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I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement.
We see this again and again. The cynic in me sees Stadia as yet another internal promotion scheme, masquerading as a product.
I doubt this will ever change. The internal momentum of the company culture will make it so. What does it mean for investors? Google has enough money they can just buy their way into markets indefinitely. It will probably keep them going, but I don't expect huge growth. I'd probably be putting my money into other stocks if I had to choose. I honestly don't think people would miss Google much if it was gone.
Stadia, from day one, has seemed like an engineering-oriented project. It's a cool tech that nobody asked for and not many people actually want (and has been atrociously packaged as an actual product). I can just hear the kickoff meeting:
"We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we could!"
That part is true! But then:
"Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part."
...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.
Are you sure people don’t want it? I think it’s one of the biggest market potentials in gaming right now.
I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life.
That’s anecdotal or course, but there’s quite a lot of us.
i'd like to think even a middling engineer would be able to recognize an intractable infrastructure problem that is entirely out of their hands. stadia can have perfect tech and the best customer service in the world and it simply will not matter until you effectively create your own nationwide isp as well. space age technology does not mean shit if your customers are still in the age of horse and buggy.
terraria also highlights the utter absurdity of game streaming. it can and has been ported to practically every relevant device and costs less than a big mac. google invented a billion dollar laser to cook microwave popcorn.
The problem with Stadia is that it's a platform geared for AAA games, but doesn't provide much value for them. It can provide good value for more casual games/gamers, but Google's ego means the service isn't geared for casuals.
When I write Stadia doesn't provide much value for AAA games, we need to look at it from both the gamer and the dev side. For gamers, if money was no object, one is better off with either a decked-out PC (better performance) or a console (wider variety). Stadia's main advantage is potentially being cheaper - which is precisely the gaming crowd which doesn't attract AAA gamedev companies.
For AAA developers, they need to port their game to a different API, then pay the Google tax, in order to appear on a small platform whose users are often drawn in by being cheap and are less likely to pay for your product.
There's no technical advantage for AAA - now that Google has closed their studios, nobody will try to make features that are only possible in cloud gaming in Stadia. If Google couldn't, can you? What happens when you ran into a problem, can you handle Google "support"?
Stadia could be good for casuals. Except it doesn't have any good discoverability features or even a search bar. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't need discoverability, but indies or anyone searching for them really do. Its payment model (direct 'purchase', no gamepass) is OK for AAA, but not as a good for casuals. And of course, one still needs to port the game which can be difficult and relatively expensive for indies (Luna is just a VM by comparison).
Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model.
So Stadia is geared for AAA games/gamers, but doesn't provide good features for AAA, and even Google itself couldn't manage to make cloud-gaming-only features. Stadia can be useful for casual gaming, but the platform just isn't geared for that, and Google is unlikely to change that. Likely result is cancellation within a few years.
my friend at Google reported almost exactly that: it's an amazing technical achievement, really pushes the cutting edge of what's possible. And the sales and marketing have no idea how to do anything with it.
This is not just Google. All other tech companies including Facebook are using the same system to promote workers. As a result:
* Nobody is held accountable for the long term success of the product. Making little things work nice is not rewarded. Maintaining UX is defiantly not rewarded.
* Rewarding process over product. That's why you see so many Google products shut down. It takes a few people from L7 to L8 to build it and rewards someone from L6 to L7 to wind it down. Every annual performance review in the process is all roses and rainbows!
> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement.
This goes well beyond Stadia - Google has an air of institutional contempt for humans, especially humans who aren't inside Google. Dealing with humans who are struggling with getting bounced by "the algorithm" is something they simply aren't interested in.
I think that their higher tier promotion system is partly to blame, and could be easily fixed. As I understand it, at a certain management level, the most effective way to pad out your promotion packet is to launch a new product. These packets are judged by an anonymous review board. This board could change the culture overnight by updating the criteria to reward managers that grow products or retain paid customers. Heck, if they just updated the definition of a successful launch to include a year+ of operation & growth or even just a proper roadmap, we might start to see and end to the usual pattern.
Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, "Paypal Mafia", For valve Mike Harrington would like to have a word with you.
Bill, Steve, Elon, Gabe, were never alone masterminds and definitely not single founders because in companies they created there always was someone else who had shares.
That you can only be promoted by creating new things (even if entirely useless) and not by maintaining and supporting existing things (that customers actually want) is an HR problem.
> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem.
I can recommend reading In The Plex. Quite literally the founders wanted to invert the usual model and put engineers first. There were some anecdotes from those in roles like marketing and so on that they felt like second class citizens.
It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies. At the very least, companies must be legally required to present you in writing with the so-called violation of terms they're accusing you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone # or other immediate contact so that you can dispute the accusations. It's insane that these basic legal rights don't even exist.
You could of course sue Google, but that's an extremely expensive and time-consuming option, rarely worth it for a mere consumer. Going to court certainly won't make your suspended account become unsuspended any quicker.
You know it’s funny that lots of the basic functions of business with consumers (eg, ability to return items) were set and codified in the US as the Uniform Commercial Code [0] that was established in 1952. Before then it was wild and variable.
What’s really interesting is that it seems like of hacker-like in how it was implemented. It was published as a guide and then states passed laws to implement.
Reminds me of a de facto standard that is then implemented by vendors.
I suppose we could start up some form of Uniform Consumer Commercial Code (UC3) that set up practices that are good that could then be passed by states.
I shudder to think through all the arguments about how it would specify some “don’t be evil on social cause X” that it almost smarts my conspiracy brain that the “corporations” started this trend to bikeshed/scissor statement society so they can’t make meaningful economic and commercial policy.
The problem with this sort of thing is that because it's interstate commerce, states usually do not have standing to regulate effectively.
The Federal government struggles to implement new regulatory authority because of political challenges. Various groups of stakeholders will declare any such regulation an infringement on free speech (ie. "The constitution gives me the right to sell fake penis pills to fund my radical political agenda!"), biased against marginalized minority or cultural groups ("My marginalized constituency of blind, alcoholic yak herders have a religious prohibition against reading contracts"), or a unfair mandate restraint of trade ("The Chamber of Meme Commerce believes that this rule will cost 10,000,000 jobs in the meme industry and kill puppies."), etc.
The original reason for free speech was to allow people of different creeds to work together against government.
The Bill of Rights is establishing as a baseline the policies that were found to reduce tribal conflicts in the European empires — having a strong central identity as a state (eg “American Destiny”), but allowing individual tribes under the state a great deal of freedom in religious practices. As a secondary purpose, it tamped down the worst state abuses.
The anti-religious messaging, the anti-conservative messaging, etc undermine this and are bringing back sectarian strife inside the state.
The EU recently proposed The Digital Services Act, which is a DCMA like legislation (with both copyright infringement and other illegal content like CP as targets).
Part of that draft law pretty clearly states that companies must have a proper appeal process for banned accounts. This would apply to "decisions taken by the online platform on the ground that the information provided by the recipients is illegal content or incompatible with its terms and conditions", which in practice covers basically all bans except for Age restriction or non-payment based bans.
They must provide details of what part of the Terms of Service they claim you violated: "where the decision is based on the alleged incompatibility of the information with the terms and conditions of the provider, a reference to the contractual ground relied on and explanations as to why the information is considered to be incompatible with that ground".
If the internal appeals process fails, the consumer can take the company to online binding arbitration (with the consumer's choice of accredited arbitrators certified by the member state). The company always pays its own costs in the process, and must reimburse the user's costs if the company loses.
Agreed. We generally allow companies to refuse service for nearly any reason, and in most cases this is a good policy. However, there are exceptions to that rule. One extreme are utilities which as both monopolies and essential services are required to do business with nearly any paying customer, and have strict rules processes about shutting of service for lack of payment. Residential rentals are another example. They don't hold a monopoly, but are an essential service, and as such they can generally choose who to do business with (although not quite as freely as your average business), but have strict legal processes they have to follow regarding evictions.
I think there are online business who are essential enough that some consumer protections are applicable. Very few reach the level of monopoly that utilities have in my mind, and even those it isn't clear to me that they are "natural" monopoly like utilities, and as such other antitrust approaches may be more beneficial.
However, I think there are a number of competitive, yet essential services online that deserve a legal protections regarding service termination. Identity providers absolutely fall in that category IMO - it is unacceptable for example for Facebook to lock your account in a manner that prevents you from not only using their services but every other third-party service which you authenticate using "Logon with Facebook". I think email is another that rises to this level. At a minimum email providers should be required to forward mail for a fixed period of time after choosing to stop doing business with a customer.
I think there also needs to be a law that, once you have accepted responsibility for storing someone else's data, that you can't delete it "on a whim" without offering some minimum retention period ok your data. As an example: a storage facility is allowed to stop doing business with me, but they legally can't just destroy all my stuff on a moment's notice... we have laws for minimum retention periods.
The Kafka solution to this will be our terms of service prohibit single spacing after periods and you are in violation. Therefore we can terminate your account at any time of our choosing.
Alternately we could prohibit posting in any language other than Latin and Klingon, or using the letter e, or accessing our services using any unapproved operating system (and our only approved OS is windows 3.11 with winsock drivers).
Anyway the point is now the company can ban you for any reason at all. Being the wrong religion, voting for the wrong candidate, being the wrong race, etc.
Not just "can", but "will". And given how effectively these companies are using their size and power (and m-word) to crush the competition, it's long past time for some anti-trust action.
Its also possible to live without electricity and running water. This disproportionate power model doesn't work there because some people implemented regulations on them. I am beginning to suspect we need similar laws for this.
What's stopping the next Google from doing the same? Providing poor justification for bans and removal from platforms is by no means limited to the big companies - it's endemic throughout tech - we just hear about Google and Facebook more because they're higher visibility and are considered more essential.
The OP is about a personal Google account, with access to mail, etc. at stake, but it's also about a developer who was going to create content for their platform. Granted, Stadia is not exactly a make-or-break gatekeeper for publishing games, but that same dev account could well be used for Google Play Store, which controls about half of the mobile market. We've certainly seen plenty of those stories here -- app developer gets locked out, only recovers account / gets app un-banned by making enough noise to get attention.
IOW, it's "possible" for you or me to drop Google or Facebook, but for some lines of business, you're basically stuck working with them.
The libertarian in me wants to believe that reputation is enough to make business act in the interests of the consumers and that personal responsibility would prevent customers from acting in their best interests: but we all know this is not true.
And, I know enough to know that any public policy that essentially says “Everything will be fine if everyone just does [X]” is bad policy, regardless of what ‘X’ is.
Oh yeah, far more easy than the government taking regulatory action is coordinating a massive consumer choice boycott.
Sometimes, it is so abundantly clear to me that this site is full of former teenage libertarians who grew up and still haven't shed all of those ideals.
You're not seeing the other side of the coin - the huge amount of spam and abuse that such systems correctly identify and remove. If every abuser requests those explanations (which they will) there will be far more spam going around the Internet.
Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health.
(I am offering no solutions here, for I know none)
I think this is a convenient narrative for an abusive pattern of behavior by Google. The company is infamous for having non-existent customer service. It's not a matter of their AI having too many false positives, it's that when there is a false positive you have literally no recourse even if you're a well known business partner.
Are we really going to believe that Google, one of the highest grossing companies in the world, doesn't have the money to provide even basic level customer service? If it were really a matter of not being able to afford it, certainly they could offer it for a fee. No, they're stubbornly refusing to address the issues, relying on this lie, and using their market dominance to avoid having to answer for it.
> If every abuser requests those explanations (which they will)
It's not a request, it's a requirement. If your account is suspended, you deserve an explanation. You should get one without having to request it.
I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are without any recourse whatsoever.
This is an age old problem in the criminal justice system. A solved problem.
After a lot of trials with various approaches, we settled on letting some criminals go free over convicting someone on weak evidence. Second we decided that trials should be open and evidence viewable by default.
Finally you generally have the option to give some security to stay out of jail during trial.
Closing a google account is a punishment worse than many criminal convictions. And will only get more important as we progress to an all digital existence.
> Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health.
Hire them directly instead of via labor farms, pay them an actual living wage, give them full health benefits, and hire enough of them to prevent overload.
But surely it’s possible to use methods other than what currently seems to be the first and only solution: “your account has been banned, bye”.
For example, if an automated system thinks an account is sending spam, enforcing a (very low) outgoing email rate limit would be a much more reasonable first step.
> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
It isn't the only solution to this problem. Not using their products is another one. However, in some sectors (e.g. smartphones) it is next to impossible to not use their products, especially because they are build on centralized schemes. But regulating those things is probably harder than a consumer rights bill. But the downside is probably, that a consumer rights bill would not just affect the few large corporations, but many smaller ones too.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that U.S. courts have found that suing is a right that can't be waived by contract. Certainly an agreement to enter arbitration can be introduced as evidence against you in a a lawsuit, but any decent lawyer should be able to prevent an arbitration agreement from getting your lawsuit thrown out.
I think we’re in a post consumer lawsuit era. Almost every terms of service on earth requires arbitration, or else absolves the vendor of any liability whatsoever
Arbitration isn't so bad. It still costs the company every time they have to deal with a case.
Mass/automated arbitration claims can turn the tables, and lawsuits can be filled to challenge the neutrality of arbitrators.
> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
Nope. That gives players like Google a platform to negotiate from now and in the future, and it won't curb abuses long term. These abuses are a symptom of economic concentration and a lack of competitive markets. The only resolution guaranteed to work is to break up these companies down to smaller parts until they no longer act like quasi-governments.
> The only resolution guaranteed to work is to break up these companies down to smaller parts until they no longer act like quasi-governments.
Why not both?
A consumer bill of rights and breaking up Google are not mutually exclusive. Consumer protection laws protect consumers from all companies big and small, present and future. Breaking up Google won't do anything about the "next Google".
It's a bit strange to think that antitrust is a long-term solution when the successful antitrust case against Microsoft didn't prevent Google, Facebook, and Apple from arising.
>It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights"...
Maybe? But I worry that politicians will use that as a tool. Look what DeSantis is trying down here in Florida. He wants to fine "Big Tech" for banning politicians during an election. Personally, I'm tired of the lies and provocations and hate speech of some politicians and I don't think any company should be compelled to share those messages.
So those evil politicians will do what? Force corporations to indiscriminately ban arbitrary people without possibility of appeal? Oh, wait a minute...
> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
Google is a private company who offers free internet services in exchange for your privacy being violated. They have no customer service because you are not a customer as customers pay. You have no rights on their platform because again, you are not a paying customer. And you agreed to their terms of service when you signed up. They don't owe you anything at that pont.
So stop expecting "paying customer" treatment from a shady adware dealer who gives you "free" "integrated platform" stuff to get you hooked. That's an old drug dealer tactic anyway.
Want to be treated like a person? You have to pay for that. Otherwise stop whining about the tyranny of "free" platforms such as google, twitter, facebook, etc.
The only thing the government should do is fund PSA's to warn people of the rights and privacy hazards of free internet platforms.
If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives.
At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB".
You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent the bad actors from abusing the appeal process while leaving your more clueless legitimate users lost in the dust?
(As the joke goes: "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" [1])
Can you build any vetting process, and associated appeal process, that successfully keeps all the bad actors out, and doesn't exclude your good users? What about those on the edge? Or those that switch? Or those who are busy, or wary?
I think this is a balancing act of risks, and I wanted to bring up what I believe to be a success story when it comes to handling suspensions: Microsoft.
One thing I believe Microsoft gets right is that suspensions are isolated to the service whose TOS was violated. I.e. violating the hotmail TOS doesn't suspend you from their other services. I think this makes the impact of a false positive less catastrophic, while still removing actual problematic users from the service. This may be an artifact of how teams work together at Microsoft.
If you're implying that there's just no way to support their users then I'm going to disagree.
At Google's scale and profitability, saying you can't build an appeals process that supports your paying users is just ridiculous. And at this point the collateral damage to Stadia's already tenuous reputation is going to be a lot more than paying someone to vet him manually.
Honestly, the answer is to charge people a fee, in order to appeal a ban. A fee that covers the cost of investigating the incident, making it revenue-neutral. This way, Google would have every incentive to investigate thoroughly all appeals, including repeated appeals by the same person.
From the user's perspective, it's still a pretty good deal. There's a 99.999% chance that you get to use gmail/youtube/etc for free. And a 0.001% chance that you'll end up a statistic, and need to pay a nominal fee for an appeal.
Unfortunately, I don't think the above will ever happen, because it would be a PR nightmare. "Google wants to charge you money, just to appeal a ban!" It's still better than the status quo, where people have almost no recourse when they are banned. But it still sounds way better in the media, if you just pretend as though these things never happen. Hence the status quo - use automated systems to cheaply get to a 99.999% success rate, and spend as little money as possible on the remaining 0.001%
They don't even have to keep the fee of the query is legitimate. They can reimburse it or keep it in the user's wallet when they consider that this was either a false positive or a honest mistake. The cost would be minimal but would deter a lot of people trying to game the system.
And if companies don't want to do it, that should be easy to regulate though. Requiring a human centric appeal process even if it has a fee, and prohibiting blanket account bans (if you get banned on gmail it doesn't affect your android and play store accounts, for example)
There are other provisions that I consider important like not being able to reuse email addresses and requiring the forwarding of email for at least 6 months after any account termination (getting banned from your email address can have disastrous consequences)
The problem with unjustified bans due to some algorithm is also: These cases might not even be a close calls like: “oh yeah this person did something that is in the grey area of what our policies state. I will ban him but he might interpret things differently.”
No if you enforce your policies strictly by (machine learning) algorithms it could just be a matter of misinterpreting a different language, slang, irony or something else. Which makes these bans even more infuriating.
Is this really true? If Gmail was replaced with a dozen competing services each with "only" 100M users each, would the total number of moderators be lower? How does the number of required human moderators per million users scale, and why?
You can't choose to stay small unless you're someone like clubhouse which still has a long waitlist for sign-ups, and even then they're trying to build their infrastructure wide enough to accompany everyone. Not offering service to all/99.9% of potential customers is effectively lost value and goes against shareholders' expectations.
>If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives.
Doesn't matter. If you're dealing with billions of accounts then you're earning billions of dollars. Just hire more people. Scale must never be an excuse for poor customer service.
Google has billions of accounts because it is FREE create them. Which could mean the cost of providing human support is actually too expensive on a per unit basis. The only way to rectify these economics is to charge for the account.
I pay for Google One to store more photos...however I have no clue if this improves my situation. Does the algorithm give me more slack for being a long, paid user? Do I get real customer support in the event I do get flagged? No clue.
> You can't even trust phone companies to do their job right and ensure the secure verification code is sent to the right phone! You provided some more secure ways for users to authenticate themselves,
For those that don't know, phone companies are easily susceptible to sim-swapping attacks which can make it easy for an attacker to intercept SMS 2fa: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016212
Edit: looks like OP changed their entire comment while I was replying.
Any company that uses SMS for 2FA is offloading risk and security to an industry that never expected it, and explicitly seeks to not provide it.
A Telco _desperately_ wants to be able to get you back up and running (making calls and spending money) on a new phone using your existing number before you walk out of the shop. And even more, they want to be able to transfer you across as a customer from a competitor - and have your existing number work on their network.
"Sim Swapping" is a valuable feature for Telcos. They have significant negative incentives to make it difficult. They don't want to secure your PayPal account, and nobody (least of all PayPal) should expect them to do a good job of it, certainly not for free...
Yes, it's pretty simple. Create and enforce some consumer protection laws which require, for example, that any company larger than a certain size is required to establish support offices staffed by humans in every major town. And required to resolve every issue within X days either by fixing the problem or clearly documenting why not. If not, no arbitration allowed, so they are subject to lawsuits if the reason doesn't hold scrutiny.
Problem solved. Companies like goog, facebook et.al. can easily afford this and it'll stop this ridiculous behavior.
It also to some extent protects the companies. Spambots who create a million accounts can't replicate a million humans to show up at the support office, so it establishes a human:human relationship that's completely missing today.
This would all be perfectly okay and understandable if the AI were the first line of defense and there was any meaningful way at all to contact support and escalate things after that filter. (I mean besides making headlines in all the gaming-news articles.)
> But 0.001% of billions or users is still millions of accounts...
Not that I disagree with your point, but even if we assume 50 billion accounts (6+ for every human on earth), 0.001% of that would still be 'just' 100k, not millions.
Yes there is a lot of money riding on that, but that is the cost of doing business.
Why banks have heavy compliance costs? Doing proper AML and KYC costs money and society decided that it was critical enough to bear that cost even in light regulation countries.
A lot of the financial success of those companies is in part the result of not fully taking responsibility for the consequences of their business activity. Eventually they will, under social pressure that this post success represent, or by laws.
At some point percentage is insufficient, but it's because it's a rate. Permillionage/DPM doesn't fix it. It's the number of people affected that matters, so if you have it at 99.9% and grow 10x, you ought to improve it to 99.99% to not become eviler. If you just stay at 99.9% when you grow 10x, you're harming 10x the people.
I'd use the total number of false positives as the proper measure.
If a company has so many users that it can't hire enough employees to manually handle the false positives properly, it's too big to exist, and should be broken up.
This is by far the most ridiculous reasoning I’ve seen for a company being too big. Because too many users get restricted from the service unintentionally then the provider is too big?
Can you please elaborate on bad actors absuing the appeals process? Is your point about how everyone will automatically appeal, making it difficult for genuine queries to receive the human attention they need? Or is there another vector of abuse you were thinking of?
If every action taken against an account by automation is appealed, then the automation becomes worthless.
In gaming forums that are run by the developer, such as the World of Warcraft or League of Legends forums, I have very frequently seen people whining and complaining that their accounts were banned for no reason until a GM or moderator finally pipes in and posts chat logs of the user spamming racial slurs or some other blatant violation of ToS.
It’s even worse than that because the bad actors are doing this at scale and will have automation to auto-appeal while normal people will sometimes shrug and decide it’s not worth it. So your appeals queue likely contains a higher flow of bad actors than the distribution of FPs.
It's interesting to me how Bloom Filters avoid the uncanny valley between probably correct and definitely correct. I don't know if this is a technological difference between problem domains or a purely ideology/mindset.
Dividing a problem by 10 should get notice. By 100 (eg, Bloom Filters) respect. By 1000, accolades. Dividing a problem by infinity should be recognized for what it is: a logic error, not an accomplishment.
Most times when I'm trying to learn someone else's process instead of dictating my own, I'm creating lists of situations where the outcomes are not good. When I have a 'class', I run it up the chain, with a counter-proposal of a different solution, which hopefully becomes the new policy. Usually, that new policy has a probationary period, and then it sticks. Unless it's unpopular, and then it gets stuck in permanent probation. I may have to formally justify my recommendation, repeatedly. In the meantime I have a lot of information queued up waiting for a tweak to the decision tree. We don't seem to be mimicking that model with automated systems, which I think is a huge mistake that is now verging on self-inflicted wound.
Perhaps stated another way, classifying a piece of data should result in many more actions than are visible to the customer, and only a few classifications should result in a fully automated action. The rest should be organizing the data in a way to expedite a human intervention, either by priority or bucket. I could have someone spend tuesday afternoons granting final dispensations on credit card fraud, and every morning looking at threats of legal action (priority and bucket).
Hopefully, more devs will do what this dev is (said to be) doing.
> Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward.
Of course, it's very difficult for small devs to do this. It takes an already solid business to be able to stand up like this. As always, I think this is the only way for Google to change, but I don't think it can happen.
Agreed about small devs, but other small devs also have to make countless decisions about which platforms/products to use for their app/platform/website. At the very least, Google should be worried that a good tie-breaker is "Is it a Google platform?".
Or the @GoogleStadia Twitter account will forward this to someone who knows about it. The Stadia Twitter account is uncharacteristically active on customer support for a Google product.
People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of:
* Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)
* Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implement)
* GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
* Stolen/shared accounts. All it takes is one evil browser extension to steal your user account cookie and go on a spamming spree. Figuring out how it happened is near impossible (user specific logs are anonymized). Usually just resetting the users logins doesn't solve it because the malware is still on the users computer/phone and will steal the cookie again.
* Falsely linked accounts. Some spammers create gmail addresses to send spam, but to disguise them they link lots of real peoples accounts for example via using someone elses recovery phone number, email address, contacts/friends, etc. In many cases they will compromise real accounts to create all these links, all so that as many real users as possible will be hurt if their spamming network is shutdown.
* Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
* Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
Yes, it's solvable, and Google should put more effort into it, but it's hard to do.
> * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)
If you had experience with this, you would know that you just described the polar opposite of how that process works in the United States. Federal law requires human verification as part of the mandatory NCMEC reporting process. If you’re employed by Google and have that impression of how it works it means the green badges doing the work aren’t known to you, which isn’t a huge shock since TVCs are barely one step above disposable barcode at Google.
Source: I’ve forensically verified enough child exploitation in the course of tech employment to make me thoroughly and irredeemably despise humanity as a species. (Fighting insurance to pay for therapy I now need, against their will, was fun too.)
Many other companies of similar size manage to provide customer service just fine.
This is a solved problem - you just have to be willing to realise that magic AI sprinkles aren’t the answer.
As for cost - this continual stream of screwups is costing them a ridiculous amount of goodwill and future business. It’s probably the best ad for AWS there is.
Even if all of that is completely true, failing to engage in any form of communication with a business partner whose services you cut off without any notice is reprehensible.
Doesn't seem an issue at all for almost every other company in the world.
Only seems to be an issue for companies like Google who ideologically don't provide any way to talk to a human and escalate. Amazon manages to have some of the best customer service in the world while operating on similar scales with far more things that can go wrong.
1. Ignore the downvotes. The reality (poor customer service perception) is what it is. Objectively looking at the problem and what can be done about it, without cynically assuming it's impossible, is the most practical focus going forward. Thanks very much for this insight, it was really interesting to read.
2. I've noticed various glitches and bugs over the years with various services - two I can remember right now are a) misspelling a search then clicking "did you mean" won't update the titlebar (been watching this one since ~2012), and b) accidentally sending an in-progress draft from one device will cause followup edits made on another device to sent to /dev/null. Well... I look at the kind of time-wasting junk input that makes it into Issue Tracker, I look at random app feedback, etc, and I know my feedback is never going to be seen. I can understand why things need to impact 10K people to be noticed. I thought I'd ask you: what's a good recommendation here?
3. Extremely specific question that I happen to be worrying about at the moment :) - I wasn't sure which Google account I wanted to use to play with GCP some months ago so I ended up enabling billing on more than one account using the same card. I have an idea I'd like to play which would call for a new account (since it would be tied to a YouTube channel) and would require me to use the same card yet again. All of this would be staying within the free tier, but I still wonder if I shouldn't run data takeouts first...? (I can't deny that the current state of Google services feels a bit like Russian roulette with extra servings of superstition - what doesn't kill your account, makes it stronger, or something??)
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
This is simply wrong since the account is always "banned" and not "deleted". So the data is still there, not providing it is going against GDPR. Evidence for this is all the accounts that were unbanned and still had their data. Make the account read-only for all I care but don't think for a second that this data has to be deleted immediately (It definitely does not, there are reasons and reasonable ways for data to be retained for some time)
> * Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
> * Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
So simultaneusly you can look at the image to ban the account but can't look at it to unban it? I get that the first one is done by algorithms and the second one presumably is not but calling this a privacy issue is laughable since you don't have to look at the content in the first place.
All of your points don't adress the issue of "The user does not even know why he was banned" at all. Luckily there are EU laws in the pipeline for that.
I'm no expert on Google and I don't have a PhD but from my time working there (and my time working at other internet services companies), multiple of your assertions here are false or absurd.
Child porn detection and enforcement literally does not work that way. I'm not sure how you even think that would work. How do you think the algorithm gets trained? Humans feed data into it. All the major social media companies (Facebook, etc) have paid human moderators that have to screen flagged content in many cases to determine whether it is illegal and then escalate to the relevant staff or authorities, and in some cases this is a legal requirement.
The GDPR one is especially ridiculous. Why would you be required to delete a user's data the moment you suspend their account? That's utterly absurd, it completely eliminates the user's recourse in the event of an error. No reasonable human being would interpret the laws that way and the relevant regulators (yes, GDPR is enforced by humans) would never require you to do that.
Google already has measures to deal with malware on machines, typically temporary or permanent bans of the hardware and/or IP address. They don't have to permanently delete your gmail account to lock out Chrome on a single malwared PC. If you've ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network you've probably seen Google Search throw up the 'automated traffic' warning and block you for a bit.
Being able to review conduct of an account (i.e. browse logs) is not "blanket access to your account" and neither is being able to examine the details on why the account was banned and reverse them. The account owner could also authorize the employee to access their data - any time you talk to a Customer Service representative for a company, you're doing this.
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
I do not think GDPR works like that. You can absolutely store information pertaining to "why" questions because that is still a service they will be providing. Also, whenever they restore some's service they give data back. So they have obviously not deleted the data.
This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replace, but just a bother to inform some people and update account details.
Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product.
I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995.
> Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer
Google now sells domains, as well as email through GSuite.
I use them a lot on new projects, because I find them so insanely convenient, but I can't help shake the feeling that now I'm both the product and a paying customer.
So I'd probably nuance your words with: "select a provider whose livelihood depends on your custom".
If you get your own domain, get one on a well-known TLD (e.g. .com, .org or your own country code). If you get a gTLD that's not well-known, there are some endpoints that will block you because your email is "not valid".
Thank you. I have been on the fence for a bit. But I will initiate project leave Gmail and Gdrive now. It will take me a year, but the deliveries and the final goal is clear.
Their new slogan is hilarious. It's not even one slogan, it's three:
* Respect the user
* Respect the opportunity
* Respect each other
The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features.
The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn't it the baseline expectation? It's somewhere on the level of "Don't steal your colleague's belongings" as far as slogans go.
But it's the second one that is absolutely the best, and by that, I mean the worst. Orwell would've had a lot to say about it. The thing is, it has absolutely no meaning in the English language. What's next? Say hi to agility? Don't offend capital gains? Console excellence?
Of course, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing has a mafia vibe, as Google's slogans and culture are drifting towards loyalty rather than standing up for what's right.
--------
If you want to have more fun, look at Google's Community Guidelines[1]
Compare to The Mafia Code:
* Be loyal to members of the organization. Do not interfere with each other's interest. Do not be an informer.
--[Google: Treat our data with care. Don't disseminate NTK information.]
* Be rational. Be a member of the team. Don't engage in battle if you can't win.
--[Google: follow Three Values, in particular: Respect the opportunity.]
* Be a man of honor. Respect womanhood and your elders. Don't rock the boat.
--[Google: Do your part to keep Google a safe, productive, and inclusive environment for everyone.]
* Be a stand-up guy. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.
--[Google: Discussions that make other Googlers feel like they don't belong have no place here.]
* Have class. Be independent. Know your way around the world.
--[Google: You are responsible for your words and your reach.]
I moved away from google a few years ago after putting it off for years because it sounded like effort. It turned out to be rather straightforward.
I still have my google accounts, I just don’t use them (except YouTube unfortunately). My gmail still forwards to my new address, but I mostly just get emails where people got their own addresses wrong nowadays.
What I did was: I registered a domain name from a company that i don’t use for anything else besides domain names (incidentally a local registrar who I trust and can call on the phone). I then set up a new email address (I use fastmail) using that domain name. Then I forwarded all my old emails to this new address.
If someone emailed my old address, I would always reply from my new one, which slowly updated peoples address books. If I got newsletters, I would either unsubscribe and resubscribe from my new one or just unsubscribe. I did that very slowly and it took a year or so before I stopped getting any forwarded, but there’s no rush. Don’t think “oh I have to update everything at once”. Similarly, I updated services that I still use that used the old email to log in on a case by case basis as I used them.
You can ditch google and it’s not as hard as it sounds!
This is why I use one of the new, privacy-focused email providers instead. It feels like the sweet spot between starting my own server (headache, dropped messages) and being one of a billion Gmail/Outlook users (no-one cares if I don't get email)
I started switching to ProtonMail for this exact reason. It’s not that I’m doing anything that would draw a purposeful or legitimate ban, but they’re so damn capricious that I fear getting my account locked because of a bug and not being able to undo it.
I switched to a combination of ProtonMail AND using a private domain in my email address AND regularly syncing entire mailbox with my desktop client (Thunderbird). This way, if ProtonMail gives me grief, I just set up a new email account with a different provider, point domain entries to it, import my mailbox in there, and can continue as if nothing happened.
I've been considering getting a new email address on a personal domain so it can be more portable and I can change providers.
Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
Plenty of people use fastmail and seemed to be happy. If you're OK with its price, I think that's a sweet spot.
It's absolutely possible to host your own e-mail server on VPS. You'll receive mail without issues. But sending mail might cause issues, so unless you're OK with some delivery problems and spending some time to investigate, I don't suggest going that route.
Hosting your email on NAS is problematic. You need to have static IP address with PTR record and most home providers won't offer those services for reasonable price.
I've self-hosted with a hand-rolled postfix+dovecot, and later with Mailcow's dockerised mailserver (FOSS, good management and webmail UI, strongly recommend).
More recently though I moved my personal domain to Microsoft Exchange Online - it's a lot less flexible than Mailcow (per-head licensing, but there's + addressing and catch-alls now) but I don't have any of the deliverability/gmail-spam-folder issues I used to have.
Exchange P1 Online [2] is roughly the same for my single-user as my old DO droplet cost per month
(edit: side-bonus you get an Azure AD tenant for your domain which is handy for SSO/IdP things)
Yes, I looked around now for a provider supporting custom domains so I don't need to change address just because I change provider and came up with a few popular ones: Fastmail, Protonmail, Runbox. Note that Protonmail is "special" about their IMAP/POP3 support, only supporting select clients and then via a particular helper application.
It's not only this issue with Google being like a wall when things happen, but also that I dislike their semi-AI based interface. While I like their good spam filter, there's a lot of other stuff going on there, and that without any inbox rules that I have set up.
> Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS?
I'm happy with Namecheap as my registrar and Mailbox.org for mail services, and have been for years (my Gmail account still exists and forwards the rare message it receives to the other one).
Mailbox.org offers ordinary IMAP and SMTP access + DKIM signing for your domain. Hosted in Germany. Prices vary, I pay about €2/month for several GB I think.
Their webmail interface is bad, but then again, I've never seen one that isn't. And I've never used it after logging in for the first time anyway.
> Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it for something as critical as email. It's not that the actual hosting is hard, it's that more and more of the big providers are refusing to handle email messages from certain networks.
Hosting your own email is pretty easy to get started, but without continuous work you will have problems getting good deliverability, and balancing blocking almost all spam without filtering out wanted email is tricky too
> Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google
For me it's google photos. While there are lot of great gmail alternatives these days there's still nothing like google photos unfortunately, is there?
I have my own Nextcloud instance, and the iOS Nextcloud app automatically saves new pics from my phone to the server. But that means that you have to manage your own server, so it's not everyone's cup of tea.[1]
If you are looking for a managed solution, I suggest one of those that you pay for (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) since usually, paid services have at least some form of customer service and something like OP's story is less likely to happen.
[1] Also, the cloud provider where I rent the server might decide to block my account for whatever reason. To minimise the risk, I'm planning to store daily server backups on a different cloud provider.
As someone in a similar spot with a GMail account I've been using since they were invite-only, I've started using Google Takeout to back up an archive of all my data from Google's services a few times a year.
It's not perfect, and I'm thinking more and more about moving to a paid service, but this at least gives me some peace of mind that if one day I run afoul of Google's AI bouncers, I won't lose a decade of info overnight.
After thinking about it a bit, I don't see things that way. Gmail is not the problem as far as I'm concerned. Nor Chrome, etc. The problem from my pov is that the only alternative to Apple phones are Androids, and Android is biased towards the whole Google ecosystem. That's where the monopolistic feeling comes from for me, and if I was in charge of antitrust efforts, Android is what I would want to force them to spin off. Not sure with or without Google Maps, because that's the other thing that I really need and don't feel like there is a substitute.
I've been making the switch (slowly) over the past year. Had a gmail from the early days, when it was invite only. Now moving to a combo of protonmail + custom domain, and I couldn't be happier.
If you intend to keep using Google products, then more or less yeah, periodically. A better way is to start using Fastmail (for example) and have them import everything. Then stop using gmail.
I've used this project, but it's been a while: https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup . It's a CLI app, though, so it's maybe not the best solution for non-technical end-users.
Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give them the password and they'll do it for you. Not the best solution in terms of security but might be ok if you're getting rid of your account anyway.
As someone who recently did this, you can link a Fastmail account to your existing Gmail account, and it will load in any email data you have into Fastmail. I think from there you can delete your google account provided you have Fastmail all setup properly. It took maybe 2 minutes and was part of the guided setup Fastmail did for me.
It's better to use Takeout than IMAP export if you're one of the people who, for whatever reason, have Google rewriting URLs in your IMAP messages (having Advanced Protection enabled is one such trigger, I learned).
It gives you all of your mail in mbox format, which is a common format.
Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue.
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.
I'd bet Amazon has more retail customers trying to get disputes resolved, than Google has business customers attempting to do the same, yet Amazon manages to get a human on the other end of the line. And I'd bet that Amazon's disputes have far less monetary value per incident. Maybe apples to oranges, but it's impressive from a customer service perspective.
Amazon has tremendous numbers of contractors and employees who handle customer issues, seller issues, and partner issues.
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.
Microsoft and IBM are also companies with a lot more humans available. I have solved lots of things with phonecalls be business or as a customer. You need to be really big to get humans on Google side.
Yeah I have been pleasantly surprised with how good Amazon's customer support is. In contrast I've had a Google wifi and home device stop working on me, and it was nearly impossible to get in touch with a customer support rep from Google. At this point, I refuse to purchase Google device because I don't know what to do if I have a problem with it.
There is no excuse for the laziness/ambiguity surrounding bans like this. I have witnessed, in 1 degree of separation, 3 separate Facebook business account bans in the last 12 months alone - the only reason cited is "you violated our community policy" with a link to the entire community policy and 0 clarification before or after requesting review.
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.
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.
Is there any context on what attempts have been made by this developer to reach Google and what the results have been? The tweet provides very little context other than the fact that it's been 3 weeks. What paths did they take to contact Google? Did they receive any answers?
I remember someone had a post here a couple years back:
- 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.
> 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.
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).
What I don't understand is why they lock you out of your data when they ban you. For IRL evictions, they'll give you notice to start moving your belongings or, worst-case, dump them on the curb. Sucks, but you still ostensibly have access to them. If Google bans you, they should provide avenues to permanently move data out of their services. Not providing this is tantamount to theft, since I sincerely doubt that the data is straight-up thrown out; it's still used for and tangled up in their ad and machine learning algos.
> 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.
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.
Do you mean google fiber? I've called fiber before I had an account there to ask some questions and I had 0 problems talking to a human immediately and they answered all my questions.
At this point I'd be more than willing to pay a monthly for Google services if it meant I knew I'd get prompt support if something went wrong. I've looked into getting a GSuite account but from my reading like there are some incompatibilities with services that I use on the free tier.
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.
I'm actually surprised there isn't more legal action taken. Not this specific case, but in advertising there's quite some damage for automated bans with unreasonable time to resolve the issue.
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.
I mostly agree with you, but I think you might be overestimating the benefit of simply having humans on the other end. There is a lot more to building "reasonable" processes than just adding humans to the mix, those people have to be given some power to make exceptions but not too much or it defeats the point of the original rules, and you will still have honest mistakes and a few bad actors on the dispute resolution teams. Doing that at scale is always going to be hard.
It's hard for some people but, isn't this a field of expertise with decades of development? Aren't there thousands of people who have years of experience managing exactly such a process?
The problem isn't that it's hard, but that it's a cost center instead of a profit center.
At least with a human you have a way to make your case or ask to speak to a manager. Of course they could deny you, but in my experience it is rare to be denied if you persist in politely asking.
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.
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.
> Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue.
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.
There needs to be a raft of community managers @ Google handling these sort of failures, including some senior ones to deal with escalations of this kind. They need this to counter the phalanx of people who enjoy spending their time trashing google. Just check reddit's ProjectFi or Stadia subgroups to see people who've made it their life's work to downvote every thread and response in those forums and spew vitriol at every opportunity.
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.
I am not trying to write a post for ABoringDystopia, but I would wager that the vast majority of folks with banned accounts that actually want them back would just pay, either for the review or just to get unblocked.
Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
> They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.
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")
>until they piss off someone too big to not give up without a legal/public fight
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?
> They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.
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.
> 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.
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.
There's no reason they can't put a reasonable support ticket price in place. Hell - MS has been doing it for ages.
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.
> There's no reason to waste a human's time on that.
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.
The problem is no different than their content moderation problem, and I'd point out to you that they do mostly solve that, and mostly through masses of human contractors.
The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.
Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.
I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn't there for the former, but there's plenty of it for the latter.
I'm the first one to jump onto the Google-hating train, but Google is literally throwing engineers at us for free so ours are ready to migrate large workloads off from our platform onto GCP.
It also helps that we're one of the largest telcos.
Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.
Same here. We're only in the high six figures in annual spend, but we wanted to do some low-level multi-cloud replication of our data and database read replicas, maybe looking toward compute multi-cloud in the future. Google Cloud entered and exited the discussion within a day.
We do disaster recovery and analysis all the time. And, not just dumb-brain "well, this is what their policies say happens", but real-world "this is what we're reading around social media, use-cases, blog posts, etc". This Terraria situation has already made the rounds in our slack DR channels.
We pulled off G-Suite about a year ago due to their stance on privacy, and concerns that the corporate firewall of G-Suite may not be as strong as they want you to believe, intentionally or not. Account lockout issues are also, obviously, a secondary concern.
Google Enterprise/Workspace/Cloud/etc needs to be separated from Google. At this point, I am blown away that their investors haven't begun to demand it. I understand that they may look at it as a new revenue growth area for the whole company, but frankly, this is flat-out wrong. These conversations are happening in nearly every technology-oriented enterprise. Google cannot be trusted, not by consumers, not be enterprises. Google proper is a cultural liability to the actually strong products their enterprise divisions put out.
It has pretty good support _today_. Who knows what will change with Google tomorrow given its track record? Amazon otoh has been exactly consistent in its customer support starting from amazon.com till AWS.
What if my Google Cloud account gets nuked because of something not related to it? Can I still contact the Cloud support to get my account back open again?
I also got locked out of my google account - not because of a violation (automated flag or otherwise) but because google decided my login location was too different. I know my password and have access to my recovery email but I am put into and endless login loop of ‘unable to verify’. I contacted support which had me fill out a form and that was maybe 6 months ago. I’ve moved on now but I’ll never use a google product seriously ever again.
I'm always afraid this will happen when I use a VPN or TOR. The internet in general is pretty hostile to any sort of privacy protecting measures, which they justify by saying your activity looks "suspicious". I've already been locked out of my Facebook account once because I forgot to turn my VPN off.
The last time I used TOR it was almost impossible to do anything on the internet. Every Google search was met with "We detected you are a bot" and every website interaction was blocked by never-ending CAPTCHAs.
My ISP has literally a single public IP address they use for all subscribers. And, I have third-party cookies disabled in my browsers because they are almost never used for something legitimately good. Because of these two things, I'm constantly being punished with captchas, and sometimes downright bans ("your IP isn't good enough to post on this forum"), in places where I least expect. Yes, looking at you, Google and Cloudflare.
Unfortunately, enabling TOR basically makes your traffic "malicious-shaped" these days. One of the largest users of privacy services are users (bot or human) who don't want their traffic easily traced because they're doing something malicious.
It's definitely not the only use case for such services, but if a service provider sees that 90% of traffic shaped a certain way is malicious traffic, it's understandable they will take steps to mitigate that traffic.
ETA: I'm not happy about it because I believe in the value of anonymity, but it is what it is. Here's a Cloudflare blog post talking about the challenges handling Tor traffic, which to their estimate is (a) 94% malicious "per se," so any tooling you do that tries to estimate intent based on origin IP address is gummed up by the malicious signal emanating from the same Tor exit node as your legit traffic and (b) anonymized by design, therefore any attempts you might make to build a reptutation signal for a given client are intended to be thwarted. The result is that a Tor user's traffic looks reputationless to a service like Cloudflare, and you can't just assume reputationless signal is benign (so, CAPTACHAs and "bot-like behavior suspected" walls).
Google needs a read only account mode that can be used instead of disabling/deleting accounts. Even if a user violated ToS, its pretty harmless to just let them export data which at least would mitigate the worse parts of this & free up energy from data recovery to time spend getting the account unlocked.
I mean what's the harm if a bot has a read only account? Or an account than can send 1 email per hour - just enough you could tell your contacts that you have to migrate to another provider. Even if the machine is AI driven - the actions taken could be more nuanced in order to stop the ToS violation but provide limited account functionality.
I just wish that regulation would step in and make behavior like this illegal for the corporate giants. It is definitely possible to limit the power of the TOS, and it's already done in some cases in Europe (certain common TOS clauses are just void and do nothing).
One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination.
But right now, we're in the middle ages with this. "You're in jail, no we won't tell you why, no, there is nobody you can ask why and no process to revert it".
Please don't, the only thing worse than no response is a byzantine system that makes you think there's a path and becomes the biggest time sinkhole of your life.
Just vote with your feet and move out of their services, life on the outside is just fine.
You can't just hand wave it away like that. Having regulation on a resolution process for account recovery is absolutely needed. You can't just tell people to move away from Google where their entire digital life is on it. At the very least, it should restrict your account to a read-only state and make it possible to download your data.
> One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination
In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. If you want to get in the details ( action X on date Y violates ToS section Z), that might be pretty useful to bots and spam accounts ( know which actions get caught and what to avoid), which are probably the vast majority of what is getting banned.
> In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation.
When the ToS are 15 pages long this is about as useful as hearing "You're being arrested for breaking the law" when you're in the back of a cop car. Doesn't really narrow it down and provides you no way of actually defending yourself.
I agree that being too specific can help bots but the current way of handling these things is obviously flawed.
A totally fair point but in this case I wouldn't consider "famous person" being the shocking part of this. The shocking part, as others in the thread have pointed out, is that this is a business partner of Google's.
I'd easily pay for a personal gmail account which has all the privacy protections on and also 24/7 access to customer support via chat and phone. Sadly most of that is only provided for business accounts.
Is there a good reason to keep using gmail? I've only got good things to say about Fastmail - which is paid, reliable, faster than gmail and private. And they're reinvesting some of their revenue into making better standards for email.
I haven't needed to contact support, but I think they have a manned tech support email address too.
The customer LTV required to justify providing live support for a wide-market B2C product is non-trivial.
But if you actually care that much, why not just pay for Google Workspace? The cheapest tier is $6 a month and gets you access to more or less what you want. (n.b.: I'm not making any representations about the quality of the support that you'd receive, only that it's available. I don't work at Google.)
I pay $6/month for a single user workspace to get that peace of mind. I don't understand why someone would entrust their digital live to a free service.
Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent? I read that Google automates the flagging and disabling of accounts but given how many people have their livelihood linked to these accounts, Google must have done something. It makes me scared how deep I have dived into the Google ecosystem. Time and time again I think about transitioning to someplace else but don’t know how to. It seems too daunting.
Google only takes calls for ad sales and gsuite support as far as I know. Beyond that shaming them on social media is the only way to get their attention. I used to work for a top five web site and even we couldn’t get ahold of anyone - one day Google decided to start crawling us at a rate of 120k rps and it was killing the site by pulling ancient content that was 100% cache miss. No way for us to get in touch with Google officially, our billionaire CEO hadn’t traded numbers with their billionaire CEO so no help there, one of the developers had a college buddy that landed at Google and that guy was able to use some sort of internal mailing list to get them to drop the crawl rate down to 20k rps.
(Microsoft is just as bad - their sales people can’t be bothered to talk to anyone who isn’t a partner, but that worked out great for me, I wasn’t really feeling azure and it made a great excuse to not consider them. One of their sales people did leave me a VM three or four months later but we had already chosen another vendor by then).
Spend ~$5 of Google Adwords, and chances are you'll have someone calling you regularly trying to talk you into using it more - at least that's my experience. In the past it's been a pain to get them to stop bothering me.
If I have an issue with Google, I might try starting an adwords campaign and ask to speak to supervisors when their sales calls comes through, and see if there's an in along the way of "we would spend more, but you see you've done X that needs to be resolved first".
My other approach - not tried it on Google, but it worked very well on DHL and Uber so far - is to sign up for LinkedIn's premium subscription and use that to Inmail a bunch of VPs/SVPs and set out my grievance. My experience so far is that you need to find someone high enough up to be under the illusion - from lack of customer contact - that everything is well. They often seem to be shocked to hear that customers hit the wall, and get approached rarely enough that it's a novelty for them to help out (as such, it'll probably stop working if everyone starts doing this...)
With DHL in particular I got an SVP to get his assistant to light a fire under the customer service operation by telling them said SVP wanted to be kept up to date on how it went, and Cc'ing said SVP and me on the e-mails. A package they "could do nothing about" because it was supposedly on a boat back to the US, magically appeared in my office one business day later after it was located in a depot 5 minutes from my office (I wish I could say that was the first time DHL has told me a package was somewhere completely different to where it actually was)
In the past I had written about my experiences with crawling[1], from accidentally getting banned by Slashdot as a teenager doing linguistic analysis to accidentally DoS'ing a major website to being threatened with lawsuits.
The latter parts of the story were when I was part of Common Crawl, a public good dataset that has seen a great deal of use. During my tenure there I crawled over 2.5 petabytes and 35 billion webpages mostly by myself.
I'd always felt guilty of a specific case as our crawler hit a big name web company (top N web company) with up to 3000 requests per second* and they sent a lovely note that began with how much they loved the dataset but ended with "please stop thrashing our cache or we'll need to ban your crawler". It was difficult to properly fix due to limited engineering resources and as they represented many tens / hundreds of thousands of domains, with some of the domains essentially proxying requests back to them.
Knowing Google hammered you at 120k requests per second down to _only_ 20k per second has assuaged some portion of that guilt.
* Up to 3000 requests per second as it'd spike once every half hour or hour when parallelizing across a new set of URL seeds but would then decrease, with the crawl not active for all the month
I think returning http status code 429 (=too many requests) or 5xx should work. Google claims to respect it. And it's not like they have choice really: the server is refusing to provide the content. Additionally, serving such an error should be as cheap or cheaper than a cache hit.
At least stop signing up for new things so you don't make the problem worse.
It is a risk. I had a problem with my Google account, and while I was able to find a human to email about it, they were completely unable to help. It was literally "you have to do the thing, even though it makes no sense, because that's what our algorithm requires" (in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to prove that I owned it, so they could cancel the account associated with that domain. Literally makes no sense, but it was the only way their process could work). That was my "ruh-oh" moment when I realised their products are basically unsupported and therefore shouldn't be used in production.
A few comments before, I've seen someone recommending to sign up for an (advanced!) (Microsoft's) LinkedIn account to solve an issue like this one. Then I guess to solve a problem with LinkedIn you'll have to sign up for a Twitter account, and so on and so forth..?
A few months ago I've seen a Googler pissed on Twitter about how their spouses GMail account got suspended and he got completely stonewalled internally as well.
It seems that even Googlers themselves cannot get any human contact for account support.
From recent tweets, it seems he's now leaving Google, and is busy retweeting stuff about people who have been fired and/or are suing Google. Wonder if him leaving has anything to do with that incident and whether it was ever resolved.
How do you manage to get totally locked out of your account though: if I have backup codes, a backup email address, the backup code for my 2FA app... surely I am protected from this, right? Assuming my account doesn't get hacked and turned into a spambot.
I am sitting here thinking of what would happen if my Gmail account got blocked. The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
Nope. My Adsense account was banned almost 9 years ago. I followed their appeals process, gave all the information required, and received automated responses every time. I repeatedly appealed over the last 9 years, receiving the automated rejections every time, until finally a few weeks ago for some reason they approved the appeal and my account was reinstated :shrugs:
No, this is a problem inherent to the business model Google/Facebook run.
Stating a truism - to make a billion dollars, you either have to get $10 from 100M sales, $10k from 100k sales or $10M from 100 sales. Although each option leads to the same revenue, there are major implications as for the amount of support and attention you can spend on each customer.
Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
> Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
That isn't necessary though - other companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP also have tens of millions - to billions - of customers all with their own support requirements: the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human.
Microsoft charges $500 for a single business-class support ticket with ~8 hour return time[1] - and you get the money back if the ticket was not a PEBCAK issue. If you're a company that depends on Azure or Visual Studio or Windows Server then keeping $500 around just makes sense.
I just don't understand why Google and other companies that deal with long-tail customers don't provide this as an option.
[1] In practice, if you have an Enterprise support contract, the effective cost is much lower AND you get a much quicker response time - but there's more paperwork involved.
These are literally some of the most profitable companies in the world. Are you honestly saying they would cease to be profitable if they hired a few hundred people to staff a customer service team?
Disabling google accounts is whats stopping me from using GCP fully. what if the credit card got declined on GCP and the google bots decide to ban me from the whole eco system.
When I was buying domain I immediately blacklisted Google Domains. I was scared about tripping something and getting Gmail account banned.
(yes, loss from not handling a single .com domain is minuscule for Google - but I wonder how common is to run away from any Google service due to risk to entire account)
You don't have to move everything, just bits (like how you diversify stocks or singe points of failure). Try move away from Chrome, or swap Drive for Dropbox.
Moving an email is admitably much harder, but after five years I've managed to do all the major ones.
> Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent?
File for a C&D and then, if that does not help, a court-issued injunction order ("Abmahnung" followed by "Antrag auf Erlass einer einstweiligen Verfügung"), if you're German. This works somewhat reasonable for Twitter, Facebook and Google.
I’m an Indian staying in US, but probably not for long. Given how many of us are there, I don’t think Google India would have the capacity or care to hear our pleas. The only way to force them to build something useful is through government interference but I hardly feel that Indian government would do so.
After filling out a fairly lengthy questionnaire, google mentions they will have someone review the issue and get back with you. I am on year 2 of waiting for a return call.
Man, some of those replies on Twitter are unreasonably harsh to this guy. Being a game developer seems like a really thankless task. Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?
> Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?
Probably because they are the biggest group out there. Games are now bigger than movies, after all. The bigger the group, the more likely it is to contain a well-populated minority of viciously hateful people, a bit like "the bigger the country, the more likely it is that it will contain a sizeable group of hardcore nazis".
There's that, but also the fact that to these people games are "just games". Maybe the HN crowd is accustomed to dealing with professionals and business clients that use their software, so it looks jarring to see responses like in that Twitter thread.
As a developer providing professional software, you're reasonably entitled to some respect from your customers, since your relationship is likely work related. But if you're making games, your product is eating up peoples' very valuable free time. If you mess that up for them, then you shouldn't be surprised to get a torrent of hate mail.
I was pretty taken aback by that, they go way further than disappointing about not having the game on their platform of choice, to just outright yelling at the developer for somehow this being their fault?
From a European perspective, EU regulation 2019/1150 covers protections for business users of online intermediation platforms [1].
Article 4 sets out a range of protections for business users, including a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable grounds for that decision"
This would seem to point towards a gradual start of the change in this way, although it will be interesting to see if anyone from Europe is ever able to use this against Google and others successfully. On the whole, the legislation seems to be sufficient, and it will come down to the usual issues of national regulators and their willingness to aid in enforcement action.
As long as the cost of false-positives is lower than the cost of human support staff, they will keep doing this stuff.
Millions of pages of EULA, but not a single line in there to protect the user? No right to get your data once banned? No right to appeal or even be informed about the reasons?
Just imagine if Google ran the Justice system! They would suspend peoples drivers licenses without their knowledge and then throw them in jail because of a two strike rule when they get caught driving with a suspended license.
The cost/loss idea is bad enough, but that person is a business partner and this situation might be the final nail on stadia's coffin.
Would be interesting if this stadia fiasco would lead to Google rethinking their customer support (ie actually start treating their users as customers).
You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts to require human review on such decisions, but apparently one of the richer companies in the world just can’t be bothered to hire a few extra people to avoid a PR problem.
That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.
> That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.
Knowing Google's engineering culture, you're probably spot-on. Ignoring long-tail events like this one is a common failure mode of this kind of relentless metrics-driven optimization (and they should know better).
On the other hand, I'd prefer they fix this process for everyone and not just those with X twitter followers.
I'm completely uninterested in making waves on social media, but I still expect services (whether paid or free) to work as advertised considering I'm not misbehaving. If they don't want me as customer/user, then say so and I'll find another provider.
As an end user, I agree. But Google clearly doesn’t care in the slightest about the end user; if they did we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’m thinking about this from Google’s own self interest only.
> You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts
What does high profile mean? I've heard of Leon Spinks, the boxer, but I've never heard of Andrew Spinks in my life until today. People with 5 digit Twitter follower counts are actually a dime a dozen.
Even people who were obscure can become "high profile" for a day. That's how going viral works.
Surely the creator of a video game that's sold tens of millions of copies, who also has an on-going business relationship with your company passes the bar?
> However, they were hit with a Terms of Service violation via email. They assumed it was issued accidentally, but three days later, their entire Google account was disabled without any warning or recourse.
EU regulation 2019/1150 would seem to be the first real attempt I'm aware of at addressing this issue.
Article 4 covers suspension and termination, with intermediary platforms (i.e. Google, Facebook et al) "the opportunity to clarify the facts and circumstances in the framework of the internal complaint-handling process referred to in Article 11".
It also introduces a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable grounds for that decision".
It seems these automated processes fall foul of several hurdles in Article 4.
I have (had?) a Google Voice number that I started using for work stuff about a dozen years ago. One day 8-9 years ago, it just disappeared from my google account. Like gone.
I go to google voice settings, and it's telling me to sign up for google voice. Nothing I do can get this back - my voice number is now just anchorless, floating in the digital sea.
The crazy thing is, it still forwards to my cell number to this day. I can't change most settings for it, so I stopped handing that number out, but every once in a while I'll get an email notification of a new voicemail or text message to that number...
Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time. It doesn't matter if you host your own domain/mailer daemon, the host and/or registrar can choose to suspend your account as well. So really, there is no solution. Other than the realization that our communications channels are not ours, they are always someone else's, and we are forever at their mercy.
the difference here though is that physically you can at least own the address, but even your digital address isn't actually yours. Phone, email, ip and whatnot are all provided by someone else and can be taken away.
Domains can be stolen, deprecated or simply restricted from your use.
> Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time.
Not only can they, for many companies disabling accounts is the only tool in the shed. There's no digital governance platform, no user rights, no process, no punishment at all besides this final cruelest kill: only this bit flip, from enabled, to disabled, alive to not alive.
it's unbelievable tha not a single big platform seems to have any system of justice or remediation in place. it's all vast uncaring corporate monoliths as far as the eye can see, no contact I do, no follow up possible.
these entities are monsters. they treat us like trash.
This is academic/ theoretical. Having control over your email and preventing total loss of email like Terraria's author is not "difficult". Own your email domain, but pay a hosting provider for emails. Then, if that hosting provider doesn't want to host you anymore, you can switch to another provider instantly or host your own mail server (bad idea). You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain or don't pay the annual fee. The case with Google is neither of these serious issues.
> You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain or don't pay the annual fee.
Registrar TOSes are just as opaque as email providers, which just as many case of seemingly irrational domain seizures.
The PGP trust graph is the ultimate fallback here. As long as your public key is out there you can even not have DNS and change your IP address and still be able to prove the identity.
Well, considering Google announced they're shutting down all internal development on Google Stadia games, and now they're locking people out of developer accounts, guess it's safe to say that once again, Google can't be trusted to follow through with their products and need to be taken with extreme skepticism on any and all future endeavors.
I didn't think for a moment this might be successful, especially when it stumbled out of the gate, because Google is so bad at sticking with projects that don't immediately do gangbusters.
Even still, it looks like the plug is being pulled faster than I anticipated.
I found My old gmail account placed under a flagged status one day. It would not allow me to purchase anything on the play store. Turns out, it was because I used an old Google service called Google Checkout(?) or something more than a decade ago to purchase a few hundred dollars worth of clothes overseas. The clothes were purchased from an H&M equivalent, legally operating stores of course, and no payments were deferred or anything - they just simply said something about my account being associated with possible fraud and disabled all Google Wallet features suddenly many years after, citing my purchase history. Wanting to purchase a $2 game on my phone, I inquired about removing the restrictions placed on my account, but the response I received were quite haphazard and they finally stated that they would not accept anything short of physical copies of my IDs before removing any restrictions. No, fuck off.
I guess it's easier to throw out blocks and bans, placing the burden of proof on their customers rather than to have people looking into why completely innocent accounts were getting flagged in the first place. I've made my peace with it and I'm happy not spending a cent on your damn play store for the rest of my life.
As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the nature of things).
For Google, users are necessary as they are product to be sold. Next are various small customers (developers) as they help bring in more users, or user interactions to be monetized. Android, nest, even google cloud (lost $5B last year) are either ways to bring in more user interactions and/or ways to try to diversify the revenue stream slightly to try to convince Wall Street that they don't have all their eggs in one basket (which they do)
But there's a risk: every new user is a potential source of inappropriate content (basically: anything that might disturb the customers, who would complain about their ads being associated with something or other). Their volume is high (so there are lots of opportunities for bad actors) but also their volume is high (so false positives aren't a big deal). So it's natural to have an immune system that just boots out perceived risks and also natural not to do an expensive thing like trying to follow up and see if it was a mistake. There's no malice involved, any more than there is in a tiger that eats someone.
The only real defense for any individual or smaller organization is to reduce your risk envelope. 1: don't put all your eggs in a google basket, and 2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully unconnected accounts for each project.
This sounds like work, and it is, but you have to do your own backups, brush your teeth, and call your friends sometimes. That's life.
>As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the nature of things).
Airlines and ISPs usually have support you can either call or mail. I don't know how to reach anyone at Google. By anyone I mean a real human, not a markov chain.
> 2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully unconnected accounts for each project.
How can one make this advice actionable? Creating new Google accounts requires providing a phone number to which one has long-term access (as they will sometimes require you to do SMS 2FA, even with 2FA off, when logging in). Using one on a different Google account links them (and could cause multiple accounts to get nuked), and you can't use a Google Voice number.
For some things I've taken to buying "aged" Google accounts on forums when I need true non-linkability, but in general this is an unsolved problem. I'd lose several accounts simultaneously if I hit the big G's antispam, as I've had to reuse some phone numbers several times.
If you have a business you get a separate phone number for it, and potentially for each customer project. You can reuse it when the project is done, or it makes it easy to hand off the amount, assets etc to the customer.
What I do is use my gf's number (so occasionally I have to ask her for the code that shows up on her phone :-) ). I am fortunate not to use google for anything I care about, or even much at all, so this is no inconvenience for me; OTOH she not only keeps everything in google but used to work there.
This is the exact opposite of what Google/Apple want to do. Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thing, and a Google-human will listen only of the victim-human will yell loud enough. This is their tiering system.
On the other side though, Google cannot have 1 FTE per 1000 'clients' (paying-humans and/or product-humans). As a 'father' here wrote, you stay or you go. Or at least keep the personal stuff out ('15years of gmail' - WHY???) and leave the app-stuff within Google (or Apple for that matter).
>Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thing
This is why I think Google/Twitter/FB were not that vocal about the section 230 business. Honestly if they got brought through it would be expensive for them but they have the money and tech potential to automate any problems that arise from it which would just extends their moat from any potential competitors even more.
The implication here is that the fix for this problem is to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone who does business with Google, as if other people aren't important enough to concern yourself about. That is 1000% the wrong approach, and exactly the sort of thinking that gets tech businesses in to this sort of mess.
The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.
> The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.
...and if you can't make it work at a given scale, don't do your business at this scale until you can. But that would be leaving money on the table now, wouldn't it? So, with no outside pressure, the companies at the top are the ones who don't care about making things work right.
I think "not treating business partners like trash" is the absolute base minimum. If they can't get that right, what hope do customers have? Feels like that needs to be solved first — particularly if it's an issue of scale — then the customer issue dealt with afterwards, if it remains an issue.
Two wrongs sometimes make a right. So 10 wrongs make 5 rights?
There is no more than 100% wrong. Saying it is 1000% wrong implies that you are arguing emotionally, not rationally.
Rationally, it doesn't matter how google reacts to their non-customers. There is no obligation to treat them well. The correct approach for non-customers is to either become a customer or to switch to another provider.
If somebody is wrong it is the non-customers who could fix the situation. Their unwillingness to change email providers is what enables google to keep on providing that bad service.
"In the case of Johnson v Esposito where the defendant is claimed to have sent an email to the plaintiff wherein this created a detrimental page rank effect due to defendant's low score..."
It is unfair from a consumer standpoint, but at least it would avoid Google's self-dug grave from getting deeper.
From a B2B standpoint, it's just the name of the game. If a partner business is a strategic asset, you fast-track them. Imagine an advertising firm treating a multi-national corporation at the same (crappy) level as a small, family-owned company. Or, imagine Microsoft treating the US government and an ordinary Windows user alike. That's bonkers, and yet it's an apt description of how Google does business right now.
Noting the reputation of your clients is powerful and ethical - the Chinese government is a monopolistic violent organisation, which makes its power evil
This service permits the export of (nearly?) all Google services data on both a scheduled and unscheduled on-demand basis.
I have my Google account configure to automatically export all service data every 2 months and upload ZIP files to MS OneDrive. This process completely bypasses me and my local computer. I just have to remember to check that the data transferred to OneDrive as expected.
The only constructive criticism I have of the Takeout Services scheduled process is that the scheduled exports are limited to a one year duration. I have to remember to reconfigure the next year's scheduled exports. Ideally I'd be permitted to set and forget, with a periodic reminder that the export is still happening and a "Good" / "Not Good" confirmation that the process ought continue.
Takeout Services won't restore function and applications, but at least a great part of my data won't be irretrievably lost.
good question, not exactly sure, need to download and look at contents... (queue Jeopardy thinking music) ...
Okay, so my account generates five 2GB zip files. I randomly picked file #4 and unzipped to inspect the contents. The structure of the zip file included the following:
* Google Photos
* Contacts
* Drive
* YouTube and YouTube Music
Interestingly, while the general structure looks okay, the content under the directories is incomplete. I'm not sure why this is. Like for example, "Contacts" has only one person's recently added Contact and only a JPG of an emoji face at that. That definitely isn't a complete data set, and makes me wonder if Takeout Services is not a cumulative back up, rather only a delta.
I downloaded a second file, to see how it was formatted. The second file also had Contacts data. It generally followed the contact groupings I have in place (ex. family, friends, medical, shopping, etc.). It had a smattering of .vcf files with profile pictures for some, but not all, people. YouTube directory had what looked to be a complete download of all videos I've ever uploaded, plus various other historical record of my YouTube activity.
Basically, it looks like recovery of a single service is only possible with a full set of recovery files (in my case, all 5 files). The content of each recovered service depends in great part on the nature of the service. There is a lot of garbage in the back up files for the unused / lightly used services. What's happening with the Contacts is a bit concerning since the the data is split between (apparently) all 5 back up files. Same thing for Drive, and maybe Mail.
Recovery of the data and service would be service by service, and dependent on the type of service, and the data provided in each service type.
My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay
. I had just bought LOTR 4K and can't finish it. My @googledrive
data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube
channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail
address of over 15 years.
This happens again and again. I have had that happen to my twitter account. I see this regulary on HN.
My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people. Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high.
So I get why they would try to automate bans.
But after years and years of regular high profile news of false positives, one would think they eventually would change something.
I mean the guy had direct business with Google going on....
Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
The problems are less the automated bans but the missing human support after you got automated banned.
I you got banned go through a reasonable fast human review process then temporary reinstated a day later and fully reinstated a view days later it would be super annoying comparable with all google services being down for a day, but no where close to the degree of damage it causes now.
And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process, even if they limit it to accounts which have a certain age and had been used from time to time (to make it much harder to abuse it).
But they are as much interested in this as they are in giving out reasons why you are banned, because if they would do you might be able to sue them for arbitrary discrimination against people who fall into some arbitrary category. Or similar.
What law makers should do is to require proper reasons to be given on service termination of any kind, without allowing an opt. out of this of any kind.
> And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process
This is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.
Shows the bias in machine learning. One simple parameter isn't added and the whole model is bullshit.
One parameter would be: Amount of money this customer has spend on our products.
Another would be: Active time since signup.
I'm pretty sure if "money spend > 0" is actually a legitimate threshold to remove a lot of spam, although not all. "money spend > 200" might to the trick though.
Forget ML, this is just business process mapping. If it's a payer-customer's account, issues should be sent to a human. Payer-customers should have access to a secondary channel (read: alternate phone number). Payer-customers Google contact(s) should be notified & included in the process.
As a general rule of thumb, if Google is struggling with a problem, it's not a tech problem.
This can be gamed. There are so many stolen credit card numbers and/or payments using Apple/Google pre-paid cards out there, so it's not difficult to automatically build accounts with this kind of 'reputation'.
Unfortunately the best way to do KYC is (still) human intervention (and use of data).
It won't change until they start bleeding enough users that it actually starts hurting them. In other words, when they mess up with someone "important enough" prepared to hold a serious grudge.
[EDIT: I still hold a grudge against DHL for 20 years ago listing my credit cards as "in transit to South Korea" while I was in Santa Cruz, waiting for them. If Google hits someone with an actual large following or sufficient clout in a large company, then they might just find that one day they do so to someone prepared to hold a 20 year grudge even if they eventually fix the immediate issue -- I'm not mad at DHL for the initial mistake, but for the amount of trouble and lies I had to deal with before they took it seriously]
These companies are maximizing their margins at our expense.
> "the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high"
That is true, but the amount of money these platforms are making is mind bogglingly high, too. It's just that they decided that they will use low-cost automated methods in order to maximize margins. And as long as we all accept this, it's a good decision: more money!
But it is absolutely possible to do these things right, it just costs more.
Agree. I find it odd that so many people bring up this argument, like these companies aren't sitting on piles of cash that could be invested in systemic, human-in-the-loop improvements. (Ok, maybe except Twitter)
There's virtually no chance that the automated system that banned him knew the account belonged to someone with whom Stadia was doing business. Even if we assume there's a list of high profile people/accounts not to automatically disable, I can't see him being on it.
It's possible to have a system that marks high profile accounts that shouldn't have automated actions applied ... that it appears Google doesn't have something like this is worrying.
Couldn't care less about twitter but if you use google for email/storage/docs etc then it's a real issue.
Email is how i do business or access to other websites and i store important documents in the cloud.
Like you i've seen the ban issue many times and even worse there's no customer support to help (just automated responses). Ever since i've been migrating away from google.
Popularity cannot be dictated, unless you're suggesting something like a regulation that would limit the total number of users a website is allowed to register.
I think there is a simple solution: the "fail2ban" approach.
Instead of banning, lock out users for some times (1 day).
An AI system should make temporary changes to your IAM, and then report too often disabled guys to a human being
My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people
Most likely yes. And the annoying thing is that they don't take into account different languages. The AI can recognize words, but not meaning.
A while ago some Dutch person tweeted: "Die Bernie Sanders toch." Die = that, in Dutch. But the AI obviously recognized the word (to) 'die' in English along with Bernie Sanders and just instantly drops the ban hammer. And it takes days,if not weeks to get an actual human to look at your case.
It was like a couple of weeks ago when an Android app got banned from the Play Store because they supported Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitles and mentioned it in the description.
These are exactly the cases that worry me. ML / AI is not ready to be used like that. IDK if it ever will be, but they are already using it in production anyways.
Their size insulates them from competition, which means less accountability.
We need to give them competition in the form of neutral and permissionless decentralized platforms. Such platforms should be the primary forum for commerce and communication, and privately owned permissioned platforms like Google should be small/bit players in comparison.
Right now the situation, in terms of whether the digital commons are primarily controlled by private companies or by public networks, is the opposite of what it should be.
> Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
Does bad PR actually cost Google money? I'm not sure it does.
A bunch of advertisers claimed they were going to boycott Facebook, but they didn't stick with it, and it didn't meaningfully impact FB revenue.
I think the only think that will really dent Google at this point is privacy legislation, so the only PR they're worried about it is upsetting legislators -- not upsetting game devs.
Regardless of what's happening internally, I've come to the realization that Google has become the prototypical dystopian corporation. Yes, perhaps not the only one, and perhaps I should have come to this realization just sooner, but there it is.
Taking the long view, the apparent culture of "just don't give a sh*" isn't going to work for the human race, not in the long run.
Well, frankly speaking, as an individual or a small company, you do not matter much, especially in comparison to the cost to get the problem fixed. While an organization grows larger, it has to employ lots of processes which are obviously not perfect to make things work. When it grows even larger, it has to make changes to existing processes, abolish some processes become no longer appropriate and introduce new processes over existing processes to serve their business better. Unavoidably more and more automation are introduced and eventually AI. All those changes seem to be really minor and clear and works in most of cases. Yep, I meant most cases, not all cases. Then suddenly, something really should work per everything standard and process stopped working and no one really knows why. So here comes the question, if you are the decision maker, your system works for 99.999999% maybe even 99.999999999% of your customers but not for those 1 maybe 10 customers, are you going to spend $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ to get it fixed?
I would actually lean towards organizational incompetence. There is just too much human brain mass at Google to say the the company as a whole is screwing up this bad because of hubris. They are just at such a high complexity level that the disorganization is causing incompetent outcomes.
Yeah. Its super scary. The idea that an algorithm decides and no legal recourse, all decided by a company that has an illegal amount of control on what is supposed to be public space.
Imagine all the public squares to be owned by some company rather than the community. Now imagine an algorithm deciding to exclude you from that. To just ban you from participating in life.
It is taking too long for Google to understand what they need to do (to own public space, you must bring all the other public stuff too, like a legal system and proper rights protection and due dilligence).
We should kill the monster, while we still can. Break them up. They'll never learn. They'll keep destroying lifes. Less than 0.1% is acceptable statistical error, right? Just pray you are never the 0.1%.
I just gave up the last time my google account died. There's really little value in it at this point if you're not publishing apps and I would never build a business on one of their platforms for this reason anyway.
Using an AI to automate banning is not an excuse for not being able to quickly redress the problem for a multi-billion dollar company such as Google.
In fact, it should probably be illegal for companies to automatically ban any of their users/customers with AI/algorithms without being able to respond to said complaints within 24h.
Bottom line is that Google should have better customer support, because it's not like they can't afford it.
The only reason they don't have good support is because they are a monopoly and monopolies don't care about the repercussions to any individual customer unless something is illegal.
We keep hearing horror stories like this on HN and yet Google Cloud revenue jumps to $13.06 billion in 2020, up 47% year-over-year from $8.92 billion in 2019.
Either HN bias towards google is making sure these posts hit front page frequently (frequent enough for me to notice at least) or certain tiers of customers are treated differently.
I know everyone loves to give Microsoft a kicking but they have amazing customer support compared to Google. I've known people buy dodgy keys from eBay that haven't worked and have gone through MS support and had the key activated.
A hotmail account may not be cool anymore but at least you're likely to be able to talk to someone if you have a problem.
Google makes ~$90 billion in profit a year, they can shave off a little to open up a few call centers to deal with issues like this. It's seriously shameful at this point.
Google has a serious problem with their tightly coupled identities. They need to be forced to decouple their business so losing your YouTube account doesn't have an effect on your email service or literally any other service. Clearly they're not going to do it voluntarily, so it's time for courts to step in and start taking care of consumers.
They have to at least provide the ability to download all your data in case they ban you. Otherwise it's a hostage situation. IIRC even Facebook does that.
Banning your account is one thing and understandable that they want some kind of protection from bad actors. But on the other hand locking your data is simply theft and digital havoc. Just consider the amount of work that can get vaporised.
Imagine if your landlord would kick you out and burn your assets. At the very least they should provide access to the export tool.
Always remember: if you aren't paying a company to use their services, you aren't a customer- you're the product.
Google does not care about non-paying customers individually. They have literally billions of them. They're easily replaceable and provide roughly the same amount of value each- not much, but worth lots in aggregate. If Google were to have a human review all the complaints from the non-paying customers, then they would become a small cost each rather than a small profit each.
Google's only option is to start assessing which people are dangerous to offend and then provide just those people additional customer support. I'm sure there won't be any social consequences of that though.
He mentions having purchased thousands of dollars of apps on the play store. You're not wrong about nonpaying customers being the product, it's just not relevant to this story.
The catch is that having a Google Account is free. Whether or not you made Play Store purchases isn't relevant to the people who handle accounts or (for example) automated gmail bans. And as it happens, if the gmail team decides to ban you, it cascades to the services where you spent money.
This is insightful and it explains pretty much everything.
One thing that doesn't make sense is that there are many acounts (but a small percentage of the total) that do make google money individually. Accounts that own popular apps, for example. Accounts that control Google Cloud accounts, for another. There is absolutely no reason those accounts should be auto-banned with zero human interaction, even upon appeal.
I know the usual explanation is that they're too big to respond, but at this point I've become of the mind that if you can't handle the most basic explanation as to why lock out a user from your service, and at least one way to appeal and get a response from someone able to make a decision, then you shouldn't be allowed to scale at all. Even if it would become a bottleneck, this can't keep happening.
Simple rule: Do not use Google services for business-critical areas. Expect that you can lose access to Gmail,
Google Workspace, Google One at any time without doing anything wrong.
What method do you use? I want something automated, I don't have time to trigger google take out every so often and then manual click 100s of links and download them.
For whatever it is worth, you can setup Takeout to make a copy every X months for a year or something like that. Far cry from automated solution, but better than nothing.
I need to find Photos alternative because that's the last Google service that gets any real use.
I just don’t understand Google leadership, how can you allow stuff like this to happen and just ignore it? Your brand keeps getting more and more tainted, people make jokes out of your strategy and tendency to give up like a little child...
I didn’t think I would ever say it, but I miss Eric Schmidt... Sundar has been an absolute disaster. Has Google even accomplished anything during his reign? And if they did, did they accomplish because of him OR despite him being there?
What Eric Schmidt would do to help with Google Account bans? Bans without any appeal process were a problem since foundation of Google and it's exactly how Schmidt built that company.
The only people who ever got their accounts recovered at all were celebrities or people who go HN / reddit frontpage.
You might be right, but Google changed as a company.
They started selling phones (ok, even if your account gets locked... you can still use your phone and/or create a new account to install free apps from what was the android market)
They started to sell storage (ok, even if your account gets locked, as long as you can retrieve your contents with Takeout, you just lost access to Google Drive, and not something of lasting value)
And they've been selling music (not anymore), movies, books, games (both on Play store and Stadia)... and more hardware that ties into their services (e.g. Nest Hub is useful precisely because you can have it automatically show your pictures from Google Photos, and you can have calls with other people on Duo)
The more new commercial products they offer, the more they should be careful about account bans. At the very least you want to segment access to them (as an extreme* example: even if you uploaded child pornography on Google Drive, after you'll have paid your debt to society, you ought still be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 that you purchased on Stadia)
(* extreme both because of the heinousness of the crime, and also how trivial/unimportant a videogame is on the grand scheme of things... but I think there's an easier case to be made for someone to retain access to the game that they purchased, vs retaining access to their Google contacts, which might not even be backed by any payment for the service)
Most companies doesn't have leadership, they have administrators and bureaucrats who are paid a high salary to ensure the company doesn't change course.
Sometimes a great leader appears, but most of the time big companies are just slowly rotting away after the initial people created and grew it.
It is not a meme. You tell me what did Google achieve under Sundar in the last 6 years? The only "noteworthy" things he did is fostering a hostile environment by firing employees who spoke out against discrimination, and fighting against unionization.
Same thing happened with Schmidt too. I have heard stories of people banned from (some) Google's services and unable to get any help a decade ago. Nothing new here, unfortunately((
Abandoning Google services will not work because only a negligible number of people will actually do it.
Here's what may actually work:
- Make a website documenting cases like this and strongly encourage visitors to install an ad-blocker and tell friends and family and social media followers to do the same.
- Whenever there's a high-profile case like this, ask people to install an ad-blocker and share a link to this website.
That depends on the definition of "working". Will it change Google's practices? No, but it will ensure I don't have to endure them anymore, hence "it will work" for me just fine.
It does seem like there should be some laws around the appeal process. Right now the only hope some of these devs have is to make it to the frontpage of some newspapers/hnews etc
Unsurprising level of arrogance from Google. They are a monopoly.
I am currently reading through Google’s SRE book and there’s a similar arrogance to it.
It should be read as “here’s a bunch of practices that we can get away with because we are a monopoly & our end users are mostly non-paying/our real users are companies running ads”.
So many practices in that book would get me and my entire team fired it’s hilarious.
There US government has changed our treatment of monopolies over the last 60 years such that we allow those that lower costs, so most of our current tech behemoths are able to continue... they are “free”.
We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.
Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to politicize this issue.
Facebook is exactly the same way.
When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al., then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now, which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not spending any money on customer support.
I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm.
I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get verified, but never got a reply, and a short while later they deleted my account and all of the pictures and data with it. I'm pretty bummed out because in losing all that, I lost most of my pictures from high school. I have almost no pictures of myself or my friends for roughly a 7 year span of time.
It's my fault 100% for not backing it up, but that's not the point. I was more frustrated with the fact that, for no apparent reason, my entire account was locked and they demanded pretty intense verification to even just get it back. I haven't used Facebook or any of its platforms since, but I have to say it felt pretty gross to be handled like that.
It's pretty sus that these companies use our data for everything but have no actual express responsibility to it.
They did this to a lot of accounts back in the day and I suspected then (and now) that it was to encourage (force) people to upload high res pics of their PII information to have on file.
For counterpoint, they provide products like Gmail for free at point of use because the support costs are very low (amongst other factors).
Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want?
Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad experiences see public light so people's choices are informed.
Would I prefer government enforce food safety standards, or let consumers decide what they want?
Would I prefer government enforce building safety codes, or let consumers decide what they want?
Would I completely ignore the fact that Google has sucked the air out of the room with their market dominance, so hardly any competitors are left for consumers to decide between?
They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.
Actually their support in gmail is non-existing.
I work for European regional free e-mail provider (also ad supported) and we have free phone support for free users where You can talk to real support people who know product in 5 different languages. Google abuses it's dominant power by making basically impossible to get support
What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them.
Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is helping the people who do participate, generally the larger firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to their constituents.
Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time, in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change.
"Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move money same day, because all of, I think seven banks started across the country in the past 6-7 years. I'm not even making this up--check for yourself.
"Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state lines.
"Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad examples, and really study the process of how these things get passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits.
What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
"Regulation" gave us a reasonable number of holidays (in Europe atleast).
Regulation isn't fundamentally bad. Nor does is need to be controlled by lobbyists and big business. Your points against regulation aren't against "Regulation", they're against bad regulation. The response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation, it should be to work on better regulation and a better legislation process for that regulation.
And then the competitors _tacitly_ collude and form an oligopoly, using their combined market power to consume small competitors and collectively reduce product quality.
The unregulated free market makes minnows of us all for the whales to feed upon.
There's a lack of competition because Google and other giant companies have leveraged their monopolies in certain markets, like search or mobile operating systems or mobile app distribution, to crush and prevent competition in other markets.
We've seen this before, and thankfully anti-trust legislation allowed regulators to take effective measures against it when the market itself couldn't or wouldn't.
We could use a reminder that Google's competition, including Adobe, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, eBay, and Google itself, all colluded with each other[1] to limit competition and market processes in order to keep tech employee compensation below its true market value.
I think your critiques of regulation are fair, but I think regulation and competition are closer together than your post suggests.
>Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate.
Ordinary people have less access to companies' internal strategy meetings and, like government, companies will choose to favor their most lucrative clients over the strategy that outsiders might find more 'fair.'
Edit: A way to think about this is that, in order to 'compete' with Apple or Google on the app store, you'd need to build an entire mobile OS. In the past we've dealt with this by classifying things of that scale as utilities and requiring Goog / Apple / AT&T to sell access to their infrastructure. It's just not realistic to expect a competitor to build up from 0.
>regulations are static [...] which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo
This is often untrue, many regulations are outsourced to various agencies which are free to adjust policy as often as they see fit. By the same token, reluctance to cannibalize business or sunk costs can hold back private industry (i.e. 'green' energy needed massive public investment even though it was clearly potentially profitable).
> "Regulation" gave us banking[...]the healthcare system
The rest of the world has, arguably, more financial and health regulation and also has no problem moving money 'instantly' or administering care. I think this is unique to the calcification of the US at the moment.
> "Regulation" gave us professionals
This one is actually very interesting! Professionalization is generally a process of a group of private actors lobbying the government for a legal monopoly. I'd argue it's a mixed bag. It's good, for instance, that engineers can be held liable (and be blocked from working) if they design unsafe things. I think, now that we can track individualized results more easily, licensure may be an outdated way of accomplishing this goal, but I'm not sure it was always bad.
Regulation gave same-day/instant money transfers between banks in other countries, blame US politics for the regulatory capture
> "Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
I find the overconfidence funny if not for the sheer ignorance of history. Snake oils were literally a thing. (And you're still free to buy them in a way)
> they would be spending billions on customer support
Having supported tens of thousands employees on G Suite I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to call support. Admins know the support is poor, the agents aren't capable of providing more than basic break-fix support. Generally, calls are just to get official confirmation of an outage before notices hit the official dashboard. This isn't a service that requires a ton of support. Operate your business on a free account at your own risk.
>If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none.
I can't agree with this, there is so much competition in this field already and and it doesn't seem to make a difference. There will always be ad-supported free services with minimal support and few security/privacy guarantees, that is the entire low end of the market.
There is no competition if you want to sell phone apps. You have to sell via google store and apple store. Foregoing one of the stores drops 50% of your userbase that you can't reach with the other store, so you have to do both or leave money on the table.
“we have no choice [...] we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al.”
I don’t use Facebook at all, and I use some Google services, but not in any way where it would affect me much if they went away tomorrow. It’s a choice to use these services, and if you use them in a way where you give them the power to hurt you, you have chosen to do so.
The problem seems to be that spam (and fraud) are increasing, especially in the domain of identity.
Companies have been answering this growth with machine learning and that machine learning appears to scale poorly. Humans also scale pretty poorly. What would regulation look like?
We have been for a while now. In usual political fashion, there are two competing solutions (regulation vs trust busting) locked in a perpetual stalemate to the advantage of the abusers. Looks like you're in the regulation camp.
> We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.
Poland is introducing a law [0] to provide a right of appeal to the courts if a person is banned by social media platforms. The law's intention is to limit the platform's ability to remove content that they claim violates their policies, but which doesn't violate Poland's laws. Depending exactly on how that law is worded and implemented, it might provide protection for people banned for non-content reasons as well, including the inscrutable "we claim you broke our rules but we refuse to tell you which rule you broke". Of course, this doesn't do anyone outside of Poland any good, but other countries might copy Poland's law.
The downside is that Poland's law is inspired by the banning of Donald Trump and other right-wingers, and being associated with that political context is going to discourage people on the left from supporting it, even though I think people on the left could benefit from it as well.
This is going to be tough politically to fight. If I had to guess the tactic that would be used to fight it from the other side is something of the sort:
"If we force these regulations on Facebook / Google / etc. or break them up, the stock market will go down (aka your 401k)."
Whether that's true or not for the common folk, it's a surprisingly effective tactic.
And it's definitely true for those at the top of the economic food chain, who are likely invested in these companies.
Given they tend to have more power politically, I just don't see us touching this.
Can we just break them up? If the problem is monopolistic behaviour, just end their monopoly by chopping them up into pieces. There's plenty of historical precedent.
IMHO trust busting would be lot more effective and free-market friendly than having some bureaucrats trying to write regulations for what counts as "adequate" customer service or not.
Maybe instead of regulations we could spend the money as a society on non-coercive mitigations like education about technology that would allow people to see that centralized corporate services will always end up this way.
There are so many alternatives to email -- Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton, iCloud, etc. How can you argue with a straight face that Google has a monopoly on email?
A monopoly does not require 100% market share. It requires a majority market share and using that position against its competitors (which can be argued for, given how easily non-google emails end up in spam folders).
Clearly Email is not the point of discussion here, as no one is building a business around it. It's Android with its app ecosystem, stadia, YouTube etc. Do you not see any problem with having effectively no support for these services?
Where did the OP talk about gmail? Is it your opinion that Google is only Gmail? and that is the only service they offer?
Of all the services Google has, email is the least monopolistic, but simply because there is competition in email an open standard that many companies (including google) have tried to make less open does not change the Fact Google has market dominance in many other services
If they are so big that we need to regulate them, I would rather they either be turned into public agencies or be split up or face some other mechanism to increase competition and choice. Regulation will still be needed to some extent for data portability, but the massive centralization of power on a governmental scale should really mean that they are subject to government-level rules (the law). It doesn't make sense for example, that Twitter - bigger than almost every nation - can have a unilateral set of private laws that make our US first amendment rights virtually inaccessible because we've outsourced the town square to a private company.
Every time these stories come out I get terrified. And, angry, because just like all the carelessly built services that get breached because of poor-to-nonexistent security, this taints all SaaS companies a bit.
The focus on customer service and customer care is what sets Amazon apart from Google.
Amazon will bend over backwards to ensure that the customer is taken care of and will even eat some costs or make concessions to make sure that the customer experience is top-notch.
By comparison, Google's customer service is absent. Google has plenty of money that they could spend to hire customer support teams and boost the customer experience so that incidents like these do not happen or at least get resolved quickly, but that does not appear to be a priority for them.
> Amazon will bend over backwards to ensure that the customer is taken care of and will even eat some costs or make concessions to make sure that the customer experience is top-notch.
I think this narrative is false. Amazon will certainly refund money or eat costs but they have seemingly done little to stop scams, review bribes, or counterfeit products. Their UX is also increasingly user hostile (try cancelling Prime).
I would put them on par with WalMart, which also has a very liberal return policy.
Yeah, and it would seem that Amazon has recently destroyed one million worth of clothing from a business owner on (allegedly) spurious counterfeiting claims, and an inability to get into touch with support.
Does anyone not working for Google have an opinion which isn't a variant on "Serves Google right"?
I assume that many Googlies also have that opinion, and a few others are sure that this can be fixed, because they don't recognize that this is a systemic cultural problem. There's only been one Abcedarian unit that ever understood customer service, and they (Google Fi) dropped it on the floor and beat it to death within 3 years.
It's also bananas that they ban your entire google existence. If you violate some Developer TOS then ban you in the app store not in google drive, gmail, etc. That kind of collatoral damage begs for them to be broken up IMO.
Terraria is very very popular game so I wonder what is going on inside Stadia team... could it be that they are just incompetent and they do not even monitor Twitter feeds of popular game developers?
Or maybe Stadia team actually wants to help but they are ignored inside Google? Or they just know the project will be canceled so they don’t care?
Or maybe they really do not want terraria on their platform so they are willing ignore this?
This is a great case for Google to decouple, either voluntarily or by court order.
YouTube's faulty algorithm erroneously locking your account should never result in you losing your access to your Drive, email, Android, media purchases, or anything else unrelated to YouTube (it shouldn't erroneously lock your YouTube account either, but limiting the blast radius is a no-brainer).
I use G Suite and regularly export all my data using google takeout in case something like this happens. Plus since I have my own domain I can move my email address to another provider.
Way too many google horror stories to keep using my @gmail.com account. Although admittedly the actual odds are probably 99.99% that this frustrating issue doesn’t happen to any individual.
As a small business we use Google Suite.
We would need a single solution which provides all these:
- Email (unlimited domains, unlimited addresses)
- Drive (Docs, sheets, forms)
- Photos (this is where we also store out private photos 2Tb+; also, auto-sync is a lifesaver)
- Calendar
Any alternative which is as affordable as Google? How about Zoho?
This incident seems pretty damning of Stadia in particular. What partner in their right mind would work with Stadia when that work can be arbitrarily canned for no reason and with no reasonable recourse (of course, I feel similarly about western game developers publishing in China given their review board and capricious past actions like banning Animal Crossing there because of players voicing support for Hong Kong in-game, yet major western developers continue to court China, so what do I know)?
There also seems to be some interesting correlation of megacorps being terrible at games, between Google doing their utmost to shoot Stadia in every foot it has, and Amazon execs having no idea how to produce games people actually want to play.
While I agree with the broader point that there should be avenues for someone who's account is incorrectly closed this article is pretty vapid.
There are a lot of examples of individuals who have lost access to their accounts but no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users. If I've got a 1 in 10 million chance of incorrectly losing access to my account that is very different to if there is a 1 in 1000 chance of losing access to my account. Without that context, you're basically just saying "losing access is a crap experience for the person involved" which is obvious from the outset.
> no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users
Who cares?
No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc).
> No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc).
It doesn't detract from your point but we are effectively applying this logic to our justice system. Most cases are plea bargained[0] and don't go to trial.
"The vast majority of felony convictions are now the result of plea bargains—some 94 percent at the state level, and some 97 percent at the federal level. Estimates for misdemeanor convictions run even higher." Excerpt from Innocence is Irrelevant [1]
> No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?"
Sadly we are applying exactly this approach to our criminal justice system.
90+%[0][1] (94% of convictions at the state level, 97% at the federal level) of cases go through plea bargaining and never reach a courtroom. Trials are often impossible for poor defendants because public defenders can only bring a fraction of their cases to trial.
People like Shanta Sweatt[0] plead guilty because the alternative is to face a much longer potential sentence at trial.
I agree with the principle, but in a world of finite resources you've got to pick your battles. The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it.
It is, unfortunately, the same in many aspects of life, including many criminal justice systems. For example, if you are wrongly convicted in the UK it is incredibly hard to get that conviction overturned. It's literally life destroying for the people affected (definitely a lot worse than losing access to your gmail account!) but apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
When assessing risks one way to look at them is to consider both the chance of occurrence as well as impact if it occurs. With many google services (esp email), the impact if it occurs is high. So the risk is still serious even if odds are low.
I largely agree, but OTOH the degree to which this is a sticking point for many people is an early warning that that this is a serious issue that Google has to solve. This problem will only get worse as Google grows. Yes it's unprecedentedly difficult to solve, but I suspect it'll become increasingly difficult to ignore. Systemic failure on this level is the CEO's job and it's disappointing to see Pichai seemingly fail to do something big about it.
People complaining they they want the game on stadia and blaming the creator are really just being assholes. Imagine if you spent 3 full weeks figthing some extremely obvious extremely silly but on some system, like adding two integers causing a runtime error. Would you really continue to work even harder trying to support that platform?
The guy lost access to his primary email for nearly a month... I think he's exhibiting a metric ton more constraint that is reasonable in this situation and google needs to get their damn shit together.
If Google's goal is to make sure that future regulation forbids them from ever banning an account of real person or company, they're on the right path for that.
In a few years we'll have spammers with legit companies able to legally force Google to deliver emails to their "customers" inbox, to abuse compute resource, etc.
Just because Google decided not to act on its kafka-esque banning process.
Google is evil, etc..., but just a PSA: people often overlook emails in their backups. Don't trust your provider to not fumble the ball and lose them (or lock you out of them).
If you're ready to add another layer of tin foil, don't store emails long term on an IMAP server if your emails leaking would be a problem for you (a la Sony or Clinton).
I was pretty disappointed by the EU’s big tech bill not addressing this.
In the UK at least, the largest banks have to offer you at least a basic current account.
A lot of these big tech companies have monopoly positions over certain areas. They should have to provide at least a minimum level of service, and have proper processes when there are conflicts.
A tech challenges in machine learning these days is teaching the machines to explain why they made their decisions. With Google's commitment to 100% lights-off handling of terms-of-service violations, it seems unlikely that non-Google entities will get any decent explanations unless there are revenue implications for Google.
Big fines for violations? Maybe. But they have more lobbyists than that rest of us to resist legislation. Won't happen without a mass political movement (in the US at any rate).
How about a review department at Google?
We could pay US$200 for a human review of the situation, with a reasonable SLA (maybe two working days), with a promise of a refund if they determine the error was theirs.
Possibly a larger fee for a more aggressive SLA?
Possibly a subscription-style fee for publishers of mission-critical stuff? (Meaning, critical to the publisher's mission, not Google's mission.)
My list to improve the play store process that requires $0 additional dollars from google and would fix 99% of issues:
1) give developers a period to respond to the complaint before takedown (maybe 1 week)
2) if they respond, make a decision within 1 week.
3) show all this information in a portal to see basic information like your app is facing a review, pending google response, etc. Really basic stuff.
4) allowing you to attach information in responses (one situation I have been in, the trademark office had ruled in my favor but I literally didn't have a way to provide that ruling in the appeal).
5) having a premium developer support program that provides good support. I think most serious devs would prefer to pay $300/yr to have good support vs what they have now (zero support).
Google, Google, Google! When will you guys learn that you simply can't do this? You want me to use Google Cloud Platform but you keep killing off apps and locking people's accounts. Why would I trust you with my livelihood? The PR fallout from stories like this is killing your chances.
Maybe unrelated but I was pretty much banned from using Amazon for over two years through no fault of my own. I even asked here for suggestions on what I could do. Alt accounts just got immediately locked too.
In the end, the only way I managed to get my original account unlocked again was by collecting a huge list of @amazon.com support addresses and writing a bot to spam hundreds of emails until someone competent picked up and realised my account had been mistakenly locked. I made dozens of calls but they hung up the phone most of the time (literally).
FAANG seriously needs to step up their support game. And not with "AI" chatbots or outsourced support teams with a few buttons in front of them.
They are posting billion dollar profits year on year on year. There is literally no incentive to do this at all. For every customer wronged this way there are hundreds if not thousands who are extremely happy with the service.
That's what made it so daunting. I was completely powerless to argue against this massive, faceless corporation. I imagine for those who store their whole lives on Google, this feeling is amplified 100x.
This is why I avoid using important services (i.e. e-mail accounts, your backups, any digital products) in the one place. Just a little violate and then lose access to all of them. It can happen anytime, shouldn't be left to chance.
I keep seeing high profile cases of this pop up every month or two. If it happens to this many high profile people, imagine how many people it happens to that don't have a voice.
They have to fight a lot of fraudsters and scammers, and do so successfully every day. It is easy to say that they cannot possibly monitor everything properly because they are so big, but they earn billions because they are so big.
This shouldn't come for free, every company has costs and proper customer care and monitoring is a cost for these kind of businesses.
The other argument is that you shouldn't use these services if you don't like them, but these companies are simply too big to avoid.
> The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
I've read quite a few of these stories over the years, and it is really bad if all your digital life is tied to the Google account.
A couple of months ago I took the courage and started migrating to a new email (using mailbox.org) with my own domain purchased via namecheap.
Took a few days to migrate most of my accounts to the new e-mail, but I highly recommend for anyone in a similar situation looking for some peace of mind.
When Stadia was announced I wanted to buy one. I pre ordered it in the Google Store. A couple of weeks later I received an email that they were not able to process my credit card. That never happened anywhere else. They also said that pre ordering would not be possible anymore and therefore I would not be able to purchase the limited pre ordering offer. They would be sorry, but stated that I could buy Stadia as soon as it gets released.
Google’s product philosophy is more like they are providing the technology, not the product. If the product fails, then it is your problem because they only offer up until what their tech actually does.
Had a similar experience with Google Ads where their automated systems shut off our paid ads just before Black Friday due to a technical error, and despite having constant human sales contacts none of them could do anything useful.
I had an old blogger account with a domain registered through the blogger site.
It expired and I got repeated emails about signing into my G Suite account to address it. But I didn't register it and I don't have a G Suite account... and the only support is, step 1, sign into G Suite.
I finally tracked down the registrar they used and I contacted them directly and they helped me re-register the domain.
Worst case for your Protonmail account is losing access to your email (which you can almost fully mitigate by using your own domain and having backups).
Worst case for your Google account is losing access to hundreds of Google services and anything you paid for, like apps or movies. And Gmail doesn't even allow you to use your own domain, other than by paying for G Suite which is clearly not targeted at individuals and doesn't work well if you try to use it as an individual.
If in the future Protonmail extends into other areas like Google does, and you start using these new services, it would absolutely have the same risks.
> 1. Don't use personal gmail accounts for your business.
A good practice but won't help with this issue. Google has a history of banning business (admin/paying) accounts when it thinks that some user (under that business domain) has an unrelated personal account that was banned.
There have been stories here on HN describing how a small startup lost its Google Play account because one of their employees had their personal account banned for a terms of service violation. Then Google viewed that same person having an user account underneath the business account as ban evasion. In a puzzling move Google then proceeded to close the whole business account, so lots of collateral damage.
Isn’t Stadia effectively dead in the water anyway? The idea was based on universal infinite low-latency bandwidth which is wasteful and incongruent with the laws of physics. There are articles elsewhere showing Google abandoning its own development on the platform.
This was a mainframe play for gaming. Think this platform will be around in 2023?
This is what terrifies me about Google, specifically losing access to all accounts that I signed up for using my Gmail. I started transitioning to a custom domain that I can redirect to any email, but I just realized I bought that domain using Google Domains...I'm **ed if Google decides to ban me.
Number one step to leaving google: get your own email service. One that you pay for, from a company whose primary business is email. Then gradually move your important accounts off.
This doesn't help much if you have to publish things on the play store. But you can distribute android apps directly.
Each day I become more convinced that Google at the end of this decade will be nearly irrelevant.
It's a company with MBA leaders who don't care about the product, which values engineers that have technical prowess and often don't care about the product.
As an aside - what benefit is there to having a game such as Terraria on Stadia in the first place? It has fairly low system requirements, and given how much energy is eaten up by server-side rendering and streaming, it seems wasteful in this context.
Gamers don't care about the tech that's being used, they only care about playing good games. If you're a Stadia user, why wouldn't you want to play Terraria? Because it's not a good use of streaming? But it's an awesome game!
Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal for Google of having it on there, but from the sidelines here, it seems to me to be terribly wasteful. It's like the energy consumption angle was never even considered. I presume it wasn't.
OT - where does your username come from? I'm sure it's not, but for a Brit to read it, it stirs thoughts of a terribly un-PC origin! :)
Typically deals like this are about a mixture of cash and access. The platform holder will often partially or fully fund development, sometimes they pay an advance on sales up-front. For one project I worked on Sony provided an up-front advance that fully covered the port in addition to some sales (and it took a while to recoup for reasons mostly under their control.)
My guess for this is that given Terraria's large fanbase and high profile, Google probably handed them an advance for this and promised some promotion once the title launched on Stadia. Stadia also potentially provides access to users who can't play it on PC (it has a client for phones and some TVs, etc)
I agree. Also, I don't want Stadia to become flooded with cheap indie games, at least not for now. Because the storefront is so bad (no search), it would make it very hard to find the things you want.
Google should concentrate Stadia's efforts to make AAA-games available to people who don't want a console or gaming PC, because that's a real niche.
I personally know 5 people who would never buy dedicated gaming hardware, but will get Stadia to play the latest FIFA in great quality on their work laptop or TV (with Chromecast).
Not sure how "cheap indie games" comes into the picture here, Terraria is a wildly successful and sophisticated game that's sold over 30m copies lifetime and is available on a bunch of platforms. We're not talking about a Flappy Bird clone.
That's unfortunate. The silver lining is that there will be more people talking about this here on HN than actually affected by not bringing some game to Stadia.
To Google's credit, it's pretty easy. Go to your account (from GMail choose 'manage my account'), then go to 'data & personalization', find the 'download your data' option.
I am not fan of regulation, but apparently not every abuse of the market can be solved by courts in a practical way. Like in this case, a mere mortal can not possibly sue Google.
I can imagine the EU will step in soon. There are multiple different aspects of being locked out of a "free" service provider like Google:
- Losing your email addresses - even if it was provided for free, will cause an immense harm. Email addresses will soon be transferable between companies like mobile numbers are today.
- Losing your own data - GDPR was a first step, user should have a right to his own data even if he was locked out of a platform.
- Losing digital goods like apps or ebooks. With a transferable email address these will become transferable too.
I'm not sure how a foo@gmail.com email address could realistically be transferred to another provider.
At the very least, I wish there was a regulation that forced platforms to provide users with an explicit reason why their account was suspended. No vague "please read our T&Cs" statements. Instead, something along the lines of "We have suspended your YouTube account because in video A you made statement B at time index C which violates our rule D". No doubt it would be burdensome for the likes of Google to implement, but that's what you get when you become so large that you can destroy your users' livelihoods on a whim.
I just want to know why is no one willing to hold Google and Apple accountable?
Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?
Have had no problems reaching people about dev accounts, but also no problem even about consumer subscription services with unusual challenges, such as wanting to merge music or app libraries belonging to two different Apple IDs. (Can be done, an self-serve easy way and an Apple-performed hard way.)
In earlier HN thread, someone said “Devs would be more than happy to pay $300/yr to be able to talk to someone!”
My guess is an HN survey would suggest devs prefer to be outraged at Apple’s $100/yr — despite it being a price point at which you get to talk to people.
apple support is shit, even if you can talk with an rep. their first level basically tries to stop you going down the levels, the second level basically just forwards you. most of the time it's not even the people, it's basically their stupid system where you have your dedicated rep, but the only way to contact him is by using a stupid form/voice which sometimes prints stupid error message and you have no idea if it gone trough.
also if there is a mistake in the system and they have no clue about it you are lost or you need to pay tons of money.
> Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?
Journalists like access. Confronting Sundar and making him feel ambushed even for a second means they won't get the access for the rest of their career.
You could credibly accuse Apple of many things, and I say that as an unashamed Apple fanboy. But making it basically impossible to reach a real human being by phone via AppleCare, or in person at your local Genius Bar if you prefer, is not one of them.
The only thing scarier than the thought that Google has algorithms that track your every move is that these algorithms are fundamentally faulty and furthermore they take decisions based on these algorithms. Case in point Google ads thinks I'm 70 years old and married
Going against popular sentiment, I dont know how people can't get in touch with a human at Google.
Whenever I have needed something that required human support, such as resolving a false DMCA claim against my content or help with my G Suite account, I had no trouble getting email and phone support. I'm not a big company or influence of any kind either.
Gives me a chuckle for every high profile case such as this. Just get a domain & link it with a Zoho Mail account or any other paid one, for everything else use self-hosted storage
Having core parts of your personal computing or business computing rely on Google or AWS infrastructure is a systematic risk. Unless you are are racking up a $50k bill every month, you are simply too small that anyone there would care.
I just can't imagine that this has happened completely "without reason" as he states. The reason might be silly, erroneous (whether human or AI), or dumb, but it exists.
If Google has no procedure in place to investigate these bans on request, then Google is evil. But by the sound of this I get the feeling that this guy is leaving out some facts.
Not hard to do some Google searches to find lots of examples where people were banned by Google without reason or explanation. Sure, a reason might exist, but if it's impossible to get anyone to tell you what it is, then how can you tell? In at least one high profile case a Google employee's spouse was banned and it was still impossible to get an explanation or reversal!
You can assume that a high-profile game developer in a business partnership with Google is evil and got up to some sort of large scale malfeasance with their gmail account (why??? for what purpose? why would you risk a business deal to do this? what's the upside?) and then Google decided to ban them but not expose them for their misconduct. Or you can go "huh it sure seems like something bad happened to this person and he's not getting an explanation for it."
Threads are paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working on it), so to see the rest of the comments you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=4
(If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)
I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement.
We see this again and again. The cynic in me sees Stadia as yet another internal promotion scheme, masquerading as a product.
I doubt this will ever change. The internal momentum of the company culture will make it so. What does it mean for investors? Google has enough money they can just buy their way into markets indefinitely. It will probably keep them going, but I don't expect huge growth. I'd probably be putting my money into other stocks if I had to choose. I honestly don't think people would miss Google much if it was gone.
Stadia, from day one, has seemed like an engineering-oriented project. It's a cool tech that nobody asked for and not many people actually want (and has been atrociously packaged as an actual product). I can just hear the kickoff meeting:
"We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we could!"
That part is true! But then:
"Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part."
...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.
Are you sure people don’t want it? I think it’s one of the biggest market potentials in gaming right now.
I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life.
That’s anecdotal or course, but there’s quite a lot of us.
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i'd like to think even a middling engineer would be able to recognize an intractable infrastructure problem that is entirely out of their hands. stadia can have perfect tech and the best customer service in the world and it simply will not matter until you effectively create your own nationwide isp as well. space age technology does not mean shit if your customers are still in the age of horse and buggy.
terraria also highlights the utter absurdity of game streaming. it can and has been ported to practically every relevant device and costs less than a big mac. google invented a billion dollar laser to cook microwave popcorn.
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The problem with Stadia is that it's a platform geared for AAA games, but doesn't provide much value for them. It can provide good value for more casual games/gamers, but Google's ego means the service isn't geared for casuals.
When I write Stadia doesn't provide much value for AAA games, we need to look at it from both the gamer and the dev side. For gamers, if money was no object, one is better off with either a decked-out PC (better performance) or a console (wider variety). Stadia's main advantage is potentially being cheaper - which is precisely the gaming crowd which doesn't attract AAA gamedev companies.
For AAA developers, they need to port their game to a different API, then pay the Google tax, in order to appear on a small platform whose users are often drawn in by being cheap and are less likely to pay for your product.
There's no technical advantage for AAA - now that Google has closed their studios, nobody will try to make features that are only possible in cloud gaming in Stadia. If Google couldn't, can you? What happens when you ran into a problem, can you handle Google "support"?
Stadia could be good for casuals. Except it doesn't have any good discoverability features or even a search bar. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't need discoverability, but indies or anyone searching for them really do. Its payment model (direct 'purchase', no gamepass) is OK for AAA, but not as a good for casuals. And of course, one still needs to port the game which can be difficult and relatively expensive for indies (Luna is just a VM by comparison).
Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model.
So Stadia is geared for AAA games/gamers, but doesn't provide good features for AAA, and even Google itself couldn't manage to make cloud-gaming-only features. Stadia can be useful for casual gaming, but the platform just isn't geared for that, and Google is unlikely to change that. Likely result is cancellation within a few years.
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my friend at Google reported almost exactly that: it's an amazing technical achievement, really pushes the cutting edge of what's possible. And the sales and marketing have no idea how to do anything with it.
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Check out the stadia subreddit. It seems they've managed to connect with a pretty passionate group of innovators/early adopters.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/
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How do you know not many people actually want it?
This is not just Google. All other tech companies including Facebook are using the same system to promote workers. As a result:
* Nobody is held accountable for the long term success of the product. Making little things work nice is not rewarded. Maintaining UX is defiantly not rewarded.
* Rewarding process over product. That's why you see so many Google products shut down. It takes a few people from L7 to L8 to build it and rewards someone from L6 to L7 to wind it down. Every annual performance review in the process is all roses and rainbows!
> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of continuous introspection and improvement.
This goes well beyond Stadia - Google has an air of institutional contempt for humans, especially humans who aren't inside Google. Dealing with humans who are struggling with getting bounced by "the algorithm" is something they simply aren't interested in.
I think that their higher tier promotion system is partly to blame, and could be easily fixed. As I understand it, at a certain management level, the most effective way to pad out your promotion packet is to launch a new product. These packets are judged by an anonymous review board. This board could change the culture overnight by updating the criteria to reward managers that grow products or retain paid customers. Heck, if they just updated the definition of a successful launch to include a year+ of operation & growth or even just a proper roadmap, we might start to see and end to the usual pattern.
I wonder if it's the lack of a single founder?
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk - founders at the top who owned it.
More directly, Gabe Newell and Valve.
It might be that google started with Page/Brin and co-ownership might have weakened that a bit, and now they are not to be found.
Not that a single founder is a surefire recipe.
Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, "Paypal Mafia", For valve Mike Harrington would like to have a word with you.
Bill, Steve, Elon, Gabe, were never alone masterminds and definitely not single founders because in companies they created there always was someone else who had shares.
Sort of, but it's really a goog HR problem.
That you can only be promoted by creating new things (even if entirely useless) and not by maintaining and supporting existing things (that customers actually want) is an HR problem.
> I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem.
I can recommend reading In The Plex. Quite literally the founders wanted to invert the usual model and put engineers first. There were some anecdotes from those in roles like marketing and so on that they felt like second class citizens.
Quite ironic that it's an engineering company and stuff doesn't work how it's supposed to so often. I'm looking at you, Google Cloud :P
Brilliant comment
It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies. At the very least, companies must be legally required to present you in writing with the so-called violation of terms they're accusing you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone # or other immediate contact so that you can dispute the accusations. It's insane that these basic legal rights don't even exist.
You could of course sue Google, but that's an extremely expensive and time-consuming option, rarely worth it for a mere consumer. Going to court certainly won't make your suspended account become unsuspended any quicker.
You know it’s funny that lots of the basic functions of business with consumers (eg, ability to return items) were set and codified in the US as the Uniform Commercial Code [0] that was established in 1952. Before then it was wild and variable.
What’s really interesting is that it seems like of hacker-like in how it was implemented. It was published as a guide and then states passed laws to implement.
Reminds me of a de facto standard that is then implemented by vendors.
I suppose we could start up some form of Uniform Consumer Commercial Code (UC3) that set up practices that are good that could then be passed by states.
I shudder to think through all the arguments about how it would specify some “don’t be evil on social cause X” that it almost smarts my conspiracy brain that the “corporations” started this trend to bikeshed/scissor statement society so they can’t make meaningful economic and commercial policy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Commercial_Code
The problem with this sort of thing is that because it's interstate commerce, states usually do not have standing to regulate effectively.
The Federal government struggles to implement new regulatory authority because of political challenges. Various groups of stakeholders will declare any such regulation an infringement on free speech (ie. "The constitution gives me the right to sell fake penis pills to fund my radical political agenda!"), biased against marginalized minority or cultural groups ("My marginalized constituency of blind, alcoholic yak herders have a religious prohibition against reading contracts"), or a unfair mandate restraint of trade ("The Chamber of Meme Commerce believes that this rule will cost 10,000,000 jobs in the meme industry and kill puppies."), etc.
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The original reason for free speech was to allow people of different creeds to work together against government.
The Bill of Rights is establishing as a baseline the policies that were found to reduce tribal conflicts in the European empires — having a strong central identity as a state (eg “American Destiny”), but allowing individual tribes under the state a great deal of freedom in religious practices. As a secondary purpose, it tamped down the worst state abuses.
The anti-religious messaging, the anti-conservative messaging, etc undermine this and are bringing back sectarian strife inside the state.
The EU recently proposed The Digital Services Act, which is a DCMA like legislation (with both copyright infringement and other illegal content like CP as targets).
Part of that draft law pretty clearly states that companies must have a proper appeal process for banned accounts. This would apply to "decisions taken by the online platform on the ground that the information provided by the recipients is illegal content or incompatible with its terms and conditions", which in practice covers basically all bans except for Age restriction or non-payment based bans.
They must provide details of what part of the Terms of Service they claim you violated: "where the decision is based on the alleged incompatibility of the information with the terms and conditions of the provider, a reference to the contractual ground relied on and explanations as to why the information is considered to be incompatible with that ground".
If the internal appeals process fails, the consumer can take the company to online binding arbitration (with the consumer's choice of accredited arbitrators certified by the member state). The company always pays its own costs in the process, and must reimburse the user's costs if the company loses.
> which in practice covers basically all bans except for Age restriction or non-payment based bans.
Google avoid this EU restriction by suspending accounts/app indefinitely instead of banning them.
You can see a Google employee explaining this here : https://github.com/moneytoo/Player/issues/37#issuecomment-76...
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Agreed. We generally allow companies to refuse service for nearly any reason, and in most cases this is a good policy. However, there are exceptions to that rule. One extreme are utilities which as both monopolies and essential services are required to do business with nearly any paying customer, and have strict rules processes about shutting of service for lack of payment. Residential rentals are another example. They don't hold a monopoly, but are an essential service, and as such they can generally choose who to do business with (although not quite as freely as your average business), but have strict legal processes they have to follow regarding evictions.
I think there are online business who are essential enough that some consumer protections are applicable. Very few reach the level of monopoly that utilities have in my mind, and even those it isn't clear to me that they are "natural" monopoly like utilities, and as such other antitrust approaches may be more beneficial.
However, I think there are a number of competitive, yet essential services online that deserve a legal protections regarding service termination. Identity providers absolutely fall in that category IMO - it is unacceptable for example for Facebook to lock your account in a manner that prevents you from not only using their services but every other third-party service which you authenticate using "Logon with Facebook". I think email is another that rises to this level. At a minimum email providers should be required to forward mail for a fixed period of time after choosing to stop doing business with a customer.
I think there also needs to be a law that, once you have accepted responsibility for storing someone else's data, that you can't delete it "on a whim" without offering some minimum retention period ok your data. As an example: a storage facility is allowed to stop doing business with me, but they legally can't just destroy all my stuff on a moment's notice... we have laws for minimum retention periods.
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The Kafka solution to this will be our terms of service prohibit single spacing after periods and you are in violation. Therefore we can terminate your account at any time of our choosing.
Alternately we could prohibit posting in any language other than Latin and Klingon, or using the letter e, or accessing our services using any unapproved operating system (and our only approved OS is windows 3.11 with winsock drivers).
Anyway the point is now the company can ban you for any reason at all. Being the wrong religion, voting for the wrong candidate, being the wrong race, etc.
Not just "can", but "will". And given how effectively these companies are using their size and power (and m-word) to crush the competition, it's long past time for some anti-trust action.
> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies
I get where you're going, but I think far more costly to them and advantageous for us is to simply show them that they are unnecessary.
If we can drop them so easily, they can't pull stuff like this anymore. It is possible to drop Google and Facebook.
They do this stuff because people _need_ them and they know that people won't just drop them en mass.
> It is possible to drop Google and Facebook.
Its also possible to live without electricity and running water. This disproportionate power model doesn't work there because some people implemented regulations on them. I am beginning to suspect we need similar laws for this.
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What's stopping the next Google from doing the same? Providing poor justification for bans and removal from platforms is by no means limited to the big companies - it's endemic throughout tech - we just hear about Google and Facebook more because they're higher visibility and are considered more essential.
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The OP is about a personal Google account, with access to mail, etc. at stake, but it's also about a developer who was going to create content for their platform. Granted, Stadia is not exactly a make-or-break gatekeeper for publishing games, but that same dev account could well be used for Google Play Store, which controls about half of the mobile market. We've certainly seen plenty of those stories here -- app developer gets locked out, only recovers account / gets app un-banned by making enough noise to get attention.
IOW, it's "possible" for you or me to drop Google or Facebook, but for some lines of business, you're basically stuck working with them.
> drop them en mass
The libertarian in me wants to believe that reputation is enough to make business act in the interests of the consumers and that personal responsibility would prevent customers from acting in their best interests: but we all know this is not true.
And, I know enough to know that any public policy that essentially says “Everything will be fine if everyone just does [X]” is bad policy, regardless of what ‘X’ is.
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Oh yeah, far more easy than the government taking regulatory action is coordinating a massive consumer choice boycott.
Sometimes, it is so abundantly clear to me that this site is full of former teenage libertarians who grew up and still haven't shed all of those ideals.
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You're not seeing the other side of the coin - the huge amount of spam and abuse that such systems correctly identify and remove. If every abuser requests those explanations (which they will) there will be far more spam going around the Internet.
Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health.
(I am offering no solutions here, for I know none)
I think this is a convenient narrative for an abusive pattern of behavior by Google. The company is infamous for having non-existent customer service. It's not a matter of their AI having too many false positives, it's that when there is a false positive you have literally no recourse even if you're a well known business partner.
Are we really going to believe that Google, one of the highest grossing companies in the world, doesn't have the money to provide even basic level customer service? If it were really a matter of not being able to afford it, certainly they could offer it for a fee. No, they're stubbornly refusing to address the issues, relying on this lie, and using their market dominance to avoid having to answer for it.
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> If every abuser requests those explanations (which they will)
It's not a request, it's a requirement. If your account is suspended, you deserve an explanation. You should get one without having to request it.
I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are without any recourse whatsoever.
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This is an age old problem in the criminal justice system. A solved problem.
After a lot of trials with various approaches, we settled on letting some criminals go free over convicting someone on weak evidence. Second we decided that trials should be open and evidence viewable by default.
Finally you generally have the option to give some security to stay out of jail during trial.
Closing a google account is a punishment worse than many criminal convictions. And will only get more important as we progress to an all digital existence.
> Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health.
Hire them directly instead of via labor farms, pay them an actual living wage, give them full health benefits, and hire enough of them to prevent overload.
> the huge amount of spam and abuse that such systems correctly identify and remove.
Maybe allowing single service providers to capture several billions of users is the problem here.
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Perhaps the process should cost $100 or $500, so that actual spammers can’t use it
Maybe they really just need to offer a paid account option with real support, since that has much better incentives
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But surely it’s possible to use methods other than what currently seems to be the first and only solution: “your account has been banned, bye”.
For example, if an automated system thinks an account is sending spam, enforcing a (very low) outgoing email rate limit would be a much more reasonable first step.
So just start charging for service, and keep a non-refundable deposit for spam/abuse.
Let every abuser requests those explanations, if the decision doesn't change, the money is still kept, which funds that service.
no if the AI can be used to automate the banning it can be used to provide the electronic news email of the rule violated.
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So what is the proper Blackstone's ratio for you in these situation?
Is 1000 innocents ok to punish as long as 1 spam message is stopped?
> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
It isn't the only solution to this problem. Not using their products is another one. However, in some sectors (e.g. smartphones) it is next to impossible to not use their products, especially because they are build on centralized schemes. But regulating those things is probably harder than a consumer rights bill. But the downside is probably, that a consumer rights bill would not just affect the few large corporations, but many smaller ones too.
>You could of course sue Google
Unless you've waived that right when you agreed to the Terms of Service.
> Unless you've waived that right when you agreed to the Terms of Service.
Which would be meaningless in the EU (I think. Possibly just Germany) as you can’t waive that right.
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I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that U.S. courts have found that suing is a right that can't be waived by contract. Certainly an agreement to enter arbitration can be introduced as evidence against you in a a lawsuit, but any decent lawyer should be able to prevent an arbitration agreement from getting your lawsuit thrown out.
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Its not fair when you have to get attention on twitter before getting issues like this resolved. Some of us don't use twitter for one thing
This is in part what the GDPR mandates - that companies provide reasoning for how an automatic process works and also that there is a means to dispute that (Section 4 / Article 22) https://www.varonis.com/blog/gdpr-requirements-list-in-plain...
But then ... https://twitter.com/Cleroth/status/1348036873885806596
I think we’re in a post consumer lawsuit era. Almost every terms of service on earth requires arbitration, or else absolves the vendor of any liability whatsoever
Arbitration isn't so bad. It still costs the company every time they have to deal with a case. Mass/automated arbitration claims can turn the tables, and lawsuits can be filled to challenge the neutrality of arbitrators.
> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
Nope. That gives players like Google a platform to negotiate from now and in the future, and it won't curb abuses long term. These abuses are a symptom of economic concentration and a lack of competitive markets. The only resolution guaranteed to work is to break up these companies down to smaller parts until they no longer act like quasi-governments.
> The only resolution guaranteed to work is to break up these companies down to smaller parts until they no longer act like quasi-governments.
Why not both?
A consumer bill of rights and breaking up Google are not mutually exclusive. Consumer protection laws protect consumers from all companies big and small, present and future. Breaking up Google won't do anything about the "next Google".
It's a bit strange to think that antitrust is a long-term solution when the successful antitrust case against Microsoft didn't prevent Google, Facebook, and Apple from arising.
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>It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights"...
Maybe? But I worry that politicians will use that as a tool. Look what DeSantis is trying down here in Florida. He wants to fine "Big Tech" for banning politicians during an election. Personally, I'm tired of the lies and provocations and hate speech of some politicians and I don't think any company should be compelled to share those messages.
So those evil politicians will do what? Force corporations to indiscriminately ban arbitrary people without possibility of appeal? Oh, wait a minute...
> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
Google is a private company who offers free internet services in exchange for your privacy being violated. They have no customer service because you are not a customer as customers pay. You have no rights on their platform because again, you are not a paying customer. And you agreed to their terms of service when you signed up. They don't owe you anything at that pont.
So stop expecting "paying customer" treatment from a shady adware dealer who gives you "free" "integrated platform" stuff to get you hooked. That's an old drug dealer tactic anyway.
Want to be treated like a person? You have to pay for that. Otherwise stop whining about the tyranny of "free" platforms such as google, twitter, facebook, etc.
The only thing the government should do is fund PSA's to warn people of the rights and privacy hazards of free internet platforms.
> Want to be treated like a person? You have to pay for that.
Andrew Spinks, the author of the linked tweet, was a business partner of Google's. That didn't save him.
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> The only thing the government should do is fund PSA's ...
Should governments allow caller ID spoofing, spam bordering on harassment, or lazy oligopolies to be negligent?
Governments should do whatever we agree they should. Both governments and companies serve the humans.
To be fair, even as a paying customer, you don't get much more "customer service".
The same also applies for Google Play Store where without a doubt you paid at least once and continue for every in-app purchase.
If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives.
At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB".
You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent the bad actors from abusing the appeal process while leaving your more clueless legitimate users lost in the dust?
(As the joke goes: "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" [1])
Can you build any vetting process, and associated appeal process, that successfully keeps all the bad actors out, and doesn't exclude your good users? What about those on the edge? Or those that switch? Or those who are busy, or wary?
There's a lot of money riding on that.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a...
I think this is a balancing act of risks, and I wanted to bring up what I believe to be a success story when it comes to handling suspensions: Microsoft.
One thing I believe Microsoft gets right is that suspensions are isolated to the service whose TOS was violated. I.e. violating the hotmail TOS doesn't suspend you from their other services. I think this makes the impact of a false positive less catastrophic, while still removing actual problematic users from the service. This may be an artifact of how teams work together at Microsoft.
Yup, I agree this is the better solution. The monolithic "one account rules everything" approach just increases the user's vulnerability.
It's largely what made Facebook's forcing usage of their account for Oculus users so ass-backwards.
> This may be an artifact of how teams work together at Microsoft.
It may be an artifact of Microsoft actually being regulated for monopolistic practices.
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If we did that at Microsoft when we were bringing Hotmail under the MS umbrella, DOJ would have ripped the company into 10 pieces
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If you're implying that there's just no way to support their users then I'm going to disagree.
At Google's scale and profitability, saying you can't build an appeals process that supports your paying users is just ridiculous. And at this point the collateral damage to Stadia's already tenuous reputation is going to be a lot more than paying someone to vet him manually.
Honestly, the answer is to charge people a fee, in order to appeal a ban. A fee that covers the cost of investigating the incident, making it revenue-neutral. This way, Google would have every incentive to investigate thoroughly all appeals, including repeated appeals by the same person.
From the user's perspective, it's still a pretty good deal. There's a 99.999% chance that you get to use gmail/youtube/etc for free. And a 0.001% chance that you'll end up a statistic, and need to pay a nominal fee for an appeal.
Unfortunately, I don't think the above will ever happen, because it would be a PR nightmare. "Google wants to charge you money, just to appeal a ban!" It's still better than the status quo, where people have almost no recourse when they are banned. But it still sounds way better in the media, if you just pretend as though these things never happen. Hence the status quo - use automated systems to cheaply get to a 99.999% success rate, and spend as little money as possible on the remaining 0.001%
So now banning people incorrectly is a revenue generator?
The answer is to force google to be open and more transparent through regulations and have to scale up to deal with it and eat into their profits.
The assumption up front should not be that we need to care about protecting their profits.
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They don't even have to keep the fee of the query is legitimate. They can reimburse it or keep it in the user's wallet when they consider that this was either a false positive or a honest mistake. The cost would be minimal but would deter a lot of people trying to game the system.
I completely agree.
And if companies don't want to do it, that should be easy to regulate though. Requiring a human centric appeal process even if it has a fee, and prohibiting blanket account bans (if you get banned on gmail it doesn't affect your android and play store accounts, for example)
There are other provisions that I consider important like not being able to reuse email addresses and requiring the forwarding of email for at least 6 months after any account termination (getting banned from your email address can have disastrous consequences)
Google One, which costs 2$ a month, as far as I can tell provides you with some level of support, which is definitely more than zero.
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The problem with unjustified bans due to some algorithm is also: These cases might not even be a close calls like: “oh yeah this person did something that is in the grey area of what our policies state. I will ban him but he might interpret things differently.”
No if you enforce your policies strictly by (machine learning) algorithms it could just be a matter of misinterpreting a different language, slang, irony or something else. Which makes these bans even more infuriating.
The lesson here is: you are too big. If you were smaller, you could manage these issues. But you choose to be big instead.
Counter-example - Amazon. You can reach someone at Amazon and they are ginormous too.
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Is this really true? If Gmail was replaced with a dozen competing services each with "only" 100M users each, would the total number of moderators be lower? How does the number of required human moderators per million users scale, and why?
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You can't choose to stay small unless you're someone like clubhouse which still has a long waitlist for sign-ups, and even then they're trying to build their infrastructure wide enough to accompany everyone. Not offering service to all/99.9% of potential customers is effectively lost value and goes against shareholders' expectations.
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>If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives.
Doesn't matter. If you're dealing with billions of accounts then you're earning billions of dollars. Just hire more people. Scale must never be an excuse for poor customer service.
It depends on the unit economics.
Google has billions of accounts because it is FREE create them. Which could mean the cost of providing human support is actually too expensive on a per unit basis. The only way to rectify these economics is to charge for the account.
I pay for Google One to store more photos...however I have no clue if this improves my situation. Does the algorithm give me more slack for being a long, paid user? Do I get real customer support in the event I do get flagged? No clue.
> You can't even trust phone companies to do their job right and ensure the secure verification code is sent to the right phone! You provided some more secure ways for users to authenticate themselves,
For those that don't know, phone companies are easily susceptible to sim-swapping attacks which can make it easy for an attacker to intercept SMS 2fa: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016212
Edit: looks like OP changed their entire comment while I was replying.
You can totally trust phone companies to "do their job right". You need to understand what their job is though.
The Telcos never signed up to being a "secure verification code provider". Almost a decade ago, the local Telco industry group told us all:
"SMS is not designed to be a secure communications channel and should not be used by banks for electronic funds transfer authentication,"
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe-for...
Any company that uses SMS for 2FA is offloading risk and security to an industry that never expected it, and explicitly seeks to not provide it.
A Telco _desperately_ wants to be able to get you back up and running (making calls and spending money) on a new phone using your existing number before you walk out of the shop. And even more, they want to be able to transfer you across as a customer from a competitor - and have your existing number work on their network.
"Sim Swapping" is a valuable feature for Telcos. They have significant negative incentives to make it difficult. They don't want to secure your PayPal account, and nobody (least of all PayPal) should expect them to do a good job of it, certainly not for free...
Yeah sorry, I thought the original version was overly flowery, and the same point could be made more succintly.
> Can you build any vetting process,
Yes, it's pretty simple. Create and enforce some consumer protection laws which require, for example, that any company larger than a certain size is required to establish support offices staffed by humans in every major town. And required to resolve every issue within X days either by fixing the problem or clearly documenting why not. If not, no arbitration allowed, so they are subject to lawsuits if the reason doesn't hold scrutiny.
Problem solved. Companies like goog, facebook et.al. can easily afford this and it'll stop this ridiculous behavior.
It also to some extent protects the companies. Spambots who create a million accounts can't replicate a million humans to show up at the support office, so it establishes a human:human relationship that's completely missing today.
This would all be perfectly okay and understandable if the AI were the first line of defense and there was any meaningful way at all to contact support and escalate things after that filter. (I mean besides making headlines in all the gaming-news articles.)
> But 0.001% of billions or users is still millions of accounts...
Not that I disagree with your point, but even if we assume 50 billion accounts (6+ for every human on earth), 0.001% of that would still be 'just' 100k, not millions.
Oops, quite right. I multiplied by 0.001 when it should've been 0.00001 (because percent) >_<
Fixed
Yes there is a lot of money riding on that, but that is the cost of doing business.
Why banks have heavy compliance costs? Doing proper AML and KYC costs money and society decided that it was critical enough to bear that cost even in light regulation countries.
A lot of the financial success of those companies is in part the result of not fully taking responsibility for the consequences of their business activity. Eventually they will, under social pressure that this post success represent, or by laws.
At some point percentage is insufficient, but it's because it's a rate. Permillionage/DPM doesn't fix it. It's the number of people affected that matters, so if you have it at 99.9% and grow 10x, you ought to improve it to 99.99% to not become eviler. If you just stay at 99.9% when you grow 10x, you're harming 10x the people.
I'd use the total number of false positives as the proper measure.
If a company has so many users that it can't hire enough employees to manually handle the false positives properly, it's too big to exist, and should be broken up.
Why broken up vs users migrating to a competitive service? Seems like a very simple facet to compete on.
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This is by far the most ridiculous reasoning I’ve seen for a company being too big. Because too many users get restricted from the service unintentionally then the provider is too big?
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Can you please elaborate on bad actors absuing the appeals process? Is your point about how everyone will automatically appeal, making it difficult for genuine queries to receive the human attention they need? Or is there another vector of abuse you were thinking of?
That's basically it.
If every action taken against an account by automation is appealed, then the automation becomes worthless.
In gaming forums that are run by the developer, such as the World of Warcraft or League of Legends forums, I have very frequently seen people whining and complaining that their accounts were banned for no reason until a GM or moderator finally pipes in and posts chat logs of the user spamming racial slurs or some other blatant violation of ToS.
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It’s even worse than that because the bad actors are doing this at scale and will have automation to auto-appeal while normal people will sometimes shrug and decide it’s not worth it. So your appeals queue likely contains a higher flow of bad actors than the distribution of FPs.
It's interesting to me how Bloom Filters avoid the uncanny valley between probably correct and definitely correct. I don't know if this is a technological difference between problem domains or a purely ideology/mindset.
Dividing a problem by 10 should get notice. By 100 (eg, Bloom Filters) respect. By 1000, accolades. Dividing a problem by infinity should be recognized for what it is: a logic error, not an accomplishment.
Most times when I'm trying to learn someone else's process instead of dictating my own, I'm creating lists of situations where the outcomes are not good. When I have a 'class', I run it up the chain, with a counter-proposal of a different solution, which hopefully becomes the new policy. Usually, that new policy has a probationary period, and then it sticks. Unless it's unpopular, and then it gets stuck in permanent probation. I may have to formally justify my recommendation, repeatedly. In the meantime I have a lot of information queued up waiting for a tweak to the decision tree. We don't seem to be mimicking that model with automated systems, which I think is a huge mistake that is now verging on self-inflicted wound.
Perhaps stated another way, classifying a piece of data should result in many more actions than are visible to the customer, and only a few classifications should result in a fully automated action. The rest should be organizing the data in a way to expedite a human intervention, either by priority or bucket. I could have someone spend tuesday afternoons granting final dispensations on credit card fraud, and every morning looking at threats of legal action (priority and bucket).
Yes; decentralization
that's not a solution to a problem.
end users don't want to run their own spam and moderation filters, and they definitely do want them.
As usual, some Googler browsing HN will reactivate his account, everyone will forget and Google won't change a thing to his unbanning process.
Hopefully, more devs will do what this dev is (said to be) doing.
> Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward.
Of course, it's very difficult for small devs to do this. It takes an already solid business to be able to stand up like this. As always, I think this is the only way for Google to change, but I don't think it can happen.
I think it's also probably easy to do this with stadia since it's effectively 0 users. What would he say if steam treated devs like google does?
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Agreed about small devs, but other small devs also have to make countless decisions about which platforms/products to use for their app/platform/website. At the very least, Google should be worried that a good tie-breaker is "Is it a Google platform?".
Good on him. Takes courage and an established product to do this.
Good example of standing up.
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Makes you wonder whether that is their unbanning process.
Or the @GoogleStadia Twitter account will forward this to someone who knows about it. The Stadia Twitter account is uncharacteristically active on customer support for a Google product.
Twitter seems to be the worst platform ever created to get customer support.
If any entity requires a huge amount of Twitter followers to get support, count me out.
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This is probably because in the beginning they want publicity.
People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of:
* Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)
* Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implement)
* GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
* Stolen/shared accounts. All it takes is one evil browser extension to steal your user account cookie and go on a spamming spree. Figuring out how it happened is near impossible (user specific logs are anonymized). Usually just resetting the users logins doesn't solve it because the malware is still on the users computer/phone and will steal the cookie again.
* Falsely linked accounts. Some spammers create gmail addresses to send spam, but to disguise them they link lots of real peoples accounts for example via using someone elses recovery phone number, email address, contacts/friends, etc. In many cases they will compromise real accounts to create all these links, all so that as many real users as possible will be hurt if their spamming network is shutdown.
* Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
* Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
Yes, it's solvable, and Google should put more effort into it, but it's hard to do.
> * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)
If you had experience with this, you would know that you just described the polar opposite of how that process works in the United States. Federal law requires human verification as part of the mandatory NCMEC reporting process. If you’re employed by Google and have that impression of how it works it means the green badges doing the work aren’t known to you, which isn’t a huge shock since TVCs are barely one step above disposable barcode at Google.
Source: I’ve forensically verified enough child exploitation in the course of tech employment to make me thoroughly and irredeemably despise humanity as a species. (Fighting insurance to pay for therapy I now need, against their will, was fun too.)
Many other companies of similar size manage to provide customer service just fine.
This is a solved problem - you just have to be willing to realise that magic AI sprinkles aren’t the answer.
As for cost - this continual stream of screwups is costing them a ridiculous amount of goodwill and future business. It’s probably the best ad for AWS there is.
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Even if all of that is completely true, failing to engage in any form of communication with a business partner whose services you cut off without any notice is reprehensible.
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> due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implement
Now that sounds like a technical problem that could be solved!
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Doesn't seem an issue at all for almost every other company in the world.
Only seems to be an issue for companies like Google who ideologically don't provide any way to talk to a human and escalate. Amazon manages to have some of the best customer service in the world while operating on similar scales with far more things that can go wrong.
There is no excuse.
3 completely different points:
1. Ignore the downvotes. The reality (poor customer service perception) is what it is. Objectively looking at the problem and what can be done about it, without cynically assuming it's impossible, is the most practical focus going forward. Thanks very much for this insight, it was really interesting to read.
2. I've noticed various glitches and bugs over the years with various services - two I can remember right now are a) misspelling a search then clicking "did you mean" won't update the titlebar (been watching this one since ~2012), and b) accidentally sending an in-progress draft from one device will cause followup edits made on another device to sent to /dev/null. Well... I look at the kind of time-wasting junk input that makes it into Issue Tracker, I look at random app feedback, etc, and I know my feedback is never going to be seen. I can understand why things need to impact 10K people to be noticed. I thought I'd ask you: what's a good recommendation here?
3. Extremely specific question that I happen to be worrying about at the moment :) - I wasn't sure which Google account I wanted to use to play with GCP some months ago so I ended up enabling billing on more than one account using the same card. I have an idea I'd like to play which would call for a new account (since it would be tied to a YouTube channel) and would require me to use the same card yet again. All of this would be staying within the free tier, but I still wonder if I shouldn't run data takeouts first...? (I can't deny that the current state of Google services feels a bit like Russian roulette with extra servings of superstition - what doesn't kill your account, makes it stronger, or something??)
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
This is simply wrong since the account is always "banned" and not "deleted". So the data is still there, not providing it is going against GDPR. Evidence for this is all the accounts that were unbanned and still had their data. Make the account read-only for all I care but don't think for a second that this data has to be deleted immediately (It definitely does not, there are reasons and reasonable ways for data to be retained for some time)
> * Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
> * Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
So simultaneusly you can look at the image to ban the account but can't look at it to unban it? I get that the first one is done by algorithms and the second one presumably is not but calling this a privacy issue is laughable since you don't have to look at the content in the first place.
All of your points don't adress the issue of "The user does not even know why he was banned" at all. Luckily there are EU laws in the pipeline for that.
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I'm no expert on Google and I don't have a PhD but from my time working there (and my time working at other internet services companies), multiple of your assertions here are false or absurd.
Child porn detection and enforcement literally does not work that way. I'm not sure how you even think that would work. How do you think the algorithm gets trained? Humans feed data into it. All the major social media companies (Facebook, etc) have paid human moderators that have to screen flagged content in many cases to determine whether it is illegal and then escalate to the relevant staff or authorities, and in some cases this is a legal requirement.
The GDPR one is especially ridiculous. Why would you be required to delete a user's data the moment you suspend their account? That's utterly absurd, it completely eliminates the user's recourse in the event of an error. No reasonable human being would interpret the laws that way and the relevant regulators (yes, GDPR is enforced by humans) would never require you to do that.
Google already has measures to deal with malware on machines, typically temporary or permanent bans of the hardware and/or IP address. They don't have to permanently delete your gmail account to lock out Chrome on a single malwared PC. If you've ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network you've probably seen Google Search throw up the 'automated traffic' warning and block you for a bit.
Being able to review conduct of an account (i.e. browse logs) is not "blanket access to your account" and neither is being able to examine the details on why the account was banned and reverse them. The account owner could also authorize the employee to access their data - any time you talk to a Customer Service representative for a company, you're doing this.
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> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
That's absolutely not how GDPR works.
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
I do not think GDPR works like that. You can absolutely store information pertaining to "why" questions because that is still a service they will be providing. Also, whenever they restore some's service they give data back. So they have obviously not deleted the data.
This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replace, but just a bother to inform some people and update account details.
Start the process of getting out right now.
Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product.
I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995.
[1] http://www.iki.fi/
> Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer
Google now sells domains, as well as email through GSuite.
I use them a lot on new projects, because I find them so insanely convenient, but I can't help shake the feeling that now I'm both the product and a paying customer.
So I'd probably nuance your words with: "select a provider whose livelihood depends on your custom".
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If you get your own domain, get one on a well-known TLD (e.g. .com, .org or your own country code). If you get a gTLD that's not well-known, there are some endpoints that will block you because your email is "not valid".
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I can happily second the Fastmail recommendation. I self-hosted mail for 17 years and there's nothing I want that they don't do.
I've had an email on a personal domain for years.
But I still use my old gmail for one thing: Point of contact for the my domain registrar. Do you have any suggestions for how I can solve this?
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Thank you. I have been on the fence for a bit. But I will initiate project leave Gmail and Gdrive now. It will take me a year, but the deliveries and the final goal is clear.
Any thoughts on getting your own domain and then still using gmail for receive email on that domain?
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That fi TLD and "1995" jolted a name out of the old memory unit: anon @penet.fi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
I pay Apple for my email address, although I’d prefer to run email off my own domain.
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Yes, the good old Don't Be Evil days. I've asked so many people if they can remember Google's old slogan. Nobody does.
Their new slogan is hilarious. It's not even one slogan, it's three:
* Respect the user
* Respect the opportunity
* Respect each other
The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features.
The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn't it the baseline expectation? It's somewhere on the level of "Don't steal your colleague's belongings" as far as slogans go.
But it's the second one that is absolutely the best, and by that, I mean the worst. Orwell would've had a lot to say about it. The thing is, it has absolutely no meaning in the English language. What's next? Say hi to agility? Don't offend capital gains? Console excellence?
Of course, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing has a mafia vibe, as Google's slogans and culture are drifting towards loyalty rather than standing up for what's right.
--------
If you want to have more fun, look at Google's Community Guidelines[1]
Compare to The Mafia Code:
* Be loyal to members of the organization. Do not interfere with each other's interest. Do not be an informer.
--[Google: Treat our data with care. Don't disseminate NTK information.]
* Be rational. Be a member of the team. Don't engage in battle if you can't win.
--[Google: follow Three Values, in particular: Respect the opportunity.]
* Be a man of honor. Respect womanhood and your elders. Don't rock the boat.
--[Google: Do your part to keep Google a safe, productive, and inclusive environment for everyone.]
* Be a stand-up guy. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.
--[Google: Discussions that make other Googlers feel like they don't belong have no place here.]
* Have class. Be independent. Know your way around the world.
--[Google: You are responsible for your words and your reach.]
[1]https://about.google/community-guidelines/
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Don't Be Evil is so stupid. It's like Disneyworld having the slogan "we won't kill your kids".
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I moved away from google a few years ago after putting it off for years because it sounded like effort. It turned out to be rather straightforward.
I still have my google accounts, I just don’t use them (except YouTube unfortunately). My gmail still forwards to my new address, but I mostly just get emails where people got their own addresses wrong nowadays.
What I did was: I registered a domain name from a company that i don’t use for anything else besides domain names (incidentally a local registrar who I trust and can call on the phone). I then set up a new email address (I use fastmail) using that domain name. Then I forwarded all my old emails to this new address.
If someone emailed my old address, I would always reply from my new one, which slowly updated peoples address books. If I got newsletters, I would either unsubscribe and resubscribe from my new one or just unsubscribe. I did that very slowly and it took a year or so before I stopped getting any forwarded, but there’s no rush. Don’t think “oh I have to update everything at once”. Similarly, I updated services that I still use that used the old email to log in on a case by case basis as I used them.
You can ditch google and it’s not as hard as it sounds!
Thanks for sharing your "phased transition" strategy.
Things aren't all-or-nothing, and taking this sort of approach can definitely help with making such a non-trivial change.
This is why I use one of the new, privacy-focused email providers instead. It feels like the sweet spot between starting my own server (headache, dropped messages) and being one of a billion Gmail/Outlook users (no-one cares if I don't get email)
The best thing is using your own domain, then you can change your providers whenever you need to.
I started switching to ProtonMail for this exact reason. It’s not that I’m doing anything that would draw a purposeful or legitimate ban, but they’re so damn capricious that I fear getting my account locked because of a bug and not being able to undo it.
I switched to a combination of ProtonMail AND using a private domain in my email address AND regularly syncing entire mailbox with my desktop client (Thunderbird). This way, if ProtonMail gives me grief, I just set up a new email account with a different provider, point domain entries to it, import my mailbox in there, and can continue as if nothing happened.
Next don’t-be-evil step: Having a Protonmail account proves that you have something to hide! Ban!
I've been considering getting a new email address on a personal domain so it can be more portable and I can change providers.
Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
Do not host your own email unless you really, really want to do that for learning purposes or something similar.
You can use fastmail, or if you don't want to lose Gmail's UI you can use GSuite which lets you use a personal domain name.
Plenty of people use fastmail and seemed to be happy. If you're OK with its price, I think that's a sweet spot.
It's absolutely possible to host your own e-mail server on VPS. You'll receive mail without issues. But sending mail might cause issues, so unless you're OK with some delivery problems and spending some time to investigate, I don't suggest going that route.
Hosting your email on NAS is problematic. You need to have static IP address with PTR record and most home providers won't offer those services for reasonable price.
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I have done exactly this with Fastmail and my own domain, and the experience was wonderful, as in "why didn't I do this years ago".
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I've self-hosted with a hand-rolled postfix+dovecot, and later with Mailcow's dockerised mailserver (FOSS, good management and webmail UI, strongly recommend).
More recently though I moved my personal domain to Microsoft Exchange Online - it's a lot less flexible than Mailcow (per-head licensing, but there's + addressing and catch-alls now) but I don't have any of the deliverability/gmail-spam-folder issues I used to have.
Exchange P1 Online [2] is roughly the same for my single-user as my old DO droplet cost per month
(edit: side-bonus you get an Azure AD tenant for your domain which is handy for SSO/IdP things)
[1]: https://mailcow.email/
[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...
Yes, I looked around now for a provider supporting custom domains so I don't need to change address just because I change provider and came up with a few popular ones: Fastmail, Protonmail, Runbox. Note that Protonmail is "special" about their IMAP/POP3 support, only supporting select clients and then via a particular helper application.
It's not only this issue with Google being like a wall when things happen, but also that I dislike their semi-AI based interface. While I like their good spam filter, there's a lot of other stuff going on there, and that without any inbox rules that I have set up.
> Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS?
I'm happy with Namecheap as my registrar and Mailbox.org for mail services, and have been for years (my Gmail account still exists and forwards the rare message it receives to the other one).
Mailbox.org offers ordinary IMAP and SMTP access + DKIM signing for your domain. Hosted in Germany. Prices vary, I pay about €2/month for several GB I think.
Their webmail interface is bad, but then again, I've never seen one that isn't. And I've never used it after logging in for the first time anyway.
> Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it for something as critical as email. It's not that the actual hosting is hard, it's that more and more of the big providers are refusing to handle email messages from certain networks.
I am very happy with this https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-checks/
It is a docker based email server setup very well done.
I use Fastmail with a personal domain name.
I use Zoho with my own domains. Haven't had any issues so far.
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I just recently setup Zoho and seem to be working fine so far. Their web mail interface is decent but I don’t use it much.
Hosting your own email is pretty easy to get started, but without continuous work you will have problems getting good deliverability, and balancing blocking almost all spam without filtering out wanted email is tricky too
mailbox.org from me as well. I compared them with fastmail and they don't upsell on the personal domain and let you pay as you use storage.
Both have unpleasant web accessibility experience, but it is not consideration for many.
Take a look at migadu.com
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I switched from gsuite to protonmail, but I kinda wish I had checked out fastmail
> It was a different Google back then.
No it has always been the same company, and we tried to tell you.
> Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google
For me it's google photos. While there are lot of great gmail alternatives these days there's still nothing like google photos unfortunately, is there?
I have my own Nextcloud instance, and the iOS Nextcloud app automatically saves new pics from my phone to the server. But that means that you have to manage your own server, so it's not everyone's cup of tea.[1]
If you are looking for a managed solution, I suggest one of those that you pay for (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) since usually, paid services have at least some form of customer service and something like OP's story is less likely to happen.
[1] Also, the cloud provider where I rent the server might decide to block my account for whatever reason. To minimise the risk, I'm planning to store daily server backups on a different cloud provider.
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iCloud.
As someone in a similar spot with a GMail account I've been using since they were invite-only, I've started using Google Takeout to back up an archive of all my data from Google's services a few times a year.
It's not perfect, and I'm thinking more and more about moving to a paid service, but this at least gives me some peace of mind that if one day I run afoul of Google's AI bouncers, I won't lose a decade of info overnight.
After thinking about it a bit, I don't see things that way. Gmail is not the problem as far as I'm concerned. Nor Chrome, etc. The problem from my pov is that the only alternative to Apple phones are Androids, and Android is biased towards the whole Google ecosystem. That's where the monopolistic feeling comes from for me, and if I was in charge of antitrust efforts, Android is what I would want to force them to spin off. Not sure with or without Google Maps, because that's the other thing that I really need and don't feel like there is a substitute.
I've been making the switch (slowly) over the past year. Had a gmail from the early days, when it was invite only. Now moving to a combo of protonmail + custom domain, and I couldn't be happier.
Make sure you don’t use any of the other services: don’t post to YouTube from that account, don’t share Google Docs, files etc.
What I’ve been slowly doing over the years is proxying all accounts behind addresses at my domain (that then forward to my gmail, natch).
So at least I could redirect my accounts to a new address if worst happens.
I’ve been trying to switch off gmail for a while but spam filtering is really hard for me.
Pay $25/mo for GSuite enterprise if your email matters to you.
Those can get shut down in exactly the same manner.
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Using email at a domain that you own (and thus makes you provider independent) is table stakes for adulting online.
What's the best way to back up your data? Google Takeout? Is that easily ingestible into other email programs?
If you intend to keep using Google products, then more or less yeah, periodically. A better way is to start using Fastmail (for example) and have them import everything. Then stop using gmail.
I've used this project, but it's been a while: https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup . It's a CLI app, though, so it's maybe not the best solution for non-technical end-users.
Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give them the password and they'll do it for you. Not the best solution in terms of security but might be ok if you're getting rid of your account anyway.
As someone who recently did this, you can link a Fastmail account to your existing Gmail account, and it will load in any email data you have into Fastmail. I think from there you can delete your google account provided you have Fastmail all setup properly. It took maybe 2 minutes and was part of the guided setup Fastmail did for me.
It's better to use Takeout than IMAP export if you're one of the people who, for whatever reason, have Google rewriting URLs in your IMAP messages (having Advanced Protection enabled is one such trigger, I learned).
It gives you all of your mail in mbox format, which is a common format.
Google was never nice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460094
Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue.
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.
I'd bet Amazon has more retail customers trying to get disputes resolved, than Google has business customers attempting to do the same, yet Amazon manages to get a human on the other end of the line. And I'd bet that Amazon's disputes have far less monetary value per incident. Maybe apples to oranges, but it's impressive from a customer service perspective.
Amazon has tremendous numbers of contractors and employees who handle customer issues, seller issues, and partner issues.
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.
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Microsoft and IBM are also companies with a lot more humans available. I have solved lots of things with phonecalls be business or as a customer. You need to be really big to get humans on Google side.
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Yeah I have been pleasantly surprised with how good Amazon's customer support is. In contrast I've had a Google wifi and home device stop working on me, and it was nearly impossible to get in touch with a customer support rep from Google. At this point, I refuse to purchase Google device because I don't know what to do if I have a problem with it.
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The fact that someone else might be worse says nothing about this issue.
There is no excuse for the laziness/ambiguity surrounding bans like this. I have witnessed, in 1 degree of separation, 3 separate Facebook business account bans in the last 12 months alone - the only reason cited is "you violated our community policy" with a link to the entire community policy and 0 clarification before or after requesting review.
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.
FB is the worst when it comes to this.
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.
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Is there any context on what attempts have been made by this developer to reach Google and what the results have been? The tweet provides very little context other than the fact that it's been 3 weeks. What paths did they take to contact Google? Did they receive any answers?
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I remember someone had a post here a couple years back:
- 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.
> 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.
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).
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What I don't understand is why they lock you out of your data when they ban you. For IRL evictions, they'll give you notice to start moving your belongings or, worst-case, dump them on the curb. Sucks, but you still ostensibly have access to them. If Google bans you, they should provide avenues to permanently move data out of their services. Not providing this is tantamount to theft, since I sincerely doubt that the data is straight-up thrown out; it's still used for and tangled up in their ad and machine learning algos.
> 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.
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.
Do you mean google fiber? I've called fiber before I had an account there to ask some questions and I had 0 problems talking to a human immediately and they answered all my questions.
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At this point I'd be more than willing to pay a monthly for Google services if it meant I knew I'd get prompt support if something went wrong. I've looked into getting a GSuite account but from my reading like there are some incompatibilities with services that I use on the free tier.
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.
There's an assumption here that Google would behave differently for paid consumer accounts which I do not think is justified/safe.
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Checkout Google one: https://one.google.com/about which is more of a personal plan but come with support.
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This is called Google One. I pay for it.
I'm actually surprised there isn't more legal action taken. Not this specific case, but in advertising there's quite some damage for automated bans with unreasonable time to resolve the issue.
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.
> there's the element of not having a choice while ending up with a significant disadvantage once these mechanisms falsely trigger.
Some people would call that racketeering.
For some of these cases you could sue them in small claims or pursue CFPB or GDPR claims depending on jurisdiction. I’ve had good luck with CFPB.
People might be afraid of lawyers but they aren’t involved in these processes.
I mostly agree with you, but I think you might be overestimating the benefit of simply having humans on the other end. There is a lot more to building "reasonable" processes than just adding humans to the mix, those people have to be given some power to make exceptions but not too much or it defeats the point of the original rules, and you will still have honest mistakes and a few bad actors on the dispute resolution teams. Doing that at scale is always going to be hard.
It's hard for some people but, isn't this a field of expertise with decades of development? Aren't there thousands of people who have years of experience managing exactly such a process?
The problem isn't that it's hard, but that it's a cost center instead of a profit center.
At least with a human you have a way to make your case or ask to speak to a manager. Of course they could deny you, but in my experience it is rare to be denied if you persist in politely asking.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350968
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.
> Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue.
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.
There needs to be a raft of community managers @ Google handling these sort of failures, including some senior ones to deal with escalations of this kind. They need this to counter the phalanx of people who enjoy spending their time trashing google. Just check reddit's ProjectFi or Stadia subgroups to see people who've made it their life's work to downvote every thread and response in those forums and spew vitriol at every opportunity.
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.
I am not trying to write a post for ABoringDystopia, but I would wager that the vast majority of folks with banned accounts that actually want them back would just pay, either for the review or just to get unblocked.
Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
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> They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.
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")
Coasting at a rate of 20% Y/Y growth on $10^12.
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.
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>until they piss off someone too big to not give up without a legal/public fight
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?
It's been what 10 years of this, already? Even with Facebook gobbling up ad space and Apple gobbling up mobile? How long can a coaster coast?
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It's a crazy situation. There should be regulation requiring reasonable dispute processes.
I'm curious if Google were to provide a payed service for their web services, which includes human support, how many people would pay for that?
... Probably as many as currently pay for Youtube Premium and then come to HN and complain about ads on Youtube :)
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/alex-kearns-robinhood-trade...
> They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.
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.
“Don’t attribute to greed.” You’re not my dad, you can’t tell me what to do
> 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.
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.
There's no reason they can't put a reasonable support ticket price in place. Hell - MS has been doing it for ages.
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.
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> There's no reason to waste a human's time on that.
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.
The problem is no different than their content moderation problem, and I'd point out to you that they do mostly solve that, and mostly through masses of human contractors.
The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.
Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.
I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.
There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn't there for the former, but there's plenty of it for the latter.
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I'm the first one to jump onto the Google-hating train, but Google is literally throwing engineers at us for free so ours are ready to migrate large workloads off from our platform onto GCP.
It also helps that we're one of the largest telcos.
Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.
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GCP is the only Google service where I regularly, easily, got humans to take up my problem.
Once including waking up people in Mountain View on weekend.
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Human support for Google Cloud has been very good, even on a small account.
Now if only they could figure it out for consumer accounts... Those are customers as well and deserve to be treated as such.
i suspect that google's cloud infrastructure's first customer is google themselves, and they don't care that nobody else is buying it.
Same here. We're only in the high six figures in annual spend, but we wanted to do some low-level multi-cloud replication of our data and database read replicas, maybe looking toward compute multi-cloud in the future. Google Cloud entered and exited the discussion within a day.
We do disaster recovery and analysis all the time. And, not just dumb-brain "well, this is what their policies say happens", but real-world "this is what we're reading around social media, use-cases, blog posts, etc". This Terraria situation has already made the rounds in our slack DR channels.
We pulled off G-Suite about a year ago due to their stance on privacy, and concerns that the corporate firewall of G-Suite may not be as strong as they want you to believe, intentionally or not. Account lockout issues are also, obviously, a secondary concern.
Google Enterprise/Workspace/Cloud/etc needs to be separated from Google. At this point, I am blown away that their investors haven't begun to demand it. I understand that they may look at it as a new revenue growth area for the whole company, but frankly, this is flat-out wrong. These conversations are happening in nearly every technology-oriented enterprise. Google cannot be trusted, not by consumers, not be enterprises. Google proper is a cultural liability to the actually strong products their enterprise divisions put out.
Google Cloud actually has pretty good and reachable support including by phone in case you have login issues.
It has pretty good support _today_. Who knows what will change with Google tomorrow given its track record? Amazon otoh has been exactly consistent in its customer support starting from amazon.com till AWS.
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How much money should I waste into Google Cloud to have good support for my Google account ?
Not for everyone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609
From the comments:
> Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-moderation bot our entire project was shut down immediately
What if my Google Cloud account gets nuked because of something not related to it? Can I still contact the Cloud support to get my account back open again?
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I also got locked out of my google account - not because of a violation (automated flag or otherwise) but because google decided my login location was too different. I know my password and have access to my recovery email but I am put into and endless login loop of ‘unable to verify’. I contacted support which had me fill out a form and that was maybe 6 months ago. I’ve moved on now but I’ll never use a google product seriously ever again.
I'm always afraid this will happen when I use a VPN or TOR. The internet in general is pretty hostile to any sort of privacy protecting measures, which they justify by saying your activity looks "suspicious". I've already been locked out of my Facebook account once because I forgot to turn my VPN off.
The last time I used TOR it was almost impossible to do anything on the internet. Every Google search was met with "We detected you are a bot" and every website interaction was blocked by never-ending CAPTCHAs.
My ISP has literally a single public IP address they use for all subscribers. And, I have third-party cookies disabled in my browsers because they are almost never used for something legitimately good. Because of these two things, I'm constantly being punished with captchas, and sometimes downright bans ("your IP isn't good enough to post on this forum"), in places where I least expect. Yes, looking at you, Google and Cloudflare.
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Unfortunately, enabling TOR basically makes your traffic "malicious-shaped" these days. One of the largest users of privacy services are users (bot or human) who don't want their traffic easily traced because they're doing something malicious.
It's definitely not the only use case for such services, but if a service provider sees that 90% of traffic shaped a certain way is malicious traffic, it's understandable they will take steps to mitigate that traffic.
ETA: I'm not happy about it because I believe in the value of anonymity, but it is what it is. Here's a Cloudflare blog post talking about the challenges handling Tor traffic, which to their estimate is (a) 94% malicious "per se," so any tooling you do that tries to estimate intent based on origin IP address is gummed up by the malicious signal emanating from the same Tor exit node as your legit traffic and (b) anonymized by design, therefore any attempts you might make to build a reptutation signal for a given client are intended to be thwarted. The result is that a Tor user's traffic looks reputationless to a service like Cloudflare, and you can't just assume reputationless signal is benign (so, CAPTACHAs and "bot-like behavior suspected" walls).
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/
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Google needs a read only account mode that can be used instead of disabling/deleting accounts. Even if a user violated ToS, its pretty harmless to just let them export data which at least would mitigate the worse parts of this & free up energy from data recovery to time spend getting the account unlocked.
I mean what's the harm if a bot has a read only account? Or an account than can send 1 email per hour - just enough you could tell your contacts that you have to migrate to another provider. Even if the machine is AI driven - the actions taken could be more nuanced in order to stop the ToS violation but provide limited account functionality.
Or if you could only email those who have emailed you already, or replied to you
I just wish that regulation would step in and make behavior like this illegal for the corporate giants. It is definitely possible to limit the power of the TOS, and it's already done in some cases in Europe (certain common TOS clauses are just void and do nothing).
One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination.
But right now, we're in the middle ages with this. "You're in jail, no we won't tell you why, no, there is nobody you can ask why and no process to revert it".
I'm hoping they don't and Google just dies.
Please don't, the only thing worse than no response is a byzantine system that makes you think there's a path and becomes the biggest time sinkhole of your life.
Just vote with your feet and move out of their services, life on the outside is just fine.
You can't just hand wave it away like that. Having regulation on a resolution process for account recovery is absolutely needed. You can't just tell people to move away from Google where their entire digital life is on it. At the very least, it should restrict your account to a read-only state and make it possible to download your data.
[flagged]
Regulation != socialism
Welfare != socialism
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> One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination
In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. If you want to get in the details ( action X on date Y violates ToS section Z), that might be pretty useful to bots and spam accounts ( know which actions get caught and what to avoid), which are probably the vast majority of what is getting banned.
> In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation.
When the ToS are 15 pages long this is about as useful as hearing "You're being arrested for breaking the law" when you're in the back of a cop car. Doesn't really narrow it down and provides you no way of actually defending yourself.
I agree that being too specific can help bots but the current way of handling these things is obviously flawed.
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It needs to be enough information so that it can be either remedied (if the violation is real) or disputed (if it isn't).
I agree that currently, "you violated the ToS" is legally enough reason and enough information. I don't think it should be.
I also don't think we want the fight against bots and spam to justify taking inscrutable actions against real customers.
Kafka approves.
We only hear the celebs that got their accounts suspended. Imagine how many others are stuck and have nowhere to talk to.
A totally fair point but in this case I wouldn't consider "famous person" being the shocking part of this. The shocking part, as others in the thread have pointed out, is that this is a business partner of Google's.
I'd easily pay for a personal gmail account which has all the privacy protections on and also 24/7 access to customer support via chat and phone. Sadly most of that is only provided for business accounts.
Is there a good reason to keep using gmail? I've only got good things to say about Fastmail - which is paid, reliable, faster than gmail and private. And they're reinvesting some of their revenue into making better standards for email.
I haven't needed to contact support, but I think they have a manned tech support email address too.
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Google one gives you support it says. I had an issue with gpay once and the support chat was available and seemingly working.
But when your account is suspended that doesn't really help you eh
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The customer LTV required to justify providing live support for a wide-market B2C product is non-trivial.
But if you actually care that much, why not just pay for Google Workspace? The cheapest tier is $6 a month and gets you access to more or less what you want. (n.b.: I'm not making any representations about the quality of the support that you'd receive, only that it's available. I don't work at Google.)
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Don't you get that with Google One? Never tried the support, but it says there's chat (2-3mn response time) and email support (24hrs or less)
I pay $6/month for a single user workspace to get that peace of mind. I don't understand why someone would entrust their digital live to a free service.
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If that’s what you want, I recommend fastmail.
For storage, I’ve successfully reached human tech support at synology and backblaze.
I’d love my inexplicably banned ebay account back, or at least have an explanation rather than “there is no appealing this ban”.
purge intensifies
Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent? I read that Google automates the flagging and disabling of accounts but given how many people have their livelihood linked to these accounts, Google must have done something. It makes me scared how deep I have dived into the Google ecosystem. Time and time again I think about transitioning to someplace else but don’t know how to. It seems too daunting.
Google only takes calls for ad sales and gsuite support as far as I know. Beyond that shaming them on social media is the only way to get their attention. I used to work for a top five web site and even we couldn’t get ahold of anyone - one day Google decided to start crawling us at a rate of 120k rps and it was killing the site by pulling ancient content that was 100% cache miss. No way for us to get in touch with Google officially, our billionaire CEO hadn’t traded numbers with their billionaire CEO so no help there, one of the developers had a college buddy that landed at Google and that guy was able to use some sort of internal mailing list to get them to drop the crawl rate down to 20k rps.
(Microsoft is just as bad - their sales people can’t be bothered to talk to anyone who isn’t a partner, but that worked out great for me, I wasn’t really feeling azure and it made a great excuse to not consider them. One of their sales people did leave me a VM three or four months later but we had already chosen another vendor by then).
Spend ~$5 of Google Adwords, and chances are you'll have someone calling you regularly trying to talk you into using it more - at least that's my experience. In the past it's been a pain to get them to stop bothering me.
If I have an issue with Google, I might try starting an adwords campaign and ask to speak to supervisors when their sales calls comes through, and see if there's an in along the way of "we would spend more, but you see you've done X that needs to be resolved first".
My other approach - not tried it on Google, but it worked very well on DHL and Uber so far - is to sign up for LinkedIn's premium subscription and use that to Inmail a bunch of VPs/SVPs and set out my grievance. My experience so far is that you need to find someone high enough up to be under the illusion - from lack of customer contact - that everything is well. They often seem to be shocked to hear that customers hit the wall, and get approached rarely enough that it's a novelty for them to help out (as such, it'll probably stop working if everyone starts doing this...)
With DHL in particular I got an SVP to get his assistant to light a fire under the customer service operation by telling them said SVP wanted to be kept up to date on how it went, and Cc'ing said SVP and me on the e-mails. A package they "could do nothing about" because it was supposedly on a boat back to the US, magically appeared in my office one business day later after it was located in a depot 5 minutes from my office (I wish I could say that was the first time DHL has told me a package was somewhere completely different to where it actually was)
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In the past I had written about my experiences with crawling[1], from accidentally getting banned by Slashdot as a teenager doing linguistic analysis to accidentally DoS'ing a major website to being threatened with lawsuits.
The latter parts of the story were when I was part of Common Crawl, a public good dataset that has seen a great deal of use. During my tenure there I crawled over 2.5 petabytes and 35 billion webpages mostly by myself.
I'd always felt guilty of a specific case as our crawler hit a big name web company (top N web company) with up to 3000 requests per second* and they sent a lovely note that began with how much they loved the dataset but ended with "please stop thrashing our cache or we'll need to ban your crawler". It was difficult to properly fix due to limited engineering resources and as they represented many tens / hundreds of thousands of domains, with some of the domains essentially proxying requests back to them.
Knowing Google hammered you at 120k requests per second down to _only_ 20k per second has assuaged some portion of that guilt.
[1]: https://state.smerity.com/smerity/state/01EAN3YGGXN93GFRM8XW...
* Up to 3000 requests per second as it'd spike once every half hour or hour when parallelizing across a new set of URL seeds but would then decrease, with the crawl not active for all the month
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I think returning http status code 429 (=too many requests) or 5xx should work. Google claims to respect it. And it's not like they have choice really: the server is refusing to provide the content. Additionally, serving such an error should be as cheap or cheaper than a cache hit.
Google One comes with phone support
At least stop signing up for new things so you don't make the problem worse.
It is a risk. I had a problem with my Google account, and while I was able to find a human to email about it, they were completely unable to help. It was literally "you have to do the thing, even though it makes no sense, because that's what our algorithm requires" (in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to prove that I owned it, so they could cancel the account associated with that domain. Literally makes no sense, but it was the only way their process could work). That was my "ruh-oh" moment when I realised their products are basically unsupported and therefore shouldn't be used in production.
> in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to prove that I owned it
What happens if the domain-name is repurchased by someone else or claimed by Sedo, etc?
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A few comments before, I've seen someone recommending to sign up for an (advanced!) (Microsoft's) LinkedIn account to solve an issue like this one. Then I guess to solve a problem with LinkedIn you'll have to sign up for a Twitter account, and so on and so forth..?
A few months ago I've seen a Googler pissed on Twitter about how their spouses GMail account got suspended and he got completely stonewalled internally as well.
It seems that even Googlers themselves cannot get any human contact for account support.
(Sadly I can't find that Twitter thread anymore.)
EDIT: Found it - https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981
> EDIT: Found it - https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981
From recent tweets, it seems he's now leaving Google, and is busy retweeting stuff about people who have been fired and/or are suing Google. Wonder if him leaving has anything to do with that incident and whether it was ever resolved.
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How do you manage to get totally locked out of your account though: if I have backup codes, a backup email address, the backup code for my 2FA app... surely I am protected from this, right? Assuming my account doesn't get hacked and turned into a spambot.
I am sitting here thinking of what would happen if my Gmail account got blocked. The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
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Nope. My Adsense account was banned almost 9 years ago. I followed their appeals process, gave all the information required, and received automated responses every time. I repeatedly appealed over the last 9 years, receiving the automated rejections every time, until finally a few weeks ago for some reason they approved the appeal and my account was reinstated :shrugs:
The system works! Just takes about a decade.
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So a happy ending!
No, this is a problem inherent to the business model Google/Facebook run.
Stating a truism - to make a billion dollars, you either have to get $10 from 100M sales, $10k from 100k sales or $10M from 100 sales. Although each option leads to the same revenue, there are major implications as for the amount of support and attention you can spend on each customer.
Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
> Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
That isn't necessary though - other companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP also have tens of millions - to billions - of customers all with their own support requirements: the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human.
Microsoft charges $500 for a single business-class support ticket with ~8 hour return time[1] - and you get the money back if the ticket was not a PEBCAK issue. If you're a company that depends on Azure or Visual Studio or Windows Server then keeping $500 around just makes sense.
I just don't understand why Google and other companies that deal with long-tail customers don't provide this as an option.
[1] In practice, if you have an Enterprise support contract, the effective cost is much lower AND you get a much quicker response time - but there's more paperwork involved.
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These are literally some of the most profitable companies in the world. Are you honestly saying they would cease to be profitable if they hired a few hundred people to staff a customer service team?
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Well, TBH, it's really "$10 from 100M sales + $0 from O(7 billion) sales."
Disabling google accounts is whats stopping me from using GCP fully. what if the credit card got declined on GCP and the google bots decide to ban me from the whole eco system.
When I was buying domain I immediately blacklisted Google Domains. I was scared about tripping something and getting Gmail account banned.
(yes, loss from not handling a single .com domain is minuscule for Google - but I wonder how common is to run away from any Google service due to risk to entire account)
I usually keep a separate email for these critical things. That is why I have 4 GMail accounts.
You don't have to move everything, just bits (like how you diversify stocks or singe points of failure). Try move away from Chrome, or swap Drive for Dropbox.
Moving an email is admitably much harder, but after five years I've managed to do all the major ones.
> Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent?
File for a C&D and then, if that does not help, a court-issued injunction order ("Abmahnung" followed by "Antrag auf Erlass einer einstweiligen Verfügung"), if you're German. This works somewhat reasonable for Twitter, Facebook and Google.
I’m an Indian staying in US, but probably not for long. Given how many of us are there, I don’t think Google India would have the capacity or care to hear our pleas. The only way to force them to build something useful is through government interference but I hardly feel that Indian government would do so.
You would need legal standing. A free account isn't your property.
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After filling out a fairly lengthy questionnaire, google mentions they will have someone review the issue and get back with you. I am on year 2 of waiting for a return call.
Man, some of those replies on Twitter are unreasonably harsh to this guy. Being a game developer seems like a really thankless task. Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?
> Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?
Probably because they are the biggest group out there. Games are now bigger than movies, after all. The bigger the group, the more likely it is to contain a well-populated minority of viciously hateful people, a bit like "the bigger the country, the more likely it is that it will contain a sizeable group of hardcore nazis".
There's that, but also the fact that to these people games are "just games". Maybe the HN crowd is accustomed to dealing with professionals and business clients that use their software, so it looks jarring to see responses like in that Twitter thread.
As a developer providing professional software, you're reasonably entitled to some respect from your customers, since your relationship is likely work related. But if you're making games, your product is eating up peoples' very valuable free time. If you mess that up for them, then you shouldn't be surprised to get a torrent of hate mail.
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I was pretty taken aback by that, they go way further than disappointing about not having the game on their platform of choice, to just outright yelling at the developer for somehow this being their fault?
Most of those people are children, or adult-children. Anyone else just doesn't care.
I think this is just a case of very vocal minority.
Who reasonable is exited about Stadia anyways? I don't think it will last till next year without being slashed by google.
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From a European perspective, EU regulation 2019/1150 covers protections for business users of online intermediation platforms [1].
Article 4 sets out a range of protections for business users, including a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable grounds for that decision"
This would seem to point towards a gradual start of the change in this way, although it will be interesting to see if anyone from Europe is ever able to use this against Google and others successfully. On the whole, the legislation seems to be sufficient, and it will come down to the usual issues of national regulators and their willingness to aid in enforcement action.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
As long as the cost of false-positives is lower than the cost of human support staff, they will keep doing this stuff.
Millions of pages of EULA, but not a single line in there to protect the user? No right to get your data once banned? No right to appeal or even be informed about the reasons?
Just imagine if Google ran the Justice system! They would suspend peoples drivers licenses without their knowledge and then throw them in jail because of a two strike rule when they get caught driving with a suspended license.
...
The cost/loss idea is bad enough, but that person is a business partner and this situation might be the final nail on stadia's coffin.
Would be interesting if this stadia fiasco would lead to Google rethinking their customer support (ie actually start treating their users as customers).
I think Google is so used to trying projects and cancel the stuff that fails, that they are not really good to _make_ things not fail anymore.
They fail in stupid ways (like this) and then cancel Stadia and then celebrate their "failure culture".
Funny how google's attitude on false positives is the complete opposite of what it is for interviews
You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts to require human review on such decisions, but apparently one of the richer companies in the world just can’t be bothered to hire a few extra people to avoid a PR problem.
That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.
> That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.
Knowing Google's engineering culture, you're probably spot-on. Ignoring long-tail events like this one is a common failure mode of this kind of relentless metrics-driven optimization (and they should know better).
On the other hand, I'd prefer they fix this process for everyone and not just those with X twitter followers.
I'm completely uninterested in making waves on social media, but I still expect services (whether paid or free) to work as advertised considering I'm not misbehaving. If they don't want me as customer/user, then say so and I'll find another provider.
As an end user, I agree. But Google clearly doesn’t care in the slightest about the end user; if they did we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’m thinking about this from Google’s own self interest only.
> You’d think that there’d be a “this person is high profile and any automated bans will cause a stink” flag on accounts
What does high profile mean? I've heard of Leon Spinks, the boxer, but I've never heard of Andrew Spinks in my life until today. People with 5 digit Twitter follower counts are actually a dime a dozen.
Even people who were obscure can become "high profile" for a day. That's how going viral works.
Surely the creator of a video game that's sold tens of millions of copies, who also has an on-going business relationship with your company passes the bar?
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Andrew Spinks isn't famous, but Terraria is. This probably cost Google a few million dollars for botching a simple customer support case.
Some context:
> However, they were hit with a Terms of Service violation via email. They assumed it was issued accidentally, but three days later, their entire Google account was disabled without any warning or recourse.
https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/terraria-studio-re-logic-...
> They assumed it was issued accidentally
That seems like a dangerous assumption to make.
Given it's the Terraria YouTube account it has to be either stupidity or accidental, both on Google's part.
My imagination fails trying to picture a scenario where you could justify suspending that account.
Three days from initial warning to disabling their account is ridiculous though. What if the person behind that mailbox was off sick or on holiday?
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EU regulation 2019/1150 would seem to be the first real attempt I'm aware of at addressing this issue.
Article 4 covers suspension and termination, with intermediary platforms (i.e. Google, Facebook et al) "the opportunity to clarify the facts and circumstances in the framework of the internal complaint-handling process referred to in Article 11".
It also introduces a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable grounds for that decision".
It seems these automated processes fall foul of several hurdles in Article 4.
As a patriotic redblooded 'murican it really upsets me that I have to rely on the EU to police big-tech and fight for civil liberties.
Personal Anecdote Time(tm).
I have (had?) a Google Voice number that I started using for work stuff about a dozen years ago. One day 8-9 years ago, it just disappeared from my google account. Like gone.
I go to google voice settings, and it's telling me to sign up for google voice. Nothing I do can get this back - my voice number is now just anchorless, floating in the digital sea.
The crazy thing is, it still forwards to my cell number to this day. I can't change most settings for it, so I stopped handing that number out, but every once in a while I'll get an email notification of a new voicemail or text message to that number...
Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time. It doesn't matter if you host your own domain/mailer daemon, the host and/or registrar can choose to suspend your account as well. So really, there is no solution. Other than the realization that our communications channels are not ours, they are always someone else's, and we are forever at their mercy.
Yes, in practice you always have to rely on someone. Even before the internet you'd have to rely on the USPS to carry your letters.
Unless you are physically speaking to someone in person, then there is always a middleman.
Well you can always just create your own courier. If you want true free speech these days you need to build your own stack from the ground up anyway.
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the difference here though is that physically you can at least own the address, but even your digital address isn't actually yours. Phone, email, ip and whatnot are all provided by someone else and can be taken away.
Domains can be stolen, deprecated or simply restricted from your use.
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> Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time.
Not only can they, for many companies disabling accounts is the only tool in the shed. There's no digital governance platform, no user rights, no process, no punishment at all besides this final cruelest kill: only this bit flip, from enabled, to disabled, alive to not alive.
it's unbelievable tha not a single big platform seems to have any system of justice or remediation in place. it's all vast uncaring corporate monoliths as far as the eye can see, no contact I do, no follow up possible.
these entities are monsters. they treat us like trash.
This is academic/ theoretical. Having control over your email and preventing total loss of email like Terraria's author is not "difficult". Own your email domain, but pay a hosting provider for emails. Then, if that hosting provider doesn't want to host you anymore, you can switch to another provider instantly or host your own mail server (bad idea). You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain or don't pay the annual fee. The case with Google is neither of these serious issues.
> You can argue the domain registrar can take it away from you, but that doesn't happen unless you do something illegal with that domain or don't pay the annual fee.
Registrar TOSes are just as opaque as email providers, which just as many case of seemingly irrational domain seizures.
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The PGP trust graph is the ultimate fallback here. As long as your public key is out there you can even not have DNS and change your IP address and still be able to prove the identity.
Self-custody has risks too, most notably theft or loss of the private key. It's tradeoffs all the way down.
Well, considering Google announced they're shutting down all internal development on Google Stadia games, and now they're locking people out of developer accounts, guess it's safe to say that once again, Google can't be trusted to follow through with their products and need to be taken with extreme skepticism on any and all future endeavors.
I didn't think for a moment this might be successful, especially when it stumbled out of the gate, because Google is so bad at sticking with projects that don't immediately do gangbusters.
Even still, it looks like the plug is being pulled faster than I anticipated.
https://kotaku.com/google-stadia-shuts-down-internal-studios...
I found My old gmail account placed under a flagged status one day. It would not allow me to purchase anything on the play store. Turns out, it was because I used an old Google service called Google Checkout(?) or something more than a decade ago to purchase a few hundred dollars worth of clothes overseas. The clothes were purchased from an H&M equivalent, legally operating stores of course, and no payments were deferred or anything - they just simply said something about my account being associated with possible fraud and disabled all Google Wallet features suddenly many years after, citing my purchase history. Wanting to purchase a $2 game on my phone, I inquired about removing the restrictions placed on my account, but the response I received were quite haphazard and they finally stated that they would not accept anything short of physical copies of my IDs before removing any restrictions. No, fuck off.
I guess it's easier to throw out blocks and bans, placing the burden of proof on their customers rather than to have people looking into why completely innocent accounts were getting flagged in the first place. I've made my peace with it and I'm happy not spending a cent on your damn play store for the rest of my life.
As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the nature of things).
For Google, users are necessary as they are product to be sold. Next are various small customers (developers) as they help bring in more users, or user interactions to be monetized. Android, nest, even google cloud (lost $5B last year) are either ways to bring in more user interactions and/or ways to try to diversify the revenue stream slightly to try to convince Wall Street that they don't have all their eggs in one basket (which they do)
But there's a risk: every new user is a potential source of inappropriate content (basically: anything that might disturb the customers, who would complain about their ads being associated with something or other). Their volume is high (so there are lots of opportunities for bad actors) but also their volume is high (so false positives aren't a big deal). So it's natural to have an immune system that just boots out perceived risks and also natural not to do an expensive thing like trying to follow up and see if it was a mistake. There's no malice involved, any more than there is in a tiger that eats someone.
The only real defense for any individual or smaller organization is to reduce your risk envelope. 1: don't put all your eggs in a google basket, and 2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully unconnected accounts for each project.
This sounds like work, and it is, but you have to do your own backups, brush your teeth, and call your friends sometimes. That's life.
>As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the nature of things).
Airlines and ISPs usually have support you can either call or mail. I don't know how to reach anyone at Google. By anyone I mean a real human, not a markov chain.
> 2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully unconnected accounts for each project.
How can one make this advice actionable? Creating new Google accounts requires providing a phone number to which one has long-term access (as they will sometimes require you to do SMS 2FA, even with 2FA off, when logging in). Using one on a different Google account links them (and could cause multiple accounts to get nuked), and you can't use a Google Voice number.
For some things I've taken to buying "aged" Google accounts on forums when I need true non-linkability, but in general this is an unsolved problem. I'd lose several accounts simultaneously if I hit the big G's antispam, as I've had to reuse some phone numbers several times.
If you have a business you get a separate phone number for it, and potentially for each customer project. You can reuse it when the project is done, or it makes it easy to hand off the amount, assets etc to the customer.
What I do is use my gf's number (so occasionally I have to ask her for the code that shows up on her phone :-) ). I am fortunate not to use google for anything I care about, or even much at all, so this is no inconvenience for me; OTOH she not only keeps everything in google but used to work there.
Would you be willing to share your resource for 'aged' accounts? Email is in profile if you'd prefer to send a private message.
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Hey Google here is a feature: account reputation, anyone doing business with you, has that flag enabled and human reviewers will be supporting them
Google already kind of practices this feature, it's just that the "reputation" part is external:
Is the public reputation of the owner of this account high enough that the ban will make the news?
Unfortunately for Google's products- sorry, users, the machines doing the bans don't give a damn for reputation in the eyes of humans.
and pretty soon google is charging 'protection money' to all the victims of a hack.
This is the exact opposite of what Google/Apple want to do. Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thing, and a Google-human will listen only of the victim-human will yell loud enough. This is their tiering system.
On the other side though, Google cannot have 1 FTE per 1000 'clients' (paying-humans and/or product-humans). As a 'father' here wrote, you stay or you go. Or at least keep the personal stuff out ('15years of gmail' - WHY???) and leave the app-stuff within Google (or Apple for that matter).
>Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thing
This is why I think Google/Twitter/FB were not that vocal about the section 230 business. Honestly if they got brought through it would be expensive for them but they have the money and tech potential to automate any problems that arise from it which would just extends their moat from any potential competitors even more.
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100% agree. They just keep shooting themselves in the foot. Unbelievable.
The implication here is that the fix for this problem is to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone who does business with Google, as if other people aren't important enough to concern yourself about. That is 1000% the wrong approach, and exactly the sort of thinking that gets tech businesses in to this sort of mess.
The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.
> The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.
...and if you can't make it work at a given scale, don't do your business at this scale until you can. But that would be leaving money on the table now, wouldn't it? So, with no outside pressure, the companies at the top are the ones who don't care about making things work right.
I think "not treating business partners like trash" is the absolute base minimum. If they can't get that right, what hope do customers have? Feels like that needs to be solved first — particularly if it's an issue of scale — then the customer issue dealt with afterwards, if it remains an issue.
Two wrongs sometimes make a right. So 10 wrongs make 5 rights?
There is no more than 100% wrong. Saying it is 1000% wrong implies that you are arguing emotionally, not rationally.
Rationally, it doesn't matter how google reacts to their non-customers. There is no obligation to treat them well. The correct approach for non-customers is to either become a customer or to switch to another provider.
If somebody is wrong it is the non-customers who could fix the situation. Their unwillingness to change email providers is what enables google to keep on providing that bad service.
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It's like page rank but even worse?
I can see the Black Mirror episode already...
"In the case of Johnson v Esposito where the defendant is claimed to have sent an email to the plaintiff wherein this created a detrimental page rank effect due to defendant's low score..."
> anyone doing business with you
If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or something like that?
Disclaimer: Work at Google (far from this space); opinions are my own.
It's SUPPOSED TO BE pay-to-play. Google is a business. That's how businesses work. That's the entire point.
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It is unfair from a consumer standpoint, but at least it would avoid Google's self-dug grave from getting deeper.
From a B2B standpoint, it's just the name of the game. If a partner business is a strategic asset, you fast-track them. Imagine an advertising firm treating a multi-national corporation at the same (crappy) level as a small, family-owned company. Or, imagine Microsoft treating the US government and an ordinary Windows user alike. That's bonkers, and yet it's an apt description of how Google does business right now.
> If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or something like that?
You can't please everyone; here is how I would frame it.
Stadia developers and business partners receive Enterprise Support.
It's absurd that they aren't already doing something like this.
China has this for its citizens already
Noting the reputation of your clients is powerful and ethical - the Chinese government is a monopolistic violent organisation, which makes its power evil
China has rather the reverse.
Perfect time to advertise Google's Takeout Services:
https://takeout.google.com/
This service permits the export of (nearly?) all Google services data on both a scheduled and unscheduled on-demand basis.
I have my Google account configure to automatically export all service data every 2 months and upload ZIP files to MS OneDrive. This process completely bypasses me and my local computer. I just have to remember to check that the data transferred to OneDrive as expected.
The only constructive criticism I have of the Takeout Services scheduled process is that the scheduled exports are limited to a one year duration. I have to remember to reconfigure the next year's scheduled exports. Ideally I'd be permitted to set and forget, with a periodic reminder that the export is still happening and a "Good" / "Not Good" confirmation that the process ought continue.
Takeout Services won't restore function and applications, but at least a great part of my data won't be irretrievably lost.
I just learned about Takeout today. The question I still have though is, how do you import those exports back into some usable state/service?
good question, not exactly sure, need to download and look at contents... (queue Jeopardy thinking music) ...
Okay, so my account generates five 2GB zip files. I randomly picked file #4 and unzipped to inspect the contents. The structure of the zip file included the following:
* Google Photos
* Contacts
* Drive
* YouTube and YouTube Music
Interestingly, while the general structure looks okay, the content under the directories is incomplete. I'm not sure why this is. Like for example, "Contacts" has only one person's recently added Contact and only a JPG of an emoji face at that. That definitely isn't a complete data set, and makes me wonder if Takeout Services is not a cumulative back up, rather only a delta.
I downloaded a second file, to see how it was formatted. The second file also had Contacts data. It generally followed the contact groupings I have in place (ex. family, friends, medical, shopping, etc.). It had a smattering of .vcf files with profile pictures for some, but not all, people. YouTube directory had what looked to be a complete download of all videos I've ever uploaded, plus various other historical record of my YouTube activity.
Basically, it looks like recovery of a single service is only possible with a full set of recovery files (in my case, all 5 files). The content of each recovered service depends in great part on the nature of the service. There is a lot of garbage in the back up files for the unused / lightly used services. What's happening with the Contacts is a bit concerning since the the data is split between (apparently) all 5 back up files. Same thing for Drive, and maybe Mail.
Recovery of the data and service would be service by service, and dependent on the type of service, and the data provided in each service type.
The link is actually a reply to his first message... The start of his thread is: https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661841220730882
The message reads:
My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay . I had just bought LOTR 4K and can't finish it. My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
This happens again and again. I have had that happen to my twitter account. I see this regulary on HN.
My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people. Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high.
So I get why they would try to automate bans.
But after years and years of regular high profile news of false positives, one would think they eventually would change something.
I mean the guy had direct business with Google going on....
Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
> So I get why they would try to automate bans.
The problems are less the automated bans but the missing human support after you got automated banned.
I you got banned go through a reasonable fast human review process then temporary reinstated a day later and fully reinstated a view days later it would be super annoying comparable with all google services being down for a day, but no where close to the degree of damage it causes now.
And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process, even if they limit it to accounts which have a certain age and had been used from time to time (to make it much harder to abuse it).
But they are as much interested in this as they are in giving out reasons why you are banned, because if they would do you might be able to sue them for arbitrary discrimination against people who fall into some arbitrary category. Or similar.
What law makers should do is to require proper reasons to be given on service termination of any kind, without allowing an opt. out of this of any kind.
> And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process
This is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.
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Shows the bias in machine learning. One simple parameter isn't added and the whole model is bullshit.
One parameter would be: Amount of money this customer has spend on our products.
Another would be: Active time since signup.
I'm pretty sure if "money spend > 0" is actually a legitimate threshold to remove a lot of spam, although not all. "money spend > 200" might to the trick though.
Forget ML, this is just business process mapping. If it's a payer-customer's account, issues should be sent to a human. Payer-customers should have access to a secondary channel (read: alternate phone number). Payer-customers Google contact(s) should be notified & included in the process.
As a general rule of thumb, if Google is struggling with a problem, it's not a tech problem.
This can be gamed. There are so many stolen credit card numbers and/or payments using Apple/Google pre-paid cards out there, so it's not difficult to automatically build accounts with this kind of 'reputation'.
Unfortunately the best way to do KYC is (still) human intervention (and use of data).
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It won't change until they start bleeding enough users that it actually starts hurting them. In other words, when they mess up with someone "important enough" prepared to hold a serious grudge.
[EDIT: I still hold a grudge against DHL for 20 years ago listing my credit cards as "in transit to South Korea" while I was in Santa Cruz, waiting for them. If Google hits someone with an actual large following or sufficient clout in a large company, then they might just find that one day they do so to someone prepared to hold a 20 year grudge even if they eventually fix the immediate issue -- I'm not mad at DHL for the initial mistake, but for the amount of trouble and lies I had to deal with before they took it seriously]
These companies are maximizing their margins at our expense.
> "the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high"
That is true, but the amount of money these platforms are making is mind bogglingly high, too. It's just that they decided that they will use low-cost automated methods in order to maximize margins. And as long as we all accept this, it's a good decision: more money!
But it is absolutely possible to do these things right, it just costs more.
> Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high.
So hire more people. You can't argue that you can't do your work properly because your AI is not yet up to the task.
Agree. I find it odd that so many people bring up this argument, like these companies aren't sitting on piles of cash that could be invested in systemic, human-in-the-loop improvements. (Ok, maybe except Twitter)
You think humans are better at spotting abuse? Mods on Reddit demonstrate that such systems can be worse.
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There's virtually no chance that the automated system that banned him knew the account belonged to someone with whom Stadia was doing business. Even if we assume there's a list of high profile people/accounts not to automatically disable, I can't see him being on it.
I think the point is that he has direct business with Google and yet _even he_ can't get his account unbanned.
If someone in that position is screwed, an average joe is most definitely screwed.
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It's possible to have a system that marks high profile accounts that shouldn't have automated actions applied ... that it appears Google doesn't have something like this is worrying.
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He is developer of Terraria including their official Youtube has been suspended. What does a guy have to do to become a true Scotsman? Fall acy?
Couldn't care less about twitter but if you use google for email/storage/docs etc then it's a real issue.
Email is how i do business or access to other websites and i store important documents in the cloud.
Like you i've seen the ban issue many times and even worse there's no customer support to help (just automated responses). Ever since i've been migrating away from google.
Maybe the solution is to not have single platforms that are this big.
Then move off. It's not the only solution.
There are alternatives to all these: Search, Email, Game streaming, Online doc editing, Etc
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Popularity cannot be dictated, unless you're suggesting something like a regulation that would limit the total number of users a website is allowed to register.
Network effects are pretty handy, though.
And that is why "innocent until proved guilty" is such an important tenet of Western justice.
I think there is a simple solution: the "fail2ban" approach. Instead of banning, lock out users for some times (1 day). An AI system should make temporary changes to your IAM, and then report too often disabled guys to a human being
My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people
Most likely yes. And the annoying thing is that they don't take into account different languages. The AI can recognize words, but not meaning.
A while ago some Dutch person tweeted: "Die Bernie Sanders toch." Die = that, in Dutch. But the AI obviously recognized the word (to) 'die' in English along with Bernie Sanders and just instantly drops the ban hammer. And it takes days,if not weeks to get an actual human to look at your case.
It was like a couple of weeks ago when an Android app got banned from the Play Store because they supported Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitles and mentioned it in the description.
Yes and it's proof there is no such thing as "AI", just stupid pattern matching programmed by not very brillant people.
These are exactly the cases that worry me. ML / AI is not ready to be used like that. IDK if it ever will be, but they are already using it in production anyways.
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Their size insulates them from competition, which means less accountability.
We need to give them competition in the form of neutral and permissionless decentralized platforms. Such platforms should be the primary forum for commerce and communication, and privately owned permissioned platforms like Google should be small/bit players in comparison.
Right now the situation, in terms of whether the digital commons are primarily controlled by private companies or by public networks, is the opposite of what it should be.
> Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
Does bad PR actually cost Google money? I'm not sure it does.
A bunch of advertisers claimed they were going to boycott Facebook, but they didn't stick with it, and it didn't meaningfully impact FB revenue.
I think the only think that will really dent Google at this point is privacy legislation, so the only PR they're worried about it is upsetting legislators -- not upsetting game devs.
Regardless of what's happening internally, I've come to the realization that Google has become the prototypical dystopian corporation. Yes, perhaps not the only one, and perhaps I should have come to this realization just sooner, but there it is.
Taking the long view, the apparent culture of "just don't give a sh*" isn't going to work for the human race, not in the long run.
Well, frankly speaking, as an individual or a small company, you do not matter much, especially in comparison to the cost to get the problem fixed. While an organization grows larger, it has to employ lots of processes which are obviously not perfect to make things work. When it grows even larger, it has to make changes to existing processes, abolish some processes become no longer appropriate and introduce new processes over existing processes to serve their business better. Unavoidably more and more automation are introduced and eventually AI. All those changes seem to be really minor and clear and works in most of cases. Yep, I meant most cases, not all cases. Then suddenly, something really should work per everything standard and process stopped working and no one really knows why. So here comes the question, if you are the decision maker, your system works for 99.999999% maybe even 99.999999999% of your customers but not for those 1 maybe 10 customers, are you going to spend $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ to get it fixed?
>Why would they continue like that.
Sheer hubris?
> Sheer hubris?
I would actually lean towards organizational incompetence. There is just too much human brain mass at Google to say the the company as a whole is screwing up this bad because of hubris. They are just at such a high complexity level that the disorganization is causing incompetent outcomes.
Yeah. Its super scary. The idea that an algorithm decides and no legal recourse, all decided by a company that has an illegal amount of control on what is supposed to be public space.
Imagine all the public squares to be owned by some company rather than the community. Now imagine an algorithm deciding to exclude you from that. To just ban you from participating in life.
It is taking too long for Google to understand what they need to do (to own public space, you must bring all the other public stuff too, like a legal system and proper rights protection and due dilligence).
We should kill the monster, while we still can. Break them up. They'll never learn. They'll keep destroying lifes. Less than 0.1% is acceptable statistical error, right? Just pray you are never the 0.1%.
please consider indieweb.org/POSSE to not loose your digital home, when huge organisations cancel tiny ones.
The big ones just cannot care about all, even if they really wanted. They had to be both onmiscient and omnipotent.
> Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
Because they can afford it, they are a monopoly
There's another post making the rounds on HN at the moment: "Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?"
this. this is why. bots, chat or otherwise, are not competent enough to replace humans.
Actually, sometime humans aren't that great at this either, if poorly paid/motivated/trusted.
I wrote an essay about big tech's aim for a monopoly on moderation.
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
I just gave up the last time my google account died. There's really little value in it at this point if you're not publishing apps and I would never build a business on one of their platforms for this reason anyway.
Google is above needing PR. Or at least they seem to think so.
Using an AI to automate banning is not an excuse for not being able to quickly redress the problem for a multi-billion dollar company such as Google.
In fact, it should probably be illegal for companies to automatically ban any of their users/customers with AI/algorithms without being able to respond to said complaints within 24h.
Bottom line is that Google should have better customer support, because it's not like they can't afford it.
The only reason they don't have good support is because they are a monopoly and monopolies don't care about the repercussions to any individual customer unless something is illegal.
Businesses that have this happen to them should call a lawyer and sue. That ought to get a human on the line...
We keep hearing horror stories like this on HN and yet Google Cloud revenue jumps to $13.06 billion in 2020, up 47% year-over-year from $8.92 billion in 2019.
Either HN bias towards google is making sure these posts hit front page frequently (frequent enough for me to notice at least) or certain tiers of customers are treated differently.
Google Cloud at least has a contact page with a contact form.
https://cloud.google.com/contact
It may not be the right human, but it will be a human you get in touch with.
You probably want support, not a salesperson: https://cloud.google.com/support/
Basic billing support (including account suspensions etc) is available to all GCP users for free via ticket, chat or phone.
On revenue reports, the term Google Cloud includes Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite). Sorry for the confusion.
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Note that many people have Google accounts.
30 000 random bans per year without justification are entirely consistent with Google Cloud revenue in billions.
In similar way as people keep doing things despite (sometimes tiny!) potential for death, mutilation or bankruptcy.
I know everyone loves to give Microsoft a kicking but they have amazing customer support compared to Google. I've known people buy dodgy keys from eBay that haven't worked and have gone through MS support and had the key activated.
A hotmail account may not be cool anymore but at least you're likely to be able to talk to someone if you have a problem.
Google makes ~$90 billion in profit a year, they can shave off a little to open up a few call centers to deal with issues like this. It's seriously shameful at this point.
Google has a serious problem with their tightly coupled identities. They need to be forced to decouple their business so losing your YouTube account doesn't have an effect on your email service or literally any other service. Clearly they're not going to do it voluntarily, so it's time for courts to step in and start taking care of consumers.
They have to at least provide the ability to download all your data in case they ban you. Otherwise it's a hostage situation. IIRC even Facebook does that.
Banning your account is one thing and understandable that they want some kind of protection from bad actors. But on the other hand locking your data is simply theft and digital havoc. Just consider the amount of work that can get vaporised.
Imagine if your landlord would kick you out and burn your assets. At the very least they should provide access to the export tool.
The quote I'm going to remember:
"Doing business with Google is a liability"
We really need regulation for the large tech monopolies like Google.
There’s no recourse if you’re suddenly locked out of your account short of making the news or attracting attention on social media.
From which legislation? The faltering nation-states?
Always remember: if you aren't paying a company to use their services, you aren't a customer- you're the product.
Google does not care about non-paying customers individually. They have literally billions of them. They're easily replaceable and provide roughly the same amount of value each- not much, but worth lots in aggregate. If Google were to have a human review all the complaints from the non-paying customers, then they would become a small cost each rather than a small profit each.
Google's only option is to start assessing which people are dangerous to offend and then provide just those people additional customer support. I'm sure there won't be any social consequences of that though.
He mentions having purchased thousands of dollars of apps on the play store. You're not wrong about nonpaying customers being the product, it's just not relevant to this story.
The catch is that having a Google Account is free. Whether or not you made Play Store purchases isn't relevant to the people who handle accounts or (for example) automated gmail bans. And as it happens, if the gmail team decides to ban you, it cascades to the services where you spent money.
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This is insightful and it explains pretty much everything.
One thing that doesn't make sense is that there are many acounts (but a small percentage of the total) that do make google money individually. Accounts that own popular apps, for example. Accounts that control Google Cloud accounts, for another. There is absolutely no reason those accounts should be auto-banned with zero human interaction, even upon appeal.
I know the usual explanation is that they're too big to respond, but at this point I've become of the mind that if you can't handle the most basic explanation as to why lock out a user from your service, and at least one way to appeal and get a response from someone able to make a decision, then you shouldn't be allowed to scale at all. Even if it would become a bottleneck, this can't keep happening.
Simple rule: Do not use Google services for business-critical areas. Expect that you can lose access to Gmail, Google Workspace, Google One at any time without doing anything wrong.
This is the reason why I have offsite backups of my Google account as everyone has a chance of getting banned. It really feels like Russian roulette.
What method do you use? I want something automated, I don't have time to trigger google take out every so often and then manual click 100s of links and download them.
For whatever it is worth, you can setup Takeout to make a copy every X months for a year or something like that. Far cry from automated solution, but better than nothing.
I need to find Photos alternative because that's the last Google service that gets any real use.
Within Google Takeout, you can setup monthly backup to another service (I chose OneDrive with 1TB storage)
I just don’t understand Google leadership, how can you allow stuff like this to happen and just ignore it? Your brand keeps getting more and more tainted, people make jokes out of your strategy and tendency to give up like a little child...
I didn’t think I would ever say it, but I miss Eric Schmidt... Sundar has been an absolute disaster. Has Google even accomplished anything during his reign? And if they did, did they accomplish because of him OR despite him being there?
What Eric Schmidt would do to help with Google Account bans? Bans without any appeal process were a problem since foundation of Google and it's exactly how Schmidt built that company.
The only people who ever got their accounts recovered at all were celebrities or people who go HN / reddit frontpage.
> were a problem since foundation of Google
You might be right, but Google changed as a company.
They started selling phones (ok, even if your account gets locked... you can still use your phone and/or create a new account to install free apps from what was the android market)
They started to sell storage (ok, even if your account gets locked, as long as you can retrieve your contents with Takeout, you just lost access to Google Drive, and not something of lasting value)
And they've been selling music (not anymore), movies, books, games (both on Play store and Stadia)... and more hardware that ties into their services (e.g. Nest Hub is useful precisely because you can have it automatically show your pictures from Google Photos, and you can have calls with other people on Duo)
The more new commercial products they offer, the more they should be careful about account bans. At the very least you want to segment access to them (as an extreme* example: even if you uploaded child pornography on Google Drive, after you'll have paid your debt to society, you ought still be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 that you purchased on Stadia)
(* extreme both because of the heinousness of the crime, and also how trivial/unimportant a videogame is on the grand scheme of things... but I think there's an easier case to be made for someone to retain access to the game that they purchased, vs retaining access to their Google contacts, which might not even be backed by any payment for the service)
Most companies doesn't have leadership, they have administrators and bureaucrats who are paid a high salary to ensure the company doesn't change course.
Sometimes a great leader appears, but most of the time big companies are just slowly rotting away after the initial people created and grew it.
What is this meme about Sundar being bad? Any details on this .... I keep seeing this on HN.
"Google Support" was already a joke way back.
It is not a meme. You tell me what did Google achieve under Sundar in the last 6 years? The only "noteworthy" things he did is fostering a hostile environment by firing employees who spoke out against discrimination, and fighting against unionization.
Same thing happened with Schmidt too. I have heard stories of people banned from (some) Google's services and unable to get any help a decade ago. Nothing new here, unfortunately((
Just look at the revenue chart. After all that's what a company's ultimate goal is.
Abandoning Google services will not work because only a negligible number of people will actually do it. Here's what may actually work:
- Make a website documenting cases like this and strongly encourage visitors to install an ad-blocker and tell friends and family and social media followers to do the same.
- Whenever there's a high-profile case like this, ask people to install an ad-blocker and share a link to this website.
> Abandoning Google services will not work
That depends on the definition of "working". Will it change Google's practices? No, but it will ensure I don't have to endure them anymore, hence "it will work" for me just fine.
It does seem like there should be some laws around the appeal process. Right now the only hope some of these devs have is to make it to the frontpage of some newspapers/hnews etc
Which it always does for name-brand businesses since it's basically free clicks for news publications.
Unsurprising level of arrogance from Google. They are a monopoly.
I am currently reading through Google’s SRE book and there’s a similar arrogance to it. It should be read as “here’s a bunch of practices that we can get away with because we are a monopoly & our end users are mostly non-paying/our real users are companies running ads”.
So many practices in that book would get me and my entire team fired it’s hilarious.
There US government has changed our treatment of monopolies over the last 60 years such that we allow those that lower costs, so most of our current tech behemoths are able to continue... they are “free”.
> So many practices in that book would get me and my entire team fired it’s hilarious.
Such as?
Induced outages when you are under your error budget because no one should build dependencies on your system assuming higher uptime than advertised.
Imagine..
Your home internet being cut for a day because it’s been up for 365 days and that’s better than the SLO.
Your iPhone sending 1 out of 1000 emails into the ether because you shouldn’t expect better than 99.9% service.
Bank losing some of your money because too many of their transfers went well this month.
Boeing crashing a plane because they didn’t do enough this year.
Very cool stuff.
We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.
Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to politicize this issue.
Facebook is exactly the same way.
When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al., then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now, which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not spending any money on customer support.
I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm.
I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get verified, but never got a reply, and a short while later they deleted my account and all of the pictures and data with it. I'm pretty bummed out because in losing all that, I lost most of my pictures from high school. I have almost no pictures of myself or my friends for roughly a 7 year span of time.
It's my fault 100% for not backing it up, but that's not the point. I was more frustrated with the fact that, for no apparent reason, my entire account was locked and they demanded pretty intense verification to even just get it back. I haven't used Facebook or any of its platforms since, but I have to say it felt pretty gross to be handled like that.
It's pretty sus that these companies use our data for everything but have no actual express responsibility to it.
Interesting, I wonder if deliberately getting one's account flagged as a bot is the best (and quickest) way to get "deleted" from FB?
They did this to a lot of accounts back in the day and I suspected then (and now) that it was to encourage (force) people to upload high res pics of their PII information to have on file.
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Why is it "intense verification?" What is a good alternative? I lost access to my blizzard account once and I had to send in my driver's license.
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For better or for worse, that is good customer support with clear remediation procedures.
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For counterpoint, they provide products like Gmail for free at point of use because the support costs are very low (amongst other factors).
Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want?
Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad experiences see public light so people's choices are informed.
Would I prefer government enforce food safety standards, or let consumers decide what they want?
Would I prefer government enforce building safety codes, or let consumers decide what they want?
Would I completely ignore the fact that Google has sucked the air out of the room with their market dominance, so hardly any competitors are left for consumers to decide between?
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Counter-counterpoint
They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.
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Actually their support in gmail is non-existing. I work for European regional free e-mail provider (also ad supported) and we have free phone support for free users where You can talk to real support people who know product in 5 different languages. Google abuses it's dominant power by making basically impossible to get support
No!
What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them.
Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is helping the people who do participate, generally the larger firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to their constituents.
Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time, in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change.
"Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move money same day, because all of, I think seven banks started across the country in the past 6-7 years. I'm not even making this up--check for yourself.
"Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state lines.
"Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad examples, and really study the process of how these things get passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits.
What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
"Regulation" also gave us things like a rapid reduction of deaths in cars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...) and airliners (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#/media/File:Fa...), and it's hardly illegal to start a Google competitor.
"Competition" isn't a cure-all any more than "regulation" is. Google got big because they competed well with the alternatives at the time.
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"Regulation" gave us the end of Slavery.
"Regulation" gave us the end of child labour.
"Regulation" gave us a 5 day work week.
"Regulation" gave us a reasonable number of holidays (in Europe atleast).
Regulation isn't fundamentally bad. Nor does is need to be controlled by lobbyists and big business. Your points against regulation aren't against "Regulation", they're against bad regulation. The response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation, it should be to work on better regulation and a better legislation process for that regulation.
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Complaining about "regulation" in general is as insightful as complaining about code in general, and for pretty much the same reasons.
> What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
If there isn't competition, how do you plan to get it, short of policy to encourage it (aka regulation)?
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Regulation gave us Google (and chrome).
If the US and the EU hadn't threatened Microsoft with anti-trust they clearly would have embedded browser and search into their (then) dominant OS.
And then the competitors _tacitly_ collude and form an oligopoly, using their combined market power to consume small competitors and collectively reduce product quality.
The unregulated free market makes minnows of us all for the whales to feed upon.
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There's a lack of competition because Google and other giant companies have leveraged their monopolies in certain markets, like search or mobile operating systems or mobile app distribution, to crush and prevent competition in other markets.
We've seen this before, and thankfully anti-trust legislation allowed regulators to take effective measures against it when the market itself couldn't or wouldn't.
We could use a reminder that Google's competition, including Adobe, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, eBay, and Google itself, all colluded with each other[1] to limit competition and market processes in order to keep tech employee compensation below its true market value.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Why not both? They aren't mutually exclusive.
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I think your critiques of regulation are fair, but I think regulation and competition are closer together than your post suggests.
>Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate.
Ordinary people have less access to companies' internal strategy meetings and, like government, companies will choose to favor their most lucrative clients over the strategy that outsiders might find more 'fair.'
Edit: A way to think about this is that, in order to 'compete' with Apple or Google on the app store, you'd need to build an entire mobile OS. In the past we've dealt with this by classifying things of that scale as utilities and requiring Goog / Apple / AT&T to sell access to their infrastructure. It's just not realistic to expect a competitor to build up from 0.
>regulations are static [...] which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo
This is often untrue, many regulations are outsourced to various agencies which are free to adjust policy as often as they see fit. By the same token, reluctance to cannibalize business or sunk costs can hold back private industry (i.e. 'green' energy needed massive public investment even though it was clearly potentially profitable).
> "Regulation" gave us banking[...]the healthcare system
The rest of the world has, arguably, more financial and health regulation and also has no problem moving money 'instantly' or administering care. I think this is unique to the calcification of the US at the moment.
> "Regulation" gave us professionals
This one is actually very interesting! Professionalization is generally a process of a group of private actors lobbying the government for a legal monopoly. I'd argue it's a mixed bag. It's good, for instance, that engineers can be held liable (and be blocked from working) if they design unsafe things. I think, now that we can track individualized results more easily, licensure may be an outdated way of accomplishing this goal, but I'm not sure it was always bad.
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For there to be competition, there needs to be regulation to help new players enter the market.
Regulation gave same-day/instant money transfers between banks in other countries, blame US politics for the regulatory capture
> "Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
I find the overconfidence funny if not for the sheer ignorance of history. Snake oils were literally a thing. (And you're still free to buy them in a way)
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> they would be spending billions on customer support
Having supported tens of thousands employees on G Suite I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to call support. Admins know the support is poor, the agents aren't capable of providing more than basic break-fix support. Generally, calls are just to get official confirmation of an outage before notices hit the official dashboard. This isn't a service that requires a ton of support. Operate your business on a free account at your own risk.
>If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none.
I can't agree with this, there is so much competition in this field already and and it doesn't seem to make a difference. There will always be ad-supported free services with minimal support and few security/privacy guarantees, that is the entire low end of the market.
There is no competition if you want to sell phone apps. You have to sell via google store and apple store. Foregoing one of the stores drops 50% of your userbase that you can't reach with the other store, so you have to do both or leave money on the table.
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“we have no choice [...] we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al.”
I don’t use Facebook at all, and I use some Google services, but not in any way where it would affect me much if they went away tomorrow. It’s a choice to use these services, and if you use them in a way where you give them the power to hurt you, you have chosen to do so.
The problem seems to be that spam (and fraud) are increasing, especially in the domain of identity.
Companies have been answering this growth with machine learning and that machine learning appears to scale poorly. Humans also scale pretty poorly. What would regulation look like?
> We need to politicize this issue.
We have been for a while now. In usual political fashion, there are two competing solutions (regulation vs trust busting) locked in a perpetual stalemate to the advantage of the abusers. Looks like you're in the regulation camp.
Trust busting is regulation...
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> We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.
Poland is introducing a law [0] to provide a right of appeal to the courts if a person is banned by social media platforms. The law's intention is to limit the platform's ability to remove content that they claim violates their policies, but which doesn't violate Poland's laws. Depending exactly on how that law is worded and implemented, it might provide protection for people banned for non-content reasons as well, including the inscrutable "we claim you broke our rules but we refuse to tell you which rule you broke". Of course, this doesn't do anyone outside of Poland any good, but other countries might copy Poland's law.
The downside is that Poland's law is inspired by the banning of Donald Trump and other right-wingers, and being associated with that political context is going to discourage people on the left from supporting it, even though I think people on the left could benefit from it as well.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/poland-plans-t...
This is going to be tough politically to fight. If I had to guess the tactic that would be used to fight it from the other side is something of the sort:
"If we force these regulations on Facebook / Google / etc. or break them up, the stock market will go down (aka your 401k)."
Whether that's true or not for the common folk, it's a surprisingly effective tactic.
And it's definitely true for those at the top of the economic food chain, who are likely invested in these companies.
Given they tend to have more power politically, I just don't see us touching this.
Can we just break them up? If the problem is monopolistic behaviour, just end their monopoly by chopping them up into pieces. There's plenty of historical precedent.
IMHO trust busting would be lot more effective and free-market friendly than having some bureaucrats trying to write regulations for what counts as "adequate" customer service or not.
Maybe instead of regulations we could spend the money as a society on non-coercive mitigations like education about technology that would allow people to see that centralized corporate services will always end up this way.
Citizens of the free world, you actually have a choice in the matter. Don't use facebook. Never did, no one cares.
Stop relying on "gubmint" to handle your diaper changes. Think for and act by yourselves.
There are so many alternatives to email -- Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton, iCloud, etc. How can you argue with a straight face that Google has a monopoly on email?
A monopoly does not require 100% market share. It requires a majority market share and using that position against its competitors (which can be argued for, given how easily non-google emails end up in spam folders).
Clearly Email is not the point of discussion here, as no one is building a business around it. It's Android with its app ecosystem, stadia, YouTube etc. Do you not see any problem with having effectively no support for these services?
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You'd know if you tried to send a newsletter, for example, to 10k subscribers.
Just because unicycles exist as a means of locomotion doesn't mean that personal transportation isn't dominated by automobiles.
Where did the OP talk about gmail? Is it your opinion that Google is only Gmail? and that is the only service they offer?
Of all the services Google has, email is the least monopolistic, but simply because there is competition in email an open standard that many companies (including google) have tried to make less open does not change the Fact Google has market dominance in many other services
If they are so big that we need to regulate them, I would rather they either be turned into public agencies or be split up or face some other mechanism to increase competition and choice. Regulation will still be needed to some extent for data portability, but the massive centralization of power on a governmental scale should really mean that they are subject to government-level rules (the law). It doesn't make sense for example, that Twitter - bigger than almost every nation - can have a unilateral set of private laws that make our US first amendment rights virtually inaccessible because we've outsourced the town square to a private company.
Every time these stories come out I get terrified. And, angry, because just like all the carelessly built services that get breached because of poor-to-nonexistent security, this taints all SaaS companies a bit.
The focus on customer service and customer care is what sets Amazon apart from Google.
Amazon will bend over backwards to ensure that the customer is taken care of and will even eat some costs or make concessions to make sure that the customer experience is top-notch.
By comparison, Google's customer service is absent. Google has plenty of money that they could spend to hire customer support teams and boost the customer experience so that incidents like these do not happen or at least get resolved quickly, but that does not appear to be a priority for them.
> Amazon will bend over backwards to ensure that the customer is taken care of and will even eat some costs or make concessions to make sure that the customer experience is top-notch.
I think this narrative is false. Amazon will certainly refund money or eat costs but they have seemingly done little to stop scams, review bribes, or counterfeit products. Their UX is also increasingly user hostile (try cancelling Prime).
I would put them on par with WalMart, which also has a very liberal return policy.
Yeah, and it would seem that Amazon has recently destroyed one million worth of clothing from a business owner on (allegedly) spurious counterfeiting claims, and an inability to get into touch with support.
What would happen if you mailed Google a physical letter about this/faxed them something? YouTube has a mailing address and a fax number.
https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us
That seems to be what they want...
When my outlook.com account was banned by Microsoft, i wrote a letter to ms in Germany.
got a reply 4 weeks later without any solution. account was never unblocked.
since then i am not trusting Microsoft and not purchasing any of their products.
What did they say in the letter?
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That thread reads like someone put the Stadia shill bots on maximum overdrive.
Does anyone not working for Google have an opinion which isn't a variant on "Serves Google right"?
I assume that many Googlies also have that opinion, and a few others are sure that this can be fixed, because they don't recognize that this is a systemic cultural problem. There's only been one Abcedarian unit that ever understood customer service, and they (Google Fi) dropped it on the floor and beat it to death within 3 years.
Bad time for an automated response: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1358666067325968385
It's also bananas that they ban your entire google existence. If you violate some Developer TOS then ban you in the app store not in google drive, gmail, etc. That kind of collatoral damage begs for them to be broken up IMO.
Terraria is very very popular game so I wonder what is going on inside Stadia team... could it be that they are just incompetent and they do not even monitor Twitter feeds of popular game developers?
Or maybe Stadia team actually wants to help but they are ignored inside Google? Or they just know the project will be canceled so they don’t care?
Or maybe they really do not want terraria on their platform so they are willing ignore this?
This is a great case for Google to decouple, either voluntarily or by court order.
YouTube's faulty algorithm erroneously locking your account should never result in you losing your access to your Drive, email, Android, media purchases, or anything else unrelated to YouTube (it shouldn't erroneously lock your YouTube account either, but limiting the blast radius is a no-brainer).
I use G Suite and regularly export all my data using google takeout in case something like this happens. Plus since I have my own domain I can move my email address to another provider.
Way too many google horror stories to keep using my @gmail.com account. Although admittedly the actual odds are probably 99.99% that this frustrating issue doesn’t happen to any individual.
For the folks that loss the access, it is 100%.
As a small business we use Google Suite. We would need a single solution which provides all these: - Email (unlimited domains, unlimited addresses) - Drive (Docs, sheets, forms) - Photos (this is where we also store out private photos 2Tb+; also, auto-sync is a lifesaver) - Calendar
Any alternative which is as affordable as Google? How about Zoho?
We are also on GSuite (Workspace now?). I am currently considering moving everything to Office 365. However I am not sure about the photos part.
Honestly, Office 365 sounds good, but we are a Linux & Mac only business. Can't imagine using MS products... Or will that not matter at all? :)
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A hosted Nextcloud with OnlyOffice/Collabora and a Mail Server? There's quite a few providers for that.
Yes, I did consider this option. The only issue is the Mail Server. It has to be secure & maintained. + SSO for all services would be ideal.
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How does office 365 compare?
This incident seems pretty damning of Stadia in particular. What partner in their right mind would work with Stadia when that work can be arbitrarily canned for no reason and with no reasonable recourse (of course, I feel similarly about western game developers publishing in China given their review board and capricious past actions like banning Animal Crossing there because of players voicing support for Hong Kong in-game, yet major western developers continue to court China, so what do I know)?
There also seems to be some interesting correlation of megacorps being terrible at games, between Google doing their utmost to shoot Stadia in every foot it has, and Amazon execs having no idea how to produce games people actually want to play.
While I agree with the broader point that there should be avenues for someone who's account is incorrectly closed this article is pretty vapid.
There are a lot of examples of individuals who have lost access to their accounts but no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users. If I've got a 1 in 10 million chance of incorrectly losing access to my account that is very different to if there is a 1 in 1000 chance of losing access to my account. Without that context, you're basically just saying "losing access is a crap experience for the person involved" which is obvious from the outset.
> no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users
Who cares?
No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc).
> No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc).
It doesn't detract from your point but we are effectively applying this logic to our justice system. Most cases are plea bargained[0] and don't go to trial.
"The vast majority of felony convictions are now the result of plea bargains—some 94 percent at the state level, and some 97 percent at the federal level. Estimates for misdemeanor convictions run even higher." Excerpt from Innocence is Irrelevant [1]
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
> No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?"
Sadly we are applying exactly this approach to our criminal justice system.
90+%[0][1] (94% of convictions at the state level, 97% at the federal level) of cases go through plea bargaining and never reach a courtroom. Trials are often impossible for poor defendants because public defenders can only bring a fraction of their cases to trial.
People like Shanta Sweatt[0] plead guilty because the alternative is to face a much longer potential sentence at trial.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...
I agree with the principle, but in a world of finite resources you've got to pick your battles. The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it.
It is, unfortunately, the same in many aspects of life, including many criminal justice systems. For example, if you are wrongly convicted in the UK it is incredibly hard to get that conviction overturned. It's literally life destroying for the people affected (definitely a lot worse than losing access to your gmail account!) but apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
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The justice system isn't even close to error free even with a fair trial, as we define it, so I'm not sure that this is a good analog.
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When assessing risks one way to look at them is to consider both the chance of occurrence as well as impact if it occurs. With many google services (esp email), the impact if it occurs is high. So the risk is still serious even if odds are low.
I largely agree, but OTOH the degree to which this is a sticking point for many people is an early warning that that this is a serious issue that Google has to solve. This problem will only get worse as Google grows. Yes it's unprecedentedly difficult to solve, but I suspect it'll become increasingly difficult to ignore. Systemic failure on this level is the CEO's job and it's disappointing to see Pichai seemingly fail to do something big about it.
People complaining they they want the game on stadia and blaming the creator are really just being assholes. Imagine if you spent 3 full weeks figthing some extremely obvious extremely silly but on some system, like adding two integers causing a runtime error. Would you really continue to work even harder trying to support that platform?
The guy lost access to his primary email for nearly a month... I think he's exhibiting a metric ton more constraint that is reasonable in this situation and google needs to get their damn shit together.
I regularly export my Gmail emails every year.
Gmail makes it fairly simple to do. I highly recommend it.
If Google's goal is to make sure that future regulation forbids them from ever banning an account of real person or company, they're on the right path for that.
In a few years we'll have spammers with legit companies able to legally force Google to deliver emails to their "customers" inbox, to abuse compute resource, etc.
Just because Google decided not to act on its kafka-esque banning process.
Google is evil, etc..., but just a PSA: people often overlook emails in their backups. Don't trust your provider to not fumble the ball and lose them (or lock you out of them).
If you're ready to add another layer of tin foil, don't store emails long term on an IMAP server if your emails leaking would be a problem for you (a la Sony or Clinton).
I was pretty disappointed by the EU’s big tech bill not addressing this.
In the UK at least, the largest banks have to offer you at least a basic current account.
A lot of these big tech companies have monopoly positions over certain areas. They should have to provide at least a minimum level of service, and have proper processes when there are conflicts.
A tech challenges in machine learning these days is teaching the machines to explain why they made their decisions. With Google's commitment to 100% lights-off handling of terms-of-service violations, it seems unlikely that non-Google entities will get any decent explanations unless there are revenue implications for Google.
Big fines for violations? Maybe. But they have more lobbyists than that rest of us to resist legislation. Won't happen without a mass political movement (in the US at any rate).
How about a review department at Google?
We could pay US$200 for a human review of the situation, with a reasonable SLA (maybe two working days), with a promise of a refund if they determine the error was theirs.
Possibly a larger fee for a more aggressive SLA?
Possibly a subscription-style fee for publishers of mission-critical stuff? (Meaning, critical to the publisher's mission, not Google's mission.)
My list to improve the play store process that requires $0 additional dollars from google and would fix 99% of issues: 1) give developers a period to respond to the complaint before takedown (maybe 1 week) 2) if they respond, make a decision within 1 week. 3) show all this information in a portal to see basic information like your app is facing a review, pending google response, etc. Really basic stuff. 4) allowing you to attach information in responses (one situation I have been in, the trademark office had ruled in my favor but I literally didn't have a way to provide that ruling in the appeal). 5) having a premium developer support program that provides good support. I think most serious devs would prefer to pay $300/yr to have good support vs what they have now (zero support).
Google, Google, Google! When will you guys learn that you simply can't do this? You want me to use Google Cloud Platform but you keep killing off apps and locking people's accounts. Why would I trust you with my livelihood? The PR fallout from stories like this is killing your chances.
Maybe unrelated but I was pretty much banned from using Amazon for over two years through no fault of my own. I even asked here for suggestions on what I could do. Alt accounts just got immediately locked too.
In the end, the only way I managed to get my original account unlocked again was by collecting a huge list of @amazon.com support addresses and writing a bot to spam hundreds of emails until someone competent picked up and realised my account had been mistakenly locked. I made dozens of calls but they hung up the phone most of the time (literally).
FAANG seriously needs to step up their support game. And not with "AI" chatbots or outsourced support teams with a few buttons in front of them.
They are posting billion dollar profits year on year on year. There is literally no incentive to do this at all. For every customer wronged this way there are hundreds if not thousands who are extremely happy with the service.
That's what made it so daunting. I was completely powerless to argue against this massive, faceless corporation. I imagine for those who store their whole lives on Google, this feeling is amplified 100x.
What's just as bad is the public resistance to these kinds of social media pleas (I'd say astroturfed, but the public response to COVID has jaded me).
"Oh, they must have had child porn in their drive."
"I bet they were spamming."
"Return fraud, totally sounds like return fraud."
This is why I avoid using important services (i.e. e-mail accounts, your backups, any digital products) in the one place. Just a little violate and then lose access to all of them. It can happen anytime, shouldn't be left to chance.
Do not rely on Google for anything but search. Even for that there are alternatives.
Eye-opener for me that I really need to set up a fallback email address
I keep seeing high profile cases of this pop up every month or two. If it happens to this many high profile people, imagine how many people it happens to that don't have a voice.
Do no evil was it?
They have to fight a lot of fraudsters and scammers, and do so successfully every day. It is easy to say that they cannot possibly monitor everything properly because they are so big, but they earn billions because they are so big.
This shouldn't come for free, every company has costs and proper customer care and monitoring is a cost for these kind of businesses.
The other argument is that you shouldn't use these services if you don't like them, but these companies are simply too big to avoid.
> The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
I've read quite a few of these stories over the years, and it is really bad if all your digital life is tied to the Google account.
A couple of months ago I took the courage and started migrating to a new email (using mailbox.org) with my own domain purchased via namecheap.
Took a few days to migrate most of my accounts to the new e-mail, but I highly recommend for anyone in a similar situation looking for some peace of mind.
When Stadia was announced I wanted to buy one. I pre ordered it in the Google Store. A couple of weeks later I received an email that they were not able to process my credit card. That never happened anywhere else. They also said that pre ordering would not be possible anymore and therefore I would not be able to purchase the limited pre ordering offer. They would be sorry, but stated that I could buy Stadia as soon as it gets released.
This is why I have no Stadia.
Google’s product philosophy is more like they are providing the technology, not the product. If the product fails, then it is your problem because they only offer up until what their tech actually does.
Had a similar experience with Google Ads where their automated systems shut off our paid ads just before Black Friday due to a technical error, and despite having constant human sales contacts none of them could do anything useful.
I had an old blogger account with a domain registered through the blogger site.
It expired and I got repeated emails about signing into my G Suite account to address it. But I didn't register it and I don't have a G Suite account... and the only support is, step 1, sign into G Suite.
I finally tracked down the registrar they used and I contacted them directly and they helped me re-register the domain.
Thanks for this reminder that google is never to be trusted. I just bought a proton mail, I can't risk to lose access to my mails.
What does ensure that Protonmail will not have the same business model and the same behavior 10 yers from now as Google?
Worst case for your Protonmail account is losing access to your email (which you can almost fully mitigate by using your own domain and having backups).
Worst case for your Google account is losing access to hundreds of Google services and anything you paid for, like apps or movies. And Gmail doesn't even allow you to use your own domain, other than by paying for G Suite which is clearly not targeted at individuals and doesn't work well if you try to use it as an individual.
If in the future Protonmail extends into other areas like Google does, and you start using these new services, it would absolutely have the same risks.
For starters, users pay for that email service with money. This only works if users are willing to pay.
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There are some pretty straightforward solutions for this;
1. Don't use personal gmail accounts for your business.
2. Don't mix different business units on the same account. (Your 5-year old adsense page you forgot about probably isn't compliant anymore).
3. If your personal account gets banned, hire someone whose job it is to manage your business google accounts and don't touch them.
> 1. Don't use personal gmail accounts for your business.
A good practice but won't help with this issue. Google has a history of banning business (admin/paying) accounts when it thinks that some user (under that business domain) has an unrelated personal account that was banned.
There have been stories here on HN describing how a small startup lost its Google Play account because one of their employees had their personal account banned for a terms of service violation. Then Google viewed that same person having an user account underneath the business account as ban evasion. In a puzzling move Google then proceeded to close the whole business account, so lots of collateral damage.
It's pretty crazy stuff.
They banned the whole 150+ organization google suite account.
Someone had a private, secondary email in the profile.
A private gmail account was suspended. They suspected that he has sent a "virus" in `*.apk` file as a gmail attachment.
Ah Google, where the first rule is "don't be evil", and the first axiom is "machines cannot be evil".
Isn’t Stadia effectively dead in the water anyway? The idea was based on universal infinite low-latency bandwidth which is wasteful and incongruent with the laws of physics. There are articles elsewhere showing Google abandoning its own development on the platform.
This was a mainframe play for gaming. Think this platform will be around in 2023?
This is what terrifies me about Google, specifically losing access to all accounts that I signed up for using my Gmail. I started transitioning to a custom domain that I can redirect to any email, but I just realized I bought that domain using Google Domains...I'm **ed if Google decides to ban me.
Google should have fixed this years ago.
Number one step to leaving google: get your own email service. One that you pay for, from a company whose primary business is email. Then gradually move your important accounts off.
This doesn't help much if you have to publish things on the play store. But you can distribute android apps directly.
I've been thinking about migration out of G* for a while already and this post was a breaking point to start the migration. Thank you!
I've purchased personal domain with my country code and picked Fastmail as provided for now (since many folks here gave good feedback).
Each day I become more convinced that Google at the end of this decade will be nearly irrelevant.
It's a company with MBA leaders who don't care about the product, which values engineers that have technical prowess and often don't care about the product.
As an aside - what benefit is there to having a game such as Terraria on Stadia in the first place? It has fairly low system requirements, and given how much energy is eaten up by server-side rendering and streaming, it seems wasteful in this context.
Gamers don't care about the tech that's being used, they only care about playing good games. If you're a Stadia user, why wouldn't you want to play Terraria? Because it's not a good use of streaming? But it's an awesome game!
Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal for Google of having it on there, but from the sidelines here, it seems to me to be terribly wasteful. It's like the energy consumption angle was never even considered. I presume it wasn't.
OT - where does your username come from? I'm sure it's not, but for a Brit to read it, it stirs thoughts of a terribly un-PC origin! :)
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Typically deals like this are about a mixture of cash and access. The platform holder will often partially or fully fund development, sometimes they pay an advance on sales up-front. For one project I worked on Sony provided an up-front advance that fully covered the port in addition to some sales (and it took a while to recoup for reasons mostly under their control.)
My guess for this is that given Terraria's large fanbase and high profile, Google probably handed them an advance for this and promised some promotion once the title launched on Stadia. Stadia also potentially provides access to users who can't play it on PC (it has a client for phones and some TVs, etc)
I agree. Also, I don't want Stadia to become flooded with cheap indie games, at least not for now. Because the storefront is so bad (no search), it would make it very hard to find the things you want. Google should concentrate Stadia's efforts to make AAA-games available to people who don't want a console or gaming PC, because that's a real niche. I personally know 5 people who would never buy dedicated gaming hardware, but will get Stadia to play the latest FIFA in great quality on their work laptop or TV (with Chromecast).
Indie gamers won't come to Stadia anyway.
Not sure how "cheap indie games" comes into the picture here, Terraria is a wildly successful and sophisticated game that's sold over 30m copies lifetime and is available on a bunch of platforms. We're not talking about a Flappy Bird clone.
Some of the flak this guy is getting in his comments is pretty ridiculous.
He's the one getting stiffed by Google, but "gamers" always love playing the victim, especially when a game developer draws a line of any kind.
Never forget "the cloud" is someone else's computer. Especially if you're using a free-tier service.
On a practical level at least backup your email with Thunderbird and your Google Drive with Syncdocs.
That's unfortunate. The silver lining is that there will be more people talking about this here on HN than actually affected by not bringing some game to Stadia.
Anyone know of a good way to back-up google account content ?
To Google's credit, it's pretty easy. Go to your account (from GMail choose 'manage my account'), then go to 'data & personalization', find the 'download your data' option.
They'll zip up all your data for you to download.
https://takeout.google.com/
I guess that's the AI we should really fear. I hope nothing really important ever relies on a FB, MS or Google account. But I guess it's too late.
Move your email off Gmail immediately is all I can say. Google cannot be trusted to provide continuous access to something as important as email.
Maybe the timing's good for Microsoft to open an Android App store and other degoogly APIs. Should get better traction than Amazon's.
I am not fan of regulation, but apparently not every abuse of the market can be solved by courts in a practical way. Like in this case, a mere mortal can not possibly sue Google.
I can imagine the EU will step in soon. There are multiple different aspects of being locked out of a "free" service provider like Google:
- Losing your email addresses - even if it was provided for free, will cause an immense harm. Email addresses will soon be transferable between companies like mobile numbers are today.
- Losing your own data - GDPR was a first step, user should have a right to his own data even if he was locked out of a platform.
- Losing digital goods like apps or ebooks. With a transferable email address these will become transferable too.
I'm not sure how a foo@gmail.com email address could realistically be transferred to another provider.
At the very least, I wish there was a regulation that forced platforms to provide users with an explicit reason why their account was suspended. No vague "please read our T&Cs" statements. Instead, something along the lines of "We have suspended your YouTube account because in video A you made statement B at time index C which violates our rule D". No doubt it would be burdensome for the likes of Google to implement, but that's what you get when you become so large that you can destroy your users' livelihoods on a whim.
How do you want to transfer your apps from Google Store? Is there any other service with those apps?
Not away from Google Store, just under a different account. But you are right, I did not think it through.
It blows my mind that technically literate people still use gmail after countless horror stories of people losing their accounts.
I’m surprised an algorithm would be allowed to block someone who spends so much money on Google apps and movies
I'd rather pay a (small) fee and get some support than deal with this nonsense. Come on Google...
The more Google doesn't care about its users, the better more people move away from anything Google.
I honestly cannot believe these incidents (plural) never reach top management. It’s just not possible.
Good reminder that I need to prioritize making the switch from Gmail to iCloud mail.
I just want to know why is no one willing to hold Google and Apple accountable?
Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?
I’ve never been unable to chat with an Apple rep.
Have had no problems reaching people about dev accounts, but also no problem even about consumer subscription services with unusual challenges, such as wanting to merge music or app libraries belonging to two different Apple IDs. (Can be done, an self-serve easy way and an Apple-performed hard way.)
In earlier HN thread, someone said “Devs would be more than happy to pay $300/yr to be able to talk to someone!”
My guess is an HN survey would suggest devs prefer to be outraged at Apple’s $100/yr — despite it being a price point at which you get to talk to people.
apple support is shit, even if you can talk with an rep. their first level basically tries to stop you going down the levels, the second level basically just forwards you. most of the time it's not even the people, it's basically their stupid system where you have your dedicated rep, but the only way to contact him is by using a stupid form/voice which sometimes prints stupid error message and you have no idea if it gone trough. also if there is a mistake in the system and they have no clue about it you are lost or you need to pay tons of money.
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Asking Sundar this type of question could get your organization banned; Google has been known to do this[0].
[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/how-cnet-got-banned-by-google/
If journalists are bothersome, they lose their access. How would journalists “confront” anyone if they can’t get a foot in the door?
> Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?
Journalists like access. Confronting Sundar and making him feel ambushed even for a second means they won't get the access for the rest of their career.
You could credibly accuse Apple of many things, and I say that as an unashamed Apple fanboy. But making it basically impossible to reach a real human being by phone via AppleCare, or in person at your local Genius Bar if you prefer, is not one of them.
You get what you pay for.
Because they are not really Journalists, they are extensions of the PR Dept.
This is dubbed as "Access Journalism" but it is not really Journalism at all.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale...
so the guy filled the Stadia dev form: https://stadia.dev/intl/en_us/apply/
but used a gmail account instead of pro email account (that's not a good move on his part here).
and then he still can't get help from Stadia ?
Possible but very hard to believe.
Google takeout ftw!
The only thing scarier than the thought that Google has algorithms that track your every move is that these algorithms are fundamentally faulty and furthermore they take decisions based on these algorithms. Case in point Google ads thinks I'm 70 years old and married
Going against popular sentiment, I dont know how people can't get in touch with a human at Google.
Whenever I have needed something that required human support, such as resolving a false DMCA claim against my content or help with my G Suite account, I had no trouble getting email and phone support. I'm not a big company or influence of any kind either.
OK OK OK, hear me out. How do we know this individual didn't use the N word?
Monopoly abusing monopoly.
Gives me a chuckle for every high profile case such as this. Just get a domain & link it with a Zoho Mail account or any other paid one, for everything else use self-hosted storage
Does Zoho Mail offer Youtube accounts now? Any serious game ends up needing promotion on YT.
How you going to use that to host on Stadia?
Having core parts of your personal computing or business computing rely on Google or AWS infrastructure is a systematic risk. Unless you are are racking up a $50k bill every month, you are simply too small that anyone there would care.
This is inaccurate. A $50K a month AdWords spend does not get meaningful support.
I think I've seen meaningful support for this level of AdWords spend.
A $5k a month cloud bill definitely gets this.
Utterly untrue. AWS is not a 'systematic risk', that's absolutely ridiculous and I can't even begin to address that statement.
The recent Parler incident is proof otherwise. If you happen to cause any inconvenience for them, you are at risk of being cut off.
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Can't speak for Google, but I've gotten great phone support from AWS while spending less than $100 a month.
I just can't imagine that this has happened completely "without reason" as he states. The reason might be silly, erroneous (whether human or AI), or dumb, but it exists. If Google has no procedure in place to investigate these bans on request, then Google is evil. But by the sound of this I get the feeling that this guy is leaving out some facts.
Not hard to do some Google searches to find lots of examples where people were banned by Google without reason or explanation. Sure, a reason might exist, but if it's impossible to get anyone to tell you what it is, then how can you tell? In at least one high profile case a Google employee's spouse was banned and it was still impossible to get an explanation or reversal!
You can assume that a high-profile game developer in a business partnership with Google is evil and got up to some sort of large scale malfeasance with their gmail account (why??? for what purpose? why would you risk a business deal to do this? what's the upside?) and then Google decided to ban them but not expose them for their misconduct. Or you can go "huh it sure seems like something bad happened to this person and he's not getting an explanation for it."
Let's be honest, he's been banned in error by some google bot.