Comment by rochak
5 years ago
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)
Both are outrageously good ideas and I sincerely hope not too many people read your comment so it doesn't become blocked!
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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
With some planning we could have accommodated the 120K rps rate and more, but just out of the blue it caused a lot of issues, the database shards for historic information tended to be configured for infrequent access to large amounts of historic data, their access completely thrashed our caches, etc. We did want Google to index us, if there had been an open dialog we could have created a separate path for their traffic that bypassed the cache and we could have brought additional database servers into production to handle the increased load, we even had a real time events feed that updated whenever content was created or updated that we would have given Google free access to that so they could just crawl the changes instead of having to scan the site for updates, but since they would not talk to anyone none of that happened.
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?
He's fucked and has to hope the nice new domain owner will help him out.
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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.
Many high-profile departures from Google seem to involve an incident like this, in my experience. When I was there most of the high-profile departures I saw were related to internal strife (in some cases with widely shared complaint posts on internal G+ or internal gdocs), management misconduct, or things like the company's health insurer refusing to cover surgeries. Then occasionally you have the departures where notorious abusers or sex pests are sent off with a severance package, like ("allegedly") Andy Rubin's $90m farewell gift.
In my direct personal experience, I went on medical leave near the end of my stay there and when I came back over half of my team had quit and bailed for other companies or other orgs (largely over complaints with management).
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.
What is being discussed here is not "I lost the password", is "Google disabled my account because they have reasons". In the latter case, you could have the right password and the account would still not work.
> surely I am protected from this, right?
Nope. Google can disable you account at any time, without telling you why, and without giving you any appeal process whatsoever. No free-gmail user is in any way protected against this. People paying for Google Suite accounts are ever-so-slightly more likely to receive some support if anything happens, but that's it.
> The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
This is why I'm slowly moving away from it (and everything Google, really). The service is extremely reliable, it raised the bar for email services and web UI, what they've done to spam is fantastic, but the possibility of losing such a key account and not have any recourse is now too terrifying to contemplate.
It's not you, it's Google that locks you out of the account for vague "term of service violation" and nothing you do will help.
Why would backup codes etc help you against an account suspension because some random algorithm decided your usage pattern is suspect?
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.
That's how long it takes to train the machine learning model.
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.
Microsoft (used to?) pick up the phone if you called about an issue with Windows. If you actually called them, then they lost money on your consumer Windows license.
Say what you will about how crappy Win 9x was, but they definitely drove the average tech support load to much less than one call per machine.
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> the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human.
Maybe a company at a certain scale should have a legal requirement to get a person on the phone for any support issue, full stop.
All these companies will continue the race to the bottom unless you twist their arm. For PR, sounds like a nice job creator to me!
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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?
I think they would require a customer service team at least an order of magnitude larger than that to properly deal with things.
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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.
Even for a free account, there is a contract in place between you and Twitter, which Twitter can't unilaterally terminate without reason, especially if the "code of conduct" collides with the right of free speech (https://www.ratgeberrecht.eu/internetrecht-aktuell/meinungsf...)
In Europe, GDPR has provisions about algorithmic decision-making, including a "Right to explanation":
https://turkishlawblog.com/read/article/221/algorithms-meet-...
I look forward to this getting used against Google and everyone else banning customers without explanation and/or recourse.
Property might be the wrong word here. I suspect that you do have a contract of sorts with any company with whom you have a free account. The consideration is sharing your data in exchange for the account.
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.