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Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuria

Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine. I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day. In this scenario it seems pretty obvious that their automated fraud AI messed up, but the customer service person is probably also automated. They have so many people working on insane moonshots, but don't spend money for customer service for their core products (in this case people literally trying to give you money!). Just bizarre.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
> I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day. Perhaps you should change this? If you're aware your entire livelihood is a game of Russian roulette, you should maybe work on making it something else.
- bauerd 7y ago
  I second this, recognising my Google account as a giant SPOF made me invest heavily into redundancy. I've gotten closer and closer to the point where I can realistically consider Google services as ephemeral.
  - jacekm 7y ago
    I took similar approach a while ago. I don't run google ads and I am not doing any business with them but I have lots of important data on my Google Drive (personal backup) that I really wouldn't want to lose. One day I read a story of a guy who had his account shut down for posting a video (innocent in his own claims) to youtube. As a result he lost access to his gmail and Drive too. This was a wake up call for me as I realised that I could be denied access to my data for whatever reason. I have several additional copies now, both on local hard drives and different cloud providers.
    - Gibbon1 7y ago
      I feel like people are slowly learning that one shouldn't use google for anything important unless there is no other option. Hardware equivalent is Intel for anything but PC and laptop microprocessors. Intel acts the same way google does. And people in the hardware business avoid Intel products when alternatives exist.
- atemerev 7y ago
  It is kind of hard to just “change” one’s principal passive income source. It’s not like taking another job if you don’t like the current one. Such things can take years.
  - maximente 7y ago
    there's nothing "passive" about this. he's relying upon a "platform" (there should be a more nefarious word for this, perhaps monopolyform or something) whose behavior in the past has indicated that it is arbitrary at best and malicious at worst. thus, there's an absolutely nontrivial existential risk of losing all of that one morning, at the whim of the platform overlord. when you associate to any extent with a monopolyform, you must understand that at any point, the owner can absolutely annihilate you. that's the game, and those complaining post facto about how it's not fair should consider that those were always the rules, and complaining after getting bumped off is certainly understandable but that outcome should have always been a part of one's expected risks and possible outcomes.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Yes everyone who has an unsteady job should just get a better one or not worry about losing the one they have. Quite stoic.
- wolco 7y ago
  At one time I felt like I was going to be one of those people but very glad I decided to keep working as additional income because a few years later it slowly declined when google decided big brand were more important search results. I feel like if you get your traffic from a source and also sell on that platform at some point the company sees you are successful and cuts you out. We see it with google search result taking content and presenting it at the top. Or Amazon scanning for profitable niches on the platform and pushing their own product.
zeta0134 7y ago
This whole practice reeks of being downright fraudulent. Especially with a new technology like Apple Card, which folks will understandably not have a strong familiarity with. I get that Google needs to combat fraud and all that, but they should at least inform the customer of why such a drastic action (a permanent ban! !!) was taken with almost no warning. Really, any respectable company in this situation would simply flag the account for a billing problem, deny the card, and let the customer try again. At which point, any legitimate customer will go, "Oh, guess they don't take Apple Card" and use something else. It's the same effect (account can't be used, "fraud" with the Apple Card if it exists is dodged) but is not nearly so user hostile as this... mess. Google's opacity here seems like it could only really have one benefit to the company: They can shut down any account they don't like, and since they're always vague with the reasoning, they don't necessarily have to have a valid reason. Their whole "you know what you did" approach is just uncertain enough to cause the victim to doubt themselves and be unlikely to mount a defense. I don't know what their actual motivations are (I know it's popular to hate on Google, but I have a hard time believing they're pulling stunts like this on purpose) but it looks bad no matter how you slice it.
- quanticle 7y ago
  I think an application of Hanlon's Razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor) is applicable here. Google is in an oligopolistic position (along with Facebook) in the online ads space. Therefore, they face zero consequence for having extraordinarily poor customer service. As a result, they optimize their customer "service" to minimize work for themselves. I ran into a very similar situation with my gas company. I'd fat-fingered my bank account number in their online form, so they weren't able to debit my account. Instead of notifying me of this problem, they simply locked my account and threatened to cut me off for non-payment. Even after I'd called the company and appealed, they still prevented me from paying with my bank account for 12 months and forced me to pay with a credit card (which incurred an additional $3.75 "convenience fee").
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    Bank accounts and credit cards work very differently in making payments. Getting an ACH transaction disputed is far more time consuming and difficult. Fat fingering a bank account number number and not triple checking it for an ACH payment isn't something I would just shrug off.
janoc 7y ago
And why do you think this isn't intentional? Spending money on people solving company's screwups costs a lot of money. For the company the size of Google or Facebook one client (or hundred) like this are peanuts, drop in the bucket. The cost of losing them is minimal over the costs of paying a support person to deal with problems. Big client won't get banned - and if they do, they have also a non-public phone number to an account manager to make things right again too. Sadly this is a common trend - e.g. with ISPs it is almost impossible to find a contact to an actual person, only some online chats or automated hotline that will waste your time with canned responses not solving your problem.
- jonknee 7y ago
  It is intentional, I'm just saying it's ridiculous. the Google way is to treat everything like a programming problem. That works decently well for bits, but really breaks down when working with humans.
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    The thing is that it doesn't break down except in the extreme cases, and even then it's often less bad than the edge cases with traditional human-mediated customer service. Consider the Wells Fargo accounts snafu, or the Comcast customer nickname issue. Or PayPal just in general. Is Google actually worse, or are they the kind of better that makes their rarer screwups seem worse. Consider in your evaluation just how many people they deal with using their automated systems.
    - jonknee 7y ago
      Extreme cases like using a popular new credit card to pay? Please. Google uses an algorithm to ban people for life without recourse, it's insane. Not everything can be reduced to an algo, sometimes you need to make exceptions. It can even make your algo better (thousands of people are going to try using their new Apple cards in the coming weeks).
      - 7y ago
AceJohnny2 7y ago
> Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine. Apple does that too [1]. I assume it's to prevent a DoS from fraudsters. (Obviously, it's a problem for legitimate users) [1] https://qz.com/1683460/what-happens-to-your-itunes-account-when-apple-says-youve-committed-fraud/ https://qz.com/1683460/what-happens-to-your-itunes-account-w...
- GeekyBear 7y ago
  In your example, the user was easily able to contact a real human being who informed them that their account had been terminated for using a fraudulent gift card. That human being even went to bat for the user and tried to convince corporate that buying the fraudulent gift card had been an honest mistake in trusting the wrong seller and not intentional fraud. This seems like quite a different experience from "you are banned for life and we won't even talk to you or tell you why".
  - AceJohnny2 7y ago
    Read on for the salient part. > This Senior Agent #2 was not as supportive as the first, and gave me information that contradicted Senior Agent #1: “Your account has been permanently disabled,” he said. “There is nothing else you can do, there is no escalation path.” > When I asked for an explanation as to why, all he would say is, “See the terms and conditions.” Ultimately, the author was able to get out of that dead-end, but it sounded awfully close.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - GeekyBear 7y ago
      The salient fact is that the user was easily able to contact customer support, find out exactly what the issue was, provide documentation showing what had happened, and appeal an adverse decision all the way to the top. This is significantly different than "we won't tell you what the issue is and we won't even accept communications from you".
kryogen1c 7y ago
> Just bizarre. It would be except you and other are still using their services.
lallysingh 7y ago
It's a classic "Go fuck yourself" response.
- beamatronic 7y ago
  That would actually be a more honest response.
  - ggg3 7y ago
    american Puritanism. imply and do as much as you want, but for God, do not spell it out!
- twoheadedboy 7y ago
  Modern life is so Kafkaesque.
themagician 7y ago
I had this exact issue with FB a while ago. Got that exact response. Fortunately I’d worked with FB before for major brands, so I knew the email to send to to get a real person. There is almost always a monitored email address for accounts receivable, and if you email them pretending like you are having trouble making a large payment, someone will respond. When they think it’s a fat check, suddenly “this decision is final” is just a mistake.
microtherion 7y ago
> In this scenario it seems pretty obvious that their automated fraud AI messed up Ah, but is it really obvious? One of the benefits of virtual card numbers, in particular the Apple Card implementation, is that it's easy to switch them out, which makes tracking harder. Could it be that a company that makes its living off tracking users would not be overly fond of virtual card numbers? As long as users' reaction is "if you're planning on using the Apple Card for anything important, think again", it looks like the AI did exactly what it was meant to do.
- harshreality 7y ago
  If that's the case, they should simply reject charges from virtual cards, rather than charging them and then banning the account.
  - microtherion 7y ago
    But as I've argued above, maybe the deterrent effect is a feature, as long as it's the use of virtual cards that is deterred and not the use of Google products.
    - wrs 7y ago
      Wouldn't you say that banning you from using Google products forever is a pretty darn effective way of deterring you from using those products?
      - microtherion 7y ago
        That would be one way of looking at it. But the OP took the opposite conclusion, that one should avoid using Apple Card. So we have one user who is using neither Apple Card nor Google products, and a number of his readers, who are deterred from using Apple Card.
- jonknee 7y ago
  I usually pay with Amex and sometimes a business will say "Oh sorry, we don't take Amex". Never once have they ushered me out the door and issued a trespass notice. Instead I just pay another way and we are both happy. That seems pretty optimal.
optimiz3 7y ago
Coinbase does the same thing. Perma-banned for reasons. Won't ever know why.
duxup 7y ago
We thought the sci-fi style evil AI would become the overlord making nonsensical decisions that can't be appealed. But really, humans are happy to do it to each other. It makes sense I guess as those sci-fi AIs are often to some extent or another trying to save us from, other humans, or at least that was their origin.
jsonne 7y ago
FWIW Facebook will also ban you without telling you which ad policy you violated. Most infuriating they can pull access to accounts or your ability to turn off ads while they're still running and connected to a credit card. To me, that seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
howdisposs45 7y ago
>in this case people literally trying to give you money! Gmail for Android has 2 core functions: to send and to receive mail. It fails at one of them. (Emails get stuck in its outbox indefinitely - you can force it to send by going into the "outbox" and dragging down to refresh, which is an action that has no button to show it is possible. There is no notification that your mail wasn't sent.) Here is a thread about it: https://support.google.com/mail/thread/3130686?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/thread/3130686?hl=en How is it possible for an app that has 2 functions, to fail to do one of them? This is like a salt and pepper set where the pepper side has no holes - the pepper is stuck inside. (You can unscrew the top and manually shake some out though.) Sure salt is more common. But it's literally a salt and pepper set that only functions as a salt shaker. Gmail for android is literally a mail sending and receiving app that can't send mail. How can this happen? I mean literally, how is the support thread I linked possible? If I were the CEO and I saw a thread like that, the issue would be fixed within 7 minutes, as every person within earshot of me rushed to make themselves look good to me. How is Google's CEO different?
- kube-system 7y ago
  Easy. Google’s CEO runs an advertising company. You assumption is that the app has two functions functions: sending and receiving email. It actually only has one function, put eyes in front of ads.
  - howdisposs45 7y ago
    To be honest this doesn't make sense. If the salt and pepper set only had "one function" which is to display advertising in your home (the analogy works pretty well, as I could imagine the set plastered with ads) it still has to work as a salt and pepper set, or people wouldn't use it.
    - kube-system 7y ago
      In the example thread above, people are reacting by complaining about the problem. If they reacted by switching email providers, they wouldn’t be in that thread. I highly doubt Gmail’s active user count is affected by any more than a minuscule amount as a result.
Marsymars 7y ago
> Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine. For non-negligible damages, heading immediately to small claims court (given you live in a sensible jurisdiction) seems to be the easiest thing in that case. Even if Google's ultimately in the right, they typically can't just ignore that entirely. From a decade ago: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_172403 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_1... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_213176 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...
- raverbashing 7y ago
  Really, sometimes people forget (and I'm guilty as charged) they live in a society with laws and legal recourses. It's not as simple as "Google can cut you off no questions asked whenever they feel like it"
  - joemi 7y ago
    > It's not as simple as "Google can cut you off no questions asked whenever they feel like it" Are you sure about that? Often such terms are built into the user agreements.
    - raverbashing 7y ago
      Well, that's certainly what they want you to think ;) I suppose there are a couple of issues that haven't been tested in court. But besides that, anything you paid and wasn't rendered as services needs to be refunded. It doesn't look like they refund it most times, no?
      - arielm 7y ago
        The problem is that regardless of whether they are or not, getting to a point where a judge looks it over is a process most can’t go through with an opponent like Google.
noonespecial 7y ago
Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine. Its also almost certainly completely fake as they're done nothing of the sort. I'd be shocked if it wasn't as automatic as an away message.
ganeshkrishnan 7y ago
This is exactly what I said few hours back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20838089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20838089. Premium support in Google only exists to make sure your have paid them. They will ban your account after you have paid them. They usually want till your payment is cleared and then ban you. My colleague's play account was banned because he used PayPal not Google wallet, when it was launched
jacquesm 7y ago
> Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine. There isn't a week that goes by without that exact same story repeating itself. > I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day. Maybe you could prepare for this by writing an angry blogpost ahead of time, to get it out of your system?
sha666sum 7y ago
Google ignoring their customers is a recurring theme,, and I'd like to think that I have a pretty good list of tech news that I follow. Since this is HN, which (at least used to) primarily cater to the startup crowd, I hope it goes without saying that Google does not fix this issue because they don't have a financial incentive to do so. This is basic capitalism at play, and what you as a developer/advertiser/user need to do is use and pay for competing products if you're not happy about the status quo.
- lapnitnelav 7y ago
  Exactly, it's all about power. On one hand, in the online ads biz, Google is king and is happy to outsource its customer support for its most premium customers both large network of agencies and advertisers. I know it quite well, I was one of those guys for Doubleclick many moons ago. That is if you are big enough to be worthy of being a Google (DC) customer in the first place, which means, you have to be a large spender. But on the other hand, if you sign up for their Google Cloud thing despite being a nobody (me again), you'll have their sales folks hounding you for an upsell, mostly because GCloud is ridiculously behind both AWS and Azure. Funny how it goes.
scohesc 7y ago
It's absolutely fucking mind-boggling how these large, impenetrable silicon valley companies (mainly google here) like to hide behind their "algorithms". "Oh, sorry your main method of making money was terminated, we won't tell you why or how we came to that conclusion - must have been the algorithm, sorry!" What's that old saying - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? I'm starting to think that these massive companies aren't stupid and that they're actually designing their algorithms behind this and using it as a scapegoat to push their own agenda.
- ghettoimp 7y ago
  I don't disagree with anything you have said. But, if your main method of making money is dependent on some particular entity continuing to do whatever they are currently doing, you have a problem.
  - ajnin 7y ago
    I hear that argument a lot from people trying to shift the blame to the victim. But we all depend on some particular entity in one form or another, we all depend on the government upholding the value of money, we depend on the transportation systems not to cease to operate, we do that not because we're sloppy but because there is no other way to do things. Try to run ads on the Internet without dealing with Google.
  - Wistar 7y ago
    ... the Federal reserve, for instance.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I’ve never once had a problem reaching a live human that could solve my problem on the business side working with AWS. As a consumer I’ve never had any issues with Amazon retail.
  - zenexer 7y ago
    It's pretty difficult to reach a human if you don't pay a ridiculous extra amount each month for support--and even then, they're rarely able to assist with actual bugs. They just assume everything that's wrong is your mistake, and when they finally come to the conclusion that it's a bug on their end, they give up.
rapind 7y ago
My theory is that Google is now being run by robots. They maintain a few token humans to propagate the facade. Before you disagree, ask yourself, would you know if they were(n't)?
- jboles 7y ago
  The humans are too distracted by non-work activities maybe? This article paints a bizarre picture: https://thefederalist.com/2018/01/10/19-insane-tidbits-james-damores-lawsuit-googles-office-environment/ https://thefederalist.com/2018/01/10/19-insane-tidbits-james...
qwerty456127 7y ago
Yet there still are all kinds of scams advertised and millions of people download trojaned apps from Google Play.
julianee 7y ago
Unfortunately they practice these sorts of policy on the app store as well. We've been saying Google does this, Google does that. The thing is, a company is composed of its people. I am just curious, how does something like this, something most people with reasonable sense of "fairness" would flag as concerning and potentially very wrong, comes to be implemented? Even more so for a large company like Google? (smaller companies can have a "bad dictator boss" which can push this through without issue) Policies like these, which appear to have consistencies across their products, how far up does the chain of responsibility go? How does stuff like these occur? Does it start with some MBA grad who comes in, gets assigned a KPI to "cut costs" and then their natural bias is that customer service is the first to go, proposes it to their managers and it bubbles up for approval and implementation? All the while everyone at each level is oblivious to the potentially damaging collateral the policy would cause, but only think that "oh this is a great move, we would save a bunch!" and then finally gets implemented? Or would this more be a top-down thing where executives discuss and push this and then the employees, being good people at heart have no choice but to implement it? I just find it so difficult to imagine something like this being OK-ed by all the people involved within the company. Like, is everyone "in on it"? Or do they not know? Or they know but can't/unwilling to say anything?
- wolco 7y ago
  It starts with someone coming up with a way of cutting costs. It continues because it can. Then it becomes part of their brand which would only matter if you had similiar choices for similiar services.
- ben_jones 7y ago
  I think Google employees view their services as a gift to users who should be grateful and understanding of any deficiencies.
WalterGR 7y ago
I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day. Me too. My favorite so far is Google threatening to take away my primary source of income because my site has content related to pirated software. Google is correct! My site is a dictionary, and it has the temerity to define the term “warez”.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

> I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day. Perhaps you should change this? If you're aware your entire livelihood is a game of Russian roulette, you should maybe work on making it something else.

bauerd 7y ago
I second this, recognising my Google account as a giant SPOF made me invest heavily into redundancy. I've gotten closer and closer to the point where I can realistically consider Google services as ephemeral.
- jacekm 7y ago
  I took similar approach a while ago. I don't run google ads and I am not doing any business with them but I have lots of important data on my Google Drive (personal backup) that I really wouldn't want to lose. One day I read a story of a guy who had his account shut down for posting a video (innocent in his own claims) to youtube. As a result he lost access to his gmail and Drive too. This was a wake up call for me as I realised that I could be denied access to my data for whatever reason. I have several additional copies now, both on local hard drives and different cloud providers.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    I feel like people are slowly learning that one shouldn't use google for anything important unless there is no other option. Hardware equivalent is Intel for anything but PC and laptop microprocessors. Intel acts the same way google does. And people in the hardware business avoid Intel products when alternatives exist.
atemerev 7y ago
It is kind of hard to just “change” one’s principal passive income source. It’s not like taking another job if you don’t like the current one. Such things can take years.
- maximente 7y ago
  there's nothing "passive" about this. he's relying upon a "platform" (there should be a more nefarious word for this, perhaps monopolyform or something) whose behavior in the past has indicated that it is arbitrary at best and malicious at worst. thus, there's an absolutely nontrivial existential risk of losing all of that one morning, at the whim of the platform overlord. when you associate to any extent with a monopolyform, you must understand that at any point, the owner can absolutely annihilate you. that's the game, and those complaining post facto about how it's not fair should consider that those were always the rules, and complaining after getting bumped off is certainly understandable but that outcome should have always been a part of one's expected risks and possible outcomes.
lonelappde 7y ago
Yes everyone who has an unsteady job should just get a better one or not worry about losing the one they have. Quite stoic.
wolco 7y ago
At one time I felt like I was going to be one of those people but very glad I decided to keep working as additional income because a few years later it slowly declined when google decided big brand were more important search results. I feel like if you get your traffic from a source and also sell on that platform at some point the company sees you are successful and cuts you out. We see it with google search result taking content and presenting it at the top. Or Amazon scanning for profitable niches on the platform and pushing their own product.

zeta0134 7y ago

This whole practice reeks of being downright fraudulent. Especially with a new technology like Apple Card, which folks will understandably not have a strong familiarity with. I get that Google needs to combat fraud and all that, but they should at least inform the customer of why such a drastic action (a permanent ban! !!) was taken with almost no warning. Really, any respectable company in this situation would simply flag the account for a billing problem, deny the card, and let the customer try again. At which point, any legitimate customer will go, "Oh, guess they don't take Apple Card" and use something else. It's the same effect (account can't be used, "fraud" with the Apple Card if it exists is dodged) but is not nearly so user hostile as this... mess. Google's opacity here seems like it could only really have one benefit to the company: They can shut down any account they don't like, and since they're always vague with the reasoning, they don't necessarily have to have a valid reason. Their whole "you know what you did" approach is just uncertain enough to cause the victim to doubt themselves and be unlikely to mount a defense. I don't know what their actual motivations are (I know it's popular to hate on Google, but I have a hard time believing they're pulling stunts like this on purpose) but it looks bad no matter how you slice it.

quanticle 7y ago
I think an application of Hanlon's Razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor) is applicable here. Google is in an oligopolistic position (along with Facebook) in the online ads space. Therefore, they face zero consequence for having extraordinarily poor customer service. As a result, they optimize their customer "service" to minimize work for themselves. I ran into a very similar situation with my gas company. I'd fat-fingered my bank account number in their online form, so they weren't able to debit my account. Instead of notifying me of this problem, they simply locked my account and threatened to cut me off for non-payment. Even after I'd called the company and appealed, they still prevented me from paying with my bank account for 12 months and forced me to pay with a credit card (which incurred an additional $3.75 "convenience fee").
- shkkmo 7y ago
  Bank accounts and credit cards work very differently in making payments. Getting an ACH transaction disputed is far more time consuming and difficult. Fat fingering a bank account number number and not triple checking it for an ACH payment isn't something I would just shrug off.

janoc 7y ago

And why do you think this isn't intentional? Spending money on people solving company's screwups costs a lot of money. For the company the size of Google or Facebook one client (or hundred) like this are peanuts, drop in the bucket. The cost of losing them is minimal over the costs of paying a support person to deal with problems. Big client won't get banned - and if they do, they have also a non-public phone number to an account manager to make things right again too. Sadly this is a common trend - e.g. with ISPs it is almost impossible to find a contact to an actual person, only some online chats or automated hotline that will waste your time with canned responses not solving your problem.

jonknee 7y ago
It is intentional, I'm just saying it's ridiculous. the Google way is to treat everything like a programming problem. That works decently well for bits, but really breaks down when working with humans.
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  The thing is that it doesn't break down except in the extreme cases, and even then it's often less bad than the edge cases with traditional human-mediated customer service. Consider the Wells Fargo accounts snafu, or the Comcast customer nickname issue. Or PayPal just in general. Is Google actually worse, or are they the kind of better that makes their rarer screwups seem worse. Consider in your evaluation just how many people they deal with using their automated systems.
  - jonknee 7y ago
    Extreme cases like using a popular new credit card to pay? Please. Google uses an algorithm to ban people for life without recourse, it's insane. Not everything can be reduced to an algo, sometimes you need to make exceptions. It can even make your algo better (thousands of people are going to try using their new Apple cards in the coming weeks).
    - 7y ago

AceJohnny2 7y ago

> Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine. Apple does that too [1]. I assume it's to prevent a DoS from fraudsters. (Obviously, it's a problem for legitimate users) [1] https://qz.com/1683460/what-happens-to-your-itunes-account-when-apple-says-youve-committed-fraud/ https://qz.com/1683460/what-happens-to-your-itunes-account-w...

GeekyBear 7y ago
In your example, the user was easily able to contact a real human being who informed them that their account had been terminated for using a fraudulent gift card. That human being even went to bat for the user and tried to convince corporate that buying the fraudulent gift card had been an honest mistake in trusting the wrong seller and not intentional fraud. This seems like quite a different experience from "you are banned for life and we won't even talk to you or tell you why".
- AceJohnny2 7y ago
  Read on for the salient part. > This Senior Agent #2 was not as supportive as the first, and gave me information that contradicted Senior Agent #1: “Your account has been permanently disabled,” he said. “There is nothing else you can do, there is no escalation path.” > When I asked for an explanation as to why, all he would say is, “See the terms and conditions.” Ultimately, the author was able to get out of that dead-end, but it sounded awfully close.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - GeekyBear 7y ago
    The salient fact is that the user was easily able to contact customer support, find out exactly what the issue was, provide documentation showing what had happened, and appeal an adverse decision all the way to the top. This is significantly different than "we won't tell you what the issue is and we won't even accept communications from you".

kryogen1c 7y ago

> Just bizarre. It would be except you and other are still using their services.

lallysingh 7y ago

It's a classic "Go fuck yourself" response.

beamatronic 7y ago
That would actually be a more honest response.
- ggg3 7y ago
  american Puritanism. imply and do as much as you want, but for God, do not spell it out!
twoheadedboy 7y ago
Modern life is so Kafkaesque.

themagician 7y ago

I had this exact issue with FB a while ago. Got that exact response. Fortunately I’d worked with FB before for major brands, so I knew the email to send to to get a real person. There is almost always a monitored email address for accounts receivable, and if you email them pretending like you are having trouble making a large payment, someone will respond. When they think it’s a fat check, suddenly “this decision is final” is just a mistake.

microtherion 7y ago

> In this scenario it seems pretty obvious that their automated fraud AI messed up Ah, but is it really obvious? One of the benefits of virtual card numbers, in particular the Apple Card implementation, is that it's easy to switch them out, which makes tracking harder. Could it be that a company that makes its living off tracking users would not be overly fond of virtual card numbers? As long as users' reaction is "if you're planning on using the Apple Card for anything important, think again", it looks like the AI did exactly what it was meant to do.

harshreality 7y ago
If that's the case, they should simply reject charges from virtual cards, rather than charging them and then banning the account.
- microtherion 7y ago
  But as I've argued above, maybe the deterrent effect is a feature, as long as it's the use of virtual cards that is deterred and not the use of Google products.
  - wrs 7y ago
    Wouldn't you say that banning you from using Google products forever is a pretty darn effective way of deterring you from using those products?
    - microtherion 7y ago
      That would be one way of looking at it. But the OP took the opposite conclusion, that one should avoid using Apple Card. So we have one user who is using neither Apple Card nor Google products, and a number of his readers, who are deterred from using Apple Card.
jonknee 7y ago
I usually pay with Amex and sometimes a business will say "Oh sorry, we don't take Amex". Never once have they ushered me out the door and issued a trespass notice. Instead I just pay another way and we are both happy. That seems pretty optimal.

optimiz3 7y ago

Coinbase does the same thing. Perma-banned for reasons. Won't ever know why.

duxup 7y ago

We thought the sci-fi style evil AI would become the overlord making nonsensical decisions that can't be appealed. But really, humans are happy to do it to each other. It makes sense I guess as those sci-fi AIs are often to some extent or another trying to save us from, other humans, or at least that was their origin.

jsonne 7y ago

FWIW Facebook will also ban you without telling you which ad policy you violated. Most infuriating they can pull access to accounts or your ability to turn off ads while they're still running and connected to a credit card. To me, that seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

howdisposs45 7y ago

>in this case people literally trying to give you money! Gmail for Android has 2 core functions: to send and to receive mail. It fails at one of them. (Emails get stuck in its outbox indefinitely - you can force it to send by going into the "outbox" and dragging down to refresh, which is an action that has no button to show it is possible. There is no notification that your mail wasn't sent.) Here is a thread about it: https://support.google.com/mail/thread/3130686?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/thread/3130686?hl=en How is it possible for an app that has 2 functions, to fail to do one of them? This is like a salt and pepper set where the pepper side has no holes - the pepper is stuck inside. (You can unscrew the top and manually shake some out though.) Sure salt is more common. But it's literally a salt and pepper set that only functions as a salt shaker. Gmail for android is literally a mail sending and receiving app that can't send mail. How can this happen? I mean literally, how is the support thread I linked possible? If I were the CEO and I saw a thread like that, the issue would be fixed within 7 minutes, as every person within earshot of me rushed to make themselves look good to me. How is Google's CEO different?

kube-system 7y ago
Easy. Google’s CEO runs an advertising company. You assumption is that the app has two functions functions: sending and receiving email. It actually only has one function, put eyes in front of ads.
- howdisposs45 7y ago
  To be honest this doesn't make sense. If the salt and pepper set only had "one function" which is to display advertising in your home (the analogy works pretty well, as I could imagine the set plastered with ads) it still has to work as a salt and pepper set, or people wouldn't use it.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    In the example thread above, people are reacting by complaining about the problem. If they reacted by switching email providers, they wouldn’t be in that thread. I highly doubt Gmail’s active user count is affected by any more than a minuscule amount as a result.

Marsymars 7y ago

> Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine. For non-negligible damages, heading immediately to small claims court (given you live in a sensible jurisdiction) seems to be the easiest thing in that case. Even if Google's ultimately in the right, they typically can't just ignore that entirely. From a decade ago: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_172403 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_1... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_213176 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...

raverbashing 7y ago
Really, sometimes people forget (and I'm guilty as charged) they live in a society with laws and legal recourses. It's not as simple as "Google can cut you off no questions asked whenever they feel like it"
- joemi 7y ago
  > It's not as simple as "Google can cut you off no questions asked whenever they feel like it" Are you sure about that? Often such terms are built into the user agreements.
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    Well, that's certainly what they want you to think ;) I suppose there are a couple of issues that haven't been tested in court. But besides that, anything you paid and wasn't rendered as services needs to be refunded. It doesn't look like they refund it most times, no?
    - arielm 7y ago
      The problem is that regardless of whether they are or not, getting to a point where a judge looks it over is a process most can’t go through with an opponent like Google.

noonespecial 7y ago

ganeshkrishnan 7y ago

This is exactly what I said few hours back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20838089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20838089. Premium support in Google only exists to make sure your have paid them. They will ban your account after you have paid them. They usually want till your payment is cleared and then ban you. My colleague's play account was banned because he used PayPal not Google wallet, when it was launched

jacquesm 7y ago

> Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine. There isn't a week that goes by without that exact same story repeating itself. > I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day. Maybe you could prepare for this by writing an angry blogpost ahead of time, to get it out of your system?

sha666sum 7y ago

Google ignoring their customers is a recurring theme,, and I'd like to think that I have a pretty good list of tech news that I follow. Since this is HN, which (at least used to) primarily cater to the startup crowd, I hope it goes without saying that Google does not fix this issue because they don't have a financial incentive to do so. This is basic capitalism at play, and what you as a developer/advertiser/user need to do is use and pay for competing products if you're not happy about the status quo.

lapnitnelav 7y ago
Exactly, it's all about power. On one hand, in the online ads biz, Google is king and is happy to outsource its customer support for its most premium customers both large network of agencies and advertisers. I know it quite well, I was one of those guys for Doubleclick many moons ago. That is if you are big enough to be worthy of being a Google (DC) customer in the first place, which means, you have to be a large spender. But on the other hand, if you sign up for their Google Cloud thing despite being a nobody (me again), you'll have their sales folks hounding you for an upsell, mostly because GCloud is ridiculously behind both AWS and Azure. Funny how it goes.

scohesc 7y ago

It's absolutely fucking mind-boggling how these large, impenetrable silicon valley companies (mainly google here) like to hide behind their "algorithms". "Oh, sorry your main method of making money was terminated, we won't tell you why or how we came to that conclusion - must have been the algorithm, sorry!" What's that old saying - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? I'm starting to think that these massive companies aren't stupid and that they're actually designing their algorithms behind this and using it as a scapegoat to push their own agenda.

ghettoimp 7y ago
I don't disagree with anything you have said. But, if your main method of making money is dependent on some particular entity continuing to do whatever they are currently doing, you have a problem.
- ajnin 7y ago
  I hear that argument a lot from people trying to shift the blame to the victim. But we all depend on some particular entity in one form or another, we all depend on the government upholding the value of money, we depend on the transportation systems not to cease to operate, we do that not because we're sloppy but because there is no other way to do things. Try to run ads on the Internet without dealing with Google.
- Wistar 7y ago
  ... the Federal reserve, for instance.
scarface74 7y ago
I’ve never once had a problem reaching a live human that could solve my problem on the business side working with AWS. As a consumer I’ve never had any issues with Amazon retail.
- zenexer 7y ago
  It's pretty difficult to reach a human if you don't pay a ridiculous extra amount each month for support--and even then, they're rarely able to assist with actual bugs. They just assume everything that's wrong is your mistake, and when they finally come to the conclusion that it's a bug on their end, they give up.

rapind 7y ago

My theory is that Google is now being run by robots. They maintain a few token humans to propagate the facade. Before you disagree, ask yourself, would you know if they were(n't)?

jboles 7y ago
The humans are too distracted by non-work activities maybe? This article paints a bizarre picture: https://thefederalist.com/2018/01/10/19-insane-tidbits-james-damores-lawsuit-googles-office-environment/ https://thefederalist.com/2018/01/10/19-insane-tidbits-james...

qwerty456127 7y ago

Yet there still are all kinds of scams advertised and millions of people download trojaned apps from Google Play.

julianee 7y ago

Unfortunately they practice these sorts of policy on the app store as well. We've been saying Google does this, Google does that. The thing is, a company is composed of its people. I am just curious, how does something like this, something most people with reasonable sense of "fairness" would flag as concerning and potentially very wrong, comes to be implemented? Even more so for a large company like Google? (smaller companies can have a "bad dictator boss" which can push this through without issue) Policies like these, which appear to have consistencies across their products, how far up does the chain of responsibility go? How does stuff like these occur? Does it start with some MBA grad who comes in, gets assigned a KPI to "cut costs" and then their natural bias is that customer service is the first to go, proposes it to their managers and it bubbles up for approval and implementation? All the while everyone at each level is oblivious to the potentially damaging collateral the policy would cause, but only think that "oh this is a great move, we would save a bunch!" and then finally gets implemented? Or would this more be a top-down thing where executives discuss and push this and then the employees, being good people at heart have no choice but to implement it? I just find it so difficult to imagine something like this being OK-ed by all the people involved within the company. Like, is everyone "in on it"? Or do they not know? Or they know but can't/unwilling to say anything?

wolco 7y ago
It starts with someone coming up with a way of cutting costs. It continues because it can. Then it becomes part of their brand which would only matter if you had similiar choices for similiar services.
ben_jones 7y ago
I think Google employees view their services as a gift to users who should be grateful and understanding of any deficiencies.

WalterGR 7y ago

I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day. Me too. My favorite so far is Google threatening to take away my primary source of income because my site has content related to pirated software. Google is correct! My site is a dictionary, and it has the temerity to define the term “warez”.