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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 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?
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=4
(If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/
* 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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe allowing single service providers to capture several billions of users is the problem here.
Maybe they really just need to offer a paid account option with real support, since that has much better incentives
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.
Let every abuser requests those explanations, if the decision doesn't change, the money is still kept, which funds that service.
Is 1000 innocents ok to punish as long as 1 spam message is stopped?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Andrew Spinks, the author of the linked tweet, was a business partner of Google's. That didn't save him.
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.
The same also applies for Google Play Store where without a doubt you paid at least once and continue for every in-app purchase.
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...
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.
It's largely what made Facebook's forcing usage of their account for Oculus users so ass-backwards.
It may be an artifact of Microsoft actually being regulated for monopolistic practices.
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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.
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%
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Fixed
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.
I'd use the total number of false positives as the proper measure.
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.
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).
end users don't want to run their own spam and moderation filters, and they definitely do want them.
> 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.
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Good example of standing up.
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If any entity requires a huge amount of Twitter followers to get support, count me out.
* 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.
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.)
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.
Now that sounds like a technical problem that could be solved!
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.
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??)
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.
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.
That's absolutely not how GDPR works.
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.
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/
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".
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer
* 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/
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!
Things aren't all-or-nothing, and taking this sort of approach can definitely help with making such a non-trivial change.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
It is a docker based email server setup very well done.
Both have unpleasant web accessibility experience, but it is not consideration for many.
No it has always been the same company, and we tried to tell you.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It gives you all of your mail in mbox format, which is a common format.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Some people would call that racketeering.
People might be afraid of lawyers but they aren’t involved in these processes.
The problem isn't that it's hard, but that it's a cost center instead of a profit center.
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.
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.
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.
Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
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")
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.
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?
... Probably as many as currently pay for Youtube Premium and then come to HN and complain about ads on Youtube :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It also helps that we're one of the largest telcos.
Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.
Once including waking up people in Mountain View on weekend.
Now if only they could figure it out for consumer accounts... Those are customers as well and deserve to be treated as such.
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.
From the comments:
> Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-moderation bot our entire project was shut down immediately