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Here is the money quote for myself: 'To the Raffs, this is Google’s real crime: its inaccessibility and unwillingness to respond, even to legitimate complaints.
by effingwewt 9y ago
Here is the money quote for myself: 'To the Raffs, this is Google’s real crime: its inaccessibility and unwillingness to respond, even to legitimate complaints. “We’ve never said that the fault was being penalised,” says Adam. “Collateral damage in complex algorithms is inevitable. The fault was not having a procedure by which we could appeal and get timely relief.” '
I've been dealing with exactly this myself recently. I had an old gmail hacked and stolen. Well the idiot didnt remove my main acct as the forwading address, so I began receiving emails for everything from his uber account to his facebook account.
No matter what answers I gave google about account creation, old passwords, no matter that I provided whatever they asked, that they sent a verification code that didn't even work, NOTHING restored my access. I even still have the forwarded emails! The emails themselves show how this kid took MY email.
Yet there is no way to get ahold of google other than their product forums, posting and praying to not get a cheap canned response (which is what happened to me).
It seems these companies, in trying to remove themselves from their users by as many degrees of separation as possible are doing this to themselves. If they simply interacted with their users and gave even the most rudimentary of ways to speak with someone (livechat, helpdesk, whatever) most of their problems would be handled at the first contact, instead of becoming huge issues which can possibly affect many people (try searching for 'gmail verification code wont work' or 'cant recover hacked gmail' it will be days of fun reading).
I was infuriated over simply losing an old worthless email to their shenanigans, I can't imagine seeing the startup I created stomped underfoot by a megacorp like an ant.
I used to LOVE google back in the early gmail/android days. They were the good guys. What happened?
- mciancia 9y agoBy the way, it is kind of interesting what drives someone to steal someones gmail account and than use it as his own - unless it's name was in some way unique and desired
- a012 9y agoIt is, to own something like a 3 - 4 letters long username or email address is worth more to some people.
- Brajeshwar 9y agoHow do you get Gmail username with 5 characters or less?
- Ftuuky 9y agoToo late by now I think.
- Zak 9y agoI got my Gmail account in late 2004 and there was a lower limit on username length then.
- thinkythought 9y agoyep, i distinctly remember wanting just my first name and it not allowing it. i have one of the first 500~ accounts, and it wasn't taken
- sangnoir 9y agoYou have to hack an existing one and make it your own, apparently. :-)
- Whitestrake 9y agoEspecially distinguishable words, and especially names. Domains are a great example of this, too. I recently reached out, out of curiosity, and learned that the owner of the .net domain for my own four-letter name wants a quarter of a million dollars for it. A shame, really. They're not doing anything with it, best I can tell. But if that's what someone would pay for it... You can bet someone would try to steal it.
- deanCommie 9y agoAt Google, the "user" and the "customer" are not the same entity. That causes a problem of incentives.
- MisterTea 9y agoGoogle and other companies don't want customers.
- Slansitartop 9y ago> Google and other companies don't want customers. What do they want, by your reckoning?
- laythea 9y agoyour data please <insert user disabled but already checked check-box here> :)
- Slansitartop 9y agoThat doesn't make any sense. They're not some supervillian who wants your data just to have it; they want to sell it (or products derived from it) to their real customers, which are big ad-buyers. Google and Facebook want customers, ad-buying customers.
- laythea 9y agoIndeed. And if you had an ad to market you want it targeted. Targeting can only occur if there is data.
- dazc 9y agoGoogle has customers and users. One gets support, the other doesn't.
- mrighele 9y agoBut you should take good care of your cattle otherwise you have nothing to sell to your customers.
- jacquesm 9y ago> I used to LOVE google back in the early gmail/android days. They were the good guys. What happened? By then they were already a very large company with lots of forces pulling them in different directions. Google were 'the good guys' right up until they became an advertising company, and it's been downhill from there.
- MisterTea 9y agoTheir chant of "Be less evil" was dead and buried 10+ years ago. They were the underdog in the beginning but absolute power corrupts absolutely. It was only a matter of time before they began to abuse their position as the world's leading search engine and positioned themselves as the internet gatekeepers.
- canes123456 9y agoThey were never the good guys. Apple is not the bad guys. They are both huge corporations with tons of people with varying motivations and goals. You were and are creating a narrative about intentions that probably does not exist.
- infinity0 9y agoA single corporation has a few people with much greater power than most of the other people. Pointing out that there are many people doesn't imply that intentions don't exist. Even if you work at Google, the people that you see and the intentions that you infer for them, might not truly reflect the intentions of the people higher up.
- canes123456 9y agoYes but malintent is much rarer than oversight. Even for actions that hurt customers, are not truly a choice. Save for Google and Facebook, even CEOs that hurt the bottom line for a minor moral victory will be replaced with other people.
- ionised 9y ago> They were the good guys. Villains who twirl their moustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.
- laythea 9y agoI like that. Very thought provoking. Thank you.
- Slansitartop 9y ago> Yet there is no way to get ahold of google other than their product forums, posting and praying to not get a cheap canned response (which is what happened to me). I believe the only way to get relief from Google is to know an insider, who can escalate to someone who can do something. All their public support channels are dead ends. Google sees you as a product, not a customer, and it's customer service skills are so bad that even if you're a real customer you can get the same treatment. Stuff like this is why I switched to used Fastmail with my own domain. > I used to LOVE google back in the early gmail/android days. They were the good guys. What happened? I don't think anything happened. You just hit an important function that they're utterly terrible at.b Despite their success, they're clearly not omnicompetent.
- tzs 9y agoSometimes you can get that insider by becoming a customer of a different part of the company from the one that is giving you trouble. We had an email problem with a major free email provider that also ran an advertising network (no, it was NOT Google or Microsoft...). Our problem was that they kept deciding all the mail we sent to their users was spam. None of it was actually spam. The only things we were sending were: • receipts for purchases • installation instructions and license keys for whatever the user had just purchased • if the user was on a subscription plan with a term longer than a month, a notice a few days before subscription billing that they were going to be billed • responses to support tickets the user initiated We'd complain to the louts running the email service, and they would fix it...and a month later it would happen again. Each time it took them longer and longer to fix it. Then we realized we were spending a large amount buying ads on their ad network. Our guy in charge of ad buying called up our account rep at their advertising sales department, and asked why the heck we should keep paying them a large amount to drive customers to us, if they were going to make it so we could not communicate with those customers if those customers used their email service? It doesn't take a young Einstein to figure we shouldn't. The account rep put our guy on hold a few minutes, then came back and had conference called in someone high up in their IT department, explained the problem. The IT department head conferenced in the person in charge of mail filtering and told him to put in a white list entry for us, and he wanted it done right away. About ten minutes later we were told it was done, and we never had another problem that I know of with email being misclassified as spam. This disturbed me quite a bit. None of our mail was spam, so no one was harmed by that white list entry. But they had plenty of people using their ad network who were pushing sleazy products and who I greatly doubt only sent non-spam mail. Would they also be able to get white listed just be calling an ad rep and complaining? We never had any spam classification problems with customers who used Google or Microsoft free email services, so have no idea if similar things work there, or if they keep a stronger separation between the ad network and the mail services. In my more cynical moments I wonder if this sort of the thing might be the reason advertising companies run free email services. If they can amass a large number of email users, and they grant exceptions in the spam filters for their bigger advertisers, that provides an incentive to use their ad network over one with a smaller email service or without an email server, so you'll get more customers that you email market to at will.
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoI'd ask that we consider a different spectrum than good and bad, but naive and abused. Look at LL Bean and their cancellation of their lifetime warranty [1]. That linked article talks about abuse of the warranty, but I'm fairly sure people were trolling through ebay + thrift shops and buying items to return and resell as new. That's abuse and they had to make changes to it. Or consider how widely reviled PayPal is for how they "take" their customer's money and lock it up. I had a friend who worked there that described it as "a fraud detection company that occasionally takes payments". You can't even imagine the ingenious lengths people go to commit fraud and rip PayPal and other people off. So they have by necessity become this draconian organization. When Google/Gmail was small it was easier, they were more naive. But now? I imagine every scammer in the world is trying to corrupt and steal gmail accounts as a stepping stone to greater fraud - and some significant portion are trying to do so by claiming that someone else's account was hacked and that ney need special access. I don't think there's any easy answers to these thorny problems but forcing it into a false good/bad dichotomy isn't helping. 1 - https://slate.com/business/2018/02/l-l-bean-has-ended-unlimited-returns-and-i-am-fairly-certain-its-my-fault.html https://slate.com/business/2018/02/l-l-bean-has-ended-unlimi...
- dhimes 9y agoPerhaps, but I think GP has a good first step: gave even the most rudimentary of ways to speak with someone (livechat, helpdesk, whatever) Otherwise, we are just guessing. Some will give them the benefit of the doubt. Some will assume the worst. The truth is simply somewhere in between. The opposite of the LL Bean anecdote is a company that gave a lifetime warranty and made a name for itself in the nautical outerwear industry. People bought in part because of the warranty. After a few years they started having to make good on the warranty- not because of fraud, but because out wear doesn't last forever.
- dralley 9y agoThat's reasonable, but also consider that the Apple iCloud "hacking" from a few years back was largely social engineering Apple's tech support into providing them with enough information to get access.
- ballenf 9y agoI see an interesting parallel to malpractice liability for physicians. The well known and understood best way to avoid malpractice is not expertise or avoiding mistakes, it's having good beside manners and treating patients with respect. (Expertise and attention to detail are very, very important of course but have less impact on chances to get sued than these other soft factors, according to this advice.) I've seen doctors miss cancers before and escape unscathed after frank discussions with the patient, while others that do everything technically correct are sued over a hangnail. Not saying missing cancer is "ok as long as your nice", I'm saying that people don't really sue over money, they sue over hurt feelings and seek retribution in monetary form. (There's a big exception to all this in the patients who are opportunistically seeking an opening to sue. They are simply dangerous to have as patients, but are usually quick to move on.) Finally, the physician who has good bedside manners is also a better witness and more sympathetic to juries. These can be hard lessons for techies who "aren't doing anything wrong".
- zitterbewegung 9y agoCompanies are never the good guys. If I recall correctly Google never actually cared about customer service. They expected your questions to be resolved automatically by their software. If you aren't a paying customer to a service related to Google Ads you basically get shafted.
- liquidgecka 9y agoWorked there.. I cared. I responded on forums, dealt with customers large and small, bot direct and as a point of engineering contact. Here is the problem with a company like Google: SPAM. Want to support the regular user? You are going to get people bitching that they can't find the "save" button and they are afraid of losing documents. You will get people asking you where their Nigerian prince went. You will have people who don't own a computer but need access to gmail. etc. Controlling the ways that support enters the system controls the amount of pure bullshit support requests you have to filter. My favorites from the people that made far enough to find a way to contact us directly: * A 30 minute long voicemail from a person talking about how he invented a system to produce energy from.. something.. we never did figure out what the model was. * A person asking YouTube to send over camera to record some event they were having. * A scammer who was annoyed that their scam emails were being filtered, who spent a lot of effort trying to convince US that they really were an estate lawyer in a country that didn't exist. * Somebody telling us that they lost access to an email that didn't exist (and had never existed) and kept slipping up what their name really was. * Piles, and piles of people trying to sell us stuff we didn't need or want.
- lancewiggs 9y agoJust make all calls to support paid per minute - it shortens the calls and removes the nutters. Adjust the price dynamically to meet demand.
- liquidgecka 9y agoSpammers would sign up for enterprise accounts, drop a couple hundred or more to get priority access, then spam the ever living hell out of the internet because they knew that we couldn't just disable the accounts outright. In the time it took to get the account shut down they more than made their money back. Eventually it would turn out that the card was stolen so the money would get reversed. Dealing with credit cards is a nightmare, especially in support situations. What happens if the problem is totally on the users end? (Hi, I can't log into my gmail account, its bob@yahoo.com) Do you refund them since you can't fix the issue? If not they are going to be pissed. What if the problem is quite a lot complicated and requires several hours to fix? In the enterprise space we _constantly_ had to explain to mail carriers that the Cisco PIX device was mangling their SMTP EHLO line in a way that would break the SMTP protocol which is why mail was not going through. If an end user calls it can take hours to debug something like that. Will the user demand a refund when $200 later its ruled to be their shitty ISP's fault?
- elorant 9y agoGoogle has 2bn users. How on earth would they provide support for that? I feel your pain but we have to be realistic. If support is of essence you don't sign in free services.
- woolvalley 9y agoPaid support tbh. It can create perverse incentives, but having an option is better than no option.
- laythea 9y agodo no evil?
- fouc 9y agoTheir customers aren't really the end-user, but advertisers. They just want to appear to be the good guys. Perhaps they should offer a paid customer support service just so that they're finally incentivized to help the end-user.
- emilfihlman 9y agoThis is exactly why I'm teaching myself skills in it and computing. I cannot rely on Google.
- effingwewt 9y agoJust in case anyone was curious, no nothing has been resolved, just the same runaround despite the info I have to provide. Also, if anyone is curious here is a link to the google group discussion: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/gmail/bQy5MhUaLEM/BVZ8e7PDAAAJ https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm...