're still overwhelmed with new users, but so far so good.

</comment><comment><USER59> Maybe someone on HN will know the answer to this: is it easy to enable/disable service with Google Fi? My use case is to use Fi while traveling internationally for a few months out of the year while switching back to my existing plan in the US. I only want to pay for Fi in the months when I'm out of the country.

<comment><USER24> You can pause Fi service for a few months at a time.

However, Google will catch on to your proposed usage pattern and will eventually boot you from the platform. Majority usage outside the USA violate ToS.

There are plenty of stories on r/projectfi about this. I've also had a personal friend that was booted after he subscribed to Fi, then moved out of the USA month later for a temporary work assignment, and was booted from Fi a few months later for violating ToS.

<comment><USER60> > Majority usage outside the USA violate ToS.

I'm not seeing this listed here: [https://fi.google.com/about/tos/](https://fi.google.com/about/tos/). What are the guidelines behind this?

<comment><USER61> "The Services are offered only to residents of the United States. The Services must be primarily used in the United States and are not intended for extended international use. Further, the Services are designed for use predominantly within our network. If your usage outside our network is excessive, abnormally high, or cause us to incur too much cost, we may, at our option and sole discretion, suspend your Google Fi account, terminate your service, or limit your use of roaming."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I switched to Google Fi from Verizon last month. I tested it in the Bay Area, Southern California and Florida. The service quality sucked unimaginably. I literally had to use my iPhone like an antenna in the office in San Francisco to have a phone call. The internet sucked badly as well.

I switched back to Verizon and Google Fi made me feel thankful to have Verizon.

</comment><comment><USER63> Yet another reason why "your phone number is your identity" (aka sms "2fA") is a horrible horrible horrible idea, especially for payment companies.

If you're paying your cell bill with your credit card, and your credit card requires sms authentication, you've entered an infinite loop.

</comment><comment><USER64> I am happy with Fi, and have been a customer for 2.5 years so far. There are certainly many use cases in which Fi is way more expensive, but that is the case with any carrier.

I think as far as customer support I have had more problems with Verizon than Fi, but your mileage may vary!

</comment><comment><USER65> About a year ago I tried getting Google Fi. Ordered a phone online, paid about $300. Then it never arrived.

When I talked to support, first they made me wait for about a week to confirm on their end that the phone was lost. Then their only solution was to process a refund (which took them another week to do), after which I would've had to purchase the same phone again.

Talked to a bunch of their support staff to no avail. They just would not send another phone. Seems like completely the opposite of what Amazon would have done (and probably the main reason why I'm a happy Amazon customer after over a decade, whereas I never looked back after the bad experience with Google Fi).

</comment><comment><USER66> Anyone notice a theme here?

Every failure of google has _something_ to do with the fact that they're automating so far that it ends up being downright harmful. Youtube, Google Pay, Google Cloud, etc

I've even heard of similar stories about using Google Cloud, where the system can flag your account and basically your entire business is _deleted_ due to an automated process!

[https://medium.com/@serverpunch/why-you-should-not-use- googl...](https://medium.com/@serverpunch/why-you-should-not-use-google- cloud-75ea2aec00de)

Though they seem to have reigned that in a bit here: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/18/google_cloud_platfo...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/18/google_cloud_platform_account_suspensions/)

I get the feeling in the short term they'll double-down on automation/AI until it's good enough nobody notices.

I wonder if they have a pulse on how their businesses are suffering because of that perception, though. When your company has a stigma of it being nearly impossible to reach a human being to get things done - is it really a surprise that my colleagues and I won't recommend google cloud as a service provider?

</comment><comment><USER67> I've had accounts with Verizon, Sprint and tMobile. On their worst day Google Fi is head and shoulders above them, it's not even close. I've used cell phones for thirty years and my time on Fi is the most stress free in all that time.

Having said that Google needs to do a better job at customer service. But so do Facebook and Amazon, both of which have caused me major problems.

<comment><USER68> Sprint support was incompetent, but they were at least as likely to make an error in your favor as not, so you could just call a couple times until you got the result you wanted.

Verizon's support was mediocre, but it idn't take too much persistence to escalate things to someone who could actually make a decision.

The recent stories I've heard of Fi's support make it sound like when something goes wrong, the easiest thing to do is to just open a new gmail account and switch to using that, which is a bit mind boggling.

<comment><USER67> I was in a Verizon store and was asked to leave or they'd call the police. My crime was to insist they honor a deal they advertised on their website. Offered to bring it up on one of their own computers when they insisted that I was wrong. Then I was asked not so politely to leave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I have had a similar recent experience with Fi after having used their service for three years now, and I would also no longer recommend Fi. This is very disappointing because Fi's customer service was once _fantastic_.

I had many time consuming and useless interactions via phone, chat, and email with Fi's support reps over the course of a month to solve a simple issue. After growing increasingly frustrated, I requested that the issue be escalated to an employee with actual sway, but the reps refused to escalate it beyond one level up to a "specialist" who was of no help. I finally tracked down on LinkedIn a Fi higher up who works at the mothership in Mountain View (all contacts thus far were with what was clearly an offshore team). I DM'ed them directly via LinkedIn to explain my issue. This action resulted in a complete resolution of my problem within 5 days. This _absolutely_ shouldn't be necessary to address what was a very straightforward problem, and does not augur well for Fi's future.

</comment><comment><USER70> I can relate. We have two Fi phones and there are bunch of problems: 1\. If you use the max 10G every month it's pretty expensive. 2\. Support is indeed bad. I once contacted them via the app and was told someone will reach out to me within 24 hours. No one did. 3\. There are technical problems such as people calling me when I'm on wifi and they cannot hear me when I answer and instead go directly to voice mail. I was told to clear the cache but it's not always helpful.

Things I like about Fi: 1\. It's really nice that it works pretty much in every country. I travel often and it's supper convenient. (it's more expensive than getting a local sim in many countries but more convenient). 2\. I don't need to listen to messages since they get transcribed automatically. (I'm assuming this is not a Fi only thing)

So overall the main differentiation for me is the travel part. For people who don't travel out of the country the Fi doesn't provide anything special.

<comment><USER71> > _1\. If you use the max 10G every month it 's pretty expensive._

How can that be? They cap your bill at $60 (which you hit after using 6GB). [https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/17/googles-project-fi-now- cap...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/17/googles-project-fi-now-caps-data- bills-at-60/)

<comment><USER70> It's 10G for two lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Google Fi's international data service used to be great. Now it's completely dysfunctional in countries such as Croatia, China, etc, and very spotty in Austria, Iceland, Philippines, Ecuador, northern Japan etc. I can no longer rely on Fi when I travel abroad.

</comment><comment><USER73> I think this is a very good example of PRIVATE vs. GOVERNMENT.

Google has set up a service that is usable/payable by their own rules.

This is something we (U.S.) take as verboten as a private business. They can discriminate on any reason except as dictated as against governance(race/age/religion/etc).

If you've been detected by google as "fraudulent" by google, then there is zero recourse for you. Goodbye to your google account.

If the U.S. government is not going to do anything about this (it has not shown any interest in this type of problem) then YOU need to be proactive. Be ready to change services to the private businesses that you interact with AND/OR speak with your representatives of your government.

</comment><comment><USER74> US citizen here. I was in Mozambique, England, Romania and Denmark with my Fi phone in 2017. Despite being listed as a country Fi covered, I could never get service in Mozambique (Beria), despite spending a few hours with several courteous Google Fi customer support people. My experience in the European countries was satisfactory. I don't recall any issues and it was nice to have my US phone number just work in those places.

An earlier trip in 2016 to Tajikistan in central Asia with my Fi phone required purchasing a local SIM card.

I've since given up on Google Fi and switched my number back to Verizon and have been happily using a $200 Moto G5 Plus purchased through Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER75> For all that "legal tender" as a concept is so often misused, this is actually pretty much the poster-child case where it's necessary: you one someone money and they're refusing to accept payment. Offer them some legal tender, they're required to accept _that_ in payment of your debt.

Of course, Google being a tech company that might not motivate them to solve their tech problems so it might not fix their other account issues. But it really should fix the phone company side of the problem, allowing the number to be ported out.

Or maybe I'm overly optimistic.

</comment><comment><USER76> I love my Fi. But I did not activate it in the US and activating abroad was not trivial. Their "Service" called this "buyers remorse" since I could still use Wifi. Long story.

</comment><comment><USER77> Isn't a more fundamental reason to not use fi is that it's not a real phone network ? Nobody other than google can operate a client as intended on the fi network. The network switching stuff isn't a standard or open source AFAIK. It's not a part of AOSP. Only google's licensed devices get that logic as a part of google play services. All other devices will operate in degraded mode where you are basically using a single carrier just like other carriers. So why bother ?

</comment><comment><USER78> Anecdotal evidence, but service was getting worse and worse with google fi (in San Francisco) over the past few months and I just switched to another carrier a few weeks ago. Calls were regularly dropping and data would cut in and out.

(I scrolled through the comments and didn't see this anywhere else. I think it's worth mentioning. I will miss the international coverage and included hotspot... And as someone who is on WiFi most of the time, it was cheaper than any of the major carriers.)

</comment><comment><USER79> It always seemed like a rip-off to me, given that there existed a $120 per 4 lines T-Mobile plan with _global data_ for free and unlimited domestic data (well, speed is capped after 4GB per line, but still pretty decent). When abroad, data speeds aren't going to impress, but it's enough for email and maps and it works nearly everywhere. I'm not associated with T-Mobile and don't hold any of their stock. Just a satisfied customer.

</comment><comment><USER80> If you want a cheap, fairly good mobile plan ... try Mint SIM. You can choose Verizon, AT&T, or TMobile networks. You prepay for your plans. A 5GB, unlimited call, unlimited text plan is about $15/month. The cheapest I've found.

Only downside is my texts don't always download when I'm on Wifi, so sometimes I have to disconnect to download my texts, and then reconnect to wifi. Annoying but not a deal breaker.

</comment><comment><USER81> I quit a couple years ago when my phone left me in a position where I could not get any connectivity from the TMobile or Sprint towers, nor wifi. They tried to use the excuse that it was tower maintenance yet couldn't explain why wifi connectivity wouldn't work. As someone who is on call 24/7/365 it was unacceptable and I moved to another provider. Their phone support was absolutely useless.

</comment><comment><USER82> This post is not surprising to me. Google product support team lacks empathy at a very fundamental level. Last year in middle somehow google's system decided to get me locked out of the old gmail account. I have all the phones which have ever been connected to it, and all emails I have had ever connected to it. But no! The only message I have got is, our security team will take 3-5 days to get back to you.

</comment><comment><USER83> I had a lot of issues with getting Google Fi. On Wi-Fi the calls wouldn't go through. If it did the quality of voice was not good. When receiving calls there was a delay after I accept the call when the caller couldn't hear me. When my wife was in Manhattan her phone stopped working completely. she had to use the phone of her friend to call me. And we moved from iPhone to android and we hated the experience.

</comment><comment><USER84> Since switching to Android 9 has anyone else noticed that their data usage went up? Or rather that their phone disconnects from Wifi frequently?

</comment><comment><USER85> FWIW re: cell carriers in the US, I've found prepaid has worked really well for me at a much lower price than even something like Google Fi. I've been using Mint, and I pay $25 a month for a 10GB plan and it's worked great so far.

I've heard their support isn't the best, but fortunately I've not had to deal with them yet.

</comment><comment><USER86> I've been a Fi customer for two years. Sometimes it 'just works' when you travel internationally, which is magical. Most times however it just ok. It was dismal in Pakistan last year. In Netherlands it's barely ok. I'm ditching it in a few days since the Dutch have better, cheaper carriers.

</comment><comment><USER87> One of the realizations of operationalizing an algorithm / system is that designers / programmers rarely think of every way in which human beings do unexpected things with their system. And usually the enthusiasm is never as great to mop up the customer experience problems after the 99% is solved for.

</comment><comment><USER88> Is anyone using GCE? This is making me pretty worried. I'm operating a jupyter notebook service where every user gets their own volume. If my account was suspended and we no longer have access to user data that would be terrible. We can try backing data out to AWS but the egress fees would add up

</comment><comment><USER80> Holy shit! So Google has turned into the Comcast of 2019.

Wow, it took just 19 years to go from the darling of the year 2000 ... DO NO EVIL ... to the WE DONT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT RUINING YOUR DIGITAL LIFE BECAUSE WE HAVE A POLICY AND PROCEDURE.

I guess it really is inevitable. You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.

</comment><comment><USER89> The service is tremendous, the support is terrible. My experience signing up definitely gave me pause about the service, but I have no complaints since.

When I signed up for Fi on Black Friday, taking advantage of a great deal with $200 off the Pixel 3, and $200 in Google Fi credits, I mistakenly used a pre- populated shipping address to my work address in my order. That address was no longer valid, as my company had recently moved.

When I got a shipping notification, I realized my mistake. I contacted FedEx to change the shipping address, but Google Fi had placed a restriction on their shipments that didn't allow recipients to change the shipping address.

So I contacted Google Fi support. After waiting on hold for nearly two hours, I was told that since the product had already shipped, the issue would need to be escalated to their Shipping Specialists, who would contact me. Great.

Two days later, the package arrived in my city, and FedEx noted a delivery exception, since the address was not occupied. I called Google Fi support again, and after waiting on hold for an hour, was told the issue had already been escalated.

Several days later, after no progress, I chatted with Google Fi support again. No update, no ETA, they simply said the Shipping Specialists would get to it when they can. I contacted them again two days later. Same drill. No update, no ETA, no information, no ability to do anything except tell me to wait.

About ten days after I first contacted them, and seven days after the package arrived in my city, FedEx returned the package to the sender. I contacted Google Fi again, and asked if they could send a replacement, now that the original was being returned. No dice. I'd have to wait for the Shipping Specialists.

A few days later, the Shipping Specialists cancelled my order and refunded my payment, without ever talking to me. They advised me that I could place a new order. I replied asking if Google Fi would honor their promotional pricing, since the phone was now $200 more expensive, and the Google Fi credits had dropped from $200 to $100. They said they might, and they would escalate it to a manager if I purchased a new phone, and sent them the order details.

So I did. Here was their reply about a week later:

> Hi XXXXX,

> My name is XXXXX and I'm a higher level Specialist here with Google Fi. I'm > working directly with our Promotions Team to determine your eligibility for > our "Pixel 3 / 3 XL $400 Back" promotion that was ongoing from November 22nd > @ 11:00 PM PT - November 27th @ 11:59 PM PT.

> After thoroughly reviewing your account, we have determined you are > ineligible for an exception to this promotion.

> Per the promotion terms: "Limited time offer available from 11/22/18 11:00 > PM PT through 11/27/18 11:59 PM PT, or while supplies last"

> Since your original order GS.XXXXXXXX was returned to shipper due to an > incorrect shipping address, we are unable to provide an exception.

Pretty amazing. I called Google Fi support five times over a 10 day period to try and get the shipping address changed. The original mistake was mine, but no one at Google Fi support was able to do anything about the problem until the phone was returned, and then they made no effort to rectify the situation.

With that said, I'm quite happy with the phone and service - just not the support.

</comment><comment><USER90> I've tried it and overall found the service spotty in Denver, and typically a notch lower (technical term) on whatever speed compared to Verizon etc, when traveling internationally. I will admit that initial tech support experiences were unsustainably amazing.

</comment><comment><USER91> I'm always amazed how expensive mobile plans in the US are.

Google Fi Unlimited + 6 GB of is $80 a month. In Poland you get the same for around $6.5, prepaid.

On the other hand AT&T Prepaid $40 Monthly Plan has everything unlimited and 8 GB of data, so why would anyone use Google Fi?

</comment><comment><USER92> I've had edge case service nightmares with Google as well. Hate to say it but for a company that prides themselves on being smart, sometimes (just like in any other bureaucracy) they come across as really stupid.

</comment><comment><USER60> Just switched to Google Fi, and while I haven't had any issues to the extent to which the author did, the I do agree that the support experience is not great. It's in line with most Google products.

</comment><comment><USER93> I've been with them for 3 years and change, the entire time it's very much been an iffy beta-feeling product. _shrugs_ the price is worth the inconveniences I've experienced.

</comment><comment><USER94> Ah, I live on a small island in the Pacific and just got back from Thailand. Having Google Fi has been an absolute game changer.

Would having a back-up payment method set have solved something like this?

</comment><comment><USER95> Things like this are why I've recently bailed on my Google account (including my decades-old gmail account). There ARE alternatives out there. I've been enjoying ProtonMail.

</comment><comment><USER96> Throughout years Google showed that if you make any of their products essential for you, there is big chance you are going to be screwed. In the end all they care is web search.

</comment><comment><USER97> I'd leave Fi, but who am I going to use after that? Verizon, ATT? Granted Fi uses ATT (and roams on Verizon once in a while) but I'd rather not pay them directly....

</comment><comment><USER98> The EU should introduce some Digital Consumer Rights to put a stop to these arbitrary black holes you can get into with internet giants.

Would surely be a positive measure?

</comment><comment><USER99> Just to be sure, the gmail account was also locked?

</comment><comment><USER100> FWIW I started a Google Fi competitor focused on providing competent service quickly: CommunityPhone.org

</comment><comment><USER21> Well, it will be fixed with the next rewrite of Google Payments/Wallet/Pay/Whatever.

</comment><comment><USER101> Would adding multiple payment methods to your google payments account mitigate the risk here?

</comment><comment><USER102> Is there some disadvantage to using a dedicated Google account solely for Google Fi?

</comment><comment><USER103> tl;dr:

* all payments through google use google pay

* poster's husband bought a pixel 3 at the same time there was fraud on their card.

* the pixel 3 shipped even though the payment was reversed because of the fraud

* google shut down his google pay account hard, and that broke google fi, hangouts, access to his phone number, etc.

* google support has been super googley about this (ie foad)

* if you ever have fraud problems with google pay, prepare for all google stuff to break with 0 resolution or help

* as a side note, poster bought a pixel 3 and they have improved their support from the pixel 2 to be more googley. The phone remains basically broken.

<comment><USER104> This is why consolidation of power is bad. You can't out run their influence and consideration. Competition is great in both tech and state because you have options (barring collusion).

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> It routinely cost me so much in data that it was cheaper to get a Verizon unlimited data plan. That was the end of it for me.

<comment><USER106> What is Verizon billing you? Verizon's "unlimited" plan is capped 22 GB and slows you down after. You get true unlimited data with Fi at $60 + $20 per line.

<comment><USER105> When did they start that? I was paying $10/GB plus $20/mo. Also Google Fi slows data after 15GB... [https://fi.google.com/about/plan/](https://fi.google.com/about/plan/)

My Verizon plan is under $70 w/ the taxes/fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> Just my luck, I start seeing all the horror stories after I've _just_ signed up for this. Pucker intensifies...

<comment><USER108> 99% chance you'll be totally fine, so probably not worth losing sleep over it.

</comment></comment><comment> your-nanny on plus side, Google asked the cell companies not to cell Fi customers location data...

</comment><comment><USER109> A credit card pushing post veiled as a Google Fi review. Awesome.

My wife still loves Fi, and I love having a Fi data sim.

<comment><USER110> You're not wrong, but you don't have to point it out like it's a revelation. The disclosure is prominently displayed at the head of the article.

<comment><USER109> Every post is marked with that disclosure. I just find the content hard to read when it is so blatantly there to try and get you to sign up for one of the cards that happens to be mentioned.

The whole post could have been 150 words.

<comment><USER111> The whole post had quite a lot of useful setup for how support has changed and the current state of it. Don't be so taken aback by a _single sentence_ of advertising that it taints your view of the rest.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Imperfect Forward Secrecy: The Coming Cryptocalypse - <AUTHOR> http://tonyarcieri.com/imperfect-forward-secrecy-the-coming-cryptocalypse

<comment><USER2> Edit: Sorry, I was confused. I missed out on the part where the adversary attacks the DH exchange, thinking he would only try to get to the private keys. Original gripe below.

\----

This guy has not understood forward secrecy. The session key is never transmitted, not in clear text, nor in crypto text.

Forward secrecy over SSL is achieved by using Diffie-Hellman key exchange in combination with public key crypto. This makes sure that as long as the private keys are not compromised, the DH exchange is immune to a man in the middle-attack (which otherwise is the weak point of DH).

Recording the communication between the parties will therefore not yield any information even if the private keys are leaked or otherwise discovered in the future. So solving discrete logarithms or factoring numbers quickly _in the future_ does not break contemporary forward secret communication.

(Read, for example, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_forward_secrecy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_forward_secrecy) )

\----

Okay, so after re-reading, I'm still inclined to believe he hasn't fully grasped forward secrecy, or at least is misrepresenting it here:

> _If the NSA can break the public keys used for your sessions, and derive > their corresponding private keys, it can decrypt all of your sessions, > regardless of whether you used "perfect" forward secrecy._

This is still not true. What _is_ true, though, is this: If the adversary can solve discrete logarithms (or whatever's the appropriate difficult problem) quickly, they can decrypt your session. Not simply because they get your private keys, but because they get your private keys _and_ are able to defeat DH.

\----

And _finally_ I understand why I'm wrong and he's right: Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman, unlike "regular" DH, uses public and private keys. The passage I quoted above is indeed talking about breaking the DH exchange. TIL :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think you understand Diffie-Hellman, or how forward secrecy applies to it, so let me take you through it.

Alice and Bob want to compute a shared secret with ECDHE. I'll use Wikipedia's notation:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_Diffie%E2%80%93...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman)

Alice has private key dA and public key QA. Bob has private key dB and public key QB.

Alice can compute a shared secret S (I'll simplify here for brevity)using scalar multiplication as follows:

S = dA * QA

Bob can compute the same shared secret as:

S = dB * QB

Do you notice the inputs to the scalar multiplication operation? They're the elliptic curve public keys.

For Alice and Bob to arrive at a shared secret, they much have each others' public keys.

For forward secrecy to work, Alice and Bob can't use well-known public keys they found in advance. They generate ephemeral public keys for the session, and transmit them to each other as part of the protocol.

Still don't believe me? Let's look at CurveCP, an advanced transport encryption protocol that provides both passive and active forward secrecy:

[http://curvecp.org/packets.html](http://curvecp.org/packets.html)

The "hello packet" is:

        Hello packet:
        (C',0,Box[0'](C'->S))
        where C' is the client's short-term public key

The very first message sent from one peer to another is the short-term public key, in plaintext.

If you can solve the discrete logarithm problem, using future computers or future algorithms, you can derive the short-term private key, the shared secret, and with it the entire session.

<comment><USER2> Yep, you're right.

I was thrown off by the fact that Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman has public and private keys. I figured you weren't talking about the DH part when you talked about public and private keys.

Today I learned more about Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman. A good day. Thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For what it's worth, you don't really need your problems to be NP-hard to resist quantum computers. You just don't want problems that are in the BQP (or P, obviously) complexity class.

Why bring up OTPs if current symmetric encryption is quantum-computing proof (modulo Grover)? If anything, OTPs just leave you with a much bigger (literally) key exchange problem, without any meaningful advantage.

With all that said, "scalable quantum computers" are very much like the year of the Linux desktop, or cold fusion: always just a few years from now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I brought up OTP because it actually provides perfect secrecy, unlike "perfect" forward secrecy.

And yes, we won't know when (or for the true pessimists, if) quantum computers capable of breaking today's public keys will be available. And as another counterpoint, D-Wave's technology appears to be a bit overblown:

[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started to write a comment detailing what's wrong with this article and then realized that 'flag' was easier.</comment>


Launching my new web-based timeline software this week. Sneak preview for HNers - <AUTHOR> http://tiki-toki.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been building this over the past year or so in my spare time. My main job is as a freelance web developer. The aim was to create some timeline software that was easy to use and offered quite a bit of customization.

Here's a couple of timelines that have been created with the software:

[http://tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/67/The-Life-of-Mary-Kear...](http://tiki- toki.com/timeline/entry/67/The-Life-of-Mary-Kearns/)

[http://tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/55/The-Fight-for-Democra...](http://tiki- toki.com/timeline/entry/55/The-Fight-for-Democracy-in-the-Middle-East/)

Tell me what you think:

<comment><USER2> Awesome. looks great. The time line control.. did you create it from scratch or did you use a plugin?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much the whole site was created from scratch using Javascript, CSS, HTML and a smattering of HTML5 for the front end.

Most of this was written in-house by but we did use the odd bit of open source JS, for the color picker. Plus, we used jQuery for some of the animations and for its great dom selector engine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The login/registration form does not use password inputs for the password box, and shows therefore the password in plain text when trying to login or register.

</comment><comment><USER4> Are these all public timelines or can use it to create private timelines too.

Like for milestones on a project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Toadi

At present, all timelines are public, but allowing people to have private timelines is in the road map. If it is something that you are particularly keen on, we can move that feature forward.

Thanks for the feedback

Alex</comment></comment>