10 ms·

Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a r

by blunte 6y ago

Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue. But Google (and Facebook, and probably some other companies) don't have reasonable processes for disputing or resolving these situations. Some have said that we should consider Google's challenge: lots of users/activities that need to be monitored and policed. The assumption is that Google could not afford to do this "reasonably" with humans instead of automated systems because the volume is high. But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit. In the unlikely event that involving more humans would be too expensive, then Google should raise their prices (or stop giving so much away for free). To summarize, there is no excuse for Google to operate this way. They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.

technofiend 6y ago
There needs to be a raft of community managers @ Google handling these sort of failures, including some senior ones to deal with escalations of this kind. They need this to counter the phalanx of people who enjoy spending their time trashing google. Just check reddit's ProjectFi or Stadia subgroups to see people who've made it their life's work to downvote every thread and response in those forums and spew vitriol at every opportunity. Edit: I'm not defending Google's actions in the case of the Terraria developer's account or any other. I'm saying there are some people who have an axe to grind and right now they are the loudest voices. IMHO Google needs to counteract that by taking real action at a broad scale. At some point the trolls will win for no other reason than inaction on Google's part.
- sitkack 6y ago
  I am not trying to write a post for ABoringDystopia, but I would wager that the vast majority of folks with banned accounts that actually want them back would just pay, either for the review or just to get unblocked. Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
  - technofiend 6y ago
    >Question, does take-out still work with a banned account? No clue, my friend; I am not a Google employee.
  - gowld 6y ago
    > does take-out still work with a banned account? No, because banned (not merely "suspended", which you can fix using google tools) accounts are usually banned because of bad content.
raverbashing 6y ago
> They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column. Yeah, until they piss off someone too big to not give up without a legal/public fight or they piss enough people to make a dent on their bottom line. I think Google right now is just coasting and the short term evolution is just reactive/siloed plans but no bigger picture of where they want to go (basically just "evolution for promotion points")
- benlivengood 6y ago
  Coasting at a rate of 20% Y/Y growth on $10^12. The big plans are cloud/youtube. Smaller plans are things like Nest, Pixel, Stadia, etc. Web ads will take care of itself indefinitely. There are always moonshots in flight but it's non-trivial to create a second trillion dollar business out of thin air.
  - WalterSear 6y ago
    GCP is in big trouble at the moment. Their issues are long standing and endemic, and not shared by their competitors. They have absolutely been coasting, and the market is only getting more cutthroat.
- gowld 6y ago
  It's been what 10 years of this, already? Even with Facebook gobbling up ad space and Apple gobbling up mobile? How long can a coaster coast?
  - aspaceman 6y ago
    It’s honestly really sad / pathetic. Big ass tech company been around for ages saying it’s gonna change the world. All you do is coast. Like what. Could you imagine going back in time and saying that to folks? That their whole “I’m gonna change the world” routine is going to be given up on?
    - MockObject 6y ago
stronglikedan 6y ago
I'd bet Amazon has more retail customers trying to get disputes resolved, than Google has business customers attempting to do the same, yet Amazon manages to get a human on the other end of the line. And I'd bet that Amazon's disputes have far less monetary value per incident. Maybe apples to oranges, but it's impressive from a customer service perspective.
- a1o 6y ago
  Microsoft and IBM are also companies with a lot more humans available. I have solved lots of things with phonecalls be business or as a customer. You need to be really big to get humans on Google side.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    And it absolutely bites them in the ass. Google's awful reputation at the enterprise level is probably why GCP is struggling to make it among that sector.
    - castlecrasher2 6y ago
      It's in Google's culture, too. A few years ago when I was learning GCP for a role and wanted to know if they had an AWS Firehose equivalent, I asked on their Slack and the response I got from a GCP rep was "just make a process in Dataflow." Doing that would have cost far, far more than Firehose costs, not to mention the dev/troubleshooting time.
      - oillio 6y ago
        What did you expect the response to be. Should they have said, "No we don't have that, you should probably just use AWS"? They didn't have exactly what you wanted so provided a workaround that would solve the problem.
        castlecrasher2 6y ago
gowld 6y ago
> They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column. Only in the vaguest sense. Don't attribute to corporate greed what can be adequately explained by an out-of-control bureaucracy made of competing personal interests and baroque by leadership by committee on promotions and raises. Writing a fast computer program is much easier than designing a good bureaucracy.
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  “Don’t attribute to greed.” You’re not my dad, you can’t tell me what to do
Pxtl 6y ago
At this point I'd be more than willing to pay a monthly for Google services if it meant I knew I'd get prompt support if something went wrong. I've looked into getting a GSuite account but from my reading like there are some incompatibilities with services that I use on the free tier. I already use Google's paid-tier for their storage and I use their domain registrar. I get that I'm using a free product so that means they have to do customer service on the cheap. I get it. I'm happy to give something that's mission-critical in my life mission-critical payment without the pain of migrating to a new email provider. Shut up and take my money, Google.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Checkout Google one: https://one.google.com/about https://one.google.com/about which is more of a personal plan but come with support.
  - Pxtl 6y ago
    > from my reading like there are some incompatibilities with services that I use on the free tier.
    - easton 6y ago
      GSuite != Google One, which is an add-on to consumer accounts. GSuite makes you a different account that has different access to services.
      - Pxtl 6y ago
        I'm actually already on Google One for the storage - iirc when I bought it I was just buying a storage upgrade... maybe I got transferred in from storage upgrade to the Google One product? I don't remember if it was called One when I bought in. Looking it over, I didn't realize the Google One product offers human support options, so... maybe hypothetically I could actually get service if my account was shuttered? Or they'll actually be resistant to shuttering my account?
  - 6y ago
tgtweak 6y ago
There is no excuse for the laziness/ambiguity surrounding bans like this. I have witnessed, in 1 degree of separation, 3 separate Facebook business account bans in the last 12 months alone - the only reason cited is "you violated our community policy" with a link to the entire community policy and 0 clarification before or after requesting review. In 2 of those cases, they were high-6 & low-7 figure follower companies and were spending well into the 6 figures per year on facebook ads. They were both ultimately overturned after escalating via an "agency-only" facebook person who looked into it and found it to be automated violations (both the original and the appeal!). The excuse for why it wasn't overturned upon appeal was "Sorry we cannot disclose this since people would game the system if we did" yet a single person manually reviewed and overturned it in a matter of minutes. I don't understand the (successful) business logic that gets Facebook into a scenario like this where you can't put 1 hour of human capital into reviewing a potentially million dollar contract.
- dillondoyle 6y ago
  FB is the worst when it comes to this. I created instagram filters this cycle for a client which I thought would be really cool; I haven't seen any from campaigns beyond the Biden Aviators (I work in politics). I wanted to do a 'i just voted' type challenge; tried many ideas and combinations like swappable campaign buttons without text showing 'issues,' branding, different voting method 3d objects. Facebook kept rejecting and pointing to policy that clearly did not apply to what I was uploading. I wish they would have just said 'we don't want political filters.' Escalating to actual @fb employee emails did not work. We're not important enough.
  - blunte 6y ago
    I'm no fan of Facebook by any measure, but I think when it comes to current political content and ads they are in a very tricky position. If they say something is not allowed, at least one group will claim they are suppressing free speech. But if they allow it, they end up having to allow some misleading or completely false disinformation.
    - 6y ago
benlivengood 6y ago
> But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit. They'd waste 99% of their time with spammers, scammers, and attackers trying to social engineer account access. There's no reason to waste a human's time on that.
- horsawlarway 6y ago
  There's no reason they can't put a reasonable support ticket price in place. Hell - MS has been doing it for ages. Make the support request cost $250-$500. Guarantee a human on the other end. That drops spam/scam attempts down to basically nothing. It also helps cover the cost of providing real review. Plus, $500 is a very reasonable expense for most companies (basically negligible for all but the smallest), and it's a high bar for scams/spam. Basically - No, your answer is not a valid reason to not provide human based support.
  - philsnow 6y ago
    That's pretty much an impossible (or at the very least, asymmetric) amount of money in much of the world. So charge them less? Now the scammers will call from those places. How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world?
    - d1zzy 6y ago
      I don't think there are a lot of development world people posting on HN so it's all good /s
    - horsawlarway 6y ago
      > How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world? As far as I know it's priced the same. In the context of this discussion - A business to business relationship - $500 is pretty reasonable at a global level. For an individual consumer - I think $500 is a fairly steep price even in the US (and other 1st world countries) and that's by design.
harha 6y ago
I'm actually surprised there isn't more legal action taken. Not this specific case, but in advertising there's quite some damage for automated bans with unreasonable time to resolve the issue. In a setting where advertisers are effectively forced to use Google to avoid giving market share to competitors, there's the element of not having a choice while ending up with a significant disadvantage once these mechanisms falsely trigger. With Google being the operator of the platform and judge at the same time, I don't think they can hide behind terms of use in all jurisdictions. Scaling up without carrying the costs involved seems pretty unjustified.
- hinkley 6y ago
  > there's the element of not having a choice while ending up with a significant disadvantage once these mechanisms falsely trigger. Some people would call that racketeering.
- astrange 6y ago
  For some of these cases you could sue them in small claims or pursue CFPB or GDPR claims depending on jurisdiction. I’ve had good luck with CFPB. People might be afraid of lawyers but they aren’t involved in these processes.
cactus2093 6y ago
I mostly agree with you, but I think you might be overestimating the benefit of simply having humans on the other end. There is a lot more to building "reasonable" processes than just adding humans to the mix, those people have to be given some power to make exceptions but not too much or it defeats the point of the original rules, and you will still have honest mistakes and a few bad actors on the dispute resolution teams. Doing that at scale is always going to be hard.
- MockObject 6y ago
  It's hard for some people but, isn't this a field of expertise with decades of development? Aren't there thousands of people who have years of experience managing exactly such a process? The problem isn't that it's hard, but that it's a cost center instead of a profit center.
- blunte 6y ago
  At least with a human you have a way to make your case or ask to speak to a manager. Of course they could deny you, but in my experience it is rare to be denied if you persist in politely asking. Without a human to contact, you have no recourse. The email that you received denying your request for re-evaluation is no-reply@big.co, so you're stuck. It is a surprisingly awful feeling of helplessness. In fact, if a human on the other end of the phone were to say, "I'm sorry, it doesn't say why, but our system won't let you back in.", you would probably feel a little better because some soul heard you.
Justsignedup 6y ago
I remember someone had a post here a couple years back: - They bought google wireless. - Their charge was declined, whatever the reason, they wanted to correct that. Or possibly an accidental dispute. - Google disabled their account because of non-payment - Google's customer support couldn't help because they weren't a paying customer. - They literally couldn't do ANYTHING because google was ignoring every step of the way. - Their account was blocked from making any payments and couldn't contact someone until they made a payment. - Eventually their phone was disabled, and they lost the phone number because... no payment! And once the phone number was released / re-used there was nothing they could do. Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar.
- ativzzz 6y ago
  Do you mean google fiber? I've called fiber before I had an account there to ask some questions and I had 0 problems talking to a human immediately and they answered all my questions.
  - strgcmc 6y ago
    Think that story is about Google Fi. I'm a Fi user, but haven't had to try and reach a human to resolve a problem yet; I dread the day if/when that happens where I actually do need a human to solve something I encountered...
    - nicolas_t 6y ago
      On the flip side, I reached out to Google Fi for a payment issue (my account was a French account originally which got converted to a US account and that created an issue) and I got through to a human. This was during the beta phase though so might have been different during that time.
    - emidln 6y ago
      I attempted to be a Fi user. I was a Google Voice number, but apparently some small % of Google Voice numbers could not be ported into Fi at all. After a couple escalations the rep was very sorry but said their system was not able to handle my account unless I was willing to give up my Google Voice number. They suggested I create an alternate google account just for Fi, although Fi and Google Voice cannot front one another, so I end up with a separate phone number that nobody would know.
Sosh101 6y ago
It's a crazy situation. There should be regulation requiring reasonable dispute processes.
d1zzy 6y ago
I'm curious if Google were to provide a payed service for their web services, which includes human support, how many people would pay for that? ... Probably as many as currently pay for Youtube Premium and then come to HN and complain about ads on Youtube :)
mcguire 6y ago
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/alex-kearns-robinhood-trader-suicide-wrongful-death-suit/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/alex-kearns-robinhood-trade...
jeroen 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350968 That was more than 12 years ago, and there has been a steady stream of incidents like that one. If you're still using a Google account for critical stuff, you know what you're getting yourself into.
rodgerd 6y ago
> Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue. It's almost like they could, I don't know, have some AI ethics researcher who could explain to them the pitfalls of letting a bunch of programmers act like their algos are infallible and suggest how to avoid those pitfalls. Nah, just kidding. You sack her for being an uppity black lady who won't just churn out reports saying Google are perfect, because it hurts the feelings of the programmers and their managers.

by blunte 6y ago

technofiend 6y ago

There needs to be a raft of community managers @ Google handling these sort of failures, including some senior ones to deal with escalations of this kind. They need this to counter the phalanx of people who enjoy spending their time trashing google. Just check reddit's ProjectFi or Stadia subgroups to see people who've made it their life's work to downvote every thread and response in those forums and spew vitriol at every opportunity. Edit: I'm not defending Google's actions in the case of the Terraria developer's account or any other. I'm saying there are some people who have an axe to grind and right now they are the loudest voices. IMHO Google needs to counteract that by taking real action at a broad scale. At some point the trolls will win for no other reason than inaction on Google's part.

sitkack 6y ago
I am not trying to write a post for ABoringDystopia, but I would wager that the vast majority of folks with banned accounts that actually want them back would just pay, either for the review or just to get unblocked. Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
- technofiend 6y ago
  >Question, does take-out still work with a banned account? No clue, my friend; I am not a Google employee.
- gowld 6y ago
  > does take-out still work with a banned account? No, because banned (not merely "suspended", which you can fix using google tools) accounts are usually banned because of bad content.

raverbashing 6y ago

> They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column. Yeah, until they piss off someone too big to not give up without a legal/public fight or they piss enough people to make a dent on their bottom line. I think Google right now is just coasting and the short term evolution is just reactive/siloed plans but no bigger picture of where they want to go (basically just "evolution for promotion points")

benlivengood 6y ago
Coasting at a rate of 20% Y/Y growth on $10^12. The big plans are cloud/youtube. Smaller plans are things like Nest, Pixel, Stadia, etc. Web ads will take care of itself indefinitely. There are always moonshots in flight but it's non-trivial to create a second trillion dollar business out of thin air.
- WalterSear 6y ago
  GCP is in big trouble at the moment. Their issues are long standing and endemic, and not shared by their competitors. They have absolutely been coasting, and the market is only getting more cutthroat.
gowld 6y ago
It's been what 10 years of this, already? Even with Facebook gobbling up ad space and Apple gobbling up mobile? How long can a coaster coast?
- aspaceman 6y ago
  It’s honestly really sad / pathetic. Big ass tech company been around for ages saying it’s gonna change the world. All you do is coast. Like what. Could you imagine going back in time and saying that to folks? That their whole “I’m gonna change the world” routine is going to be given up on?
  - MockObject 6y ago

stronglikedan 6y ago

I'd bet Amazon has more retail customers trying to get disputes resolved, than Google has business customers attempting to do the same, yet Amazon manages to get a human on the other end of the line. And I'd bet that Amazon's disputes have far less monetary value per incident. Maybe apples to oranges, but it's impressive from a customer service perspective.

a1o 6y ago
Microsoft and IBM are also companies with a lot more humans available. I have solved lots of things with phonecalls be business or as a customer. You need to be really big to get humans on Google side.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  And it absolutely bites them in the ass. Google's awful reputation at the enterprise level is probably why GCP is struggling to make it among that sector.
  - castlecrasher2 6y ago
    It's in Google's culture, too. A few years ago when I was learning GCP for a role and wanted to know if they had an AWS Firehose equivalent, I asked on their Slack and the response I got from a GCP rep was "just make a process in Dataflow." Doing that would have cost far, far more than Firehose costs, not to mention the dev/troubleshooting time.
    - oillio 6y ago
      What did you expect the response to be. Should they have said, "No we don't have that, you should probably just use AWS"? They didn't have exactly what you wanted so provided a workaround that would solve the problem.
      - castlecrasher2 6y ago

gowld 6y ago

> They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column. Only in the vaguest sense. Don't attribute to corporate greed what can be adequately explained by an out-of-control bureaucracy made of competing personal interests and baroque by leadership by committee on promotions and raises. Writing a fast computer program is much easier than designing a good bureaucracy.

imwillofficial 6y ago
“Don’t attribute to greed.” You’re not my dad, you can’t tell me what to do

Pxtl 6y ago

At this point I'd be more than willing to pay a monthly for Google services if it meant I knew I'd get prompt support if something went wrong. I've looked into getting a GSuite account but from my reading like there are some incompatibilities with services that I use on the free tier. I already use Google's paid-tier for their storage and I use their domain registrar. I get that I'm using a free product so that means they have to do customer service on the cheap. I get it. I'm happy to give something that's mission-critical in my life mission-critical payment without the pain of migrating to a new email provider. Shut up and take my money, Google.

searchableguy 6y ago
Checkout Google one: https://one.google.com/about https://one.google.com/about which is more of a personal plan but come with support.
- Pxtl 6y ago
  > from my reading like there are some incompatibilities with services that I use on the free tier.
  - easton 6y ago
    GSuite != Google One, which is an add-on to consumer accounts. GSuite makes you a different account that has different access to services.
    - Pxtl 6y ago
      I'm actually already on Google One for the storage - iirc when I bought it I was just buying a storage upgrade... maybe I got transferred in from storage upgrade to the Google One product? I don't remember if it was called One when I bought in. Looking it over, I didn't realize the Google One product offers human support options, so... maybe hypothetically I could actually get service if my account was shuttered? Or they'll actually be resistant to shuttering my account?
- 6y ago

tgtweak 6y ago

There is no excuse for the laziness/ambiguity surrounding bans like this. I have witnessed, in 1 degree of separation, 3 separate Facebook business account bans in the last 12 months alone - the only reason cited is "you violated our community policy" with a link to the entire community policy and 0 clarification before or after requesting review. In 2 of those cases, they were high-6 & low-7 figure follower companies and were spending well into the 6 figures per year on facebook ads. They were both ultimately overturned after escalating via an "agency-only" facebook person who looked into it and found it to be automated violations (both the original and the appeal!). The excuse for why it wasn't overturned upon appeal was "Sorry we cannot disclose this since people would game the system if we did" yet a single person manually reviewed and overturned it in a matter of minutes. I don't understand the (successful) business logic that gets Facebook into a scenario like this where you can't put 1 hour of human capital into reviewing a potentially million dollar contract.

dillondoyle 6y ago
FB is the worst when it comes to this. I created instagram filters this cycle for a client which I thought would be really cool; I haven't seen any from campaigns beyond the Biden Aviators (I work in politics). I wanted to do a 'i just voted' type challenge; tried many ideas and combinations like swappable campaign buttons without text showing 'issues,' branding, different voting method 3d objects. Facebook kept rejecting and pointing to policy that clearly did not apply to what I was uploading. I wish they would have just said 'we don't want political filters.' Escalating to actual @fb employee emails did not work. We're not important enough.
- blunte 6y ago
  I'm no fan of Facebook by any measure, but I think when it comes to current political content and ads they are in a very tricky position. If they say something is not allowed, at least one group will claim they are suppressing free speech. But if they allow it, they end up having to allow some misleading or completely false disinformation.
  - 6y ago

benlivengood 6y ago

> But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit. They'd waste 99% of their time with spammers, scammers, and attackers trying to social engineer account access. There's no reason to waste a human's time on that.

horsawlarway 6y ago
There's no reason they can't put a reasonable support ticket price in place. Hell - MS has been doing it for ages. Make the support request cost $250-$500. Guarantee a human on the other end. That drops spam/scam attempts down to basically nothing. It also helps cover the cost of providing real review. Plus, $500 is a very reasonable expense for most companies (basically negligible for all but the smallest), and it's a high bar for scams/spam. Basically - No, your answer is not a valid reason to not provide human based support.
- philsnow 6y ago
  That's pretty much an impossible (or at the very least, asymmetric) amount of money in much of the world. So charge them less? Now the scammers will call from those places. How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world?
  - d1zzy 6y ago
    I don't think there are a lot of development world people posting on HN so it's all good /s
  - horsawlarway 6y ago
    > How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world? As far as I know it's priced the same. In the context of this discussion - A business to business relationship - $500 is pretty reasonable at a global level. For an individual consumer - I think $500 is a fairly steep price even in the US (and other 1st world countries) and that's by design.

harha 6y ago

I'm actually surprised there isn't more legal action taken. Not this specific case, but in advertising there's quite some damage for automated bans with unreasonable time to resolve the issue. In a setting where advertisers are effectively forced to use Google to avoid giving market share to competitors, there's the element of not having a choice while ending up with a significant disadvantage once these mechanisms falsely trigger. With Google being the operator of the platform and judge at the same time, I don't think they can hide behind terms of use in all jurisdictions. Scaling up without carrying the costs involved seems pretty unjustified.

hinkley 6y ago
> there's the element of not having a choice while ending up with a significant disadvantage once these mechanisms falsely trigger. Some people would call that racketeering.
astrange 6y ago
For some of these cases you could sue them in small claims or pursue CFPB or GDPR claims depending on jurisdiction. I’ve had good luck with CFPB. People might be afraid of lawyers but they aren’t involved in these processes.

cactus2093 6y ago

I mostly agree with you, but I think you might be overestimating the benefit of simply having humans on the other end. There is a lot more to building "reasonable" processes than just adding humans to the mix, those people have to be given some power to make exceptions but not too much or it defeats the point of the original rules, and you will still have honest mistakes and a few bad actors on the dispute resolution teams. Doing that at scale is always going to be hard.

MockObject 6y ago
It's hard for some people but, isn't this a field of expertise with decades of development? Aren't there thousands of people who have years of experience managing exactly such a process? The problem isn't that it's hard, but that it's a cost center instead of a profit center.
blunte 6y ago
At least with a human you have a way to make your case or ask to speak to a manager. Of course they could deny you, but in my experience it is rare to be denied if you persist in politely asking. Without a human to contact, you have no recourse. The email that you received denying your request for re-evaluation is no-reply@big.co, so you're stuck. It is a surprisingly awful feeling of helplessness. In fact, if a human on the other end of the phone were to say, "I'm sorry, it doesn't say why, but our system won't let you back in.", you would probably feel a little better because some soul heard you.

Justsignedup 6y ago

I remember someone had a post here a couple years back: - They bought google wireless. - Their charge was declined, whatever the reason, they wanted to correct that. Or possibly an accidental dispute. - Google disabled their account because of non-payment - Google's customer support couldn't help because they weren't a paying customer. - They literally couldn't do ANYTHING because google was ignoring every step of the way. - Their account was blocked from making any payments and couldn't contact someone until they made a payment. - Eventually their phone was disabled, and they lost the phone number because... no payment! And once the phone number was released / re-used there was nothing they could do. Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar.

ativzzz 6y ago
Do you mean google fiber? I've called fiber before I had an account there to ask some questions and I had 0 problems talking to a human immediately and they answered all my questions.
- strgcmc 6y ago
  Think that story is about Google Fi. I'm a Fi user, but haven't had to try and reach a human to resolve a problem yet; I dread the day if/when that happens where I actually do need a human to solve something I encountered...
  - nicolas_t 6y ago
    On the flip side, I reached out to Google Fi for a payment issue (my account was a French account originally which got converted to a US account and that created an issue) and I got through to a human. This was during the beta phase though so might have been different during that time.
  - emidln 6y ago
    I attempted to be a Fi user. I was a Google Voice number, but apparently some small % of Google Voice numbers could not be ported into Fi at all. After a couple escalations the rep was very sorry but said their system was not able to handle my account unless I was willing to give up my Google Voice number. They suggested I create an alternate google account just for Fi, although Fi and Google Voice cannot front one another, so I end up with a separate phone number that nobody would know.

Sosh101 6y ago

It's a crazy situation. There should be regulation requiring reasonable dispute processes.

d1zzy 6y ago

I'm curious if Google were to provide a payed service for their web services, which includes human support, how many people would pay for that? ... Probably as many as currently pay for Youtube Premium and then come to HN and complain about ads on Youtube :)

mcguire 6y ago

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/alex-kearns-robinhood-trader-suicide-wrongful-death-suit/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/alex-kearns-robinhood-trade...

jeroen 6y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350968 That was more than 12 years ago, and there has been a steady stream of incidents like that one. If you're still using a Google account for critical stuff, you know what you're getting yourself into.

rodgerd 6y ago

> Google uses non-human automation to make some decisions, including banning accounts. As others have mentioned, this is not unreasonable as long as there is a reasonable (in terms of time and effort) path to disputing a ban - i.e., speaking to a human about the issue. It's almost like they could, I don't know, have some AI ethics researcher who could explain to them the pitfalls of letting a bunch of programmers act like their algos are infallible and suggest how to avoid those pitfalls. Nah, just kidding. You sack her for being an uppity black lady who won't just churn out reports saying Google are perfect, because it hurts the feelings of the programmers and their managers.