Agreed. I often second guess my usage of various Google apps and services since I don't want to trigger some process that I would have no way of ever knowing.
The recent case of someone getting banned from using Apple Pay comes to mind (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841586)
Apple says that their virtual card numbers protect your privacy because they're untraceable. Ok, but that also means that your using Apple pay is mostly indistinguishable from credit card fraud.
But, you ask, does Google really have to worry that much about fraud? Do people really phish known-good Google accounts, add a stolen card, and then buy a whole bunch of ads?
Well.... yeah. That's actually one of the primary uses for stolen credit cards.
If only they had some process where a customer could agree to have Google publicly explain why an account was banned, I think we'd see many more explanations along the lines of "This customer was using Google cloud to launch Ddos attacks" or "This customer sent bomb threats to the president".
Considering these links are all about people with valid businesses and apps, I doubt your examples apply for violations.
The only thing that's preventing Google from telling their side of the story is their own refusal to engage human-to-human with individual customers.
Which law?
> That's still your private mail. They can't go looking it it,
They definitely subject it to all kinds of automated scanning for spam and potentially abuse. The nearest thing to a public statement from Google on the subject seems to be: “very specific cases where you ask us to and give consent, or where we need to for security purposes, such as investigating a bug or abuse”
i.e. there may be abuse cases where they read your mail without asking.
I am willing to bet there would be zero explanations along those lines.
“Digital Ocean killed our company” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169
Big G's policy is to lock you, provide no further comments and no contact link.
What's the alternative you're proposing? Are you just saying Cloud Bad?
Google's algorithm can flag a chargeback as suspicious, leading you to be locked out.
(GOOG's market cap as I write this is $985B...)
Source: I work there.
Also: I would exhaust all my escalation options before going the cc route. With any retailer.
> Afaiu this doesn't cancel the contract
There is no contract if Google didn't send the phone. The commenter doesn't owe them money for something they failed to send.
> Then, teaching all the fraud detection systems that your exact usage pattern leads to fraud seems unpleasant too.
Or (hear me out, this might sound insane): a fucking human could talk to the customer and flag it as "not fraud". This is how every other company does it.
The solution to getting screwed by an algorithm is not to give in to the algorithm. It's to talk to a human to override it.
The ultimate solution, I hope, is that the next iteration of the federal government is pro-consumer and enforces our UCC rights and/or breaks up Google.
Don't know about your jurisdiction, but in most countries I lived in the law works otherwise. The moment you checked out you have a contract. Seller not sending out the goods is failing their contractual obligations. But that failure does not cancel the contract, only allows you to execute the appropriate clauses of it (some of which usually lead to refund and cancellation). On the other hand, the delivery of goods doesn't usually prevent you from cancelling the contract (you usually have an obligation to return the goods in that case). The clauses injected by laws tend to make this very consumer friendly... But the ones I remember require you delivering a notice of cancellation and I'm not sure if failing payment counts as such (IANAL, I don't even know your jurisdiction, Yadda Yadda).
Packages get lost all the time. They have a process to file it with their shipping partner.
In fact, I recently shut down a personal App Engine service I had been using for myself for a few years just because of this paranoia. The service was not doing anything illegal, just crawling a few websites (forums, ...) I like and sending me emails when there are interesting updates. But you never know if they might determine my outbound traffic is suspicious. I also started the long process of moving my main email from a @gmail.com to a @custom.domain that currently forwards to gmail, just in case I get locked out.
It is quite bizzarre that this is the reputation google gained for themselves.