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As I see Google expand it's service offerings I find myself excited with the potential yet refraining from using any of these services for a very good reason:

As I see Google expand it's service offerings I find myself excited with the potential yet refraining from using any of these services for a very good reason: As an entrepreneur you are always up against the very real probability of Google shutting down your account due to unknown violations. This topic has been discussed on HN before. I have seen it and experienced it first hand with clients. You account is auto-magically tagged and permanently suspended and you are screwed. Say goodbye to your docs, email, storage, adwords, adsense, plus and now logins. I would really like to hear from someone at Google on the reasons why your company will not come out and offer: (a) A solid guarantee of non-termination of services (b) Real customer service (c) A sensible mechanism through which honest users of your services can deal with TOS violations (and learn how to fix problems) without risking loosing it all. There's more, but I'm busy. The point is that Google offers a lot of neat stuff but the risk is too great. It's like jumping off a plane with a parachute while someone retains control of a "deploy disable" mechanism. You don't know if you are going to crater yourself on the fifth, the hundredth or the nth jump. You just know that it could happen and you will never know why.

chetanahuja 14y ago
Yes this is a serious problem. I do have a lot of my data tied up in google accounts but I still fear the sudden, unexplained ban-hammer coming down on me with no way to contact an actual human to ask questions off of (see this as a hilarious example of google's support for paying customers: https://plus.google.com/114419328456762929144/posts/NAJbzrZwWNj https://plus.google.com/114419328456762929144/posts/NAJbzrZw... )
weareconvo 14y ago
> A solid guarantee of non-termination of services If they terminate your account, it's because they had a reasonable suspicion that the account violated their TOS. So I guess this one is actually related to not knowing what the violation was, and accordingly assuming it was for no good reason. I didn't work on the Policy team - I was a dev - but I seriously doubt anyone there could terminate peoples' accounts without reasonable suspicion of a violation and get away with it. The checks and balances are too tight. > Real customer service Google does have "real customer service". However, as far as I know, it's reserved for the people who are paying Google money for whatever reason. In general, any of Google's free services have so many tens of millions of users that it would be ludicrous to guarantee any level of service for every single one of them. As to the general complaint about the very real possibility of being cut off from your data, that's a risk wherever you go. Drives fail, servers get hacked, someone accidentally hits "delete everything" instead of "refresh monitoring dashboard"... etc. At least with Google Take-Out, they make it incredibly easy to download whatever data you have on there periodically for the purpose of doing backups.
- robomartin 14y ago
  I don't think you are exposed to the reality of the problem. I'll describe one incident I witnessed for you to get an idea. We were working on a client's medical information site. A reputable MD. He happened to own about 250 domains parked at GoDaddy. We were going to use AdSense on his one site once it was up. He went ahead and setup an account with Google to use both AdSense and AdWords. During this process he saw that Google offered a product called "AdSense for Domains". The premise being that you park your Domains with Google and they auto-magically place ads on them. The domains were already parked with GoDaddy's "Cash Parking" service for over a year. It didn't take long for him to realize that this was an intermediates version of Google's AdSense for Domains. He decided to cut out the middle man and park the domains directly with Google. He transferred all the domains. They had to be approved by Google. That happened overnight. All was well. Two days later he gets the dreaded notice and his entire account is permanently suspended without recourse, without a way to learn what the problem may have been and without a way to speak to a real person. Horrible. Particularly when you realize that he had already been using this service through GoDaddy as a middle-man. That is the kind of thing a shit company who cares not for their customers would do, not a company who clims to live by this "Do no evil" ethos. Based on that experience I can't see ever trusting them with anything at all. Great search. Absolute lack of respect and consideration for their customers, which is an absolutely shitty way to behave in my book. My standing recommendation is to not use Google for anything other than search.
  - weareconvo 14y ago
    If the person was buying Adwords ads and then using them to direct customers to parked domains, then I think I have an inkling as to why their account was terminated, considering I am the person who implemented that policy.
    - robomartin 14y ago
      No such thing. The events were exactly as I described them. No ad clicking. No vectoring through AdWords. Nothing other than a transfer of the domains from GoDaddy intermediated parking to Google's "AdSense for Domains" and in three days the account was closed. Because there's zero feedback all we could figure out is that some of the domain names (he had a couple that were politically charged) may have hit a filter. What's weird is that they went through their approval process, started showing ads for a day and then the account was closed. This is one account. Search for "Google closed my account" to read more horror stories, all with different threads. Their process and approach is absolute crap. Not to be trusted with anything.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

chetanahuja 14y ago

Yes this is a serious problem. I do have a lot of my data tied up in google accounts but I still fear the sudden, unexplained ban-hammer coming down on me with no way to contact an actual human to ask questions off of (see this as a hilarious example of google's support for paying customers: https://plus.google.com/114419328456762929144/posts/NAJbzrZwWNj https://plus.google.com/114419328456762929144/posts/NAJbzrZw... )

weareconvo 14y ago

> A solid guarantee of non-termination of services If they terminate your account, it's because they had a reasonable suspicion that the account violated their TOS. So I guess this one is actually related to not knowing what the violation was, and accordingly assuming it was for no good reason. I didn't work on the Policy team - I was a dev - but I seriously doubt anyone there could terminate peoples' accounts without reasonable suspicion of a violation and get away with it. The checks and balances are too tight. > Real customer service Google does have "real customer service". However, as far as I know, it's reserved for the people who are paying Google money for whatever reason. In general, any of Google's free services have so many tens of millions of users that it would be ludicrous to guarantee any level of service for every single one of them. As to the general complaint about the very real possibility of being cut off from your data, that's a risk wherever you go. Drives fail, servers get hacked, someone accidentally hits "delete everything" instead of "refresh monitoring dashboard"... etc. At least with Google Take-Out, they make it incredibly easy to download whatever data you have on there periodically for the purpose of doing backups.

robomartin 14y ago
I don't think you are exposed to the reality of the problem. I'll describe one incident I witnessed for you to get an idea. We were working on a client's medical information site. A reputable MD. He happened to own about 250 domains parked at GoDaddy. We were going to use AdSense on his one site once it was up. He went ahead and setup an account with Google to use both AdSense and AdWords. During this process he saw that Google offered a product called "AdSense for Domains". The premise being that you park your Domains with Google and they auto-magically place ads on them. The domains were already parked with GoDaddy's "Cash Parking" service for over a year. It didn't take long for him to realize that this was an intermediates version of Google's AdSense for Domains. He decided to cut out the middle man and park the domains directly with Google. He transferred all the domains. They had to be approved by Google. That happened overnight. All was well. Two days later he gets the dreaded notice and his entire account is permanently suspended without recourse, without a way to learn what the problem may have been and without a way to speak to a real person. Horrible. Particularly when you realize that he had already been using this service through GoDaddy as a middle-man. That is the kind of thing a shit company who cares not for their customers would do, not a company who clims to live by this "Do no evil" ethos. Based on that experience I can't see ever trusting them with anything at all. Great search. Absolute lack of respect and consideration for their customers, which is an absolutely shitty way to behave in my book. My standing recommendation is to not use Google for anything other than search.
- weareconvo 14y ago
  If the person was buying Adwords ads and then using them to direct customers to parked domains, then I think I have an inkling as to why their account was terminated, considering I am the person who implemented that policy.
  - robomartin 14y ago
    No such thing. The events were exactly as I described them. No ad clicking. No vectoring through AdWords. Nothing other than a transfer of the domains from GoDaddy intermediated parking to Google's "AdSense for Domains" and in three days the account was closed. Because there's zero feedback all we could figure out is that some of the domain names (he had a couple that were politically charged) may have hit a filter. What's weird is that they went through their approval process, started showing ads for a day and then the account was closed. This is one account. Search for "Google closed my account" to read more horror stories, all with different threads. Their process and approach is absolute crap. Not to be trusted with anything.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]