Comment by blunte
5 years ago
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.
And it absolutely bites them in the ass. Google's awful reputation at the enterprise level is probably why GCP is struggling to make it among that sector.
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Yeah, the clients are different - Microsoft and IBM target enterprise clients and they know that if a client can't reach someone on the phone, they will lose their business. Google on the other hand is a business-to-consumer business trying now to be a business-to-business one, and still thinks that it can ignore the "older" generation and target the current generation who are more familiar with interacting with automated response systems. It's already biting them in the arse.
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.
In the public sector in Europe we’ve long liked Microsoft because they actually sell support. When they decided to push 365 additions as enabled by default and no easy way to turn it off, we suddenly had a couple of thousand employees trying this new teams thing out. After a few hours on the phone with Seattle, it was possible to disable, and later Microsoft changed policy to let their enterprise customers decided what features are on. We have a lot of those stories, and it’s something people often overlook when they wonder why the public sector favours Microsoft. We have more than a quarter century of great relations.
When AWS first arrived they had the same automated support system that Google does, and they didn’t really want to comply with GDPR. We probably would’ve gone with Azure anyway because it’s the easy option for operations when you’re already in bed with 365, but the Amazon/Google attitude meant they weren’t even considered beyond the first look.
Since then AWS has overtaken Azure in GDPR compliance and the availability of their support, and we now have several supplier operated solutions in AWS.
Google is still on the “do not buy from this company” list.
But maybe they just aren’t interested. They are primarily an advertising company after all.
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I tried to contact nest to order a replacement plug/harness (for a 1 year old $150 smoke detector...) and after getting run around for 10+ emails I was finally told "sorry we can't supply that part" and you're shit out of luck.
The cumulative time if took them to read and answer all of those emails (and cost) was definitely double that of just shipping the $1 part.
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.
I'm no fan of Facebook by any measure, but I think when it comes to current political content and ads they are in a very tricky position.
If they say something is not allowed, at least one group will claim they are suppressing free speech. But if they allow it, they end up having to allow some misleading or completely false disinformation.
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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?
I don't think it really matters - they intentionally leave no ways of getting to a human or even getting to a system that can help.
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).
>... your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to host the email).
I have considered this, but converting is not risk free. Say I utilize my own domain backed by Gmail. I have increased my surface area by being reliant upon both Google and the security of my domain registrar. Perl.com was just stolen[0] due to some shenanigans -how I would I keep myself immune?
My fear with using my own domain is that if it is compromised, then an attacker can access all of my email linked accounts (eg banking). If Google shuts me down, at least I know the domain is secure and the email is dead and unable to be intercepted.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25940240
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This is kinda what I do. I personally really enjoy Gmail and don't find any competitor can match it, especially since I use a catch-all domain and really value having Gmail's spam filtering in place. However I use my own domain and have all my email forwarded to Gmail. If I ever get locked out of my Gmail account I can just switch where my email is going and be good to go.
I also do regular Google Takeout backups so that I at least have access to the majority of emails and google data.
> 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).
I've yet to find a good solution for this without paying for Google's business product, which I find way too dangerous to risk. You can't get a custom domain on consumer gmail.
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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.
Think that story is about Google Fi. I'm a Fi user, but haven't had to try and reach a human to resolve a problem yet; I dread the day if/when that happens where I actually do need a human to solve something I encountered...
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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.
Google treats all their customers, paid or not, like trash. If you ever have doubt of this go over to the Google Fi subreddit and see all the people that got screwed by Google Support.
Checkout Google one: https://one.google.com/about which is more of a personal plan but come with support.
There are many features that Google blocks if you have a GSuite accounts. You cannot use Stadia, post reviews in the google play store, use any of there family subscriptions as the paying account or as a family member and note application integration with google assistance. Those are just the few I can think of off the top of my head.
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> from my reading like there are some incompatibilities with services that I use on the free tier.
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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?
> does take-out still work with a banned account?
No, because banned (not merely "suspended", which you can fix using google tools) accounts are usually banned because of bad content.
>Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
No clue, my friend; I am not a Google employee.
> 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.
GCP is in big trouble at the moment. Their issues are long standing and endemic, and not shared by their competitors.
They have absolutely been coasting, and the market is only getting more cutthroat.
>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?
It’s honestly really sad / pathetic.
Big ass tech company been around for ages saying it’s gonna change the world.
All you do is coast. Like what. Could you imagine going back in time and saying that to folks? That their whole “I’m gonna change the world” routine is going to be given up on?
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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.
That's pretty much an impossible (or at the very least, asymmetric) amount of money in much of the world.
So charge them less? Now the scammers will call from those places.
How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world?
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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.