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I'm hesitant to invest anymore into the Google ecosystem after reading about how account termination can happen without detail, or recourse to resolve. [1] The

• thegayngler 9y ago
  I actually agree with this. I'd be too concerned about if Google or a Google AI bot randomly decided to deactivate or delete my work life. As a company what recourse would you have? I'd also be concerned about losing work and trade secrets etc... Yeah no. Just no.
  • carussell 9y ago
    1. Offer a service 2. The enterprise is skittish to adopt because there's no support, so when users get locked out, they often have no recourse, which is bad for business 3. Address this—fill in the missing piece and introduce support 4. People react as if you didn't just announce you would be offering a solution to the very thing they're complaining about
    • jstewartmobile 9y ago
      yeah... if you count "enterprise" "support" as a "solution" to what they're complaining about.
      • carussell 9y ago
        The comment I'm responding to is literally about questioning how a business could be comfortable using this. What do you want me to say? Do I have the complaint wrong?
        • JohnTHaller 9y ago
          It says you have 24/7 enterprise support. It doesn't say that your paid accounts will be immune to whatever process is used to shut down a Google account (including Gmail, Hangouts, Blogger, YouTube, etc) without warning or explanation.
          • JBReefer 9y ago
            Even inside a given service - you think Viacom suddenly stops paying top talent without notice? They at least buy you dinner first.
        • nol13 9y ago
          There's nothing to say. "And thus you see the supreme importance of never having the public find out you've ever, even once, locked someone out without recourse."
        • Spooky23 9y ago
          The comment you responded to is a troll. At what point do you stop using web browsers in a snit over some corporate bullshit? IE/Edge is MS, Apple does bullshitty things and Firefox is funded by Verizon/OATH.
    • saghm 9y ago
      Should you really have to pay extra for the privilege of not being locked out?
    • SerLava 9y ago
      I guess you've described the 4 steps to existing as a company that makes itself known for burning the fuck out of people without recourse - you don't get to have a good reputation in the areas you want. That user just said "hm, google-something, business-something... eh, no thanks I don't want to get fucked over." Which is inaccurate but that's what happens.
    • johnjhayes 9y ago
      I get what you're saying, but Google's history here is atrocious, which is why business' are skittish, people aren't just going to take their word for it. You go first, if you and 100 others have a good experience maybe that attitude will change. Until then, hard pass.
      • TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
        FWIW, I think Google has been turning things around for their paid services. I've had to contact Project Fi customer support a few times, and found it vastly superior to all previous experiences with telcos. They're also probably getting a ton of experience in dealing with enterprises thanks to GCP. With that said, this announcement doesn't look like it has any relevance to regular consumers. I'm gradually migrating as many things as possible away from Google, having realized that I'd have no recourse if they locked me out my accounts. Their TOS [0] says services can be terminated at any time. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we had a guaranteed grace period for migrating away upon your Google Account being terminated. IANAL though, so maybe I missed something? [0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/ https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/
        • corobo 9y ago
          Likewise I've never had a problem contacting someone at Adwords. I've spent like £200 total as well so I'm not exactly a big business spender.
        • koheripbal 9y ago
          I manage several GSuite accounts. The tech support staff is friendly and helpful, but if the problem is outside their list of known issues or current outages, they're basically useless. They aren't developers and they have no access to investigate underlying system data/logs, let alone resolve anything. ...and that's where the true problem with Google is. There's no mechanism to report/escalate a well-defined and reproducible technical bug - even as a technical sysadmin with a paid account. ...and if a data issue only impacts a small number of people, it'll never get fixed. The GSuite forums are bombarded with usability questions, and real tech issues are given the old "let's see which FAQ I can post to get some karma" response. Calling the help desk might get the issue escalated, but it's far far more time consuming than if I could just put a normal bug report together with a screenshot.
    • archontes 9y ago
      And thus you see the supreme importance of never having the public find out you've ever, even once, locked someone out without recourse.
      • themacguffinman 9y ago
        What about the importance of understanding what a business support agreement is?
        • imron 9y ago
          Let's say for arguments sake, you have a business support agreement and then it comes out in the news that your business (or maybe just a rogue employee) has done something horribly racist or sexist. Maybe not even racist or sexist, but that something that gets blown out of all proportion and so people think what happened was racist or sexist. The twitter mobs are baying for your blood. Some Employees inside Google might also be baying for your blood. Will Google decide to end the business support agreement, and would you bet your business on the answer to that question being 'no'?
    • chris_wot 9y ago
      The company I work for uses Google extensively. Simple stuff like Google Admin is abominably slow, and important things we need like Google Groups are, to be frank, rubbish. Google Docs is OK, but Google Sheets is abysmal for any serious amount of data. It seems very hard to have Google listen to our concerns.
      • chris_wot 9y ago
        It's sad I'm being downvoted for speaking about our experience using Google. I work for a major Australian company and we dove right into Google. I'm not entirely negative about it, lots of it is great, but there are still significant gaps.
        • dijit 9y ago
          Your comment is/was not necessarily relevant to the more political issue of being forcibly removed from having access to your data with absolutely no way of recovering it.
        • khedoros1 9y ago
          I think you're just being downvoted for being off-topic. This part of the thread's about how trustworthy Google is as a host, and the likelihood of being locked out of your account for some arcane reason, and a discussion of the merits and flaws of their products doesn't fit in smoothly.
        • mnglkhn2 9y ago
          His comment is relevant as to how would a new product be perceived through the experience had with other products offered by the same company.
      • foxylad 9y ago
        Interesting. I guess it depends on your definition of "serious amount of data". Our entire accounting system is built on Google Sheets, including about ten thousand transactions in four currencies per financial year. The system summarises by country and cost centre, and has sheets that provide our current profit and loss, and nice things like all the fields in each of the tax forms we have to complete. OK, we are a small organisation, but I'm happy to recommend Google Sheets to anyone but power users. If you are crunching a lot more data than this, then I certainly agree that using a browser-based spreadsheet is not optimal.
    • cm2187 9y ago
      Yep. And that's called a reputation.
    • imron 9y ago
      The problem with destroying trust is that it's really hard to rebuild it. You can introduce missing pieces and support all you like, but if people think they can't trust you based on your previous history, then it won't make a whit of difference.
  • logicallee 9y ago
    Would you pay for an insurance service against this, meaning that if this occurs you get paid out whatever monetary sum you had paid the premium against? (And just so everyone knows, insurance fraud is illegal, can be a felony in all 50 states, and lands you in jail.)[1] It would certainly give peace of mind and the next time we read about 1 person in 10 million facing such a problem, we can think, "maybe they should have just paid $10 in insurance." As a public service the insurer could also publish rates of lockout. I've had this idea for some time, so if you want it you need to reply with a resounding, yes, you'd pay for it. For the record, I'd pay for it. But I need to find 9 million other people too. [1] I'm not a lawyer or even actuary.
    • rocqua 9y ago
      I'd pay, given I have enough trust. I'd also be happy to e.g. half my payout for legal assistance in retrieving whatever access was taken away. The issue I see is, what happens when a spam-account gets blocked? And how do you keep people who knowingly break e.g. google policy from forming the majority of your customers.
      • logicallee 9y ago
        Thanks, but your and the other reply weren't enough :)
    • mdpopescu 9y ago
      Unfortunately, people lie - even to themselves. The only way to see if such a service is viable is to actually offer it. [And for the record - yes, definitely.]
      • logicallee 9y ago
        thanks, but your and the other reply weren't enough :)
    • hobarrera 9y ago
      Given that google doesn't usually accurately describe why accounts are closed, such an insurance company would never be able to prove insurance fraud and be completely exposed to it.
• deleted 9y ago
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• massar 9y ago
  While login happens with a Google account, guest logins are possible. The advice given typically is to have a separate account for the device 'ownership', that way, even if your main account gets blocked you still have access to it. See for instance this blog article which talks about that: https://blog.lessonslearned.org/building-a-more-secure-development-chromebook/ https://blog.lessonslearned.org/building-a-more-secure-devel... 'factory resetting' a device is easy too so that you can get rid of the device in a nice pristine state...
• dredmorbius 9y ago
  Google products, services, and features are like farm animals or Hogwart's instructors in Defence Against the Dark Arts. Don't become too fond of, or used to them.
• paulcole 9y ago
  Until someone makes something that I like as much, I'm not going to cut off my nose on the off chance it might spite my face.
• geofft 9y ago
  I'm not sure if you're objecting for ideological or practical reasons. I totally get the ideological objection, but on practical grounds, 1. Is this a problem if you're using a G Suite account run by a company instead of a personal Google account (as in the linked case, as far as I can tell)? 2. Is this a problem if you're using on-prem AD for auth instead of Google accounts, which is one of the things specifically being introduced in this launch? I mean, independent of whether you think this was Google shutting down free speech or whatever, it totally seems like neither Google's algorithms or humans should be able to shut down a single corporate account (there's of course cases for shutting down an entire corporate G Suite setup, e.g., if it's used by spammers), but also that seems like such a basic feature that I would have assumed that's written into the contract.
• victorhooi 9y ago
  I'm know some of the specifics around this - and whilst I will not comment in any official capacity or on the specifics here, I can offer the following general principles which may be applicable here: 1. More often than not, it's not something nefarious or convoluted, but something very simple. 2. A lot of the things Google does are for the protection of the users themselves (whether from themselves or from outside forces). (Disclaimer: I work for Google).
  • WaylonKenning 9y ago
    Pretty rough to not tell people what that 'very simple' thing is, and how deactivating their account through a terms of use violation is 'for the protection of users'. I think with great trust comes great responsibility, and Google is eroding this trust, as shown in this thread, with kafkaesque processes around account termination.
    • jtmcmc 9y ago
      I doubt it's one simple thing but any number of simple things and they can't tell you for the fact that they like their job.
      • victorhooi 9y ago
        Yes, I happen to like my job, so won't comment on specifics =). However, as a general principal, I've found that Google has very robust protections to protect users from both themselves, and from malicious outside forces. (Disclaimer: I work for Google).
  • kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
    When your life is screwed up due to your primary google account of over a decade (that has god knows what all data, memories, contacts, brand association etc.) being shut down with little to no recourse, it does not matter that it was not nefarious or convoluted. It especially does not matter that it wasn't nefarious when Google isn't going to listen to you anyway unless you happen to write a blog post that happens to get viral in the right circles. It's not like there's a simple form that you can fill and which is reviewed and resolved in a few days reliably if your account gets deactivated by mistake. At that point you might as well be banging your head on a wall for all the good that will do.
• masterleep 9y ago
  Recently I had a domain entirely blown away by a mistaken Google algorithm. We were doing some large computations on Google Compute Engine, much larger that this account had done before, and it tripped some sort of hack flag. As billing account owner, my account was suspended. That meant I could no longer receive emails, because that was the same account. The Google project was also suspended, terminating all servers and the DNS records for the domain, which were using Google nameservers. That meant it was impossible to do the Google account recovery process, which relied on adding records to the domain to prove we owned it. It was also impossible for me to open a support ticket without being able to log in or access the domain. Thankfully, we had another account on the project that was still able to log in and open the ticket. It was really a terrible experience. The moral of the story is you can't rely on one provider for everything, especially if they don't have accessible customer support. Google really should not algorithmically blow away a corporate account in good standing without some notice and cure period offered.
  • k_sh 9y ago
    That is a mind-bogglingly large ball drop on Google's part.
  • Narkov 9y ago
    That's horrific! How can such a large company be so inept not to think this through?
• mstade 9y ago
  This. Having been burned by Google in the past I just closed the window when I read "24/7 support." It just seemed like a slap in the face somehow.
  • em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    24/7, but for how many weeks? :)
    • seanp2k2 9y ago
      Well, you can probably get about 50 weeks* of that if you sign up now. *expected TTL of this product before it gets discontinued Edit: ~source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_services https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google... I didn't calculate the average lifetime for their discontinued products, but there are many.
      • ucaetano 9y ago
        Are you bundling free consumer products with paid SLA'd enterprise products?
  • ehsankia 9y ago
    There's a difference between 24/7 support for a paid product (50$/year per device), and support for a free internet service backed by ads. Enterprise services get far better support. Personal services are used by literally billions of users, with possibly millions of fake bot accounts spamming all the time, so it's not surprising that sometimes false positives happen. And providing support to billions of people is not easy.
    • syshum 9y ago
      >>Enterprise services get far better support. Better is relative. it is accurate to say it is better than the no support they give to free consumers. But it is a far cry from "good" support
• Spooky23 9y ago
  There's a distinction between business and personal services. Any consumer facing service faces similar issues. Microsoft in the consumer division has down similar things.
• JetSpiegel 9y ago
  I thought this account termination was an overreaction until it happened to me a few years ago. Never went another day without an IMAP client.
• syshum 9y ago
  Not only this but Google also has a TERRIBLE track record for just ending products with little or nor warning I would NEVER trust a Google Operating system in the Enterprise. For example they are pushing a use case as Kiosk's Kiosk need to run for years with stability, not be at the whims of a company that can kill the product in a whim or make substantial non-backward compatible changes to it ever 12 months
  • djsumdog 9y ago
    Things like Google Glass, which were expensive consumer products people shelled a lot of money for. OS/2 was used in ATMs for a really long time, and so was WinXP in kiosks. There are a lot of systems that still use XP yes (causing many security nightmares), but Microsoft did support that OS for an incredibly long time. I agree, I wouldn't use anything Google for a Kiosk. You're better off with custom packages ontop of Ubuntu LTS or something similar.
    • rbobby 9y ago
      > Microsoft did support that OS for an incredibly long time And you could pay Microsoft to keep supporting it. Sure, it might be several million dollars to keep XP support for another year (and big increases each year)... but for some large customers it was available (banks with ATM's based on XP).
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Things like Google Glass, which were expensive consumer products people shelled a lot of money for. Glass was never a consumer product; Explorer Edition was fairly clearly marketed to people developing apps or investigating potential.
• agentdrtran 9y ago
  This is not a problem and would not happen for an enterprise customer.
  • legostormtroopr 9y ago
    Except when it does - for example CloudFront and GoDaddy vs. Stormfront. Agree or disagree with a user, but paying for a service doesn't guarantee you get to keep it. Shopify has made the decision to keep Breitbart as a customer on the pretense they just provide an apolitical service, but crowds certainly tried to pressure them to take a stance and drop them.
    • themacguffinman 9y ago
      I think most companies can live with the caveat that they may be dropped if they are Nazis or white supremacists.
    • pgeorgi 9y ago
      > paying for a service doesn't guarantee you get to keep it I wish OVH would follow that idea when it comes to booting spammers off their network. Failing that, I moved my boxes (that also serve mail, but the legitimate kind) off their network, which ended my troubles with ip range based blacklists. Sometimes companies need to decide which sort of customers they want to retain.
• Trundle 9y ago
  Holy shit. As someone whose first.last@gmail address is basically their online passport, I'm going to spend this evening doing what I can to spread things out and investigate alternatives to their assorted services that actually come with support. If Google suddenly turned me off right now I don't really know what I'd do. Probably cry in the shower.
  • rb666 9y ago
    1. Get your own domain and email address 2. Use mailgun to forward to gmail 3. Set Gmail from to your new mail 4. Slowly start changing your login/email everywhere you use Gmail 5. Make a proper backup of all your Gmail mail In time, you will no longer depend on Gmail for the rest of your life and can just switch to, for example Fastmail, any time.
    • enitihas 9y ago
      Doesn't Fastmail has similar terms of service, i.e, that they can terminate your account any time for any reason whatsoever. Source : https://www.fastmail.com/about/tos.html https://www.fastmail.com/about/tos.html This is the biggest reason I am hesitant to try fastmail.
      • osel 9y ago
        Fast mail are generally good at support, so unlike google you're not dealing with a black hole when something needs to be fixed.
        • enriquto 9y ago
          Yes, but their terms of service are absolutely preposterous (unjustified and unannounced termination at anytime). Most mail providers can terminate users for any reason, but at least with a few days of notice, allowing you to move the data elsewhere.
      • lloeki 9y ago
        This is why step 1. is important, along with step 6. have an automated backup of your mail, whatever the provider.
• rebootthesystem 9y ago
  It's worst than this. Every large Internet company has this flavor of totalitarian customer-NO-service relationship with their users. It's like you are an ant that they can step on any given Monday at 1:45 PM and Google couldn't care less. And it will not change until either the government intervenes (I hate this solution) or people do exactly as you and I are doing, we do not do business with them no matter how much candy they want to throw our way. I have exactly zero interest in doing business with Google ever again. I don't even look at their new product announcements. I saw what they did to one of our clients about a decade ago. I have never since even looked at a Google service nor recommended them. Search, maps and AdWords are the only things I use. I won't touch anything business critical. When a company deals with their clients the way you might expect a prepubescent third world country dictator might treat his subjects, well, the best idea is to just stay away.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• victorhooi 9y ago
  The author of that post offered an official statement: https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/899863971817238528 https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/89986397181723852...
• jlebrech 9y ago
  Imagine being a men's health or men's right organization and being locked out of all your data and contacts.
• ae1112 9y ago
  It's not only about Gmail or contacts. I have literally all my photos in Google Photos. Imagine losing all of them if my account gets deactivated for some reason. I'll be downloading pretty soon.
• pleasecalllater 9y ago
  I'm slowly leaving google because of that. The only problem is that the alternatives are either not so good or harder and more expensive to set up.
• amelius 9y ago
  And it's not just account termination. Google is known to drop services just like that. I guess it's better to not become too dependent on them indeed.
• 72deluxe 9y ago
  Even for "free" level accounts, there is no information on support or anything if you buy something like Drive storage. No info on termination, how to get support (leaving an entry on a rammed, replete and bursting forum is not support) or anything. And there's nobody to ask or get into regarding any of this. eg. can I use gdrive CLI to upload or does this fall foul of the general terms "try to access them using a method other than the interface and the instructions that we provide"? Where is my data stored? Does it stay in EU datacentres or does it go to the USA? How would I get support if you terminated my account as I would not be able to log in? etc. etc.