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Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

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Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#81

Post by ClarityJones »

thefurdrake wrote: post #13

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 ha…

> 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.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#83

Post by gus_massa »

coddle-hark wrote: post #52
cletus wrote: post #17

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…

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. Don’t use gmail as your primary 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?

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#84

Post by Dylan16807 »

kube-system wrote: post #67
AlexandrB wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're both problems. Smaller companies shouldn't be able to retaliate against a valid chargeback either.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#85

Post by ferminaut »

I placed an order for a Pixel Watch on Black Friday as a gift. Spent $380 or so on the watch+band. Site said it would be delivered on Nov 29-Dec 2nd (and status was updated to 'Pending Shipment'). Well, Dec 5th rolled around, still wasnt shipped. Since the status was 'pending shipment' you cannot cancel the order.

I contacted google asking them to cancel my order. Two weeks later, it's still not shipped, CS rep is basically useless ("we are investigating! Thanks for your patience! :)").

Did a chargeback yesterday. Now I am running Google Takeout. Trying to figure out what happens to the domains & google fi service when my account is banned.

I am now realizing I am banking too much of my life on a company that offers 0 customer service.

On the off chance someone from Google sees this, Case is 8-4940000033434.

Is apple any better?

Who can I transfer my google domains to?

Who can I transfer my google workspaces to?

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#86

Post by kjs3 »

williamscales wrote: post #10
MrYellowP wrote: post #5

I thought all companies are doing that by default?

I haven't heard that. I can see two perspectives: 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.

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.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#87

Post by 10729287 »

roywiggins wrote: post #49
moviuro wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which cannot be automated, AFAICT. I'm syncing pictures of 4 GooglePhoto accounts twice a week each on a machine at home. Fire and forget. But yeah, Google takeout can be done once a month if you have time to spare for that task.

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.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#88

Post by karteum »

mschulkind wrote: post #35
moviuro wrote: post #3

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 [0] https://rclone.org , https://rclone.org/drive/ , https://rclone.org/googlephotos/

Google takeout is a much much better option.

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 :).

It seems I'm not the only one experiencing those encoding issues with Google Takeout https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/71153/takeout-br...

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#89

Post by dom96 »

That's an interesting coincidence. I have been pondering whether to do a chargeback on a food order that Deliveroo failed to deliver. The support refused to refund until I told them I would do a chargeback. I was wondering what the consequences of doing the chargeback would be, but if even the threat of performing one changes their stance on a refund I guess it can't be that bad.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#90

Post by glogla »

glitchc wrote: post #72
logicalmonster wrote: post #56

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 i…

> 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 d…

> 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.

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