Comment by izacus
5 years ago
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?