But Google (and Facebook, and probably some other companies) don't have reasonable processes for disputing or resolving these situations.
Some have said that we should consider Google's challenge: lots of users/activities that need to be monitored and policed. The assumption is that Google could not afford to do this "reasonably" with humans instead of automated systems because the volume is high.
But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit.
In the unlikely event that involving more humans would be too expensive, then Google should raise their prices (or stop giving so much away for free).
To summarize, there is no excuse for Google to operate this way. They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.
Edit: I'm not defending Google's actions in the case of the Terraria developer's account or any other. I'm saying there are some people who have an axe to grind and right now they are the loudest voices. IMHO Google needs to counteract that by taking real action at a broad scale.
At some point the trolls will win for no other reason than inaction on Google's part.
Yeah, until they piss off someone too big to not give up without a legal/public fight or they piss enough people to make a dent on their bottom line.
I think Google right now is just coasting and the short term evolution is just reactive/siloed plans but no bigger picture of where they want to go (basically just "evolution for promotion points")
Only in the vaguest sense. Don't attribute to corporate greed what can be adequately explained by an out-of-control bureaucracy made of competing personal interests and baroque by leadership by committee on promotions and raises.
Writing a fast computer program is much easier than designing a good bureaucracy.
Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
No clue, my friend; I am not a Google employee.
I already use Google's paid-tier for their storage and I use their domain registrar.
I get that I'm using a free product so that means they have to do customer service on the cheap. I get it. I'm happy to give something that's mission-critical in my life mission-critical payment without the pain of migrating to a new email provider.
Shut up and take my money, Google.
Big ass tech company been around for ages saying it’s gonna change the world.
All you do is coast. Like what. Could you imagine going back in time and saying that to folks? That their whole “I’m gonna change the world” routine is going to be given up on?
In 2 of those cases, they were high-6 & low-7 figure follower companies and were spending well into the 6 figures per year on facebook ads. They were both ultimately overturned after escalating via an "agency-only" facebook person who looked into it and found it to be automated violations (both the original and the appeal!). The excuse for why it wasn't overturned upon appeal was "Sorry we cannot disclose this since people would game the system if we did" yet a single person manually reviewed and overturned it in a matter of minutes.
I don't understand the (successful) business logic that gets Facebook into a scenario like this where you can't put 1 hour of human capital into reviewing a potentially million dollar contract.
They'd waste 99% of their time with spammers, scammers, and attackers trying to social engineer account access. There's no reason to waste a human's time on that.
In a setting where advertisers are effectively forced to use Google to avoid giving market share to competitors, there's the element of not having a choice while ending up with a significant disadvantage once these mechanisms falsely trigger.
With Google being the operator of the platform and judge at the same time, I don't think they can hide behind terms of use in all jurisdictions. Scaling up without carrying the costs involved seems pretty unjustified.
Looking it over, I didn't realize the Google One product offers human support options, so... maybe hypothetically I could actually get service if my account was shuttered? Or they'll actually be resistant to shuttering my account?
Make the support request cost $250-$500. Guarantee a human on the other end. That drops spam/scam attempts down to basically nothing. It also helps cover the cost of providing real review. Plus, $500 is a very reasonable expense for most companies (basically negligible for all but the smallest), and it's a high bar for scams/spam.
Basically - No, your answer is not a valid reason to not provide human based support.
The big plans are cloud/youtube. Smaller plans are things like Nest, Pixel, Stadia, etc. Web ads will take care of itself indefinitely.
There are always moonshots in flight but it's non-trivial to create a second trillion dollar business out of thin air.
So charge them less? Now the scammers will call from those places.
How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world?
If you have no problems, it's fine. The first time you need to call customer support, you start wondering if TMobile or somebody else would be a better provider.
Google, on the other hand, pretends to be a good provider of lots of software services, but if anything ever goes wrong with any of them, you are screwed, including if it's a premium service that you pay for. This is why you should never allow Google to control anything that is important to a business of yours or to your personal life.
Google has tons of sales reps on the ad side who will be happy to give you a rationale on why you should spend money more aggressively on their platform, but even they will sometimes be useless at fixing problems unless you are a truly massive customer for them. If you ever need to talk to a sales rep, you can get a Google ad person on the phone in minutes, but they will tell you to bid more aggressively and to buy more display ads.
If your problem with Google is that you aren't spending enough money on display ads, they're Johnny on the spot; they've got 9 trillion hammers that they want to sell you for that particular nail. Need help with anything else substantial related to a Google service? We have a robot you can e-mail for that, and that robot will ignore you.
Some people would call that racketeering.
I created instagram filters this cycle for a client which I thought would be really cool; I haven't seen any from campaigns beyond the Biden Aviators (I work in politics). I wanted to do a 'i just voted' type challenge; tried many ideas and combinations like swappable campaign buttons without text showing 'issues,' branding, different voting method 3d objects.
Facebook kept rejecting and pointing to policy that clearly did not apply to what I was uploading.
I wish they would have just said 'we don't want political filters.' Escalating to actual @fb employee emails did not work. We're not important enough.
I didn't know about Stadia. I had been thinking of getting it, partly out of curiosity. Now I won't bother.
- They bought google wireless. - Their charge was declined, whatever the reason, they wanted to correct that. Or possibly an accidental dispute. - Google disabled their account because of non-payment - Google's customer support couldn't help because they weren't a paying customer. - They literally couldn't do ANYTHING because google was ignoring every step of the way. - Their account was blocked from making any payments and couldn't contact someone until they made a payment. - Eventually their phone was disabled, and they lost the phone number because... no payment!
And once the phone number was released / re-used there was nothing they could do.
Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar.
The problem isn't that it's hard, but that it's a cost center instead of a profit center.
Don't hold your breath. Didn't Google/Youtube recently ban the sitting President of the United States who is also a billonaire and notoriously litigious?
Just curious, why would you accept this risk? Even though the probability of losing your account is small, the impact is huge. I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to host the email).
On that note - I have AT&T. I'm fine with AT&T, except that group MMS / messaging is broken with non-iPhone users. I've tried calling support, walking into a store, and now - simply given up. I tried two other carriers a few years ago, and had far worse problems, so I just suck it up and call people when we have to communicate. At least that part works.
You sum it up well.
When AWS first arrived they had the same automated support system that Google does, and they didn’t really want to comply with GDPR. We probably would’ve gone with Azure anyway because it’s the easy option for operations when you’re already in bed with 365, but the Amazon/Google attitude meant they weren’t even considered beyond the first look.
Since then AWS has overtaken Azure in GDPR compliance and the availability of their support, and we now have several supplier operated solutions in AWS.
Google is still on the “do not buy from this company” list.
But maybe they just aren’t interested. They are primarily an advertising company after all.
... Probably as many as currently pay for Youtube Premium and then come to HN and complain about ads on Youtube :)
They have absolutely been coasting, and the market is only getting more cutthroat.
If they say something is not allowed, at least one group will claim they are suppressing free speech. But if they allow it, they end up having to allow some misleading or completely false disinformation.
That was more than 12 years ago, and there has been a steady stream of incidents like that one. If you're still using a Google account for critical stuff, you know what you're getting yourself into.
That is most of politics....
Google is already wasting 'a human's time' - but its the user. When a user is banned, an enormous amount of time is wasted trying to re-register their new email with every single website, service, bank, etc - at times talking to a human to fix things. And that is the best case. The worst case is that their livelihood is affected - app developer, youtuber, etc.
The status-quo needs to change - and Google should provide better service. It doesn't really matter if they hire more humans or not.
I have a monthly calendar reminder to do a GDPR export (Google Takeout, Facebook, etc), and I just save it to a big HDD. I keep the instructions to order exports for each service in the "event description" to make it as quick and as little effort for me as possible.
I know it's boring... but I read the article this thread is about and it just re-inforces that I am doing the right thing.
They didn't have exactly what you wanted so provided a workaround that would solve the problem.
https://tedpiotrowski.svbtle.com/switched-to-verizon-iphone-...
I also do regular Google Takeout backups so that I at least have access to the majority of emails and google data.
I have considered this, but converting is not risk free. Say I utilize my own domain backed by Gmail. I have increased my surface area by being reliant upon both Google and the security of my domain registrar. Perl.com was just stolen[0] due to some shenanigans -how I would I keep myself immune?
My fear with using my own domain is that if it is compromised, then an attacker can access all of my email linked accounts (eg banking). If Google shuts me down, at least I know the domain is secure and the email is dead and unable to be intercepted.
I've yet to find a good solution for this without paying for Google's business product, which I find way too dangerous to risk. You can't get a custom domain on consumer gmail.
No, because banned (not merely "suspended", which you can fix using google tools) accounts are usually banned because of bad content.
Banks use 2FA so stealing your email won't steal your account.
Anyway, you can appeal to the registrar and IANA for help if your registration is attacked.
Anyway why is Google's paid business product more risky than their free Gmail?
1. You need to pay for a mail server, and then you lose the benefits of gmail's spam filters, and also you start having deliverability problems.
2. You lose the benefits of some of gmail's features as they don't classify forwarded emails the same.
Because as a person I have some rights under GDPR, as a business I don't really. Business accounts are even easier for them to shut, and using a business account for personal things sets off loads of red flags. You can't review products, you can use family features, your google home products get messed up, etc.
Without a human to contact, you have no recourse. The email that you received denying your request for re-evaluation is no-reply@big.co, so you're stuck. It is a surprisingly awful feeling of helplessness. In fact, if a human on the other end of the phone were to say, "I'm sorry, it doesn't say why, but our system won't let you back in.", you would probably feel a little better because some soul heard you.
Google is AT&T: technically great, but customer support is intentionally and aggressively incompetent.
AWS is Verizon: technically good with some weird rough edges and legacy stuff, but customer support will bend over backwards for you.
Does that mean Azure is T-mobile? I have little experience with either.
A couple years ago, there was an update that affected a bunch of embedded devices and caused some machines to go down. Luckily our machines were on an older version, but another shop we worked with got hit by it.
Within an hour of Microsoft being alerted to the issue they'd begun working on the problem and within two hours machines were back up and running again after Microsoft pushed an update.
People might be afraid of lawyers but they aren’t involved in these processes.
It's almost like they could, I don't know, have some AI ethics researcher who could explain to them the pitfalls of letting a bunch of programmers act like their algos are infallible and suggest how to avoid those pitfalls.
Nah, just kidding. You sack her for being an uppity black lady who won't just churn out reports saying Google are perfect, because it hurts the feelings of the programmers and their managers.
Yes? If you can't trust your rep to give accurate recommendations, then what's the point of even having one?
They didn't "do" anything.
Google will be forgotten the same way any company that rides off coattails does.
Google changed the world - you legit made me spit my drink that's such a fucking joke. They were the search engine that went big
The cumulative time if took them to read and answer all of those emails (and cost) was definitely double that of just shipping the $1 part.
For what it's worth the ads do have more docs on what ads are accepted.
-- Going off the rails here but you brought it up (i am GP?), I'm actually pissed ads aren't back up!!!
It's hindering our business (enough to hurt), preventing fundraising, and really hurts smaller campaigns.
However from my (Dem) perspective I do think FB should act like TV stations and fact check.
One study in my city said 1 minute of fact check for every 160 minutes of ads (I think i remember that roughly correct).
I also especially had beef with the super weak 'projected winner' banner on posts with Biden/Trump post election. It compounded the lie. Projected gives a false sense of 'up in the air.'
They knew that Trump and MAGA media are using nonsense to lie to people. It ended up with insurrection at the capitol.
They should have called Biden the winner -> link to the facts. Most media went beyond projected after a few days.
They again should have also followed the rest of the media by adding another few words to combat the lies from MAGA once they continued and escalated: all lawsuits got thrown out with prejudice the election is not contested.
NyTimes et al use language like baseless, 'Mr. Trump's lie', unfounded. They now go further and use words like extreme, conspiracy, 'cult figure.'
As far as I know it's priced the same. In the context of this discussion - A business to business relationship - $500 is pretty reasonable at a global level.
For an individual consumer - I think $500 is a fairly steep price even in the US (and other 1st world countries) and that's by design.
I have never heard anyone say that the AWS toolset was anything but "an amalgam of individual projects developed separately." It is obvious from their UI that the different tools are run by different teams that have very different opinions on how things should be done. Just look at the various iterations of deployment management. ECS vs Lambda vs EKS vs classic EC2. All the UIs have different design standards and assumptions. It has gotten better over the years, but the AWS org chart is still peaking through the UI.
GCP is not much better. At least they had the advantage of starting later in the market cycle. They were able to see what worked and what didn't work at AWS and build a bit cleaner.
In the end we are talking about B2B systems targeting power user engineers. The control surfaces need to be powerful first, and easy to use is a distant second or third consideration.