Start the process of getting out right now. Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product. I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995. [1] http://www.iki.fi/
I pay Apple for my email address, although I’d prefer to run email off my own domain.
Why don't you just do it? It will cost you like one or two coffee a month, but the feeling of security (as in "they won't close my account for nothing") is worth a lot more.
Many other companies of similar size manage to provide customer service just fine. This is a solved problem - you just have to be willing to realise that magic AI sprinkles aren’t the answer. As for cost - this continual stream of screwups is costing them a ridiculous amount of goodwill and future business. It’s probably the best ad for AWS there is.
I suspect they don't have the combination of strict privacy so employees can't look into the account, massive spam potential, and billions of users...
Amazon, Microsoft and Apple have similar numbers of users and there are no issues getting in touch with them.
Google chooses this path, it’s not forced on them.
I just don’t understand Google leadership, how can you allow stuff like this to happen and just ignore it? Your brand keeps getting more and more tainted, people make jokes out of your strategy and tendency to give up like a little child... I didn’t think I would ever say it, but I miss Eric Schmidt... Sundar has been an absolute disaster. Has Google even accomplished anything during his reign? And if they did, did t…
What is this meme about Sundar being bad? Any details on this .... I keep seeing this on HN. "Google Support" was already a joke way back.
It is not a meme. You tell me what did Google achieve under Sundar in the last 6 years? The only "noteworthy" things he did is fostering a hostile environment by firing employees who spoke out against discrimination, and fighting against unionization.
Man, some of those replies on Twitter are unreasonably harsh to this guy. Being a game developer seems like a really thankless task. Why are so many game players so entitled and unfriendly?
I was pretty taken aback by that, they go way further than disappointing about not having the game on their platform of choice, to just outright yelling at the developer for somehow this being their fault?
Most of those people are children, or adult-children.
Anyone else just doesn't care.
I think this is just a case of very vocal minority.
Who reasonable is exited about Stadia anyways? I don't think it will last till next year without being slashed by google.
This happens again and again. I have had that happen to my twitter account. I see this regulary on HN. My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people. Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high. So I get why t…
Well, frankly speaking, as an individual or a small company, you do not matter much, especially in comparison to the cost to get the problem fixed. While an organization grows larger, it has to employ lots of processes which are obviously not perfect to make things work. When it grows even larger, it has to make changes to existing processes, abolish some processes become no longer appropriate and introduce new processes over existing processes to serve their business better. Unavoidably more and more automation are introduced and eventually AI. All those changes seem to be really minor and clear and works in most of cases. Yep, I meant most cases, not all cases. Then suddenly, something really should work per everything standard and process stopped working and no one really knows why. So here comes the question, if you are the decision maker, your system works for 99.999999% maybe even 99.999999999% of your customers but not for those 1 maybe 10 customers, are you going to spend $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ to get it fixed?
People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of: * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.) * Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-s…
> * GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed. This is simply wrong since the account is always "banned" and not "deleted". So the data is still there, not providing it is going against GDPR. Evidence for this is all the…
> But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
Having 10 highly paid long-tenured engineering employees who can look at small parts of a users account data is clearly better than having 10,000 call center workers be able to access user private data.
The end result is high profile incidents get handled in a way that it would be too risky to do for everyone.
Even with the small pool of engineers, there are incidents[1] where user data is used inappropriately. Would you make this pool larger?
Start the process of getting out right now. Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product. I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995. [1] http://www.iki.fi/
> Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer Google now sells domains, as well as email through GSuite. I use them a lot on new projects, because I find them so insanely convenient, but I can't help shake the feeling that now I'm both the product and a paying customer. So I'd probably nuance your words with: "select a provider whose livelihood depends on your custom".
Can you access the DNS records of the domain you bought if your Google Account is ever locked?
If you get your own domain, get one on a well-known TLD (e.g. .com, .org or your own country code). If you get a gTLD that's not well-known, there are some endpoints that will block you because your email is "not valid".
It's not a big deal. I've had a .so domain for a decade and have only had to use a different email a couple times. There is a different danger however — after about 8 years the annual fee went from about $15 to $60.
> It's not a big deal. I've had a .so domain for a decade and have only had to use a different email a couple times
That is exactly the point krageon is making. If you have a .so domain (or .earth like me), you need to have a backup at least, so you can still access things like a normal human. My @gmail.com address have been used for this, but seems I'm gonna have to get yet another domain with a normal tld so I can stop using the gmail one for when .earth is not correctly accepted.
Spend ~$5 of Google Adwords, and chances are you'll have someone calling you regularly trying to talk you into using it more - at least that's my experience. In the past it's been a pain to get them to stop bothering me. If I have an issue with Google, I might try starting an adwords campaign and ask to speak to supervisors when their sales calls comes through, and see if there's an in along the way of "we would spen…
Both are outrageously good ideas and I sincerely hope not too many people read your comment so it doesn't become blocked!
Thankfully these companies are big enough that the supply of SVPs and VPs is near endless. In fact, with DHL my biggest effort was wading through the list to find the people I thought most likely to reply. Of three messages I wrote, two replied and offered to help.