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Google suspended my company's Google cloud account for the third time
- znpy 11mo agoMaybe it’s time to ditch google cloud? After the third occurrence of this i’d blame this on you, honestly.
- rcruzeiro 11mo agoHave you bothered reading the post where the author stated why they cannot simply ditch GCP?
- znpy 11mo agoyes. If you had actually read the post you would have understood there are ways to ditch GCP, but they are perceived as cumbersome. The exaple is OpenID Connect. It works well with Azure (according to the post). I'm sorry to say this, but the author is choosing something easy but unrealiable over something a bit more complicated but reliable. It's really the author's fault. They are choosing their comfort over the service reliability (and keeping promises made to customers). Heck they might even go with api keys. They could give explicit direction on the minimal amount of permissions the api key would need and they could ping the users each 3-4 months to rotate them. But no, I guess we'll have another post at some point about the fourth (definitive?) account suspension.
- x0x0 11mo ago> The exaple is OpenID Connect. It works well with Azure That's nonsense. It requires a 7 step setup process that customers will mess up.
- fiskfiskfisk 11mo agoAs noted in the article it's hard to ditch Google Cloud when the reason you keep the account is for integration with, well, Google Cloud. I'm sure they'd be happy to not have rely on having a Google Cloud account for integration with Google Cloud if possible.
- october8140 11mo agoAt some point it’s not worth supporting google cloud.
- agwa 11mo agoRight, and we will be ditching our Google Cloud account this time, but as explained in the post this will come at either a security or a usability cost for our customers, which is why I did not ditch after the first suspension.
- anonym29 11mo agoThose are negligible compared to a 100% availability / uptime cost to your business incurred from being a serf to a feudal tyrant with no name or face that enjoys abusing you. Using GCP, AWS, or Azure is like volunteering to use your own money to rent heavy construction equipment to construct your own jail cell and excavate your own grave. But hey, at least you get to avoid the capex on the heavy construction equipment, and it's always¹ available! ¹ except for when human error takes it offline for 14 hours straight
- TheOtherHobbes 11mo agoYou're not just dealing with a massive bureaucracy, you're dealing with a massive automated bureaucracy whose rules aren't explicit, whose algorithms are buggy, and which can destroy your business on a whim with no recourse, without even noticing.
- znpy 11mo agoI can understand you not ditching after the first suspension but the second suspension should have been the point where you took the choice. First time is a fluke, second time is a serious wake-up call, third time it's your fault. Do you really want to reach the point where all your customers have an outage, you have to rush implementing something else (oidc or api keys) AND rush your customers to change your settings?
- 11mo ago
- philipwhiuk 11mo agoI think his problem with this is that his customers use Google Cloud.
- formerly_proven 11mo ago[flagged]
- tantalic 11mo agoThere's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee...
- jfoster 11mo agoA major downside of any service once it becomes too large is that the overall complexity introduces lower reliability. From Google's perspective perhaps each rule and feature makes sense, but from a customer perspective, there might be too much risk of who-knows-what issues coming up. I don't think this is limited to Google. I miss the older, less complicated versions of most bigtech services; Facebook, Instagram, Google, Amazon, etc. Even looking at Vercel's project settings the other day I found myself thinking "hmm this is getting a bit unwieldy."
- wouldbecouldbe 11mo agoIt just doesn’t make sense; they have so much money they are one of the few that can actually make slightly less profit and have good customer support. But they choose to treat everyone like a robot & allow scam ads
- graemep 11mo ago> they have so much money they are one of the few that can actually make slightly less profit and have good customer support. They do not want "slightly less money", they want as much money as possible
- whizzter 11mo agoThey are very well on their way to becoming the "never interact with Oracle" of the internet giants. As far as I can see they are still living a bit off the "do no evil" of ages ago and latent animosity towards Microsoft, but they're creating an animosity that will take ages to erase unless they start putting some minimal amount of money into customer support today.
- sixothree 11mo agoThey are definitely living off of their "boy genius" phase too. People still consider Google to be somehow smarter than other organizations that provide more reliable services.
- seneca 11mo agoThis pattern is a big part of why Google is a poor company to buy infrastructure from. They are horrible at customer support, and have made it clear over the years that they have no intention of changing that. That's simply unacceptable for production infrastructure.
- jonway 11mo agoI hated it. Much better from akamai, tornado, kamatera, others. I gave it a try -- Google offered a free tier vps which was a no brainer. It worked but the ui seemed jank and somewhat confusing. The cost wasn't particularly compelling, so I never deployed. I kept the free tier VPS running for a while to continue evaluation since I value a diversity of services. However, google charged me like a dollar, and i never saw the charge since i never logged into the webui. I never got an email saying I owe them a dollar so they canceled my GCP access and blacklisted my google account from GCP. There was a lot of friction here, and the fact that i "feel lucky" I didnt lose my very old gmail account over $1.00 makes me laugh...a very nervous laughter. I like a lot about google. I cannot depend on google. I use google's AI offering and I am slowly becoming concerned it could affect my legacy email account. Like, everything gets locked and my doctor cannot email me.
- justinclift 11mo agoYou're going to need to buy your own domain and move to a solution that has you being responsible for your own email. Note that doesn't mean you have to do it all yourself, there are plenty of hosting places that you can just configure with your own domain name details.
- jonway 11mo agoI have all of this. You need a google account to use GCP and I used my google account which was created with a gmail invite code shortly after gmail was released. Some things are still using this email. Hey, I'm not perfect. Sometimes I exceed posted speed limits, too. Edit: I have to choose a tech giant to get a phone app with decent push notifications as far as I can tell (I haven't scoured the earth for this .... yet) The gmail app is pretty good. Here are options I can recommend: Proton Tuta Apple (iCloud) All of these withh be your MX with DMARC/SPF. If you use an android cellphone you'll almost certainly need a google account anyhow. The tuta experience is not as advanced as the others, but is servicable and likely offers better security guarantees than the others. You get a lot of bang for your buck from Proton (personal wireguard tunnel vpn included), and apple is apple.
- philipwhiuk 11mo agoTo me it sounds like you're a weird business model for GCP and you keep being hit by tooling designed to block bad use cases that come across this uncommon use case. That might just be me though.
- nullify88 11mo agoAs mentioned in their writeup, they are following documentation and best practices from Google themselves.
- __s 11mo agoIdeally after first ticket support could flag their account as needing manual review for suspension
- 650REDHAIR 11mo agoThis seems like the easiest fix. But it adds a human interaction and that costs money so… no! Suspend.
- Hamuko 11mo agoSounds like they do have human interaction already, since the suspended emails need to email customer support to get unsuspended.
- 11mo ago
- ggm 11mo agoYou're going to look like an attacker to google for almost any model of review of access. You're in a niche role which would demand they build systems to take account of you. I can understand why a monolith has back pressure towards that cost and consequence. Sucks.
- agwa 11mo agoThey probably shouldn't have suggested doing this in their own documentation then.
- ggm 11mo agoTotally agree. But the docs aren't going to guide their model. Contradiction between the reality of a service, monitoring, and docs don't go to "align with the docs" they go to "align docs to reality" I don't like this. I too have looked like an attack on their models using things inside the customer-side of google, took special relationships to get over this, an ongoing threat to how we relate to them. (it's not in GCP btw. different arc of the megaplex)
- MichaelZuo 11mo agoSo then it seems like different departments are undermining each other’s credibility on a daily basis?
- egorfine 11mo agoJust like it supposed to be in a corporation.
- 650REDHAIR 11mo agoThat’s been my experience with Google. They’re too big and no one has the authority to clean it up. I’m honestly shocked we don’t see more account suspensions. I’ve migrated my businesses to Microsoft’s cloud offerings and they’re also a clusterfuck, but at least I can get real support people on the phone pretty easily (for now…).
- TIPSIO 11mo agoThis will probably become a major problem with the Gemini APIs in enough time. A customer does something crappy, e.g.: generates an image they aren't supposed to, and boom you're business Gmail and/or the recovery personal Gmail gone forever.
- strangescript 11mo agothere are built in moderation tools you should turn on if you have external customers generating images, or inputing data that might be sketch
- ceejayoz 11mo agoAnd these tools are perfect?
- bhouston 11mo agoIt can be super hard to moderate before an image is generated though. People can write in cryptic language and then say decode this message and generate an image the result, etc. The downside of LLMs is that they are super hard to moderate because they will gladly arbitrarily encode input and output. You need to use an LLM as advanced as the one you are running in production to actually check if they are obscene.
- fukka42 11mo ago[dead]
- samtheprogram 11mo agoThe example in this blog post, they did something recommended by Google and still got banned. Based on that, I'm not sure their built in moderation tools are enough insurance.
- calvinmorrison 11mo agofool me once fool me twice fool me thrice
- LollipopYakuza 11mo agoThey explain in the article why they still have to have a Google Cloud account. I am sure that they would gladly not deal with Google at all if they could...
- fencepost 11mo agoThere's a reason Google has a reputation of "Don't use it for anything that you can't afford to have disappear with no notice or recourse." You also can't expect it to get any better, both because Alphabet has never shown any interest in improving things and because you and the services you've been using them for aren't the new AI hotness. Even if you're absurdly profitable for them (and you're clearly not) you're not in an area that their internal people are competing to serve.
- jordanb 11mo agoI can't help but think that the mass layoffs at Amazon will produce the same culture soon. And I wonder how much is downstream of Google "defeating" antitrust. It's open season for customers, employees, suppliers and contributors.
- causal 11mo agoSecret to Azure success: Just wait for the others to f it up.
- fencepost 11mo agoMaybe, but Amazon has one thing that Google seems to take pride in avoiding - customer service. I can't help but think of the mass banning they did of people who spammed emoji in chat for a game streamer by request to vote on which direction he should choose who only got unbanned because he has a big enough following to cause bad PR. I can't imagine being in a position where you depended on Google not banning you for your livelihood. Sure you'd have separate accounts, but it's pretty much guaranteed Google knows they're connected and what's to prevent the shriek of "circumvention!" followed by banning all of them?
- Jonovono 11mo agoI submitted my app to App Store Connect for Apple and Google Play Store. After a few reviews on Apple my app was approved after a week or so. On Google, I got a couple rejections. I addressed the concerns resubmitted. Got another rejection without much detail, but changed a couple things and submitted again. App suspended... without any explanation why.
- zaoui_amine 11mo ago[flagged]
- LollipopYakuza 11mo agoUnfortunately, one doesn't get to chose who their customers make business with.
- tjpnz 11mo agoGCP is a terrible idea for anything important unless you're big enough to have an executive team and yours knows theirs - was the quote I heard somewhere but am struggling to attribute.
- gwbas1c 11mo agoI wonder if this is a situation where the right course of action is to sue Google and/or push for stronger regulation around suspension of customer accounts?
- jeffbee 11mo ago[flagged]
- shevy-java 11mo agoThat seems a simplification. Suing Google could backfire. Who has more money to win in court?
- perihelions 11mo ago"Company declines to do business with me" isn't usually a cause of action you can sue over.
- vorpalhex 11mo agoBut sue-ing means your problem goes to legal and not tier 1 customer support. So Mary from legal walks over to Manager whoever and says "Hey why the fuck did you terminate this guys account? Now I have to go to court." Account reinstated. You drop the case. This produces stupidly improved results.
- fukka42 11mo ago
- pixel_popping 11mo agoHonestly, many companies are suicidal to put "everything" in the hand of AWS or Google, thousand of accounts are banned everyday, a simple accidental VPN/Tor connection can lead to losing everything (at least temporarily) and their rules aren't transparent so we can't really anticipate it.
- e145bc455f1 11mo agoAndroid developer verification would end up just like this. Lots of people would be banned from developing for Android.
- traverseda 11mo agoHow do you justify specializing in mobile development when it's very clear that you're just sharecroppers on someone else's land?
- gear54rus 11mo agoIt doesn't matter. As long as you can spam people with crap like popups and notifications easier than on the web, we will still see all those unnecessary 'apps' that could just be a web page.
- didip 11mo agoHeh, I have been wondering about this for a very long time. The walled garden toll booth is too strict. For example, the old Uber with the crazy thing they did. What if in the alternate universe they straight up got banned? That’s it. All investments would go to zero.
- brazukadev 11mo ago> What if in the alternate universe they straight up got banned? The zeitgeist of the time wouldn't have allowed that. Everybody talking about banning Uber or Airbnb was framed as an enemy of progress.
- jonbiggums22 11mo agoLike Uber drivers' using their girlfriends' ID verification because they have a criminal record, you can also just cut in some random guy to borrow his ID for another chance. There should be plenty of dudes available willing to sell an ID verification for cheap in poorer countries but there's also plenty in wealthy countries because very few anywhere were ever going to have a Google developer account in the first place.
- ph4rsikal 11mo agoMy AdSense account was suspended three times because I had an exclamation mark in my ad. I closed my account after that. I am certain Google still tracks my account as "potential fraud" to this day.
- thousand_nights 11mo agoare exclamation marks not allowed or is that just some absurd mistake by them?
- petre 11mo ago"Multiple exclamation marks,' he went on, shaking his head, 'are a sure sign of a diseased mind." – Terry Pratchett, Eric
- master-lincoln 11mo agodepends: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/14847994?sjid=16824994512062168541-EU&hl=en https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/14847994?sjid=16...
- sixothree 11mo agoThey surely aren't going to tell you what you did wrong. That's the real problem here.
- Sevii 11mo agoIt's insane. They have the tooling to automatically lock my account because an ad doesn't follow the rules, but can't tell me while I'm making the ad? Why even let people submit invalid ads? What is the point of making it easy to sign up for adwords if new users are automatically banned in an hour?
- edoceo 11mo agoOr terminate your account while you see ads for similar products (your competitors) still showing.
- 11mo ago
- defraudbah 11mo agodid you pay for any ads to google? otherwise no wonder you get suspended
- shevy-java 11mo agoSo, we all know Google is pure Evil - pure greed. But people said this in the past too: don't become dependent on these giant mega-corporations, be it Google, Amazon/AWS and so forth. The cake is a lie - this is another example we can add to the "never trust Google" meme.
- toomuchtodo 11mo agoGoogle paid $32B for Wiz to try to sell GCP into every org Wiz is embedded in, expect this to continue until those making procurement decisions stop buying Google, which could take...some time. If you use Google at this point for commercial services, you get what you deserve when they nuke your resources (caveat being services you cannot go elsewhere for, like an Android dev account). The evidence is robust they cannot be relied upon as a commercial services provider. Stop. using. Google. (thoughts and opinions always my own, I am aware and understand in this context OP needs Google Cloud to integrate with customers in Google Cloud, which is very unfortunate, and so their Sisyphus task continues)
- eastbound 11mo agoThe question is “What else”. I’ve struggled for years with Fastmail and I’m not competent enough to buy O365.
- toomuchtodo 11mo agoFor personal or family, I think Fastmail is fine. I use it for a family account (paid years in advance), and admin other Fastmail tenants "family office" style for those who trust me to and offload the responsibility. I can get ahold of someone at Fastmail easily when issues crop up, which is rare. O365 is what I recommend for anything SMB and up. You can at least get support from Microsoft when needed. AWS is fine for cloud resources and infra, again, you can get support from a TAM or similar. But Google? I have never once had a good experience attempting to get in touch with a human when resolution is needed, hence my position on the topic. You cannot self serve critical business infra (imho), and Google is allergic to providing human support.
- tzury 11mo agoIt might be a case where illegal / scam / anything of that type were using the SSLMate service to issue and deploy those certificates, whereas some aspects of this process (DNS / HTTP / Mail) verification or similar were processed directly on the GCP. I could not get from the OP what really happened and what was the claim / explanation from Google side.
- agwa 11mo agoGoogle said "general terms of service violation" or unspecified "abusive activities". Google is only involved in the publication of DNS records, not the deployment of certificates. Note that they didn't require us to take any action after the suspension in 2024 to correct this alleged abuse; they just re-enabled access without any further explanation.
- detaro 11mo agoIf scammy GCP users use SSLMate, then GCP should probably ban the scammy users instead of SSLMate?
- 6510 11mo ago> Clearly, I cannot rely on having a Google account for production use cases. Google has built a complex, unreliable system You cant use anything from Google. I only use gmail, my mail account only got banned one time for a week. For years I thought the punishment for using gmail was just a mater of time. I tried to imagine what weird things could trigger it. Maybe they will one day just end the service because it isn't profitable enough? I decided the most likely would be that the mail account gets banned as a punishment for using any of their other services. Then I made the "mistake" to switch from iphone to android. It almost immediately started complaining that my mailbox was full. The new reality is that each and every button I press on the phone could potentially end my mailbox. Now that they [also] have very sophisticated LLM's the crappy customer service seems intentional.
- Frannky 11mo agoThe problem is that they manage customers through automation. If the system flags you, you’re out. By using their products, you accept the risk of being cut off.
- Havoc 11mo agoWhich makes it utterly useless for important use cases. Crazy way to do business but I guess Google doesn’t care
- moduspol 11mo agoWe had ours unexpectedly blocked and we were just using it for a "Login with Google" button. The only explanation was the vague "You did something against our terms and conditions." We hadn't done anything. Our use case is nothing beyond the "Login with Google" button. We opened a case to appeal asking for more details or a review. Meanwhile, we're scrambling to implement some kind of workaround for our users that log in with their Google account. And then early the next day, we get the email that our appeal was granted. Just need to be sure we follow the terms and conditions in the future. I guess it could have been worse but still a bit of a slap in the face.
- NetMageSCW 11mo agoI would just stop supporting “login with Google”.
- toomuchtodo 11mo agoConsider dropping social logins for only user/pass/MFA and Passkeys.
- CharlieDigital 11mo agoNot related to this particular reason for suspension, but I had a friend who's GCP account got put on pause a few weeks into his project because his payment method was flagged for suspicious behavior. This friend had an incident of stolen identity in the past 24 months which caused a lot of issues and basically any CC linked to him seemed to be problematic for GCP. Swapped CC linked to the account to his business partner and fixed everything. Lesson: if you use a CC with GCP or cloud services, firewall it from everything else you do to be safe.
- UltraSane 11mo agoThis is why using Google Fi Wirelessis a really bad idea since you can lose your phone at any time for no reason.
- antman 11mo agoPeople consider google as a trusted partner whereas it is designed as a retail factory. Mass serving of millions and protectioms whose false positives can destroy the lives of thousands. Still they are statistically correct. Nuking everything instead of the offending service? Convenient fir them. Unavailable support reps? Convenient for them? Meaningless automated answers? Convenient for them. Its not a solid system that has defects, it was designed that way. Their unavailability and abrupt cruelty does not serve as cost optimisation, it serves as liability optimisation.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago> People consider google as a trusted partner Haha, what "people"? Even people who aren't computer techies seems to be aware having a Google account is "a privilege lost at any time for any reason", almost everyone seems to know at least one acquaintance that somehow lost access to their personal account at one point and if you bring up any Google products in discussions, it isn't uncommon to hear "Yeah, I'd give that a try if I want to use a product that only works for a year". Not sure there are many people left treating Google as a "trusted partner" unless you have a multi-million deal/contact with them.
- goalieca 11mo agoI know more people than not who have gmail as their primary email.. the one that _every_ other account and bank and government service sends out to. It's not exactly well known that there are challenges for account recovery etc.
- szundi 11mo ago[dead]
- SoftTalker 11mo agoI have a gmail account that is connected to my Android phone. I don't use it for anything else, so it's unlikely that I would run afoul of Google for anything I do with it. Any hosted email, paid or free, is going to have terms and conditions and you will be able to find anecdotes from people whose service was suspended "for no reason" but it's that or buy your own domain and host your own email.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 11mo agoSo, what happens to an account that is registered with said suspended email account and with a passkey-only login? Does Google-synced passkeys on Google Password Manager still work even when your account is suspended? Can't recover your accounts because you can't access your email, unless Google still allows existing email client access even when suspended but I'm not unfortunate enough to test this out.
- fukka42 11mo ago[dead]
- arccy 11mo agoThe google docs they point to say > You can access data from your users' Google Cloud projects by creating a service account to represent your service, and then having your customers grant that service account appropriate access to their cloud data using IAM policies. Note that you might want to create a service account per customer if you need to avoid confused deputy problems. If you look at most SaaS services, they rarely use a service account per customer. IMO it's no different than any part of your own services where you need to handle multiple customers. Creating multiple service accounts is just overhead.
- skywhopper 11mo agoThe text you quoted explains why you wouldn’t want to create a single service account for all customers. It’s a security decision, which yes adds overhead.
- agwa 11mo agoI'll note that the overhead is only on the provider side; from the customer's perspective it's all the same. In contrast, OpenID Connect puts overhead onto the customer (in addition to the provider) which I find unfortunate since I want to provide a good experience.
- didip 11mo agoIf you are a business, I am not sure why on earth do you want to deal with the world’s worst customer service company: Google. They got used to ads money, where they control the entire board. They never got good in other types of businesses. Especially not in customer service.
- teddyh 11mo ago> If you are a business, I am not sure why on earth do you want to deal with the world’s worst customer service company: Google. The answer is extremely simple. People aren’t businesses. You are right, no business should choose Google. But people do, for their own reasons. And businesses can only act through people. And people have their own priorities which override the interest of the business, like “What should I choose to never be blamed if/when it fails?” Google is an extremely safe bet there, like IBM of old.
- gethly 11mo agoAs certain youtuber says - go where you're treated best. Google ain't it.
- ctippett 11mo agoThis is very similar to how DoIT manage their client projects. I needed to add one of their service accounts to my organization's IAM policy so they could have complete visibility over all resources for monitoring / cost reporting purposes. The only potential difference being that DoIT is a Google Cloud Premier Partner™
- markstos 11mo agoThe problem here is not just Google, but huge companies in general that operate at a scale where algorithms are the only viable way to sufficiently keep abuse under control. Reddit recently shadowbanned me as my account was approaching 20 years old. There was no message about what violation had been committed, and attempts to appeal went unanswered. All posts started getting filtered at some point and all comments throttled. The Fediverse provides a template for a better way-- smaller connected services with better moderator to user ratios.
- edoceo 11mo agoAlgorithm isn't the only viable way. G has a massive amount of cash. Enough to employ 100 people to manage these edge cases. But that cuts margin.
- Balinares 11mo ago100 people vastly underestimates both the complexity of the GCP landscape and the relentlessness of the daily fraud onslaught, and you don't know what the false positive rate of humans is vs that of the algorithms. It would take thousands, at least, with top training and the breathing space to actually engage with customers individually. Mind you Google should still do it in my opinion.
- hamdingers 11mo agoIf your concern is being mysteriously cut off from communities by capricious and inscrutable moderators then all the Fediverse offers is an opportunity to experience that over and over indefinitely. I've never encountered a community less interested in accountable moderation. Is it still true that pretty much anyone can post your handle with #fediblock and get you and your entire instance sent to the cornfield automatically by hundreds of servers? This destroyed my city's mastodon instance and drove everyone I knew there to bluesky.
- dredmorbius 11mo agoThe Fediverse has multiple hosts. And the option to host your own should you choose to do so. I've been on the Fediverse for nearly a decade. I've jumped instances a few times. I'm currently with an instance run by a friend I've known online for well over a decade, who does have a strict moderation approach, but is also reachable out-of-band and is quite responsive and principled. On Reddit, Google, FB, etc., you've got a single provider, and if they freeze you out you are fully frozen out.
- Workaccount2 11mo agoIt's important to keep in mind that many (if not most) people ad-blocking google ads do so because of the fear of malware (usually from youtube). So to Google, killing accounts of malicious actors is a primary concern, and obviously you can wield a lot of damage to people through google's services if unchecked. And even with checks, every bad actor wears the mask of innocence when appealing. So this puts Google in a rather intractable position. Without numbers it's hard to say whether they are leaning to hard towards stopping fraud (many false positives), or too hard towards giving accounts freedom (high levels of malware served).
- immibis 11mo agoI think the best reason to block ads is that ads are ugly and annoying and there's no law that says you have to watch them. I think people assume you have to watch them, when they're actually completely optional.
- tjpnz 11mo agoIf that were true reporting an ad that's clearly malicious would get it taken down. It doesn't.
- charles_f 11mo agoAll these platforms go for scale. They can't have individualized relations with people and have the rentability of a drug lord, especially when said people aren’t part of some world-scale enterprise who provides a sizeable chunk of their revenue. If they catch one good person for every bad one they eliminate, it’s seen as an unfortunate side-effect, a necessary cost, and they’re fine with it. Yesterday was a wise account(1), the week before was GitHub (2) Companies are fiefdoms, they’re not democracies with a judicial system. If one of the automated sheriffs identifies you as a criminal, it doesn’t put you on trial, but directly sentences you to jail. Your process from there is never clear and it's anyone's guess to what the outcome will be. 1: https://shaun.nz/why-were-never-using-wise-again-a-cautionary-tale-from-a-business-burned/ https://shaun.nz/why-were-never-using-wise-again-a-cautionar... 2: https://x.com/vmfunc/status/1978079375183536440 https://x.com/vmfunc/status/1978079375183536440
- trubadors 11mo agoThis is so true. That's why I always say it's better to choose smaller companies with whom you can still get in touch with a human being, not just a chat bot. I went with Tuta Mail and haven't looked back: quantum-safe encryption, no tracking, no ads. Plus, with my domain I can have as many aliases as I like.
- Romario77 11mo agowith smaller companies there is another problem - they get acquired and then you get the same deal.
- 0xbadcafebee 11mo agoAlso beware of having the owner for your Google Workspace be that of an employee who no longer works there. I was never able to fulfill all the "requirements" of Google support to get the Workspace back, despite the fact that it was linked to our domain... and we couldn't register a new Google Workspace to that domain. Ok, Google, I guess we just won't use your products, and we lose access to all our mail and files?
- immibis 11mo agoIf you were running a business and suffered financial harm because of this, you're probably eligible to sue them to recover that financial loss. Don't let their ToS (where they can write anything they want and it often has no legal effect) scare you from consulting a lawyer.
- thelastgallon 11mo agoNo people to interact with. Only AI and automated systems. Engineers/PMs/leaders/etc are incentivized to develop something new (more bonus, RSU, promotions) and move on. Nobody gets rewarded to improve things already developed. The Great Decoupling of Labor and Capital: https://www.mbi-deepdives.com/the-great-decoupling-of-labor-and-capital/ https://www.mbi-deepdives.com/the-great-decoupling-of-labor-... explains this with numbers: Alphabet required 76k employees to get to their first $100 Billion. Their most recent incremental $100 Billion? Just 11,000! (assuming they add another 3k employees in 4Q’25)
- LightBug1 11mo agoI'll tell you the problem with Google (in my experience). They've moved to Big Company cash cow mode. They even use SAP Ariba ... which dictates that their teams are silo'd and ultra rigid ... and so dealing with them is a nightmare. N=1
- matt-p 11mo agoFool me once shame on you, fool me twice..
- yomismoaqui 11mo agoSometimes I think what's the worst it could happen if Google decided to delete my main personal account that I use for everything: banking, utilities... I guess it would a hassle to go to the bank but loosing some images or old emails wouldn't be so catastrophic TBH. Maybe being somewhat nihilistic/minimalist I think that it all will still be lost when I die, so why trying to grasp those things? In some sense it's kind of liberating not depending too much on these kind of things.
- MisterTea 11mo agoGoogle offers takeout to download your data so you can keep a backup. I run it twice a year and keep a backup copy local and remote.
- masfuerte 11mo agoI don't use Google cloud but the seven step OIDC configuration process is the kind of thing that can be scripted quite easily in Azure, e.g. using the az CLI tool. When a step creates a new object the command can return its ID so you can save it in a variable and use it in a subsequent step. If Google has something similar this seems preferable to the alternatives.
- herpessimplex10 11mo agoUntil people stop building applications with hard dependencies on "other people's computers" this is going to keep happening.
- NoSalt 11mo agoFor YEARS I have been "screaming at the sky" (pun somewhat intended) about, what later became know as, cloud services. Family, friends, and coworkers would laugh at my resistance to use Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. storage. Would tell me that I do not need a µSD card slot for my phone because these wonderful "free" services existed. Would mock me for continuing to purchase DVDs and CDs. I remember when Apple told me my @mac.com email address would be free forever. I feel that, as of late, I am being vindicated somewhat. With stories like this increasing. Stories of services eliminating the movies, games, music, books, storage they promised you would be around "forever", celebrities nude photos being hacked and put out there for everybody to see. Neither the cloud, and DEFINITELY not big business, is your friend at all. To them, you are just dollar signs until you aren't.
- maxglute 11mo agoA few years ago google blocked my youtube red / premium account for spam even though the account was only used to watch videos. Not only did they wipe the account the wiped access to the payment page so I couldn't even cancel membership for months, dealing with robotic messages (you get to appeal every 3 weeks) all while being charged. Oh I also had Google One which promised in person support but they couldnt do shit because YT different team. I ended up cancelling the credit card. Earlier this year, I got a random message that my suspension was reversed and the original suspension was in error. Just anedotally, I've had my wechat account blocked before and it took less than a day to talk to a person to get it sorted. At least PRC censorship has good customer service.
- causal 11mo agoGoogle's consumer billing is a nightmare to manage and I've been fraudulently charged (in my opinion) without recourse at least once.
- merb 11mo agoGcp still can’t change our street address because of the d-u-n-s validation (of course d-u-n-s actually uses our new address… and all other vendors are fine with it). How bad must their service be that they can’t change a fucking address. Oh and the free billing support is horrible, always the same response like ‘a special team is working on it’.. yeah sure and they can’t fix an address for like a month. It’s worse since all our invoices use the old address which in Germany is a fucking problem. Time to make a migration plan.
- exabrial 11mo agoOnce again: Do not use Google for anything important. "An ant has no quarrel with a boot."
- sharts 11mo agoIf this were actually a real problem then, perhaps, rather than just posting grievances on a blog, people should (en masse) just start hounding their employees directly since most of them will proudly announce their affiliation via LinkedIn and other social media. This is the only way. Why would people who build these things give a crap if their quality of life is great save for a blog post? They are your customer service. All of them. And your complaints will eventually meaningfully get addressed.
- chmod775 11mo agoAbout once a year some server provider kicks me out, burns down, or extorts/hikes prices on me specifically. All data is already mirrored to servers at other providers, so I just need to spin up the main infra somewhere else. I can do this in seconds on anything that accepts ssh connections. The slowest step is waiting a few minutes for DNS to propagate. If you're at the mercy of a single company that probably couldn't care less about the minuscule amount of revenue you represent, your operation has a problem and I have no respect for what you do.
- btfo 11mo agoYou only got what you deserve for knowingly using proprietary software on cloud (just someone elses computer). You deserve no sympathy.
- rekabis 11mo agoConsidering how so many things have an API due to client-side development, is there not a possibility to automate the OIDC workflow from your own end, such as in a customized app on your own servers that provides a wizard interface for your clients?
- more_corn 11mo agoDid you send spam or conduct business in a way that resembles malicious scanning behavior? I know Google sucks and it’s impossible to get anyone to fix anything, but one thing they don’t do is take arbitrary and capricious action. I don’t want to hear a long sob story. First I want to hear what you did wrong (I suspect you know what you did to get flagged) that caused suspension.