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1) There have been Googlers who have posted on HN about their customer service, and the ones that have posted seem to think their algorithms are good enough and

1) There have been Googlers who have posted on HN about their customer service, and the ones that have posted seem to think their algorithms are good enough and don't really make the connection that every false positive is a real human or business that might lose a business or worse when they can't access their data. My interpretation of this is that either they're fine with being evil, or Google's average employees aren't quite as smart as public perception portrays. 2) I'm a little sympathetic to Google here, because there's no way that they can offer real customer service to the entire Internet. I run some small businesses and get dumb phone calls all of the time from confused people thinking that my random shop has anything to do with their phone plan or email issues or a problem with their cable bill or anything else under the sun because they ended up at my store after putting certain keywords into Google. I have no doubt that Google would receive hundreds of thousands of mostly dumb, useless calls daily that they are not responsible for from every confused person out there. There's no feasible way to provide standard customer service to the entire Internet. 3) The solution for Google is really easy though: charge some fee for human support that keeps customer service requests to a manageable level. When it's a genuine issue, people will pay some fee to get an actual trained person to pay attention to and hopefully resolve. 4) I'm sure people have committed suicide and lost jobs because of the consequences from Google blocking their account without any recourse. This is definitely not an acceptable state of affairs, and I'd suggest avoiding using Google products whenever possible until this reprehensible behavior is changed.

gist 4y ago
> I'm a little sympathetic to Google here, because there's no way that they can offer real customer service to the entire Internet. I run some small businesses and get dumb phone calls all of the time from confused people thinking that my random shop has anything to do with their phone plan or email issues or a problem with their cable bill or anything else under the sun because they ended up at my store after putting certain keywords into Google In part I want to agree with you because I get the same version of random calls but for different reasons. But the truth is the difference between what we (or anyone) is doing and what google is doing is google makes plenty of money that they can use to throw at the problem. The fact that you give something away at no charge (but actually make money or even if you don't make money) is not a reason you can then walk away and not have any responsibility at all for anything and everything. (Or shouldn't be). > 3) The solution for Google is really easy though: charge some fee for human support that keeps customer service requests to a manageable level. When it's a genuine issue, people will pay some fee to get an actual trained person to pay attention to and hopefully resolve. So you have to wonder then what is the reason they don't do this as many probably (including myself) have thought of the same thing. Sure they do have that with business email (google workspace). > 4) I'm sure people have committed suicide and lost jobs because of the consequences from Google blocking their account without any recourse. This is definitely not an acceptable state of affairs, and I'd suggest avoiding using Google products whenever possible until this reprehensible behavior is changed. This is most likely true and was also true with certain other products of companies let's even say Microsoft. Imagine the amount of frustration (falling short of suicide I mean) that people have as a result of using product that don't work or offer little or no support. Also another point (that you didn't make) is the behavior by google then enables all sorts of other companies who would never act that way (and have no reason to) to act the same way (similar again to what happened when the first PC's came out). In many cases the end users became the beta testers for products (and they still are) that are released to early.
- romanhn 4y ago
  > The fact that you give something away at no charge (but actually make money or even if you don't make money) is not a reason you can then walk away and not have any responsibility at all for anything and everything. (Or shouldn't be). I'm very sympathetic to OP's situation, I have also lost an account with years of irreplaceable emails to Google's finicky algorithms. But this right here is a slippery slope I would never wish for. Offering a free product should absolutely not entitle any random user to any kind of support. I should be able to release a product (whether open-source, free, or paid) and decide for myself and my business the level of support I want to provide, without an obligation to respond to everyone, or maintain it forever. It really sucks that Google's business plan is totally cool with leaving some of us behind, but I'd rather take the risk that comes with the territory rather than not see these products get created in the first place due to onerous obligations.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    If Google just offered no support for their free products, that would be one thing that might be a little understandable. But they even treat their customers for their paid products this way.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    > > The fact that you give something away at no charge (but actually make money or even if you don't make money) is not a reason you can then walk away and not have any responsibility at all for anything and everything. (Or shouldn't be). > I'm very sympathetic to OP's situation, I have also lost an account with years of irreplaceable emails to Google's finicky algorithms. But this right here is a slippery slope I would never wish for. Offering a free product should absolutely not entitle any random user to any kind of support. I should be able to release a product (whether open-source, free, or paid) and decide for myself and my business the level of support I want to provide, without an obligation to respond to everyone, or maintain it forever. I argue there is a big difference between giving something away as open source and giving something away and indirectly making money through e.g. advertising. For example if there are two game companies one makes a game that you have to pay for to play and the other makes money through in game ads, should they both not give the same support for their games? The users pay for them just in different ways.
cs137 4y ago
4) I'm sure people have committed suicide and lost jobs because of the consequences from Google blocking their account without any recourse. This is definitely not an acceptable state of affairs, and I'd suggest avoiding using Google products whenever possible until this reprehensible behavior is changed. I don't know of any Google-specific stories, but this has happened to people reliant on other tech companies and, more often than not, it was intentional. Most of the targets are foreign nationals, because they try to buy American "troublemakers" off first, but there are a couple high-profile cases of this sort of thing happening in the US. We live in a strange time wherein corporations can act with a complete absence of accountability, especially if the out-of-touch, rich, geriatric men who write our laws can be hoodwinked into thinking that abuse of technological leverage is somehow impossible (because the mechanisms are beyond what they personally understand).
Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
>Google's average employees aren't quite as smart as public perception portrays. Intelligence is a funny thing. People can be the world’s foremost expert in whatever the heck, don’t matter for my point, and be utterly incompetent in every other area of their life if someone else is picking up for them. Think of career scientists giving humiliating public speeches for the first time since high school (industry conferences notwithstanding). That’s not their specialty and they have no reason to be talented at public speaking if they’re not trained in public relations and speaking. Don’t expect a Googler to be able to tie their shoes, drive a car, navigate public transportation or experience empathy just because they get high scores in leetcode. They’re not dependent skills and assuming they are is a sure sign of insufficient critical thought. As far as your solution goes, hard pass. Providing support should be required by law. If you run a service that people depend on for any of the requirements of modern life then you should provide real live human support 24/7/365 or be liable for treble damages and equal fines for all harm this corner cutting costs. If my power goes out my electric company contacts me and tells me how they’re responding before I can even dig out their number. Google is equally important and the sooner people accept the new reality these technocrats have created for us the better off we’ll all be.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > Providing support should be required by law. I'm always extremely wary of the unintended consequences of legislation, and I think such a requirement could create really negative incentives. If organizations were forced to be on the hook for customer service of anything they put online, creating any free stuff would present a business risk. You could say goodbye to many free services online with such a path forward.
  - CogitoCogito 4y ago
    > You could say goodbye to many free services online with such a path forward. Maybe that's worth it?
    - sfe22 4y ago
cycomanic 4y ago
> 2) I'm a little sympathetic to Google here, because there's no way that they can offer real customer service to the entire Internet. I run some small businesses and get dumb phone calls all of the time from confused people thinking that my random shop has anything to do with their phone plan or email issues or a problem with their cable bill or anything else under the sun because they ended up at my store after putting certain keywords into Google. I have no doubt that Google would receive hundreds of thousands of mostly dumb, useless calls daily that they are not responsible for from every confused person out there. There's no feasible way to provide standard customer service to the entire Internet. I think you are way to sympathetic to Google here. Just look at what the size of your company is compared to Googles in terms of profit/revenue. So they should be able to spend that much more time/resources on dealing with customer support even if that means dealing with some stupid folks calling then because they can't find the chrome icon on their desktop. I mean you are able to deal with stupid requests why should they?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
2143 4y ago
> 3) The solution for Google is really easy though: charge some fee for human support that keeps customer service requests to a manageable level. When it's a genuine issue, people will pay some fee to get an actual trained person to pay attention to and hopefully resolve. Warning: totally hypothetical controversial opinion follows (I'm playing the devil here): From a game theoretical perspective, if you had to pay for support what prevents Google from intentionally blocking the accounts of random people so that they'll have to pay to contact support, who will then unblock the user?
- cryptos 4y ago
  That sounds like a case for regulation. If the support fee doesn't exceed a certain level, it would be hard to much money with support. Basically it should only cover actual costs, because it would unethical to earn money from problems they have caused.
  - lobocinza 4y ago
    Regulation here is a deus ex machina.
kazinator 4y ago
> charge some fee for human support That is an obvious conflict-of-interest situation; its optics are indistinguishable from ransomware. "Your unlucky account was randomly trashed by an account-wrecking bulldozer algorithm; please pay a ransom fee to the purveyors and operators of the algorithm to restore access to your data".
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  That's a great counterpoint that's been brought up many times before in this type of discussion. My response to that is this. 1) A genuine effort here to avoid this moral hazard might be to have a policy to refund all/most of the fee paid if the user was found to have done nothing wrong, as well as some transparency in the overall process (publish some sort of stats of their customer service efforts) to keep some kind of public view on the situation. 2) Even if Google does essentially "extort" some people, I think the downside of maybe having to pay a fee needlessly is worth the upside of having some actual recourse possible in the event of a real emergency. Again, businesses die and people lose their jobs when Google messes up. Having a flawed recourse would be a better state of affairs than no recourse at all.
lowercased 4y ago
> I have no doubt that Google would receive hundreds of thousands of mostly dumb, useless calls daily that they are not responsible for from every confused person out there. There's no feasible way to provide standard customer service to the entire Internet. Perhaps it doesn't have to be 'standard' but... they seem to have no problem identifying user behaviour and tweaking the heck out of their sites (and arm twisting other sites) to increase conversions, decrease wait times, and otherwise 'optimize' users/visitors towards a certain goal (click these ads, etc). It shouldn't be beyond them to employ or develop some better algorithms to help with identifying real customer support issues and offering some degree of support (pair or otherwise). Hey - they could even sell that service via GCE and let other companies also use their customer service tool... and recoup their investment in it...

gist 4y ago

> I'm a little sympathetic to Google here, because there's no way that they can offer real customer service to the entire Internet. I run some small businesses and get dumb phone calls all of the time from confused people thinking that my random shop has anything to do with their phone plan or email issues or a problem with their cable bill or anything else under the sun because they ended up at my store after putting certain keywords into Google In part I want to agree with you because I get the same version of random calls but for different reasons. But the truth is the difference between what we (or anyone) is doing and what google is doing is google makes plenty of money that they can use to throw at the problem. The fact that you give something away at no charge (but actually make money or even if you don't make money) is not a reason you can then walk away and not have any responsibility at all for anything and everything. (Or shouldn't be). > 3) The solution for Google is really easy though: charge some fee for human support that keeps customer service requests to a manageable level. When it's a genuine issue, people will pay some fee to get an actual trained person to pay attention to and hopefully resolve. So you have to wonder then what is the reason they don't do this as many probably (including myself) have thought of the same thing. Sure they do have that with business email (google workspace). > 4) I'm sure people have committed suicide and lost jobs because of the consequences from Google blocking their account without any recourse. This is definitely not an acceptable state of affairs, and I'd suggest avoiding using Google products whenever possible until this reprehensible behavior is changed. This is most likely true and was also true with certain other products of companies let's even say Microsoft. Imagine the amount of frustration (falling short of suicide I mean) that people have as a result of using product that don't work or offer little or no support. Also another point (that you didn't make) is the behavior by google then enables all sorts of other companies who would never act that way (and have no reason to) to act the same way (similar again to what happened when the first PC's came out). In many cases the end users became the beta testers for products (and they still are) that are released to early.

romanhn 4y ago
> The fact that you give something away at no charge (but actually make money or even if you don't make money) is not a reason you can then walk away and not have any responsibility at all for anything and everything. (Or shouldn't be). I'm very sympathetic to OP's situation, I have also lost an account with years of irreplaceable emails to Google's finicky algorithms. But this right here is a slippery slope I would never wish for. Offering a free product should absolutely not entitle any random user to any kind of support. I should be able to release a product (whether open-source, free, or paid) and decide for myself and my business the level of support I want to provide, without an obligation to respond to everyone, or maintain it forever. It really sucks that Google's business plan is totally cool with leaving some of us behind, but I'd rather take the risk that comes with the territory rather than not see these products get created in the first place due to onerous obligations.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  If Google just offered no support for their free products, that would be one thing that might be a little understandable. But they even treat their customers for their paid products this way.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > > The fact that you give something away at no charge (but actually make money or even if you don't make money) is not a reason you can then walk away and not have any responsibility at all for anything and everything. (Or shouldn't be). > I'm very sympathetic to OP's situation, I have also lost an account with years of irreplaceable emails to Google's finicky algorithms. But this right here is a slippery slope I would never wish for. Offering a free product should absolutely not entitle any random user to any kind of support. I should be able to release a product (whether open-source, free, or paid) and decide for myself and my business the level of support I want to provide, without an obligation to respond to everyone, or maintain it forever. I argue there is a big difference between giving something away as open source and giving something away and indirectly making money through e.g. advertising. For example if there are two game companies one makes a game that you have to pay for to play and the other makes money through in game ads, should they both not give the same support for their games? The users pay for them just in different ways.

cs137 4y ago

4) I'm sure people have committed suicide and lost jobs because of the consequences from Google blocking their account without any recourse. This is definitely not an acceptable state of affairs, and I'd suggest avoiding using Google products whenever possible until this reprehensible behavior is changed. I don't know of any Google-specific stories, but this has happened to people reliant on other tech companies and, more often than not, it was intentional. Most of the targets are foreign nationals, because they try to buy American "troublemakers" off first, but there are a couple high-profile cases of this sort of thing happening in the US. We live in a strange time wherein corporations can act with a complete absence of accountability, especially if the out-of-touch, rich, geriatric men who write our laws can be hoodwinked into thinking that abuse of technological leverage is somehow impossible (because the mechanisms are beyond what they personally understand).

Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago

>Google's average employees aren't quite as smart as public perception portrays. Intelligence is a funny thing. People can be the world’s foremost expert in whatever the heck, don’t matter for my point, and be utterly incompetent in every other area of their life if someone else is picking up for them. Think of career scientists giving humiliating public speeches for the first time since high school (industry conferences notwithstanding). That’s not their specialty and they have no reason to be talented at public speaking if they’re not trained in public relations and speaking. Don’t expect a Googler to be able to tie their shoes, drive a car, navigate public transportation or experience empathy just because they get high scores in leetcode. They’re not dependent skills and assuming they are is a sure sign of insufficient critical thought. As far as your solution goes, hard pass. Providing support should be required by law. If you run a service that people depend on for any of the requirements of modern life then you should provide real live human support 24/7/365 or be liable for treble damages and equal fines for all harm this corner cutting costs. If my power goes out my electric company contacts me and tells me how they’re responding before I can even dig out their number. Google is equally important and the sooner people accept the new reality these technocrats have created for us the better off we’ll all be.

logicalmonster 4y ago
> Providing support should be required by law. I'm always extremely wary of the unintended consequences of legislation, and I think such a requirement could create really negative incentives. If organizations were forced to be on the hook for customer service of anything they put online, creating any free stuff would present a business risk. You could say goodbye to many free services online with such a path forward.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  > You could say goodbye to many free services online with such a path forward. Maybe that's worth it?
  - sfe22 4y ago

cycomanic 4y ago

> 2) I'm a little sympathetic to Google here, because there's no way that they can offer real customer service to the entire Internet. I run some small businesses and get dumb phone calls all of the time from confused people thinking that my random shop has anything to do with their phone plan or email issues or a problem with their cable bill or anything else under the sun because they ended up at my store after putting certain keywords into Google. I have no doubt that Google would receive hundreds of thousands of mostly dumb, useless calls daily that they are not responsible for from every confused person out there. There's no feasible way to provide standard customer service to the entire Internet. I think you are way to sympathetic to Google here. Just look at what the size of your company is compared to Googles in terms of profit/revenue. So they should be able to spend that much more time/resources on dealing with customer support even if that means dealing with some stupid folks calling then because they can't find the chrome icon on their desktop. I mean you are able to deal with stupid requests why should they?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

2143 4y ago

> 3) The solution for Google is really easy though: charge some fee for human support that keeps customer service requests to a manageable level. When it's a genuine issue, people will pay some fee to get an actual trained person to pay attention to and hopefully resolve. Warning: totally hypothetical controversial opinion follows (I'm playing the devil here): From a game theoretical perspective, if you had to pay for support what prevents Google from intentionally blocking the accounts of random people so that they'll have to pay to contact support, who will then unblock the user?

cryptos 4y ago
That sounds like a case for regulation. If the support fee doesn't exceed a certain level, it would be hard to much money with support. Basically it should only cover actual costs, because it would unethical to earn money from problems they have caused.
- lobocinza 4y ago
  Regulation here is a deus ex machina.

kazinator 4y ago

> charge some fee for human support That is an obvious conflict-of-interest situation; its optics are indistinguishable from ransomware. "Your unlucky account was randomly trashed by an account-wrecking bulldozer algorithm; please pay a ransom fee to the purveyors and operators of the algorithm to restore access to your data".

logicalmonster 4y ago
That's a great counterpoint that's been brought up many times before in this type of discussion. My response to that is this. 1) A genuine effort here to avoid this moral hazard might be to have a policy to refund all/most of the fee paid if the user was found to have done nothing wrong, as well as some transparency in the overall process (publish some sort of stats of their customer service efforts) to keep some kind of public view on the situation. 2) Even if Google does essentially "extort" some people, I think the downside of maybe having to pay a fee needlessly is worth the upside of having some actual recourse possible in the event of a real emergency. Again, businesses die and people lose their jobs when Google messes up. Having a flawed recourse would be a better state of affairs than no recourse at all.

lowercased 4y ago

> I have no doubt that Google would receive hundreds of thousands of mostly dumb, useless calls daily that they are not responsible for from every confused person out there. There's no feasible way to provide standard customer service to the entire Internet. Perhaps it doesn't have to be 'standard' but... they seem to have no problem identifying user behaviour and tweaking the heck out of their sites (and arm twisting other sites) to increase conversions, decrease wait times, and otherwise 'optimize' users/visitors towards a certain goal (click these ads, etc). It shouldn't be beyond them to employ or develop some better algorithms to help with identifying real customer support issues and offering some degree of support (pair or otherwise). Hey - they could even sell that service via GCE and let other companies also use their customer service tool... and recoup their investment in it...