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G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#81

Post by TheChaplain »

cortesoft wrote: post #61
fivre wrote: post #49

we're getting to the point where the only reasonable answer is to regulate this, as the tech giants have well demonstrated that their only concern is to do the bare minimum trust & safety work that's beneficial to their business. users are an afterthought at best. if you provide identity services to more than 100k people or w/e, you need to have a defined dispute process, served by humans with the power to do shit, w…

Would you be ok if this law allowed a company to charge for the support request? Like, $50 to have a human review your dispute?

Not sure that would solve it.

Instead forcing companies to provide a free human based support channel for billing- and authentication issues related to paid services is a better option.

I believe it would take most companies very short time to invent working solutions to problems.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#82

Post by julianz »

eisa01 wrote: post #58

On a similar topic: One of my friends got locked out of their Instagram account He tried to fill in the form on his Android phone to get the decision reviewed, but when he hit submit it just showed an error. He persevered, and after approximately half a year the form worked and he got access to his account again this summer! It's a travesty that normal people have no way to get a fair treatment by the FAANGs when it…

A friend had someone sign up for Instagram using her Gmail address by mistake. There's no way to unsubscribe and no way to contact Insta without logging in (and it was in another language). In the end she changed the password and took over the account; it was the only reasonable option.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#84

Post by tyingq »

rckoepke wrote: post #31

>What does Google expect customers to do here? https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access To the OP ( 'HelloThur ), this is the answer to your most immediate question. I found it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17120223 > Greetings. This is Alex Diacre here from G Suite Support. This has been flagged for my team and we’re looking into it. If any G Suite customer has trouble accessing their accoun…

There's a similar url, but with different form fields, here: https://support.google.com/a/contact/recovery_form

And various forms of "googling" for where to go aren't super helpful.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#85

Post by perl4ever »

tbodt wrote: post #74
molticrystal wrote: post #67

A one time use recovery passwords you can generate(or are compelled to) in case you lose access or are locked out seems like a better option, I believe mega.nz & live.com do that, if it is available with google, it wasn't obvious to me. I love Google's rational of locking people out. I have pop3/imap access to an old secondary gmail account, but whenever I try to log in by the browser, it locks me out and asks me to…

But if you add a phone number, that makes it harder for someone to take over your account.

The more information you add, the harder it is for you to recover your account.

If you add your phone number, fine, as long as you still have access to it. But say you add a backup email. Now if you lose access to either your phone number or your backup email, you can never recover your account.

When I realized how this worked, I thought it was nuts. But it is.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#86

Post by markstos »

gerbler wrote: post #73
disappearance wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a url worth copying into a password manager...

Just to be clear, OP is factually incorrect. You can contact support using the above link if you are locked out. Source: worked on the G Suite Support team for several years.

Practically, he's correct.

Google offered no such remedy in the reply detailing his options.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#87

Post by bradly »

thoraway1010 wrote: post #76
bleepblorp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing companies to charge their customers $50 to resolve account access issues would only give companies an incentive to make 'mistakes' so they can earn $50 by spending a few minutes 'fixing' the error. Customers shouldn't be billed to fix mistakes that aren't their fault. In a functioning market, money is supposed to flow away from faults, not towards them.

You miss the point entirely. Currently because the volume of bogus support requests is so enourmously high, and the fraud attempts also very high - the cost to properly do something like handle account lockout requests properly (on the scale of billions of users) would be EXTREMELY high. Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a…

> Currently, with youtube / gmail etc, the revenue per user is so low it will NEVER make economic sense to have humans dealing with an account.

Google made over $6 billion in profit in one quarter this year. YouTube had revenue over $5 billion in one quarter. They announced a $25 billion stock buyback.

Google doesn't offer support because they choose not to.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#88

Post by mynameisvlad »

gerbler wrote: post #73
disappearance wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a url worth copying into a password manager...

Just to be clear, OP is factually incorrect. You can contact support using the above link if you are locked out. Source: worked on the G Suite Support team for several years.

This is pedantic in the worst possible way. If you make it impossible to find that link, then it's as if it wasn't there.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#89

Post by shock »

judge2020 wrote: post #62
shock wrote: post #50

Someone created a G Suite trial for a domain I own. There was no option for me to contact Google to tell them I did not create the trial account and do not want it, since all contact options required me to be logged into the trial account I did not create :)

To create a trial domain at example.com, you first get a domain at example.com.test-google-a.com and then you have to go through domain verification[0] for the real domain. Either they still have your domain as "pending" in G Suite, or they have access to your DNS/web server. 0: https://support.google.com/a/answer/60216?hl=en

They don't have access to my DNS/web server. That didn't stop Google from sending me 11 spam emails about G Suite.

I think the first step Google should take before DNS/web server verification is to verify the email address used for the setup.

Re: G Suite Doesn't Let You Contact Support Until Logged In. Locked Out = Stuck

#90

Post by jlokier »

jandrese wrote: post #45
HelloThur wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, didn't expect this post to blow up like this. For reference, I have no 2FA, nor did I lose my corporate device. I've always accessed it through a web browser, never through a mobile, therefore when it asks me to verify with my corporate mobile device, I do not know what device it is referring to.

Which device did you use when Google first asked you to verify your phone number? Your personal cell phone maybe?

Assuming it was their phone number.

What options do they have now, if they abruptly stopped using that phone number for some reason 10 years ago and had no realistic way to know which 275 utilities were hitched to the number (or even if they did, couldn't contact support for reasons described in the article), for example:

- because they couldn't afford to pay the bills for a while

- or moved country

- or changed contract and then found they couldn't port the number (happened to me) and lost the old number

- or someone took their phone and they were unable in practice to recover the number or continue using it

- or they were ill in hospital for long enough their phone contract expired and they could not have dealt with transfer issues at the time

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