Losing my google account has to be a worst nightmare scenario. I've started disentangling slowly, starting with mail, but Google Photos is just so convenient.
I ordered a Chromecast on the Google store a couple years back and the item never came. Google wouldn’t refund or reship and I was so close to doing a chargeback, but 20 wasn’t worth the trouble. I’m so glad I didn’t. Now I know to buy Google products from elsewhere and slowly migrate away from Gmail.
This feels like a huge gap in consumer protections. Retaliatory account bans seem like they should not be legal when a retailer fails to deliver. Of course this is all exacerbated by how large the entities in question are and how the same account may govern access to multiple services.
I feel like this is treating the symptoms rather than the cause. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to have such a tight grip on a consumer’s digital life such that an account ban is crippling.
Everyone thinks their system is reasonable, that's the whole problem. Banks obviously don't think chargeback fraud is fraud when they perform fraudulent chargebacks. They think they're reasonably legit, which is why they perform them. Retailers also think their fraud prevention systems are reasonable. Reasonable means different things to different people and it certainly doesn't mean infallible.
Nobody in any of these situations thinks they are being unreasonable.
Steam froze my account to punish a PayPal dispute, the amount they would not refund was ~£2. Their refusal was contrary to UK law.
Small story about Steam. They sold me a broken game, in UK one can return broken things according to the Consumer Rights Act, specifically including digital goods. Steam said, at length, they would not refund me: the game would crash (losing some settings) after ~30 minutes, I spent more than 2h of playtime trying to fix it [it's a 50h+ game, I'd have accepted an 8p reduction in my refund!].
I complained to PayPal. PayPal decided in my favour -- ie in keeping with UK law. Steam didn't dispute PayPal's findings but instead froze my Steam account (and I assume paid PayPal the money back). PayPal made me whole, financially.
My Steam account was blocked for a month or so. Ongoing they "punish" me by making it hard for me to give them money -- which is good for me, but my kids are not keen!
WhyTF would I complain over a few £. It's the principle, clearly.
It was very interesting to me to see how a big company can ignore the law in this way. But also spend what must amount to quite a bit of customer service time just to avoid a minimal refund.
All I wanted was a refund for a game Steam sold, that was broken and wouldn't be fixed. I did cursory searching for bugs before buying, but hadn't found this particular one before my purchase.
You know what I did with the refund money, bought the next game in the same series, because it was only the bug that I didn't like, and I paid more money for it than the game they wouldn't refund ... mad, eh!
Before this happens to you too: rclone[0] can be used to sync (or pull) data from Google's services to a local machine. It's pretty slow, but it "just works"^TM
rclone's documentation warns you that you can't actually get the original resolution photos back out via the Photos API. Better than nothing, obviously, but...
... just a confirmation that signing for anything on google just makes you their hostage. I'm happy I quit them 5 years ago after I couldn't have access to my mail anymore after I stepped down my paid drive access to free one and I didn't have space anymore to receive emails.
Because that hit you by surprise, or because you intended to keep all those photos while on the free tier?
It seems to me like deleting the files over your storage limit is the easy path for both you and google and I don't see how this is an example of holding you hostage. At most bad communication and a lack of warning.
Don't remember exactly but I was expecting not the two services being linked. IIRC I already downloaded back a lot of pictures and my free plan was something like 99% full. The fact that Google blocked my email reception without any notice was hard to swallow.
Can't say I've used rclone for this, but I wouldn't discard it so easily
I have a rather large library from Takeout and it's been a burden.
It seems I'm going to need to write something to interpret their metadata to make it remotely useful again; they provide a flat archive with images and JSON files.
If I have to do this, I'd rather pick my tools on familiarity - compared to Takeout, I have slightly more with rclone
Truth be told I'm a data hoarder, I'll probably do both and reconcile
From my experience, the mbox file from Google Takeout breaks some non-ASCII non-UTF8 characters from old emails you may have received (they are all replaced by 0xEFBFBD. No way to solve this). This issue does not happen when backuping emails with IMAP or GYB/GMvault (by the way I have written this little tool to use/explore GMVault backups https://github.com/karteum/gmvaultdb :).
The limitations page for the Google Photos backend [1] is something to behold. I can't imagine very many people would view this as a viable alternative to Takeout with the current limitations. This bolded one seems like it would be a dealbreaker for most people with photos:
> The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos. You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original photos as a last resort
Your point 1 isn't really true. People charge back businesses all the time for any reason up to and including "I don't want to pay for this and this is how I don't have to". It's a huge problem for folks like eBay sellers, for example.
In general companies will disable the account and the amount might be sold to collection agency (so you will receive unpleasant news when apply for mortgage or something like that).
But majority of companies do email you and do have email address for support so I never run into issues like this.
5 years from now, some engineer will probably say "oh, the adsense billing chargeback processing system seems to have been stuck for years, and the workqueue is overflowing. Lets restart it and let it work through the backlog.". Then bam, your account is gone.
I work in payments. This is pretty normal AFAIK. Doing a chargeback is a good way to be "fired" as a customer and not allowed to use that companies services anymore.
It's definitely surprising. Chargebacks cause additional issues for a company which is why they're treated more severely than something like a late payment, refunds, etc.
It seems like a lot of folks are surprised by a chargeback causing a loss of access to the company services so wanted to share my experience that this is not abnormal. Big companies tend to do this.
Isn't this a great way to motivate users to respond by setting up throw-away accounts, with disposable forwarding emails and Privacy.com-generated credit card numbers? True, this is a multi-step process, but it also seems like something which could be automated.
I was told by experienced web developer to do exactly this: every time I need something for Google I must create new address and new identity. If something goes wrong only project related identity gets destroyed and I can access other accounts.
I don't know if I'm having a false memory but it think someone some time ago commented here on a similar topic that they got banned on Google for using a virtual card
Virtual cards are often associated with fraud or malicious actions and may be rejected entirely. Generating cards probably can be done programmatically, but so can recognizing and blocking those cards.
You might be fine now, but what if you want to open a physical store/restaurant/etc next year? If you're banned from Google, you'd have no control over your business profile on Google, can't respond to reviews, can't update your store hours and other details, can't advertise on maps, etc.
Do you have an Android phone? It's getting harder to use them without a Google account.
In my university, professors and old T.A. have a mix of gmail, hotmail and yahoo, let's say 1/3, 1/3 and 1/3. But students have almost 100% emails from gmail.
There are multiple email providers. There are multiple phone providers. You want to argue this is a duopoly? Ok. But it is demonstrably not a monopoly.
Chrome‘s market share is on par with 90s windows. Google search is above that. G-apps on android is on par with ma bell.
Monopolists of the past are jealous of how many monopolies google is getting away with.
Google abuses these positions to decide what web technologies the web uses, which businesses get found on the web and which don’t, and how android device manufacturers build their phones.
An email monopoly, perhaps, but not a comms monopoly. I bet the students have snapchat, whatsapp, fb messanger, etc maybe signal or telegram too. Plus mms and phone for 2fa. But yeah, email is quite special for password recovery so its a good point you're making.
Not everyone used windows in 1994, either. What they both have/had are significant market shares in certain markets that they abuse to maintain control.
I have no idea if you're being serious, but of course code can be overridden and of course you can hire someone to override it. Google has apparently chosen not to.
If the customer was told to do a chargeback by a Google employee (or outsourced contractor) then it was _Google_ who told the customer to do the chargeback.
Every action by myself acting in my official capacity is an action by my company and they cannot disentangle themselves from that obligation by blaming an employee.
That's definitely a problem. But a lot of people seem surprised that issuing a chargeback can result in a loss of access to company services. So was just sharing from my work experience.
google is not a small local shop only responsible for one tiny part of your life like a plumber. They have actively sought to make themselves integral to your whole life. When the plumber fires you, you do not lose access to your retirement account because ypu can no longer prove your identity because your phone and email both went up in smoke. That comes with responsibility. This is a quite false equivalence. Chargebacks are bad? Yes, well, so is not having human customer service.
The plumber has a wife answering the phone who can be reasoned with and who can reason with you and you can arrive at some compromise or understanding or other deal before getting to a chargeback. And that's just for a noncritical service. What compromise or understanding does google offer? For their service which they have actively made as critical as possible?
This sob story about how bad chargebacks are falls flat.
I agree that having poor customer service is unacceptable. I agree that losing your access to email is a tragic thing and extremely difficult to resolve all the other issues that come with that. I'm not really commenting on the situation other than that issuing a chargeback commonly results in a loss of access to that companies services.
A more-measured approach would be to just disable your ability to purchase/engage with purchased services/products.
Of course, Google is actively motivated to make forcing them to face consequences for mishandling product disputes punishable by complete ostracization from their "ecosystem".
On the one hand, this feels like a Surprised Pikachu moment: Of course a chargeback, the final legal method through which you have issues redressed, is a valid reason to deny you further access to a private company's platform.
On the other hand, I've been decoupling my life from Google's services for a reason, and I'm not the only one. Google has ceased providing products for my needs superior enough to the competition to merit putting up with the ever-looming threat of their hegemonic bullshit.
I wonder if the Google+ social network failed because people were paranoid that they could lose their whole digital life for making ban-worthy posts on Google+.
> Of course a chargeback, the final legal method through which you have issues redressed, is a valid reason to deny you further access to a private company's platform.
Normally I would agree, but a representative from google told OP to do a chargeback!
That's the crux of the issue. If a CSR told you to jump off a bridge though... Yes you might win something if charges are pressed, but also you really should've known better.
In matters of "ToS;DR" it's generally the case that terms aligned with common expectations are enforceable but terms that don't aren't. That leaves me wondering if "chargebacks get you canceled" is a common expectation or not. The answer to this strongly influences whether my bridge analogy is accurate.
Google is historically incapable of ensuring the left hand knows what the right is doing. That isn't to say it's an okay way for things to be. It isn't.
However, if I were to get into a disagreement with Google, and a CSR told me to "do a chargeback", I would assume that CSR was engaging with me in poor faith, because these megashitcorps have a penchant for completely banning people out of hand for chargebacks to the point where it's basically autonomic. It seems like something I'd tell an annoying customer to do if they were annoying me and I was having a particularly bad day, because doing tech support is a miserable and soul-destroying job.
Again, this isn't a justification/rationalization, because this isn't an okay state of affairs in my mind, but I generally expect that a chargeback means I am ending my relationship with a business. Perhaps the OP from reddit should adopt the same mentality defensively.
> Of course a chargeback, the final legal method through which you have issues redressed, is a valid reason to deny you further access to a private company's platform.
I would completely disagree. It depends on whether the chargeback was justified. If a company illegally charges a user and the user merely declines to pay it, the subsequent blackballing (and damages associated with it) are damages of and resulting from the original crime / tort. It begins to smell like extortion.
Would you really, though? What does "complete" disagreement take the form of here, the denial of banning for chargebacks entirely? For every random hypothetical one can provide of a company engaging in poor faith, I can invent a hypothetical of someone charging back against a company despite receiving their product in good faith. I did not say "Is always a valid reason", and it perplexes me when I receive responses that seem to deliberately interpret statements as absolutes when they aren't phrased as such. :(
The final legal method is always court. You can always file a small claims or regular civil case.
I see dozens of people do this weekly against big companies (my company, link in bio) and it does tend to work well because the legal department is generally more motivated to resolve things than customer support. Airlines and car companies are the most common disputes from our data.
That said, you can't force Google or anyone to do business with you. This kind of thing should be regulated for big gate keepers.
Yeah, the appropriate phrasing would have been "the final legal method you can take on your own". Obviously in America you can sue for anything on a whim.
Though, thinking about it, I am not sure that's accurate either, because it's a bit difficult do a chargeback by yourself if the card issuer doesn't want to cooperate. Whoops.
A chargeback can be initiated for any number of reasons.. It's good business practice to disable the account of someone claiming fraud, to prevent more fraud.. :D
It still makes sense to ban, for the same reason insurance premiums go up even if your claim is no-fault. Your marginal value as a user is less than the cost of a single chargeback, ergo ban.
Many people (including me) raised this issue internally at Google more than a decade ago now during the Google+ era. Vic Gundotra decided that not using your "real name" was a bannable offense despite the many legitimate concerns people brought up [1].
This was of course an automatic process and there were (completely predictably) false positives. This would kill your entire Google account, Gmail included.
I was one of many voices who argued that was completely stupid. The worst thing that should happen is a policy violation on a given service should terminate or suspend that service only. It should NEVER kill Gmail. Why? Because the end result is people will ultimately only use their Google account for Gmail.
That's what I have done since and what I recommend everyone else do. Never tie your Google account to any other Google product. You may well regret it.
It's wild to me that this is still the case. The issue isn't large enough for any executive to care. That means the decision will come down to a few stubborn individuals (probably a VP of PM) who are maintaining this position.
There's nothing you can buy from the Google Store that you can't get from Best Buy or Amazon and those will be infinitely more accountable.
Sure, there will be some rough edges (what when I am banned from GDrive but not Gmail, but then I click the 'save to drive' button in gmail?). Who will test that codepath?
How about when i DDoS the antivirus service API? - does that mean my email will no longer be scanned?
But a few rough edges for a few users seems better than a few users very unhappy and enough to become negative PR sources for life.
Technically Google already has per-service bans for Google Ads and YouTube. That doesn't help if you get banned for a reason unrelated to those services however.
Or just don’t use gmail. Email is way too important to me (and most people) to risk losing because an automated system thought I broke the TOS of an unrelated Google product. Even if you keep separate accounts, there’s nothing to stop them correlating those accounts and banning you anyway.
I agree fully. There are plenty of competitors to choose from for a service so critical, and you’ll do even better if you buy your own domain and untie your email address from your email provider.
Most services ask for a confirmation via SMS. I have a few account in gmail (personal, work, another part of work, side project, ...). If they ban one of them, can they ban all of them?
Yeah, either you'd get your gmail account banned because of something happened in google ads, or they ban you for having multiple accounts and trying to "circumvent their anti-abuse policy" or something.
Well, I'm banned from AdSense (when I was something like 15 y.o I used bots to farm clicks...), everything else in google ecosystem works fine, and they even send me gift cards for ad sense that I can't use.
I lost the ability to use adwords. It has always been denied. I was never given a reason, and any attempt to appeal the decision were declined. I used my own email account to set up an account for a business, and the traffic may have been unusual because it was banner ads on the website of the local ISP. So, the ISP owned all of the IP addresses even though they were uniquely different people. And the office had multiple people in it so there is a chance that someone in the office may have, at some point, clicked on a banner advertisement themselves. I have no idea.
I have not tried in a few years, but I was nearing the 10 year mark previously, and they still would not allow me to use adwords. I am not sure if it is a lifetime ban or what.
Over the years I’ve read so many horror stories of people being locked out of their Google accounts for a wide variety of reasons. Trying to get Google’s help is like pleading for help by sending messages to /dev/null.
I’ve migrated everything I possibly can off their services as a result. Google Maps and YouTube I find hard or impossible to really replace but I don’t have any critical data there.
I remember how exciting it was when Google IPOed (2005?). I was rooting for them. Every passing year my opinion of them diminishes further.
I don't usually stick my neck out for Google, but I kinda get this policy. Charge-backs are the "nuclear" option, and both parties will take this unkindly. I understand in this case, it was suggested by the customer rep, which was a mistake.
Also it is wrong tool for other than actually fraudulent as in stolen cc details. Sadly the expensive way is court or arbitration. I wish there was some reasonable method like insurance I could buy that would fight for me instead in these cases.
I’d recommend taking a few steps before doing a chargeback in cases like this:
1. Search around for back channel support. Google things like “executive customer support”. Often times these emails get published by bloggers, forums, etc.
You can also look up support VP /Director’s names and then guess their email (e.g. first.last@example.com) and tell them your story.
2. Send a signature-required letter detailing out the issue, steps taken, and your requested resolution
These two steps get you significantly closer to having a person who can actually solve your problem actually look into the issue.
Another depending on your jurisdiction is the court process in your area.
In the U.K. we have the Money claim online service, to start proceedings against a company or person who owe money. There is a nominal fee starting at £30 and if companies don’t respond the court will de facto rule in your favour.
It would make more sense to first back up all your stuff switch all accounts to the new email address, set up email forwarding for a month, and then issue the chargeback. From what you are saying this is actually an easier process and unlike your suggestion will surely succeed 100% of the time. Then you aren't anyone's hostage.
This is completely normal for companies to do this and there is a 99% chance that doing a chargeback will get your account immediately terminated.
You cannot have it both ways with chargebacks and keeping your account as I have said before [0] as it is rife with abuse and friendly fraud and the merchant reserves the right to suspend, terminate and ban your account if you do so as per their ToS.
I think the difference here is that the OP of that post claims the representative told him to chargeback as the resolution to his issue. In their position, I would've probably done the same.
I had to return a new DOA phone once to Google Fi; despite having a tracking number, and being delivered back to them on the final return window day, they still charged me full new price for my used-replacement phone, after the return was already delivered.
Dealing with support was near impossible, no one had power to override the order, until finally I said I'd chargeback, then they were suddenly able to cancel it...
Obviously I'd never actually charge back though, as shown here, I assumed I'd get the boot
TIL never to buy physical products directly from Google!
Or for that matter to never use Google Pay, even if the c/c charge isn't run by them. You could go from "credit card buyer protection" to Google Doomsday with a single disputed charge.
I wonder how they handle "bank reversals", where a report of a stolen card (but not specifically a customer-generated chargeback) results in a reversal of the charge by the bank and issuance of a new c/c?
The difference being that a customer-generated chargeback for "goods or services not delivered" is handled differently by the bank than a "my card was stolen, reverse these charges" issue.
I have a c/c I use for Google. Said card # is stolen, and used to buy Google services (under a different ID). I call the bank, they cancel the card and refund the amounts charged to Google for the unknown services.
What is the chance of Google cancelling my other account, since it was on the same card?
Very good point about Google Pay. I never thought of that but you're right. If some vendor's misbehaviour ends up cascading in my losing access tp my Google account this would be catastrophic.
Thanks a lot. Removing it now.
Hopefully governments are looking into these customer service (or lack there of) for big tech. Google services are almost as important as banking or telcos for many people so there should be also some oversight here.
(Disclaimer: I’m a employee of one of Googles peer companies, but still only speaking for myself)
Every service does this. If you chargeback usually you will get banned. You should always get a refund by talking to support. Chargebacks cost the company extra fees and can lead to problems if they get too many.
> You should always get a refund by talking to support
In the original post, the author had multiple conversations with support, and the support agent told them to do a chargeback. And another support agent later acknowledged that the support agent was not supposed to say that, but that the ban remains in place regardless.
To me, the issue with Google's products and services is that they're not willing to provide any human customer service to resolve the real issues.
Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed.
The solution is to figure out some payment level for support that dissuades casual abuse of customer service, but is still reasonable for people to use in an emergency to save their business or communication accounts.
I'm convinced that at least some people have lost jobs and companies, had their lives ruined, or even committed suicide over being completely unable to salvage everything they've worked for all of their lives. This should be horrifying to every Google employee.
> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet.
Microsoft did this back in the 1990's. It provided a strong financial incentive to reduce the number of support calls generated per Windows installation, which is what they ended up doing.
And often Microsoft would not put the charge through, at least if you were working to try to solve the problem without them. I don't know what their criteria were, but I don't think I ever paid despite calling a few times.
The terms I remember (note that there are so many different Microsoft licensing agreements, so yours could’ve been totally different) were that you weren’t charged if the problem you called for was indeed a problem with Microsoft software.
And that definition was quite liberal: not just obvious software bugs, but also confusing documentation, etc.
In other words, as long as you RTFM before you called, it was free.
> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed.
No it is entirely reasonable. Even with a decline this quarter, Alphabet is sitting on ~$116 Billion cash on hand. Spending $1B on customer service would be trivial.
They won't though, because end-users are not the customers of Google, advertisers are. You can betcha advertisers get excellent customer service.
> They won't though, because end-users are not the customers of Google, advertisers are. You can betcha advertisers get excellent customer service.
You would think so, but no. Even advertisers get bad support from Google. Even companies using Google as replacement for Microsoft stack (Gmail and Calendar instead of Outlook, etc) get bad support from Google. Even Google Cloud customers spending millions a year get bad support from Google.
The terrible support might have started for the reasons you mention, but it turn into whole organization dysfunction.
It might be a relative perspective they had. I've heard that AWS and Azure provide much better support. I can't say firsthand, but I've heard that fairly consistently.
Can confirm. I work for a company that spends >$10MM on google cloud compute every year, and it's a common internal joke that "talk to google support" means "get fucked." Their support is outrageously bad.
> They won't though, because end-users are not the customers of Google, advertisers are. You can betcha advertisers get excellent customer service.
Have you ever advertised on Google? I'm guessing not.
Go search on Reddit and other places for stories from people who got their Google Ads accounts banned, including advertisers spending millions of dollars a year, and see how much help from customer service they've gotten.
Excellent might not be the word that comes to mind after you've been through that exercise.
Yeah, WTH. The Reddit thread is about a transaction involving money. Google can't do better support than ineffective, then incorrect, directions?
Furthermore, if Google is going to shove search, email, maps, Chrome, ChromeOS, Play Store, Android, etc, etc, etc, down our throats maybe they should be made to actually do a little customer service.
In general, I don't think you can expect free support for a free product. I do think businesses should let you buy support for any tier of product, both as part of a subscription and on a one-time basis.
Savings from scale usually comes from automation, and people are generally looking to talk to humans, not bots. This is the exact reason Google avoids human support in the first place - there are no massive cost savings, because it does not scale well.
There’s a lot to automate when doing phone support. The vast difference between the sub 20 cents per minute you need to pay people to answer phones and the 98 cents per minute each call costs are largely things that could be automated.
And that’s ignoring trying to minimize call length or even the need for any calls in the first place.
There are definite cost reductions that can be made, but they pale in comparison to keeping humans out of the loop.
For sake of argument, let's pretend you can shave half off the costs. So, now we're talking $8B annually for one support call / user / year. Does this undermine my argument about under-estimation of $1B costs?
That’s just the most obvious approach, adjusting the product and internal processes to avoid having people call is even more effective. Upselling people is another way to drop net costs even further, etc.
I suspect they could get net costs below 800m/year.
> Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed.
That would be the fair consequence of wanting to dominate the whole internet, no?
If any company providing a product would refuse to have a human that is reachable, they would never get to a dominating position.
And IMHO, google should be forced to provide that human service given its dimension, or scale down until it does.
I said that because of my life experience. I run some small businesses in some quasi-technical fields.
We've gotten phone calls asking for help with fixing peoples' Yahoo mail accounts, asking for returns to stores that were completely different than ours, trying to get refunds on products we don't even sell, and many other nonsensical and time-wasting calls from confused people.
If we, at our extremely small scale, were often annoyed by dealing with irrelevant phone calls, I have no doubt that Google would be drowned out by every person who had an issue installing Windows, trying to setup their printer, asking for help getting their money back from a shoe store, running out of gas on the highway, their apartment not turning on the heat high enough, and a host of unrelated things that most of us would never dream of calling Google about.
I'm not asking for perfection from Google: I'm just asking for Google to help desperate people that are completely screwed and giving them some option, even if it requires some payment, to fix major life-changing issues.
Having a costumer only hotline which only connects you after entering your customer ID and or Support-PIN would be a start. I know of multiple company's which have that.
Google One is only a few bucks a month and gives human support. It certainly helped me in getting someone from Google confirm to me with written info that an issue I was having was caused by the phone manufacturer and not Google.
> o me, the issue with Google's products and services is that they're not willing to provide any human customer service to resolve the real issues.
I don't get this, I engage human Google support for paid Google products at least a few times a month. It's not great, but definitely on par with other tech giants. Are you expecting human support for ... free services?
"Free services" aren't provided by Google out of the goodness of their heart. This isn't altruism. We're not choosy beggars to want support for being the very products that make Google the most money.
I don’t know what consumer support looks like, but Google Cloud support (with a premium support contract) is significantly worse then their competitors.
He paid them money for a phone they themselves lost and then charged him for. He should reasonably expect support for that transaction and any situations that stem directly from that transaction. Furthermore when you do something that deleteriously effects people like take away access to more than a decade of email/files/photos/contacts not to mention apps and other purchases for which google was indeed paid you should expect that action to reasonably generate a support request and actually provide it in case as in this situation it is unreasonable and unjust.
But its free isn't an automatic get out of jail free card for the expectation for a company to behave like reasonable human beings.
I think you might be conflating "free users" of their search engine product and a customer who paid a thousand USD to purchase their mobile hardware. I can see the reasoning for refusing to provide human-based CS for their search engine users, but to give their Pixel users the typical run around and then capping it with disabling their account? I would expect this kind of behavior from the various shell companies selling gadgets on Amazon. Google is really eating their way through the goodwill they took decades to build up.
Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet.
How about only paying customers outside of consumer subscription services (and maybe even those)? I don't know why it's reasonable to expect them not to be able to provide that service at volume when I can and have reached amazon support for small sales and even before sale events and I'm sure they move more stuff around than google does pixel phones.
> Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet
IMO they should be legally required to provide an appeals process with a real human and reasonable turnaround time (e.g. 1 business day would probably be fine with me) for all forms of account banning or website banning. For payment disputes they should also be legally required to provide human assistance within a few business days. If you can't do that then you shouldn't be allowed to take payments.
I had a location-based file sharing website banned across the internet because Chrome falsely labelled it as a suspicious website or some BS. That new Chrome version marked the end of that project. No way to reach a human. I can't imagine how many businesses and startups have been ended because of Google's rash policies and no appeal process.
There's a massive cultural blind spot at Google IMHO. And it's not as black and white as "if you're not the customer you're the product".
I used to be a paying Google Workspace customer and I cancelled my account through the usual process. After my account was closed _and deleted_ they sent some unknown invoice amount to collections, sent threatening emails.
Was there a reply-to? Was there a phone number? No, "log in with your account and raise a support issue". The account that you deleted. And another threatening email with no help about how to answer. I emailed the Collections address and I got auto-generated responses.
And I spent days combing help pages. Finally sorted it out by opening a new trial account (and then the help agent was very helpful). But even then it was awkward.
I will never send a cent their way.
Oh, and I know a google employee who was kind enought to look into it. He followed the internal channels to try and help and ... it was broken. Best he could do was file a bug report.
You can notify the CFPB and the FTC, these are US federal consumer protection agencies, they can strongarm companies into your form of compliance.
The EU has some institutions showing muscle too.
Big states like California can also do similar.
But don't forget Delaware, their agencies may not get a lot of attention but they have leverage due to the commonality of companies incorporating there.
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[ 19.7 ms ] story [ 339 ms ] threadBut only if they have reasonable system for telling the difference.
Nobody in any of these situations thinks they are being unreasonable.
Okay? I didn't say they get to choose. Was the implication of "shouldn't be able" not clear enough? You'd have externally imposed rules.
And in this case google hasn't expressed that they think the process was reasonable, they're just refusing to do anything.
Steam froze my account to punish a PayPal dispute, the amount they would not refund was ~£2. Their refusal was contrary to UK law.
Small story about Steam. They sold me a broken game, in UK one can return broken things according to the Consumer Rights Act, specifically including digital goods. Steam said, at length, they would not refund me: the game would crash (losing some settings) after ~30 minutes, I spent more than 2h of playtime trying to fix it [it's a 50h+ game, I'd have accepted an 8p reduction in my refund!].
I complained to PayPal. PayPal decided in my favour -- ie in keeping with UK law. Steam didn't dispute PayPal's findings but instead froze my Steam account (and I assume paid PayPal the money back). PayPal made me whole, financially.
My Steam account was blocked for a month or so. Ongoing they "punish" me by making it hard for me to give them money -- which is good for me, but my kids are not keen!
WhyTF would I complain over a few £. It's the principle, clearly.
It was very interesting to me to see how a big company can ignore the law in this way. But also spend what must amount to quite a bit of customer service time just to avoid a minimal refund.
All I wanted was a refund for a game Steam sold, that was broken and wouldn't be fixed. I did cursory searching for bugs before buying, but hadn't found this particular one before my purchase.
You know what I did with the refund money, bought the next game in the same series, because it was only the bug that I didn't like, and I paid more money for it than the game they wouldn't refund ... mad, eh!
[0] https://rclone.org, https://rclone.org/drive/, https://rclone.org/googlephotos/
But yeah, Google takeout can be done once a month if you have time to spare for that task.
It seems to me like deleting the files over your storage limit is the easy path for both you and google and I don't see how this is an example of holding you hostage. At most bad communication and a lack of warning.
If there was a problem with insufficient warning, that's a problem, but not a hostage problem.
To be sure I backup my phone's photos using rsync (via termux) to my own backup locations.
I have a rather large library from Takeout and it's been a burden.
It seems I'm going to need to write something to interpret their metadata to make it remotely useful again; they provide a flat archive with images and JSON files.
If I have to do this, I'd rather pick my tools on familiarity - compared to Takeout, I have slightly more with rclone
Truth be told I'm a data hoarder, I'll probably do both and reconcile
It seems I'm not the only one experiencing those encoding issues with Google Takeout https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/71153/takeout-br...
I want very much for the rclone/Gmail integration to work well but it’s very complicated and fussy.
You are better off doing a takeout and downloading in your browser.
> The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos. You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original photos as a last resort
[1] https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations
1. If a chargeback is issued, that means the company messed up massively and they should investigate, not ban the user
2. Some people fraudulently issue chargebacks and we assume our support would solve all legitimate issues, therefore it's a ban.
Probably the answer is to use risk signals about users to inform an investigation.
yeah i'm going avoid buying anything directly from google
In general companies will disable the account and the amount might be sold to collection agency (so you will receive unpleasant news when apply for mortgage or something like that).
But majority of companies do email you and do have email address for support so I never run into issues like this.
Google can do what it wants, I just wanted to let people know so they think twice before doing a chargeback against Google.
It seems like a lot of folks are surprised by a chargeback causing a loss of access to the company services so wanted to share my experience that this is not abnormal. Big companies tend to do this.
IIRC google requires a non-voip phone, so you’ll need a burner phone too if you want to go that route.
They also themselves will prevent you from using those cards to break ToS if they can detect it (i.e. multiple sign-ups for known service).
I can generate single-use cards with an arbitrary limit, limit cards that can be used any number of times, and cards with a monthly renewing limit.
This works for literally any bank in Portugal via an app called MBWay.
It should be illegal if you're a global monopoly where it's nearly impossible to function in modern society without an account to.
The problem I see time and time again, is that Google acts like it is completely unaware it's a monopoly.
In my university, professors and old T.A. have a mix of gmail, hotmail and yahoo, let's say 1/3, 1/3 and 1/3. But students have almost 100% emails from gmail.
I't not a monopoly, but it's getting very close.
Monopolists of the past are jealous of how many monopolies google is getting away with.
Google abuses these positions to decide what web technologies the web uses, which businesses get found on the web and which don’t, and how android device manufacturers build their phones.
(Having said that, I more-or-less never log into my google account, and also don't intentionally use any of their services.)
Curious what you meant by that? Which TLDs are that and why would my local network collapse?
Man it sure is a great gig being google!
The plumber has a wife answering the phone who can be reasoned with and who can reason with you and you can arrive at some compromise or understanding or other deal before getting to a chargeback. And that's just for a noncritical service. What compromise or understanding does google offer? For their service which they have actively made as critical as possible?
This sob story about how bad chargebacks are falls flat.
The issue is Google told them to issue a chargeback to get his money back. That was Google's representative saying this.
Of course, Google is actively motivated to make forcing them to face consequences for mishandling product disputes punishable by complete ostracization from their "ecosystem".
On the one hand, this feels like a Surprised Pikachu moment: Of course a chargeback, the final legal method through which you have issues redressed, is a valid reason to deny you further access to a private company's platform.
On the other hand, I've been decoupling my life from Google's services for a reason, and I'm not the only one. Google has ceased providing products for my needs superior enough to the competition to merit putting up with the ever-looming threat of their hegemonic bullshit.
Forced corporate ‘fun’ never works.
Normally I would agree, but a representative from google told OP to do a chargeback!
In matters of "ToS;DR" it's generally the case that terms aligned with common expectations are enforceable but terms that don't aren't. That leaves me wondering if "chargebacks get you canceled" is a common expectation or not. The answer to this strongly influences whether my bridge analogy is accurate.
However, if I were to get into a disagreement with Google, and a CSR told me to "do a chargeback", I would assume that CSR was engaging with me in poor faith, because these megashitcorps have a penchant for completely banning people out of hand for chargebacks to the point where it's basically autonomic. It seems like something I'd tell an annoying customer to do if they were annoying me and I was having a particularly bad day, because doing tech support is a miserable and soul-destroying job.
Again, this isn't a justification/rationalization, because this isn't an okay state of affairs in my mind, but I generally expect that a chargeback means I am ending my relationship with a business. Perhaps the OP from reddit should adopt the same mentality defensively.
I would completely disagree. It depends on whether the chargeback was justified. If a company illegally charges a user and the user merely declines to pay it, the subsequent blackballing (and damages associated with it) are damages of and resulting from the original crime / tort. It begins to smell like extortion.
Would you really, though? What does "complete" disagreement take the form of here, the denial of banning for chargebacks entirely? For every random hypothetical one can provide of a company engaging in poor faith, I can invent a hypothetical of someone charging back against a company despite receiving their product in good faith. I did not say "Is always a valid reason", and it perplexes me when I receive responses that seem to deliberately interpret statements as absolutes when they aren't phrased as such. :(
I see dozens of people do this weekly against big companies (my company, link in bio) and it does tend to work well because the legal department is generally more motivated to resolve things than customer support. Airlines and car companies are the most common disputes from our data.
That said, you can't force Google or anyone to do business with you. This kind of thing should be regulated for big gate keepers.
Though, thinking about it, I am not sure that's accurate either, because it's a bit difficult do a chargeback by yourself if the card issuer doesn't want to cooperate. Whoops.
Not if your motivation is avoiding the fraud the user just told you about. You'd investigate more.
Definitely not "of course".
This was of course an automatic process and there were (completely predictably) false positives. This would kill your entire Google account, Gmail included.
I was one of many voices who argued that was completely stupid. The worst thing that should happen is a policy violation on a given service should terminate or suspend that service only. It should NEVER kill Gmail. Why? Because the end result is people will ultimately only use their Google account for Gmail.
That's what I have done since and what I recommend everyone else do. Never tie your Google account to any other Google product. You may well regret it.
It's wild to me that this is still the case. The issue isn't large enough for any executive to care. That means the decision will come down to a few stubborn individuals (probably a VP of PM) who are maintaining this position.
There's nothing you can buy from the Google Store that you can't get from Best Buy or Amazon and those will be infinitely more accountable.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMqZ2PPOLik
Sure, there will be some rough edges (what when I am banned from GDrive but not Gmail, but then I click the 'save to drive' button in gmail?). Who will test that codepath?
How about when i DDoS the antivirus service API? - does that mean my email will no longer be scanned?
But a few rough edges for a few users seems better than a few users very unhappy and enough to become negative PR sources for life.
Don’t use gmail as your primary email provider.
Voice and sms only SIM card is only $6/mo from tello…
Google pretty much forces you to do so.
The only way to win this game is to not play it.
I have not tried in a few years, but I was nearing the 10 year mark previously, and they still would not allow me to use adwords. I am not sure if it is a lifetime ban or what.
I’ve migrated everything I possibly can off their services as a result. Google Maps and YouTube I find hard or impossible to really replace but I don’t have any critical data there.
I remember how exciting it was when Google IPOed (2005?). I was rooting for them. Every passing year my opinion of them diminishes further.
1. Search around for back channel support. Google things like “executive customer support”. Often times these emails get published by bloggers, forums, etc.
You can also look up support VP /Director’s names and then guess their email (e.g. first.last@example.com) and tell them your story.
2. Send a signature-required letter detailing out the issue, steps taken, and your requested resolution
These two steps get you significantly closer to having a person who can actually solve your problem actually look into the issue.
In the U.K. we have the Money claim online service, to start proceedings against a company or person who owe money. There is a nominal fee starting at £30 and if companies don’t respond the court will de facto rule in your favour.
This is completely normal for companies to do this and there is a 99% chance that doing a chargeback will get your account immediately terminated.
You cannot have it both ways with chargebacks and keeping your account as I have said before [0] as it is rife with abuse and friendly fraud and the merchant reserves the right to suspend, terminate and ban your account if you do so as per their ToS.
So this is of course hardly a surprise here.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32173942
Dealing with support was near impossible, no one had power to override the order, until finally I said I'd chargeback, then they were suddenly able to cancel it...
Obviously I'd never actually charge back though, as shown here, I assumed I'd get the boot
Or for that matter to never use Google Pay, even if the c/c charge isn't run by them. You could go from "credit card buyer protection" to Google Doomsday with a single disputed charge.
I wonder how they handle "bank reversals", where a report of a stolen card (but not specifically a customer-generated chargeback) results in a reversal of the charge by the bank and issuance of a new c/c?
The difference being that a customer-generated chargeback for "goods or services not delivered" is handled differently by the bank than a "my card was stolen, reverse these charges" issue.
I have a c/c I use for Google. Said card # is stolen, and used to buy Google services (under a different ID). I call the bank, they cancel the card and refund the amounts charged to Google for the unknown services.
What is the chance of Google cancelling my other account, since it was on the same card?
> since it was on the same card?
Quite high. Majority of companies have this automated.
And if you decide to do chargeback assume that that is a "nuclear option": that you will never be able to use that company again.
(Disclaimer: I’m a employee of one of Googles peer companies, but still only speaking for myself)
In the original post, the author had multiple conversations with support, and the support agent told them to do a chargeback. And another support agent later acknowledged that the support agent was not supposed to say that, but that the ban remains in place regardless.
Now, of course, I understand that even Google can't reasonably be expected to provide free 24/7 customer support for the entire Internet. If they had a normal phone number available where anybody could reach a human at any time, every confused person would call them with issues that are completely unrelated to Google's actual products and even Google would be overwhelmed.
The solution is to figure out some payment level for support that dissuades casual abuse of customer service, but is still reasonable for people to use in an emergency to save their business or communication accounts.
I'm convinced that at least some people have lost jobs and companies, had their lives ruined, or even committed suicide over being completely unable to salvage everything they've worked for all of their lives. This should be horrifying to every Google employee.
Microsoft did this back in the 1990's. It provided a strong financial incentive to reduce the number of support calls generated per Windows installation, which is what they ended up doing.
And that definition was quite liberal: not just obvious software bugs, but also confusing documentation, etc.
In other words, as long as you RTFM before you called, it was free.
No it is entirely reasonable. Even with a decline this quarter, Alphabet is sitting on ~$116 Billion cash on hand. Spending $1B on customer service would be trivial.
They won't though, because end-users are not the customers of Google, advertisers are. You can betcha advertisers get excellent customer service.
You would think so, but no. Even advertisers get bad support from Google. Even companies using Google as replacement for Microsoft stack (Gmail and Calendar instead of Outlook, etc) get bad support from Google. Even Google Cloud customers spending millions a year get bad support from Google.
The terrible support might have started for the reasons you mention, but it turn into whole organization dysfunction.
Have you ever advertised on Google? I'm guessing not.
Go search on Reddit and other places for stories from people who got their Google Ads accounts banned, including advertisers spending millions of dollars a year, and see how much help from customer service they've gotten.
Excellent might not be the word that comes to mind after you've been through that exercise.
Furthermore, if Google is going to shove search, email, maps, Chrome, ChromeOS, Play Store, Android, etc, etc, etc, down our throats maybe they should be made to actually do a little customer service.
In general, I don't think you can expect free support for a free product. I do think businesses should let you buy support for any tier of product, both as part of a subscription and on a one-time basis.
And that’s ignoring trying to minimize call length or even the need for any calls in the first place.
For sake of argument, let's pretend you can shave half off the costs. So, now we're talking $8B annually for one support call / user / year. Does this undermine my argument about under-estimation of $1B costs?
I suspect they could get net costs below 800m/year.
Their ad platform is so confusing, I had to take a Udemy course just to make head or tails of it.
This is besides the fact that their ads are nowhere near as effective as on other platforms.
That would be the fair consequence of wanting to dominate the whole internet, no?
If any company providing a product would refuse to have a human that is reachable, they would never get to a dominating position.
And IMHO, google should be forced to provide that human service given its dimension, or scale down until it does.
We've gotten phone calls asking for help with fixing peoples' Yahoo mail accounts, asking for returns to stores that were completely different than ours, trying to get refunds on products we don't even sell, and many other nonsensical and time-wasting calls from confused people.
If we, at our extremely small scale, were often annoyed by dealing with irrelevant phone calls, I have no doubt that Google would be drowned out by every person who had an issue installing Windows, trying to setup their printer, asking for help getting their money back from a shoe store, running out of gas on the highway, their apartment not turning on the heat high enough, and a host of unrelated things that most of us would never dream of calling Google about.
I'm not asking for perfection from Google: I'm just asking for Google to help desperate people that are completely screwed and giving them some option, even if it requires some payment, to fix major life-changing issues.
People are how they are and will always find the path of least resistance to get their problems solved.
That doesn't exclude them or anyone from providing support to the services they offer, and that people pay for (one way or the other)
I don't get this, I engage human Google support for paid Google products at least a few times a month. It's not great, but definitely on par with other tech giants. Are you expecting human support for ... free services?
But its free isn't an automatic get out of jail free card for the expectation for a company to behave like reasonable human beings.
How about only paying customers outside of consumer subscription services (and maybe even those)? I don't know why it's reasonable to expect them not to be able to provide that service at volume when I can and have reached amazon support for small sales and even before sale events and I'm sure they move more stuff around than google does pixel phones.
IMO they should be legally required to provide an appeals process with a real human and reasonable turnaround time (e.g. 1 business day would probably be fine with me) for all forms of account banning or website banning. For payment disputes they should also be legally required to provide human assistance within a few business days. If you can't do that then you shouldn't be allowed to take payments.
I had a location-based file sharing website banned across the internet because Chrome falsely labelled it as a suspicious website or some BS. That new Chrome version marked the end of that project. No way to reach a human. I can't imagine how many businesses and startups have been ended because of Google's rash policies and no appeal process.
I used to be a paying Google Workspace customer and I cancelled my account through the usual process. After my account was closed _and deleted_ they sent some unknown invoice amount to collections, sent threatening emails.
Was there a reply-to? Was there a phone number? No, "log in with your account and raise a support issue". The account that you deleted. And another threatening email with no help about how to answer. I emailed the Collections address and I got auto-generated responses.
And I spent days combing help pages. Finally sorted it out by opening a new trial account (and then the help agent was very helpful). But even then it was awkward.
I will never send a cent their way.
Oh, and I know a google employee who was kind enought to look into it. He followed the internal channels to try and help and ... it was broken. Best he could do was file a bug report.
They do: https://one.google.com/about/support
See... for me that is actually an argument that they are way too big, because they are not able to properly service their existing customer base.
The EU has some institutions showing muscle too.
Big states like California can also do similar.
But don't forget Delaware, their agencies may not get a lot of attention but they have leverage due to the commonality of companies incorporating there.
Same for Cayman Islands.