Really, any respectable company in this situation would simply flag the account for a billing problem, deny the card, and let the customer try again. At which point, any legitimate customer will go, "Oh, guess they don't take Apple Card" and use something else. It's the same effect (account can't be used, "fraud" with the Apple Card if it exists is dodged) but is not nearly so user hostile as this... mess.
Google's opacity here seems like it could only really have one benefit to the company: They can shut down any account they don't like, and since they're always vague with the reasoning, they don't necessarily have to have a valid reason. Their whole "you know what you did" approach is just uncertain enough to cause the victim to doubt themselves and be unlikely to mount a defense. I don't know what their actual motivations are (I know it's popular to hate on Google, but I have a hard time believing they're pulling stunts like this on purpose) but it looks bad no matter how you slice it.
I ran into a very similar situation with my gas company. I'd fat-fingered my bank account number in their online form, so they weren't able to debit my account. Instead of notifying me of this problem, they simply locked my account and threatened to cut me off for non-payment. Even after I'd called the company and appealed, they still prevented me from paying with my bank account for 12 months and forced me to pay with a credit card (which incurred an additional $3.75 "convenience fee").
For large companies, I would almost go so far as to propose that one should "never attribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by malice."
I have no opinion about this particular instance. I just find that HN tends to bring up Hanlon's Razor a lot in defense of corporations.
No they don't. It would be fine for everyone if instead one of being one of the richest companies in existence they would only make the top 10.
The real issue is that too many people are depending on advertising to support their business plan instead of the tried and true - making a product that people are willing to give you money for.
Sadly, that power clustered towards Google with no oversight whatsoever.
Google will continue to be opaque unless they have oversight/regulations. Something I imagine they spend quite a bit* to prevent in any way possible.
I have a problem with a business plan that bases your entire revenue stream on Google ads.
> but on the other hand them sending anyone to court will also cost them extraordinary amount of money
Alphabet has $117 billion cash on hand, they can handle the cost. In fact, they can handle the cost of a scorched earth defense more easily than the cost of getting a reputation for rolling over everytime someone waves the threat of a small claims action.
> so I imagine before they accept any such legal challenge they would ask the CS department to actually have a look at the case first.
More likely, once they get that kind of letter, the legal department will probe the CS records of related to the issue to determine the legal position. They might then suggest just giving you want you want, or they might then send you a nice letter from their attorney about how they are prepared to make a claim for (e.g.) civil fraud for the deceptive action that they were previously willing to leave with an account termination, and that if they do so it will far exceed the small claims limit and they will use that counterclaim to move to transfer your case out of small claims.
Here's the issue. From my perspective, Google used to be a respectable company, but through automation of customer handling and service they've elected to accept negative consequences and impact for customers - which isn't a very respectable position to take in my book.
what?
For non-negligible damages, heading immediately to small claims court (given you live in a sensible jurisdiction) seems to be the easiest thing in that case. Even if Google's ultimately in the right, they typically can't just ignore that entirely.
From a decade ago:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_1...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...
Google presumably hasn't signed a long-term contract with you to provide any services or continue a business relationship.
Is "We don't want to do business with you any more because our algorithm isn't smart enough to differentiate what you're doing for fraud" actionable?
Well, that really depends on the case and jurisdiction, I can't answer that for you. Really, the key part is to force Google to actually provide reasoning for their actions, as they eventually did in the case I edited in links for.
I get the desire to impose costs on Google for their bad actions, but this doesn't seem like a very productive plan.
It's not as simple as "Google can cut you off no questions asked whenever they feel like it"
Are you sure about that? Often such terms are built into the user agreements.
I suppose there are a couple of issues that haven't been tested in court.
But besides that, anything you paid and wasn't rendered as services needs to be refunded. It doesn't look like they refund it most times, no?
Gmail for Android has 2 core functions: to send and to receive mail. It fails at one of them. (Emails get stuck in its outbox indefinitely - you can force it to send by going into the "outbox" and dragging down to refresh, which is an action that has no button to show it is possible. There is no notification that your mail wasn't sent.)
Here is a thread about it:
https://support.google.com/mail/thread/3130686?hl=en
How is it possible for an app that has 2 functions, to fail to do one of them?
This is like a salt and pepper set where the pepper side has no holes - the pepper is stuck inside. (You can unscrew the top and manually shake some out though.) Sure salt is more common. But it's literally a salt and pepper set that only functions as a salt shaker.
Gmail for android is literally a mail sending and receiving app that can't send mail.
How can this happen? I mean literally, how is the support thread I linked possible?
If I were the CEO and I saw a thread like that, the issue would be fixed within 7 minutes, as every person within earshot of me rushed to make themselves look good to me.
How is Google's CEO different?
You assumption is that the app has two functions functions: sending and receiving email.
It actually only has one function, put eyes in front of ads.
Besides, it does appear to be a corner case. It has ~200 upvotes. Gmail has 1.5 billion users.
That's 1 in 7,500,000.
If every single one of them quits using Gmail, and they tell all of their friends, and all of their friends quit using Gmail, Google will still be able to tell their paying customers that those ads reach 1.5 billion users.
http://www.google.com/search?q=mail+stuck+in+outbox+gmail
A single quora answer alone has 20k views. Do you think that's a normal number of views on a quora answer? How many views do you think that quora answer should have for you to think it's a problem? 200k? 2m? 20m? 200m? 2b?
(A single quora answer does not represent everyone who has a problem. Maybe 0.01% of people with a specific problem will end up reading a specific quora answer. So I think that 20k represents 200 million users, or more than 10% of Gmail's userbase. While we're just throwing around made up numbers. Maybe it's 100% of installed gmail for android apps with that problem. (Since not every gmail user uses android, uses the android app, and uses it to send mail.)
Anyway I think up to 100% of the android app users could be affected.
Still, you answered the question: perhaps the development team doesn't feel that 20,000 reports is a priority. Maybe the salt and pepper manufacturer doesn't care that every one of their pepper shakers doesn't let peppers out. 20,000 complaints just don't matter.
Important people use iPhone anyway.
There isn't a week that goes by without that exact same story repeating itself.
> I make my income primarily through AdSense and live in fear of that email one day.
Maybe you could prepare for this by writing an angry blogpost ahead of time, to get it out of your system?
"Oh, sorry your main method of making money was terminated, we won't tell you why or how we came to that conclusion - must have been the algorithm, sorry!"
What's that old saying - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? I'm starting to think that these massive companies aren't stupid and that they're actually designing their algorithms behind this and using it as a scapegoat to push their own agenda.
I use the live business support plan all of the time as an “easy button”. Some of the issues they have helped us out with in the past.
- a cross account CodePipeline using CodeBuild and CloudFormation (you cant do it through the UI)
- configuration issues with lambda, API Gateway, and binary transfers.
- Python/Boto3/DynamoDB and DAX coding issues
- various weird CloudFormation issues.
- Parameter Store/CloudFormation throttling issues (ie use DependsOn to force CF to create Parameter Store resources serially)
Amazon isn't a silicon valley company, perhaps that's why its support isn't as horrible.
Ah, but is it really obvious? One of the benefits of virtual card numbers, in particular the Apple Card implementation, is that it's easy to switch them out, which makes tracking harder.
Could it be that a company that makes its living off tracking users would not be overly fond of virtual card numbers? As long as users' reaction is "if you're planning on using the Apple Card for anything important, think again", it looks like the AI did exactly what it was meant to do.
Others within last 30 days:
Premium support in Google only exists to make sure your have paid them. They will ban your account after you have paid them. They usually want till your payment is cleared and then ban you.
My colleague's play account was banned because he used PayPal not Google wallet, when it was launched
But really, humans are happy to do it to each other.
It makes sense I guess as those sci-fi AIs are often to some extent or another trying to save us from, other humans, or at least that was their origin.
Fortunately I’d worked with FB before for major brands, so I knew the email to send to to get a real person. There is almost always a monitored email address for accounts receivable, and if you email them pretending like you are having trouble making a large payment, someone will respond. When they think it’s a fat check, suddenly “this decision is final” is just a mistake.
Perhaps you should change this? If you're aware your entire livelihood is a game of Russian roulette, you should maybe work on making it something else.
when you associate to any extent with a monopolyform, you must understand that at any point, the owner can absolutely annihilate you. that's the game, and those complaining post facto about how it's not fair should consider that those were always the rules, and complaining after getting bumped off is certainly understandable but that outcome should have always been a part of one's expected risks and possible outcomes.
I feel like if you get your traffic from a source and also sell on that platform at some point the company sees you are successful and cuts you out. We see it with google search result taking content and presenting it at the top. Or Amazon scanning for profitable niches on the platform and pushing their own product.
Me too.
My favorite so far is Google threatening to take away my primary source of income because my site has content related to pirated software.
Google is correct! My site is a dictionary, and it has the temerity to define the term “warez”.
We've been saying Google does this, Google does that. The thing is, a company is composed of its people.
I am just curious, how does something like this, something most people with reasonable sense of "fairness" would flag as concerning and potentially very wrong, comes to be implemented? Even more so for a large company like Google? (smaller companies can have a "bad dictator boss" which can push this through without issue)
Policies like these, which appear to have consistencies across their products, how far up does the chain of responsibility go? How does stuff like these occur?
Does it start with some MBA grad who comes in, gets assigned a KPI to "cut costs" and then their natural bias is that customer service is the first to go, proposes it to their managers and it bubbles up for approval and implementation? All the while everyone at each level is oblivious to the potentially damaging collateral the policy would cause, but only think that "oh this is a great move, we would save a bunch!" and then finally gets implemented?
Or would this more be a top-down thing where executives discuss and push this and then the employees, being good people at heart have no choice but to implement it?
I just find it so difficult to imagine something like this being OK-ed by all the people involved within the company. Like, is everyone "in on it"? Or do they not know? Or they know but can't/unwilling to say anything?
Before you disagree, ask yourself, would you know if they were(n't)?
Its also almost certainly completely fake as they're done nothing of the sort. I'd be shocked if it wasn't as automatic as an away message.
Since this is HN, which (at least used to) primarily cater to the startup crowd, I hope it goes without saying that Google does not fix this issue because they don't have a financial incentive to do so. This is basic capitalism at play, and what you as a developer/advertiser/user need to do is use and pay for competing products if you're not happy about the status quo.
On one hand, in the online ads biz, Google is king and is happy to outsource its customer support for its most premium customers both large network of agencies and advertisers. I know it quite well, I was one of those guys for Doubleclick many moons ago. That is if you are big enough to be worthy of being a Google (DC) customer in the first place, which means, you have to be a large spender.
But on the other hand, if you sign up for their Google Cloud thing despite being a nobody (me again), you'll have their sales folks hounding you for an upsell, mostly because GCloud is ridiculously behind both AWS and Azure.
Funny how it goes.
It would be except you and other are still using their services.
Big client won't get banned - and if they do, they have also a non-public phone number to an account manager to make things right again too.
Sadly this is a common trend - e.g. with ISPs it is almost impossible to find a contact to an actual person, only some online chats or automated hotline that will waste your time with canned responses not solving your problem.
What ISP are you talking about? I've never had trouble getting a real person with Verizon, CenturyLink, or ATT. You might have to wait on hold for a few dozen minutes, but that's a separate issue.
Google is well known for terrible customer support. And if you think of it, it makes sense. After all, if you can server 100M users via an automated support systems and only 0.01% have issues a year, it's probably far, far cheaper to just drop those "problem" users, than hire thousands of customer support persons.
Note: just threw the above numbers out, but you get the gist.
EDIT:
Speaking of algorithms, I wonder if the OP was below some adsense fiscal threshold of 'it's worth it to intercede here with a level 4 manager' or some blather.
Apple does that too [1]. I assume it's to prevent a DoS from fraudsters. (Obviously, it's a problem for legitimate users)
[1] https://qz.com/1683460/what-happens-to-your-itunes-account-w...
That human being even went to bat for the user and tried to convince corporate that buying the fraudulent gift card had been an honest mistake in trusting the wrong seller and not intentional fraud.
This seems like quite a different experience from "you are banned for life and we won't even talk to you or tell you why".
> This Senior Agent #2 was not as supportive as the first, and gave me information that contradicted Senior Agent #1: “Your account has been permanently disabled,” he said. “There is nothing else you can do, there is no escalation path.”
> When I asked for an explanation as to why, all he would say is, “See the terms and conditions.”
Ultimately, the author was able to get out of that dead-end, but it sounded awfully close.
This is significantly different than "we won't tell you what the issue is and we won't even accept communications from you".
In this scenario it seems pretty obvious that their automated fraud AI messed up, but the customer service person is probably also automated. They have so many people working on insane moonshots, but don't spend money for customer service for their core products (in this case people literally trying to give you money!). Just bizarre.