191–200 of 514 posts
I'm curious if "has locked my account" means just Google Drive, or if he also lost Gmail, Android functionality, Chrome profiles, Adwords, YouTube, YouTubeTV, purchased movies and tv shows, Fitbit, Nest, sites where he used federated login (DoorDash, Uber, etc). I see, for example, his YouTube channel is up, but it's associated with 'team@armouredarchives.com', and not the personal gmail account he posted in the link…
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You cannot feasibly provide any level of acceptable human support and remain “free” with a huge user base. Meanwhile, being “free” is crucial if your actual paying customer is the advertisers. If you stop being free, you (gasp) normalize paid service. Suddenly you are conflicted and fighting two fronts, you compete with other paid services, your users can actually demand things and vote with their money, etc.
Remember, over $1 BILLION dollars a quarter of free cash flow into their cash hoard EVERY QUARTER. An absolutely stellar customer support network with real people was being operated by Network Appliance when I was there for less than $60 million A YEAR. Google is absolutely capable of providing a level of service that is unmatched, but they choose not to.
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Have you seen the TV ads for cloud storage services? They’re advertising themselves as being dependable. We cannot blame average consumers when events like these happen. We need to stop pretending that software, including free-as-in-beer SaaS, doesn’t have an implied warranty. It does. The implied warranty in Google Drive is that “we’ll host your files for you”. Google screwed-up (an “honest” mistake, it pains me to…
Google is well aware this is a problem and actively obfuscates ways to get connected to support (unless you pay them extra, of course) so I have a real hard time accepting this as an "honest" mistake.
Additionally, making them accountable for these mistakes is a way to actually have them resolve them, so honest or not, it's likely to stop of decrease in occurrence then.
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Well, when you're making an omelette you have to break some eggs. There has been a literal, yet largely silent, book burning going on with Google services in recent years. On youtube, many alternative voices are silenced, billions of comments deleted. I know its a private company, but in the US there are free speech laws + the possibility of using the court system (if someone makes a libellous statement). But no, sil…
I remember during the BLM riots, I had shared probably 50 videos of individual destructive and/or violent acts by the rioters in a Slack channel I'm a part of. Probably 6 months later, I went back to look at some. I found a total of 3 that _hadn't_ been deleted.
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Google is well aware this is a problem and actively obfuscates ways to get connected to support (unless you pay them extra, of course) so I have a real hard time accepting this as an "honest" mistake.
I mean the account lock-out was probably an honest mistake. The lack of support, however, is not - and is part of Google’s business model.
Is he on a free plan? Because if so, I see exactly zero basis for his complaint. He got what he paid for. P.S. No, I'm not saying that Google is in the right.
> I see exactly zero basis for his complaint. > P.S. No, I'm not saying that Google is in the right. You are, however, clearly saying they are not in the wrong... I'm not sure that difference matters.
> I'm not sure that difference matters.
It does. Customers pay money. He is not a customer.
I will upvote and comment to hopefully gain visibility at the minimum. Google really has an unfortunate customer support set up, in that there isn't one. Your best bet when Google does something bad to their customers like this (And regardless if its a bad AI or bad bot, its still Google doing it), is to post it on twitter or hackernews and hope it gets the visibility for a Google employee to fix it, or contact someo…
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Skynet doesn’t need Terminators. Software bots can keep us busy all on their own.
You don't even need bots - simple sorting algorithms do more damage. It shows human vulnerability more than anything else. All it took was a single fake message to get 600 people killed in Burma.
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A better analogy would be if you made terroristic remarks to the sporting goods clerk, and walmart banned you not just from sporting goods but the entire store. Gmail and Google Drive are just different departments of the same place. But in this case it's just that walmart zoomed in on your notebook with a security camera, saw some arabic scribbles about allah on a tank drawing you were sharing with your friend, and…
All of those walmart departments are doing the same thing: they sell you different kinds of consumer goods in a single marketplace. If you get banned from the entirety of Amazon marketplace by harassing sellers in the gardening equipment department, that seems fair. If you get your AWS account banned for doing the same thing that has nothing to do with AWS, that's a different story. One thing is a consumer goods stor…
Can you really say with a straight face that once google thinks they have a terrorist, they should just go on supporting that person in any way whatsoever? There can be very serious penalties for knowingly aiding terroristic acts (even if it turns out it was say a "harmless" fed or informant instead of an actual terrorist).