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I'd really like to hear Google's side of this story, since the story as-written doesn't seem plausible.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
Everybody wants to hear it, but Google can't tell it. One part of the fight with the bad guys is never to tell them how they got caught, so they never know how to protect themselves.
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  There's a difference between telling someone what they did wrong and telling them how they got caught. The former should be a legal requirement. But I'm not sure what actually happened in this particular case. We don't even know if it concerns a G Suite account and what the company was or wasn't told about why they got banned.
  - gwerbret 8y ago
    Non-expert here, but I wonder if the obscurity actually points to an machine learning-based solution at Google's end. Let's say that Google has developed a deep learning paradigm to identify -- and ban -- low-value users who violate their ToS. The low-value group would probably include all non-paying users, as well as small G Suite accounts. Let's also say that the paradigm was deployed as an automated solution, since it was 99% accurate during testing at picking out ToS violators, though the exact percentage doesn't really matter. I would imagine that the relevant Google execs did a cost-benefit analysis, and figured that the PR hit and revenue loss associated with a liberal and fully automated use of the banhammer against all supposed ToS violators -- including the 1% that were false positives -- was justified by the benefits to Google's bottom line. Based on this possibility, it seems likely that Google employees would not _know_ why the banhammer fell in any particular instance -- nor would they care to know, since that would involve digging through the data to figure out which events triggered a positive hit in their machine learning implementation. It presumably wouldn't be worth Google's time and effort on behalf of users already classified as "low-value". This might also explain why, as mentioned in another post, it took a few days for the banhammer to fall on a start-up, after a dev with a "poisoned" Google account joined the team. Presumably it took those few days worth of traffic and usage data for ToS-Hammer(tm) to figure that the dev had spawned new accounts elsewhere. Again, I'm not an expert, so pardon any flaws in the relevant logic.
    - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
      This seems realistic, if it's not like that today it may soon be. But I think this is exactly the sort of scenario that doesn't go together with all the claims of responsible use of AI powers. Given the oligopolistic structure of the industry, throwing an unlucky minority under the bus without recourse just because it's statistically "rational" will not hold up. I think Google knows that and there will be some sort of more systematic fix (compared to reddit posts and friends at Google). Some AI algorithms can explain how they came to the conclusion they came to and why not have a paid support option as well.
- scardine 8y ago
  Sure. Let's go ahead and turn the world into a Kafkaesque nightmare where you are prosecuted but has no right to know why. Justice system is perfect so if the man says you are guilty it's because you are. /S
  - nordsieck 8y ago
    > Sure. Let's go ahead and turn the world into a Kafkaesque nightmare where you are prosecuted but has no right to know why. Justice system is perfect so if the man says you are guilty it's because you are. /S The great virtue of private industry over government is the ease with which you can opt out.
    - JasonFruit 8y ago
      Have you tried to opt out of Google services, especially if you got in early on? It's not easy, let me tell you.
      - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
        I completely agree, it's extremely hard. I can do without Google on my servers at all, and I'm happy about it. On my notebook, it's much harder. On a phone, it's almost impossible, if you have and Android phone. Google is bending over backwards to make you turn on more sensors and gather more data. I recently discovered it's enough to use the Gmail app once with a given e-mail address and it will happily turn on the location service (.i.e. phone tracking) for these accounts, even though you use a completely different account for your phone set up, including Google Play. They want to lay their hands on everything, it's so annoying.
    - scardine 8y ago
      Yes, changing to another cloud provider may be less annoying than moving to another country but for how long it will be the case?
  - hluska 8y ago
    Isn't Google a private company?
- themaninthedark 8y ago
  Security through obscurity is a bad design.
swebs 8y ago
>Their policy is to not share any information about what caused this and they will not reverse these actions. There's their side of the story.
raverbashing 8y ago
I don't remember of Google providing a PR response to any moderately controversial mistake they made. They most likely don't have anyone to speak for the company except on bigger issues. Even their product forums are staffed with "community experts" who no one knows if they're Google, community or a 3rd party service and no one with enough authority and knowledge to properly manage things.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >"except on bigger issues" Internet: You're accused of not caring about any but the very largest of corporate customers, nor individual customers, and damaging companies that use your products. Google: We don't respond to such minor issues. ? It's a massive issue IMO. They know what they're doing, they just don't want to be overt with it as that will damage their rep.
alexdiacre 8y ago
Hi jimrandomh Alex here from G Suite Cloud Support at Google. We're limited on what we're able to share in public forums related to specific customer situations.
ucaetano 8y ago
From a post higher up: TL;DR: After extensive investigation, case review and working with a variety of internal teams, we’ve have not found any supporting evidence to corroborate these claims. Greetings. This is Alex Diacre again from Google’s G Suite Support team with a followup. In order to protect the privacy of all our customers and users, it is our policy not to disclose information relating to specific customer accounts in public forums. But given the amount of attention this post received, I’d like to offer some insight on the results of our investigation on this matter: -The original poster on Reddit (OP) did not identify him/herself or the customer account. We have made several attempts to reach out to the OP through PM, but have yet to receive a response. (If the OP or someone from his/her company is reading this, please get in touch with me). - We have tried to identify the customer based on the information in the original post, including an extensive review of recent support cases, but have not found any cases resembling the description. To note, Technical Support is available to G Suite customers 24/7 via chat, phone and email. We’re happy to work with the OP to investigate this matter further; until then, we have not found any supporting evidence to corroborate these claims. Technical Support can be accessed at https://gsuite.google.com/support/* https://gsuite.google.com/support/*

Everybody wants to hear it, but Google can't tell it. One part of the fight with the bad guys is never to tell them how they got caught, so they never know how to protect themselves.

fauigerzigerk 8y ago
There's a difference between telling someone what they did wrong and telling them how they got caught. The former should be a legal requirement. But I'm not sure what actually happened in this particular case. We don't even know if it concerns a G Suite account and what the company was or wasn't told about why they got banned.
- gwerbret 8y ago
  Non-expert here, but I wonder if the obscurity actually points to an machine learning-based solution at Google's end. Let's say that Google has developed a deep learning paradigm to identify -- and ban -- low-value users who violate their ToS. The low-value group would probably include all non-paying users, as well as small G Suite accounts. Let's also say that the paradigm was deployed as an automated solution, since it was 99% accurate during testing at picking out ToS violators, though the exact percentage doesn't really matter. I would imagine that the relevant Google execs did a cost-benefit analysis, and figured that the PR hit and revenue loss associated with a liberal and fully automated use of the banhammer against all supposed ToS violators -- including the 1% that were false positives -- was justified by the benefits to Google's bottom line. Based on this possibility, it seems likely that Google employees would not _know_ why the banhammer fell in any particular instance -- nor would they care to know, since that would involve digging through the data to figure out which events triggered a positive hit in their machine learning implementation. It presumably wouldn't be worth Google's time and effort on behalf of users already classified as "low-value". This might also explain why, as mentioned in another post, it took a few days for the banhammer to fall on a start-up, after a dev with a "poisoned" Google account joined the team. Presumably it took those few days worth of traffic and usage data for ToS-Hammer(tm) to figure that the dev had spawned new accounts elsewhere. Again, I'm not an expert, so pardon any flaws in the relevant logic.
  - fauigerzigerk 8y ago
    This seems realistic, if it's not like that today it may soon be. But I think this is exactly the sort of scenario that doesn't go together with all the claims of responsible use of AI powers. Given the oligopolistic structure of the industry, throwing an unlucky minority under the bus without recourse just because it's statistically "rational" will not hold up. I think Google knows that and there will be some sort of more systematic fix (compared to reddit posts and friends at Google). Some AI algorithms can explain how they came to the conclusion they came to and why not have a paid support option as well.
scardine 8y ago
Sure. Let's go ahead and turn the world into a Kafkaesque nightmare where you are prosecuted but has no right to know why. Justice system is perfect so if the man says you are guilty it's because you are. /S
- nordsieck 8y ago
  > Sure. Let's go ahead and turn the world into a Kafkaesque nightmare where you are prosecuted but has no right to know why. Justice system is perfect so if the man says you are guilty it's because you are. /S The great virtue of private industry over government is the ease with which you can opt out.
  - JasonFruit 8y ago
    Have you tried to opt out of Google services, especially if you got in early on? It's not easy, let me tell you.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
      I completely agree, it's extremely hard. I can do without Google on my servers at all, and I'm happy about it. On my notebook, it's much harder. On a phone, it's almost impossible, if you have and Android phone. Google is bending over backwards to make you turn on more sensors and gather more data. I recently discovered it's enough to use the Gmail app once with a given e-mail address and it will happily turn on the location service (.i.e. phone tracking) for these accounts, even though you use a completely different account for your phone set up, including Google Play. They want to lay their hands on everything, it's so annoying.
  - scardine 8y ago
    Yes, changing to another cloud provider may be less annoying than moving to another country but for how long it will be the case?
- hluska 8y ago
  Isn't Google a private company?
themaninthedark 8y ago
Security through obscurity is a bad design.

swebs 8y ago

>Their policy is to not share any information about what caused this and they will not reverse these actions. There's their side of the story.

raverbashing 8y ago

I don't remember of Google providing a PR response to any moderately controversial mistake they made. They most likely don't have anyone to speak for the company except on bigger issues. Even their product forums are staffed with "community experts" who no one knows if they're Google, community or a 3rd party service and no one with enough authority and knowledge to properly manage things.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
>"except on bigger issues" Internet: You're accused of not caring about any but the very largest of corporate customers, nor individual customers, and damaging companies that use your products. Google: We don't respond to such minor issues. ? It's a massive issue IMO. They know what they're doing, they just don't want to be overt with it as that will damage their rep.

alexdiacre 8y ago

Hi jimrandomh Alex here from G Suite Cloud Support at Google. We're limited on what we're able to share in public forums related to specific customer situations.

ucaetano 8y ago

From a post higher up: TL;DR: After extensive investigation, case review and working with a variety of internal teams, we’ve have not found any supporting evidence to corroborate these claims. Greetings. This is Alex Diacre again from Google’s G Suite Support team with a followup. In order to protect the privacy of all our customers and users, it is our policy not to disclose information relating to specific customer accounts in public forums. But given the amount of attention this post received, I’d like to offer some insight on the results of our investigation on this matter: -The original poster on Reddit (OP) did not identify him/herself or the customer account. We have made several attempts to reach out to the OP through PM, but have yet to receive a response. (If the OP or someone from his/her company is reading this, please get in touch with me). - We have tried to identify the customer based on the information in the original post, including an extensive review of recent support cases, but have not found any cases resembling the description. To note, Technical Support is available to G Suite customers 24/7 via chat, phone and email. We’re happy to work with the OP to investigate this matter further; until then, we have not found any supporting evidence to corroborate these claims. Technical Support can be accessed at https://gsuite.google.com/support/* https://gsuite.google.com/support/*