Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine. I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day.
In this scenario it seems pretty obvious that their automated fraud AI messed up, but the customer service person is probably also automated. They have so many people working on insane moonshots, but don't spend money for customer service for their core products (in this case people literally trying to give you money!). Just bizarre.
This whole practice reeks of being downright fraudulent. Especially with a new technology like Apple Card, which folks will understandably not have a strong familiarity with. I get that Google needs to combat fraud and all that, but they should at least inform the customer of why such a drastic action (a permanent ban! !!) was taken with almost no warning.
Really, any respectable company in this situation would simply flag the account for a billing problem, deny the card, and let the customer try again. At which point, any legitimate customer will go, "Oh, guess they don't take Apple Card" and use something else. It's the same effect (account can't be used, "fraud" with the Apple Card if it exists is dodged) but is not nearly so user hostile as this... mess.
Google's opacity here seems like it could only really have one benefit to the company: They can shut down any account they don't like, and since they're always vague with the reasoning, they don't necessarily have to have a valid reason. Their whole "you know what you did" approach is just uncertain enough to cause the victim to doubt themselves and be unlikely to mount a defense. I don't know what their actual motivations are (I know it's popular to hate on Google, but I have a hard time believing they're pulling stunts like this on purpose) but it looks bad no matter how you slice it.
I think an application of Hanlon's Razor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor) is applicable here. Google is in an oligopolistic position (along with Facebook) in the online ads space. Therefore, they face zero consequence for having extraordinarily poor customer service. As a result, they optimize their customer "service" to minimize work for themselves.
I ran into a very similar situation with my gas company. I'd fat-fingered my bank account number in their online form, so they weren't able to debit my account. Instead of notifying me of this problem, they simply locked my account and threatened to cut me off for non-payment. Even after I'd called the company and appealed, they still prevented me from paying with my bank account for 12 months and forced me to pay with a credit card (which incurred an additional $3.75 "convenience fee").
I don't think Hanlon's Razor applies to large companies. Individual humans tend to have reasonably powerful moral compass's, but make a lot of mistakes due to lack of information, focus, and error checking. For humans, it makes sense to assume "stupidity" rather than malice. On the other hand, companies like Google have tons of the smartest people in the world making decisions, but they tend to put profit over morality whenever possible. In a sense, they have to, or else they'll be out-competed by someone who does.
For large companies, I would almost go so far as to propose that one should "never attribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by malice."
I have no opinion about this particular instance. I just find that HN tends to bring up Hanlon's Razor a lot in defense of corporations.
“Google is in an oligopolistic position (along with Facebook)”
The real issue is that too many people are depending on advertising to support their business plan instead of the tried and true - making a product that people are willing to give you money for.
I’m not sure if this is an attempt to troll the thread or your legitimate point of view. If the latter, ads play a major role in the success of man (most?) great products you are currently using because without exposure most people wouldn’t know of their existence.
Sadly, that power clustered towards Google with no oversight whatsoever.
Google will continue to be opaque unless they have oversight/regulations. Something I imagine they spend quite a bit* to prevent in any way possible.
I don’t have any moral issue with using advertising to get your product in front of people. There are many different ways to market besides depending on Google ads.
I have a problem with a business plan that bases your entire revenue stream on Google ads.
Basically you sum up why having 1 major, huge company that supplies a vast array of website coverage, is a bad idea, aka google adsense/doubleclick which powers so many ad networks.
Yes there is facebook/twitter and a few others but google is the one with the crazy huge coverage.
Also yes there are other formats but we live in a very digital age where it has potentially better returns for less cost when you use google adsense rather than traditional media. When you are a small company these cost differences are a huge deal.
I wonder why more people don't take Google to court over this. Yes, you'd need extraordinary funds to fight them properly, but on the other hand them sending anyone to court will also cost them extraordinary amount of money - so I imagine before they accept any such legal challenge they would ask the CS department to actually have a look at the case first. Having a lawyer send them a letter saying that you are going to take them to court is comparatively cheap compared to having your entire AdSense account shut down.
Sure, if you have an actual colorable claim of a violation of a legal right, wave the threat of court action. But also recognize that that escalation can work two ways...
> but on the other hand them sending anyone to court will also cost them extraordinary amount of money
Alphabet has $117 billion cash on hand, they can handle the cost. In fact, they can handle the cost of a scorched earth defense more easily than the cost of getting a reputation for rolling over everytime someone waves the threat of a small claims action.
> so I imagine before they accept any such legal challenge they would ask the CS department to actually have a look at the case first.
More likely, once they get that kind of letter, the legal department will probe the CS records of related to the issue to determine the legal position. They might then suggest just giving you want you want, or they might then send you a nice letter from their attorney about how they are prepared to make a claim for (e.g.) civil fraud for the deceptive action that they were previously willing to leave with an account termination, and that if they do so it will far exceed the small claims limit and they will use that counterclaim to move to transfer your case out of small claims.
Bank accounts and credit cards work very differently in making payments. Getting an ACH transaction disputed is far more time consuming and difficult. Fat fingering a bank account number number and not triple checking it for an ACH payment isn't something I would just shrug off.
Here's the issue. From my perspective, Google used to be a respectable company, but through automation of customer handling and service they've elected to accept negative consequences and impact for customers - which isn't a very respectable position to take in my book.
You say "elected to accept" but I'd like to correct you - they designed their company that way by choice and they continue knowing at worst, one day, one of their lawyers will attend court and be told what new things are required to be compliant. Then, at worst, their lawyers will haggle over the details. Then they will change things within that one jurisdiction.
> Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine.
For non-negligible damages, heading immediately to small claims court (given you live in a sensible jurisdiction) seems to be the easiest thing in that case. Even if Google's ultimately in the right, they typically can't just ignore that entirely.
Well, that really depends on the case and jurisdiction, I can't answer that for you. Really, the key part is to force Google to actually provide reasoning for their actions, as they eventually did in the case I edited in links for.
Going to court twice to get Google to pay $0 in damages and not reinstate your account doesn't sound like "the easiest thing" to me. It's at best a Pyrrhic victory.
I get the desire to impose costs on Google for their bad actions, but this doesn't seem like a very productive plan.
Well yes, giving up is almost always the easiest option in any situation. I mean easier than attempting to navigate Google support channels or having the right internal connections.
The problem is that regardless of whether they are or not, getting to a point where a judge looks it over is a process most can’t go through with an opponent like Google.
Again, depends on the jurisdiction, but in the UK filling for a small claims court case would be like £125? And if they don't show up the case will almost certainly be ruled in your favour and Google ordered to pay back whatever they owe you - plus any court costs you incurred. It's really not that difficult. Even paying a lawyer £100 to write and send them a letter "you have 7 days to fix this or we're going to court" would most likely achieve better result than trying to contact their useless customer service.
>in this case people literally trying to give you money!
Gmail for Android has 2 core functions: to send and to receive mail. It fails at one of them. (Emails get stuck in its outbox indefinitely - you can force it to send by going into the "outbox" and dragging down to refresh, which is an action that has no button to show it is possible. There is no notification that your mail wasn't sent.)
How is it possible for an app that has 2 functions, to fail to do one of them?
This is like a salt and pepper set where the pepper side has no holes - the pepper is stuck inside. (You can unscrew the top and manually shake some out though.) Sure salt is more common. But it's literally a salt and pepper set that only functions as a salt shaker.
Gmail for android is literally a mail sending and receiving app that can't send mail.
How can this happen? I mean literally, how is the support thread I linked possible?
If I were the CEO and I saw a thread like that, the issue would be fixed within 7 minutes, as every person within earshot of me rushed to make themselves look good to me.
To be honest this doesn't make sense. If the salt and pepper set only had "one function" which is to display advertising in your home (the analogy works pretty well, as I could imagine the set plastered with ads) it still has to work as a salt and pepper set, or people wouldn't use it.
In the example thread above, people are reacting by complaining about the problem. If they reacted by switching email providers, they wouldn’t be in that thread. I highly doubt Gmail’s active user count is affected by any more than a minuscule amount as a result.
to me, your explanation doesn't really explain how an active development team can ignore that issue. If it were just a handful of users talking about an esoteric corner case I could maybe understand.
Besides, it does appear to be a corner case. It has ~200 upvotes. Gmail has 1.5 billion users.
That's 1 in 7,500,000.
If every single one of them quits using Gmail, and they tell all of their friends, and all of their friends quit using Gmail, Google will still be able to tell their paying customers that those ads reach 1.5 billion users.
A single quora answer alone has 20k views. Do you think that's a normal number of views on a quora answer? How many views do you think that quora answer should have for you to think it's a problem? 200k? 2m? 20m? 200m? 2b?
(A single quora answer does not represent everyone who has a problem. Maybe 0.01% of people with a specific problem will end up reading a specific quora answer. So I think that 20k represents 200 million users, or more than 10% of Gmail's userbase. While we're just throwing around made up numbers. Maybe it's 100% of installed gmail for android apps with that problem. (Since not every gmail user uses android, uses the android app, and uses it to send mail.)
Anyway I think up to 100% of the android app users could be affected.
Still, you answered the question: perhaps the development team doesn't feel that 20,000 reports is a priority. Maybe the salt and pepper manufacturer doesn't care that every one of their pepper shakers doesn't let peppers out. 20,000 complaints just don't matter.
Maybe they are all focused on the visual design and adding new feature bloat. This does seem like a problem with software economics, where people will put up with non functional software as long as it looks nice and always has new features advertised to them.
> Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine.
There isn't a week that goes by without that exact same story repeating itself.
> I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day.
Maybe you could prepare for this by writing an angry blogpost ahead of time, to get it out of your system?
It's absolutely fucking mind-boggling how these large, impenetrable silicon valley companies (mainly google here) like to hide behind their "algorithms".
"Oh, sorry your main method of making money was terminated, we won't tell you why or how we came to that conclusion - must have been the algorithm, sorry!"
What's that old saying - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"?
I'm starting to think that these massive companies aren't stupid and that they're actually designing their algorithms behind this and using it as a scapegoat to push their own agenda.
I’ve never once had a problem reaching a live human that could solve my problem on the business side working with AWS. As a consumer I’ve never had any issues with Amazon retail.
It's pretty difficult to reach a human if you don't pay a ridiculous extra amount each month for support--and even then, they're rarely able to assist with actual bugs. They just assume everything that's wrong is your mistake, and when they finally come to the conclusion that it's a bug on their end, they give up.
If you call $100 a month minimum or a percentage of your service plan (https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/) “ridiculous”. You can immediately reach a live person via chat or phone.
I use the live business support plan all of the time as an “easy button”. Some of the issues they have helped us out with in the past.
- a cross account CodePipeline using CodeBuild and CloudFormation (you cant do it through the UI)
- configuration issues with lambda, API Gateway, and binary transfers.
- Python/Boto3/DynamoDB and DAX coding issues
- various weird CloudFormation issues.
- Parameter Store/CloudFormation throttling issues (ie use DependsOn to force CF to create Parameter Store resources serially)
I don't disagree with anything you have said. But, if your main method of making money is dependent on some particular entity continuing to do whatever they are currently doing, you have a problem.
I hear that argument a lot from people trying to shift the blame to the victim. But we all depend on some particular entity in one form or another, we all depend on the government upholding the value of money, we depend on the transportation systems not to cease to operate, we do that not because we're sloppy but because there is no other way to do things. Try to run ads on the Internet without dealing with Google.
> In this scenario it seems pretty obvious that their automated fraud AI messed up
Ah, but is it really obvious? One of the benefits of virtual card numbers, in particular the Apple Card implementation, is that it's easy to switch them out, which makes tracking harder.
Could it be that a company that makes its living off tracking users would not be overly fond of virtual card numbers? As long as users' reaction is "if you're planning on using the Apple Card for anything important, think again", it looks like the AI did exactly what it was meant to do.
I usually pay with Amex and sometimes a business will say "Oh sorry, we don't take Amex". Never once have they ushered me out the door and issued a trespass notice. Instead I just pay another way and we are both happy. That seems pretty optimal.
But as I've argued above, maybe the deterrent effect is a feature, as long as it's the use of virtual cards that is deterred and not the use of Google products.
That would be one way of looking at it. But the OP took the opposite conclusion, that one should avoid using Apple Card. So we have one user who is using neither Apple Card nor Google products, and a number of his readers, who are deterred from using Apple Card.
Premium support in Google only exists to make sure your have paid them. They will ban your account after you have paid them. They usually want till your payment is cleared and then ban you.
My colleague's play account was banned because he used PayPal not Google wallet, when it was launched
We thought the sci-fi style evil AI would become the overlord making nonsensical decisions that can't be appealed.
But really, humans are happy to do it to each other.
It makes sense I guess as those sci-fi AIs are often to some extent or another trying to save us from, other humans, or at least that was their origin.
I had this exact issue with FB a while ago. Got that exact response.
Fortunately I’d worked with FB before for major brands, so I knew the email to send to to get a real person. There is almost always a monitored email address for accounts receivable, and if you email them pretending like you are having trouble making a large payment, someone will respond. When they think it’s a fat check, suddenly “this decision is final” is just a mistake.
> I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day.
Perhaps you should change this? If you're aware your entire livelihood is a game of Russian roulette, you should maybe work on making it something else.
I second this, recognising my Google account as a giant SPOF made me invest heavily into redundancy. I've gotten closer and closer to the point where I can realistically consider Google services as ephemeral.
I took similar approach a while ago. I don't run google ads and I am not doing any business with them but I have lots of important data on my Google Drive (personal backup) that I really wouldn't want to lose. One day I read a story of a guy who had his account shut down for posting a video (innocent in his own claims) to youtube. As a result he lost access to his gmail and Drive too. This was a wake up call for me as I realised that I could be denied access to my data for whatever reason. I have several additional copies now, both on local hard drives and different cloud providers.
I feel like people are slowly learning that one shouldn't use google for anything important unless there is no other option. Hardware equivalent is Intel for anything but PC and laptop microprocessors. Intel acts the same way google does. And people in the hardware business avoid Intel products when alternatives exist.
It is kind of hard to just “change” one’s principal passive income source. It’s not like taking another job if you don’t like the current one. Such things can take years.
there's nothing "passive" about this. he's relying upon a "platform" (there should be a more nefarious word for this, perhaps monopolyform or something) whose behavior in the past has indicated that it is arbitrary at best and malicious at worst. thus, there's an absolutely nontrivial existential risk of losing all of that one morning, at the whim of the platform overlord.
when you associate to any extent with a monopolyform, you must understand that at any point, the owner can absolutely annihilate you. that's the game, and those complaining post facto about how it's not fair should consider that those were always the rules, and complaining after getting bumped off is certainly understandable but that outcome should have always been a part of one's expected risks and possible outcomes.
At one time I felt like I was going to be one of those people but very glad I decided to keep working as additional income because a few years later it slowly declined when google decided big brand were more important search results.
I feel like if you get your traffic from a source and also sell on that platform at some point the company sees you are successful and cuts you out. We see it with google search result taking content and presenting it at the top. Or Amazon scanning for profitable niches on the platform and pushing their own product.
Unfortunately they practice these sorts of policy on the app store as well.
We've been saying Google does this, Google does that. The thing is, a company is composed of its people.
I am just curious, how does something like this, something most people with reasonable sense of "fairness" would flag as concerning and potentially very wrong, comes to be implemented? Even more so for a large company like Google? (smaller companies can have a "bad dictator boss" which can push this through without issue)
Policies like these, which appear to have consistencies across their products, how far up does the chain of responsibility go? How does stuff like these occur?
Does it start with some MBA grad who comes in, gets assigned a KPI to "cut costs" and then their natural bias is that customer service is the first to go, proposes it to their managers and it bubbles up for approval and implementation? All the while everyone at each level is oblivious to the potentially damaging collateral the policy would cause, but only think that "oh this is a great move, we would save a bunch!" and then finally gets implemented?
Or would this more be a top-down thing where executives discuss and push this and then the employees, being good people at heart have no choice but to implement it?
I just find it so difficult to imagine something like this being OK-ed by all the people involved within the company. Like, is everyone "in on it"? Or do they not know? Or they know but can't/unwilling to say anything?
It starts with someone coming up with a way of cutting costs. It continues because it can. Then it becomes part of their brand which would only matter if you had similiar choices for similiar services.
Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine.
Its also almost certainly completely fake as they're done nothing of the sort. I'd be shocked if it wasn't as automatic as an away message.
Google ignoring their customers is a recurring theme,, and I'd like to think that I have a pretty good list of tech news that I follow.
Since this is HN, which (at least used to) primarily cater to the startup crowd, I hope it goes without saying that Google does not fix this issue because they don't have a financial incentive to do so. This is basic capitalism at play, and what you as a developer/advertiser/user need to do is use and pay for competing products if you're not happy about the status quo.
On one hand, in the online ads biz, Google is king and is happy to outsource its customer support for its most premium customers both large network of agencies and advertisers. I know it quite well, I was one of those guys for Doubleclick many moons ago. That is if you are big enough to be worthy of being a Google (DC) customer in the first place, which means, you have to be a large spender.
But on the other hand, if you sign up for their Google Cloud thing despite being a nobody (me again), you'll have their sales folks hounding you for an upsell, mostly because GCloud is ridiculously behind both AWS and Azure.
FWIW Facebook will also ban you without telling you which ad policy you violated. Most infuriating they can pull access to accounts or your ability to turn off ads while they're still running and connected to a credit card. To me, that seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
And why do you think this isn't intentional? Spending money on people solving company's screwups costs a lot of money. For the company the size of Google or Facebook one client (or hundred) like this are peanuts, drop in the bucket. The cost of losing them is minimal over the costs of paying a support person to deal with problems.
Big client won't get banned - and if they do, they have also a non-public phone number to an account manager to make things right again too.
Sadly this is a common trend - e.g. with ISPs it is almost impossible to find a contact to an actual person, only some online chats or automated hotline that will waste your time with canned responses not solving your problem.
> ...with ISPs it is almost impossible to find a contact to an actual person...
What ISP are you talking about? I've never had trouble getting a real person with Verizon, CenturyLink, or ATT. You might have to wait on hold for a few dozen minutes, but that's a separate issue.
It is intentional, I'm just saying it's ridiculous. the Google way is to treat everything like a programming problem. That works decently well for bits, but really breaks down when working with humans.
The thing is that it doesn't break down except in the extreme cases, and even then it's often less bad than the edge cases with traditional human-mediated customer service. Consider the Wells Fargo accounts snafu, or the Comcast customer nickname issue. Or PayPal just in general. Is Google actually worse, or are they the kind of better that makes their rarer screwups seem worse. Consider in your evaluation just how many people they deal with using their automated systems.
Extreme cases like using a popular new credit card to pay? Please. Google uses an algorithm to ban people for life without recourse, it's insane. Not everything can be reduced to an algo, sometimes you need to make exceptions. It can even make your algo better (thousands of people are going to try using their new Apple cards in the coming weeks).
As others have mentioned, we only currently have one data point on this. However...
Google is well known for terrible customer support. And if you think of it, it makes sense. After all, if you can server 100M users via an automated support systems and only 0.01% have issues a year, it's probably far, far cheaper to just drop those "problem" users, than hire thousands of customer support persons.
Note: just threw the above numbers out, but you get the gist.
EDIT:
Speaking of algorithms, I wonder if the OP was below some adsense fiscal threshold of 'it's worth it to intercede here with a level 4 manager' or some blather.
You don’t have the data to conclude that it doesn’t work well. We could very well be commenting on an exception out of millions of perfectly executed automated fraud detections.
> Google's classic canned response of "We've confirmed we're right, we will not tell you why and this is the last reply you'll receive" is one of the most infuriating things I can imagine.
Apple does that too [1]. I assume it's to prevent a DoS from fraudsters. (Obviously, it's a problem for legitimate users)
In your example, the user was easily able to contact a real human being who informed them that their account had been terminated for using a fraudulent gift card.
That human being even went to bat for the user and tried to convince corporate that buying the fraudulent gift card had been an honest mistake in trusting the wrong seller and not intentional fraud.
This seems like quite a different experience from "you are banned for life and we won't even talk to you or tell you why".
> This Senior Agent #2 was not as supportive as the first, and gave me information that contradicted Senior Agent #1: “Your account has been permanently disabled,” he said. “There is nothing else you can do, there is no escalation path.”
> When I asked for an explanation as to why, all he would say is, “See the terms and conditions.”
Ultimately, the author was able to get out of that dead-end, but it sounded awfully close.
The salient fact is that the user was easily able to contact customer support, find out exactly what the issue was, provide documentation showing what had happened, and appeal an adverse decision all the way to the top.
This is significantly different than "we won't tell you what the issue is and we won't even accept communications from you".
All this stuff reminds me of an article I read 35 years ago about the dispossessed in the Soviet Union. People whose records had been lost by the system. And so officially to the state they didn't exist. What out that they couldn't get jobs or housing. Their only hope was to appeal to a bureaucrat with enough power to re-instate them.
In this scenario it seems pretty obvious that their automated fraud AI messed up, but the customer service person is probably also automated. They have so many people working on insane moonshots, but don't spend money for customer service for their core products (in this case people literally trying to give you money!). Just bizarre.