Google is evil

Google has shut down my gmail, you tube account, google documents, and so on and so forth, until I give them a phone number at which I can be contacted – which is to say, until I give them a provable link to my true name.

This did not come as a total surprise, so I have not lost anything important.


22 Responses to “Google is evil”

  1. spandrell says:

    Wait, you’re not James Donald?

    • jim says:

      Obviously I am James Donald, but I have more than one identifier, and the identifier “James Donald” points to more than one person.

  2. Thrasymachus says:

    I gave up on Blogger some time ago primarily because it sucks, but also because Google is pretty poor on free speech. The abuses on Blogger haven’t been seen on WordPress as far as I know. It’s easy to transfer over.

  3. anon says:

    I personally tried to find a way to get a temporary phone number in such a way as to encrypt all my internet activities through the TOR Onion browser, but I was unable to find a phone number in that manner.

    However, I was able to bootstrap my identity by creating a yahoo account through TOR onion and then creating a gmail account based off that yahoo account.

  4. Samson J. says:

    Are you sure, Jim? Gmail periodically asks me for a cell phone number, but there is always a small (very small…) “no thanks” option in the corner.

    By the way, yes, Google is evil.

    • jim says:

      Yes: I am sure. They have turned off my gmail etc, and whenever I try to go to gmail or youtube, they recognize the identity that they have turned off (despite the fact that I have cleared my cookies), and ask me for a phone number as condition for accessing my stuff. Further, if I access by straightforward means, allowing them to recognize this is the same identity, they will not let me register a new identity, but instead keep asking for a phone number for my old identity.

      They have long been nagging. Now they are no longer nagging, but holding my accounts hostage to get me to give them a phone number.

      • Ian says:

        If I was a villainous HateCriminal trying to use Google to spread the Dark Enlightenment Gospel out on the InterWebs without the PC Gestapo sending bolshevik-themed emails to my employer, I’d go to Target, buy one of the no-contract el cheapo phones and the cheapest minutes card available, and pay for both with $40 cash

        • Bill says:

          Or pay a bum to do it for you the next time you are travelling out of state.

          • jim says:

            I could fix the problem, but am not really enthusiastic about opening accounts with an organization that displays special interest in the identity of heretical bloggers.

    • namae nank says:

      did with my older account, not with new one.(former years ago, the latter a few months ago.)
      googled and there are others who face the same.

  5. Sexual Athlete says:

    Why not reduce, or better, eliminate marginal income tax rates. That’ll surely fix the problem. I mean, once a fella like Romney is worth 2.5 billion instead of only 250 million then we’ll really see some action!

    And while we’re at it, let’s liberalize trade with Malawi and Sri Lanka, that’ll show ’em!

    Another thing, why don’t some enterprising laissez-faire types start their own internet search co? Why waste all that entrepreneurial talent? Let’s see the free-marketeers freely market themselves.

    • jim says:


      If soaking the rich was profitable, Dubai would soak the rich.

      Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai indicate that low tax rates on the highly productive works. Presumably Dubai tax rates are at the long term Laffer Maximum, are at levels that maximize long term revenue, indicating that the long term revenue maximizing tax rate is far lower than the tax rates in democracies, for democracies tend to be at the short term revenue maximizing tax rate for the minority that pay taxes, and far above the short term revenue maximizing rate for demonized minorities, in particular the rich. Experience has shown that cutting taxes on those rich enough to be demonized generally results not only in a long term gain in revenue, but in an immediate and very substantial short term gain in revenue. The Bush tax cuts yielded a net loss because they were primarily tax cuts on the poor, reducing the number of taxpayers. The loss in revenue from cutting taxes on the poor was partially but not completely offset by the gain in revenue from cutting taxes on the rich.

      Experience shows that the revenue maximizing tax bears more heavily on the poor than the rich. Since the poor are unproductive, the revenue maximizing despot would not care much about incentive effects on the poor.


      Internet search is free in large part because it is profitable to collect information about people. The cure is to control what information the search company finds about you, not to hope for a more benevolent search company. Google’s evil is that it holds my information hostage for information about me, that it is going to alarming extremes to collect information about political dissidents. – to which I respond by not allowing them useful information.

      • James James says:

        I don’t know why Dubai bother taxing incomes at all. By taxing land, they get the same return without economic distortion. As Dubai becomes more important/more attractive/they spend more on infrastructure, more people want to live there and the rents go up. Everyone’s incentives are aligned.

        • jim says:

          The King of Dubai owns most of the undeveloped land in potential urban areas, and wants people to develop it. This is best accomplished by selling it outright. A high tax on land would discourage people from developing it out of fear that the tax might unpredictably rise further in future. The King also develops land himself.

          • Seems like a good plan, especially since he is involved in the process too, and not just giving orders and/or suggestions. Few country leaders do this anymore

          • James James says:

            Hong Kong avoids selling land outright. Instead they sell 99 year leases. They get a bit less revenue than selling outright, but at least they avoid the need for income tax.

            However, they do still have income tax, and even a small income tax is bad because it requires just as much work to implement.

            Selling leaseholds raises almost as much as freeholds, but substantially less than land tax. It’s a tradeoff between revenue and development, as you say.

  6. Zach says:

    I (we) closed our email account a couple months ago on gmail.

    Fuck ’em.

    Now Yahoo – all of a sudden – is requesting something absurd as well. I never read it, so I’m not sure what they’re asking for. I always click “remind me later” but I’ve been clicking that too often.

  7. Davideo says:

    This happens to one of my friends too. It’s so shame of google…

  8. outsidre says:

    The evil will only gather strength forever. It is now impossible to get a google or yahoo account of any type without giving them real-world account information ultimately verified by birth certificate.

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