Upvote here if you are locked out of a Gmail account and would join a kickstarter campaign for the legal means to enter it again.
It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users
91–94 of 94 posts
Re: It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users
#921) There have been Googlers who have posted on HN about their customer service, and the ones that have posted seem to think their algorithms are good enough and don't really make the connection that every false positive is a real human or business that might lose a business or worse when they can't access their data. My interpretation of this is that either they're fine with being evil, or Google's average employees…
> charge some fee for human support
That is an obvious conflict-of-interest situation; its optics are indistinguishable from ransomware.
"Your unlucky account was randomly trashed by an account-wrecking bulldozer algorithm; please pay a ransom fee to the purveyors and operators of the algorithm to restore access to your data".
Re: It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users
#931) There have been Googlers who have posted on HN about their customer service, and the ones that have posted seem to think their algorithms are good enough and don't really make the connection that every false positive is a real human or business that might lose a business or worse when they can't access their data. My interpretation of this is that either they're fine with being evil, or Google's average employees…
> charge some fee for human support That is an obvious conflict-of-interest situation; its optics are indistinguishable from ransomware. "Your unlucky account was randomly trashed by an account-wrecking bulldozer algorithm; please pay a ransom fee to the purveyors and operators of the algorithm to restore access to your data".
That's a great counterpoint that's been brought up many times before in this type of discussion. My response to that is this.
1) A genuine effort here to avoid this moral hazard might be to have a policy to refund all/most of the fee paid if the user was found to have done nothing wrong, as well as some transparency in the overall process (publish some sort of stats of their customer service efforts) to keep some kind of public view on the situation.
2) Even if Google does essentially "extort" some people, I think the downside of maybe having to pay a fee needlessly is worth the upside of having some actual recourse possible in the event of a real emergency. Again, businesses die and people lose their jobs when Google messes up. Having a flawed recourse would be a better state of affairs than no recourse at all.
Re: It's not acceptable that Google does not offer support to users
#941) There have been Googlers who have posted on HN about their customer service, and the ones that have posted seem to think their algorithms are good enough and don't really make the connection that every false positive is a real human or business that might lose a business or worse when they can't access their data. My interpretation of this is that either they're fine with being evil, or Google's average employees…
> I have no doubt that Google would receive hundreds of thousands of mostly dumb, useless calls daily that they are not responsible for from every confused person out there. There's no feasible way to provide standard customer service to the entire Internet.
Perhaps it doesn't have to be 'standard' but... they seem to have no problem identifying user behaviour and tweaking the heck out of their sites (and arm twisting other sites) to increase conversions, decrease wait times, and otherwise 'optimize' users/visitors towards a certain goal (click these ads, etc). It shouldn't be beyond them to employ or develop some better algorithms to help with identifying real customer support issues and offering some degree of support (pair or otherwise). Hey - they could even sell that service via GCE and let other companies also use their customer service tool... and recoup their investment in it...