A major downside of any service once it becomes too large is that the overall complexity introduces lower reliability. From Google's perspective perhaps each rule and feature makes sense, but from a customer perspective, there might be too much risk of who-knows-what issues coming up. I don't think this is limited to Google. I miss the older, less complicated versions of most bigtech services; Facebook, Instagram, Google, Amazon, etc. Even looking at Vercel's project settings the other day I found myself thinking "hmm this is getting a bit unwieldy."
This pattern is a big part of why Google is a poor company to buy infrastructure from. They are horrible at customer support, and have made it clear over the years that they have no intention of changing that. That's simply unacceptable for production infrastructure.
To me it sounds like you're a weird business model for GCP and you keep being hit by tooling designed to block bad use cases that come across this uncommon use case.
You're going to look like an attacker to google for almost any model of review of access. You're in a niche role which would demand they build systems to take account of you. I can understand why a monolith has back pressure towards that cost and consequence.
This will probably become a major problem with the Gemini APIs in enough time.
A customer does something crappy, e.g.: generates an image they aren't supposed to, and boom you're business Gmail and/or the recovery personal Gmail gone forever.
There's a reason Google has a reputation of "Don't use it for anything that you can't afford to have disappear with no notice or recourse."
You also can't expect it to get any better, both because Alphabet has never shown any interest in improving things and because you and the services you've been using them for aren't the new AI hotness. Even if you're absurdly profitable for them (and you're clearly not) you're not in an area that their internal people are competing to serve.
I submitted my app to App Store Connect for Apple and Google Play Store. After a few reviews on Apple my app was approved after a week or so. On Google, I got a couple rejections. I addressed the concerns resubmitted. Got another rejection without much detail, but changed a couple things and submitted again. App suspended... without any explanation why.
GCP is a terrible idea for anything important unless you're big enough to have an executive team and yours knows theirs - was the quote I heard somewhere but am struggling to attribute.
I wonder if this is a situation where the right course of action is to sue Google and/or push for stronger regulation around suspension of customer accounts?
Honestly, many companies are suicidal to put "everything" in the hand of AWS or Google, thousand of accounts are banned everyday, a simple accidental VPN/Tor connection can lead to losing everything (at least temporarily) and their rules aren't transparent so we can't really anticipate it.
My AdSense account was suspended three times because I had an exclamation mark in my ad. I closed my account after that. I am certain Google still tracks my account as "potential fraud" to this day.
So, we all know Google is pure Evil - pure greed. But people said this in
the past too: don't become dependent on these giant mega-corporations, be
it Google, Amazon/AWS and so forth. The cake is a lie - this is another
example we can add to the "never trust Google" meme.
It might be a case where illegal / scam / anything of that type were using the SSLMate service to issue and deploy those certificates, whereas some aspects of this process (DNS / HTTP / Mail) verification or similar were processed directly on the GCP.
I could not get from the OP what really happened and what was the claim / explanation from Google side.
> Clearly, I cannot rely on having a Google account for production use cases. Google has built a complex, unreliable system
You cant use anything from Google. I only use gmail, my mail account only got banned one time for a week. For years I thought the punishment for using gmail was just a mater of time. I tried to imagine what weird things could trigger it. Maybe they will one day just end the service because it isn't profitable enough?
I decided the most likely would be that the mail account gets banned as a punishment for using any of their other services.
Then I made the "mistake" to switch from iphone to android. It almost immediately started complaining that my mailbox was full. The new reality is that each and every button I press on the phone could potentially end my mailbox.
Now that they [also] have very sophisticated LLM's the crappy customer service seems intentional.
The problem is that they manage customers through automation. If the system flags you, you’re out. By using their products, you accept the risk of being cut off.
We had ours unexpectedly blocked and we were just using it for a "Login with Google" button. The only explanation was the vague "You did something against our terms and conditions." We hadn't done anything. Our use case is nothing beyond the "Login with Google" button.
We opened a case to appeal asking for more details or a review. Meanwhile, we're scrambling to implement some kind of workaround for our users that log in with their Google account.
And then early the next day, we get the email that our appeal was granted. Just need to be sure we follow the terms and conditions in the future.
I guess it could have been worse but still a bit of a slap in the face.
Not related to this particular reason for suspension, but I had a friend who's GCP account got put on pause a few weeks into his project because his payment method was flagged for suspicious behavior. This friend had an incident of stolen identity in the past 24 months which caused a lot of issues and basically any CC linked to him seemed to be problematic for GCP. Swapped CC linked to the account to his business partner and fixed everything.
Lesson: if you use a CC with GCP or cloud services, firewall it from everything else you do to be safe.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 68.1 ms ] threadAfter the third occurrence of this i’d blame this on you, honestly.
That might just be me though.
Sucks.
A customer does something crappy, e.g.: generates an image they aren't supposed to, and boom you're business Gmail and/or the recovery personal Gmail gone forever.
fool me twice
fool me thrice
You also can't expect it to get any better, both because Alphabet has never shown any interest in improving things and because you and the services you've been using them for aren't the new AI hotness. Even if you're absurdly profitable for them (and you're clearly not) you're not in an area that their internal people are competing to serve.
I could not get from the OP what really happened and what was the claim / explanation from Google side.
You cant use anything from Google. I only use gmail, my mail account only got banned one time for a week. For years I thought the punishment for using gmail was just a mater of time. I tried to imagine what weird things could trigger it. Maybe they will one day just end the service because it isn't profitable enough?
I decided the most likely would be that the mail account gets banned as a punishment for using any of their other services.
Then I made the "mistake" to switch from iphone to android. It almost immediately started complaining that my mailbox was full. The new reality is that each and every button I press on the phone could potentially end my mailbox.
Now that they [also] have very sophisticated LLM's the crappy customer service seems intentional.
We opened a case to appeal asking for more details or a review. Meanwhile, we're scrambling to implement some kind of workaround for our users that log in with their Google account.
And then early the next day, we get the email that our appeal was granted. Just need to be sure we follow the terms and conditions in the future.
I guess it could have been worse but still a bit of a slap in the face.
Lesson: if you use a CC with GCP or cloud services, firewall it from everything else you do to be safe.