Sorry for the rant but Google has time and money to build things like this and yet they don't have customer support for people whose account got suspended for no reason?

You have time to make this comment and yet you don't have time to volunteer at your local pet shelter?

(I'll buy you a beer if you convincingly explain to me that these two analogies are meaningfully different)

PS, not defending google, they generally suck.

Providing customer support is a part of a having a business and should be prioritized over adding random features no one asked for to your product.

Volunteering at a pet shelter is not part of the business of being an angry anonymous internet person.

Non-paying users are not customers, thus google doesn't really earn them support for their products. For paying users, that's a different story.

they banned somebody that bought stuff inside the app store.

Though Google is merely a storefront en payment intermediary of what the banned user bought (apps and movies), it could be argued the client of google per se is the companies selling the product, they're the one paying Google a share of their sales.

Not that I disagree with you here just making the argument.

Like parent said, I found that google has decent customer service once you clearly become their client (which I have been on adwords, analytics and on gsuite).

Not the parent poster, but I'll take a stab at this.

I'd wager that the parent poster doesn't have any sort of direct relationship with the local pet shelter: there's no contract, or handshake agreements, nothing like that.

The lack of a relationship is key.

Google provides services to a large number of people, and while they don't charge (most) consumers directly for those services in dollar-units, Google's user base does pay via other means: nominally by being on the receiving end of hyper-targeted ads.

There's a relationship there. Google provides a service, in exchange for psychological capital, which Google then translates into cashflow via advertisers.

Relationships, good ones at least, require trust. And the fact that I know that there is a server inside of Google which will mercilessly nuke my account from orbit without warning... isn't exactly trust-inspiring.

Moreover, I know that if that does happen, I have effectively zero options to resolve the problem. I'm screwed.

Google could choose to fix this problem, and to invest their rather substantial resources in building trust. But they don't, and instead kick out toy apps like the above. This sends a very strong message to people like the parent poster, in that Google doesn't really value them or their well-being.

Now, Google isn't required to be trustworthy. Plenty of organizations aren't. But there's nothing wrong with customers calling that out and demanding more when they feel Google isn't allocating its resources in their best interests. It's also completely within Google's purview to utterly ignore them.

That's the difference: in one case, there's an established relationship, and that comes with certain expectations. In the other, not so much.

I feel like in your attempt, you lost sight of the fact that this project has no relation with customer support at google, other than originating from Google.

Lots of things originate from google. You can say the exact same thing of all of them. In fact you can plain and simply say "Google has time to do ANYTHING, yet it doesn't have time to provide customer support for that very thing?"

There's a point to be made that Google should be providing support. Do you think this, specifically, is what they should cut for it?

Prima facie this comment enraged me, but on reflection it has a deep point; both parties here are just acting out of rational self interest. Google has decided that their bottom line won't suffer if they tell locked-out customers to get fucked. They would rather use the money on cheeky bets that carry small risk and have high potential upside.

The critical corollary is that if you still feel it is a problem that Google doesn't provide support, and feel that "the market will fix it" is unconvincing in light of the available evidence, then you ought to be in favour of regulation that obligates them to.

And would that regulation I'd be in favor of prevent them from doing this kind of cool project linked here?

Because I would be in favor of such regulations, and yet I'm also not against the project here, so i don't see your point.

> I would be in favor of such regulations, and yet I'm also not against the project here, so i don't see your point

The point is that FAANG companies are smart enough to elude a simple Hanlon's razor analysis.

Put more explicitly: 1. Your critique of OP's argument is fundamentally correct. Pointing out that Google could solve the problem if they wanted to is missing the point. Google doesn't want to solve the problem 2. Therefore, we either have to live with the status quo, or we have to change the incentive structure.

It might seem trivial to you, but I think it's an important point. Many members of the hn crowd exhibit this cognitive dissonance where on the one hand, they have a strong moral intuition that a particularly policy of tech giants is wrong (in this case, their choice not to put money in support), but on the other hand, an equally strong knee-jerk resistance to regulation of our industry.

Recognition that Google (or any other giant) are just doing what's best for them (as per their definition of "best") is an important step.

I do not think that anyone is against this project (except maybe for privacy reasons).

Why just obligate them to? They do not play nice, we should not play nice either (yes, obligating them is playing nice). I instead suggest nationalizing them, or close them down and arrest at least the executives.

Obligating them would solve the problem without creating a bunch of new problems. Your suggestions would create more problems than they solve.

A given company is typically not Capital-G-Good or Capital-E-Evil. They are probably doing some things well, and doing some things poorly. They respond to incentives. When a company is doing things poorly in a way that is hurting consumers, we should ask what incentives they're responding to.

Google has failed at support. They also do plenty of things well. On my view it's weird to take the position that they don't. I regard Google Search as the crown jewel of modern engineering.

The money Google spent on these devs with inflated bay area salaries would’ve been enough for an army of customer support agents

Source your claim or show your work. My guess: you're wrong by a factor of three.

It costs way less to build something like that and depreciate it afterwards than have a proper support team, just one person going through complaints won't do it.

This is probably well paid engineers side project while they didn't have anything better to do.

I'll take your "Karen" reference as a crude attempt to insult OP. Let me recycle your "argument": You think Google should hire "300k+" SWEs (in reality according to their public filings it's more like a 5th of that at best) to build and maintain millions of servers in a system that indexes billions of pieces of information on the open internet just so in a fraction of a second you can find a tired meme (and definitely NOT to find the actual number of SWEs Google has) to use in an inaccurate answer to a legitimate question, albeit irrelevant to the posted topic? But here they are doing it.

Alphabet is a trillion dollar company. The reason they're not fixing their customer support issues is that nobody is making them. They're not losing customers and they can just save the money. This doesn't make it OK or excusable. Certainly not with the "arguments" you brought.

I believe the 300k is referring to $300k, not the number of engineers.

I've been permalocked out of a Google account before. It's nothing to balk at. You are completely powerless.

Google doesn't have anywhere close to 300K SWEs. More like 50K.

Bezos would make his ppl do that until the problem is fixed.

Bro.

For now twitch is separate from Amazon. Can't wait till shitposting on twitch means you cant shop at whole foods anymore.

Yes.

Don't expect support if you do not pay.

Can we add 2018 to this? this article is from January 18 2018.

It will prompt me to see if the one they associated with me then has been updated.

I just spent the weekend re-reading Virtual Light & Idoru, Gibson's Bridge series, and I think both books mentioned this theory that the most effective way to ask if anyone's seen a person is to try to identify what celebrity a person looks like, & go around asking if anyone had seen a John Malkovich looking dude around the area, or who-have-you. Both books mention that there is a part of the brain literally trained on looking for/at celebrities, special purpose function for it, and declaring that it's the most likely system to register for most people, our common node/vibration where we'll find matches.

Kind of getting a weird celebrity-recognition-part-of-the-brain vibe of that off this story? Except it's AI's dreaming instead of human people?

Pre-pandemic, my wife and I would sometimes play a game at events with large numbers of people we didn't know, where one of us would mention a celebrity lookalike and the other had to spot them in the crowd.

I find more value in the historical doppelganger than free email. FAANG should come up with more parlor tricks for my data, instead of boring office products lol.

Maybe tag this with 2018? I wasn't sure if this was an update to the algo I read about back then.

It's ReCaptcha all over again. They're training their neural nets for free and as an incentive tell you which painting is the closest.

To everyone remarking about privacy, the app does say that the photo won't be sent anywhere. I wonder if everything is done on-device.

Face has landmarks which can form a unique signature, like a fingerprint.

Mobile extracts facial landmarks “signature” and sends to server only numbers.

Server runs an algorithm to find “neighbors” to those facial landmarks based on signatures collected from museum photos and present the closest match.

Actually pretty simple nowadays. Challenge off course is to collect the museum photos, what google spent some millions doing for other project.

Conceptually, this is rather like lossy compression with a shared dictionary. In practice your likeness has still been trasmitted. Jpeg files are after all just numbers too, merely less specialized.

Agreed. But you’ll only be able to reconstruct the original face if you have a photo from it. Which google probably has anyway.

The best it could find came back at only 61%. I like the virtual tours on the app but I would like (maybe someone has done this already?) an AR app/option where when you are in a place like the Acropolis you hold it up and it shows you what it looked like in its heyday.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-arts-culture/id10509705...

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Someone is gathering images with metadata to sell it later to interested parties

Google should do deeper analysis on them self. They could be shocked how censurating and biased corporation they are.

Who is the best doppelganger most eigenface like face of Monalisa?

Being german i had a very hard time figuring out what this comment is supposed to mean. Could you rephrase it so one might be able to answer your Question?

(2018), and this doesn't work in Illinois because of their anti-biometrics law: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-google-art-se...

I assume this is more of Google not wanting to put the effort into researching and complying with the law for a one-off arts and culture project, sort of like how the website for Mom & Pops deli in upstate NY started banning European visitors because of fear/misunderstanding of the GDPR.

So a dark trick to get people to upload pictures of themselves to feed the Google surveillance machinery...?

Google already knows what you look like. And, more importantly, what you look at.

"I don't need to protect my privacy because they already know everything about me" is a form of privacy nihilism. You still have plenty of privacy worth protecting

> You still have plenty of privacy worth protecting

But, not this particular bit. If they already know the value of a given bit there is minimal possible harm in disclosing it to them again.

Yes, this particular bit because that's speculation. How do you know they already have it and that there's no added value to them in doing it again?

The Framers detested dragnet searches and preventing dragnets was the cornerstone of the Fourth Amendment. Data mining threatens to bring back the dragnet search in digital form.

The Fourth Amendment is worthless.

All the information is held by private companies and the gov’t gets the info from them voluntarily.

Ditto for the First Amendment. Worthless. Instead of the govt prohibiting speech, the govt just has private companies do it for them.

How many times a week on HackerNews do you see this kind of exchange:

A: Facebook censored this or that and thus infringes on free speech.

B: It’s a private company; it can do what it wants.

A: But, but, there’s something wrong with that!

B: Don’t like it, make your own Facebook. Hur dur...

Etc. Ad nauseum.

Clearly, both (A) and (B) above are trying to reason through something within an outdated and outmoded framework; it’s why both sides sound silly.

Anyway, this is the same thing... but with the 4th amendment.

Same problem.

A private company that holds your data can do with it what it wishes. And, like the first amendment, if the govt makes it clear to these private companies that they ought ‘voluntarily’ cooperate with the govt “if they know what’s good for them,” then then Bill of Rights is worthless.

The 1st and 4th were meant to protect us from a tyrannical govt; not a tyrannical corporation.

Scrap the entire ball of wax and start over.

The Constitution — at this point — is an utter joke.

The constitution has functioned as intended. Its blindingly obvious to anyone that the biggest concern of the founders were to limit and reduce tyrannical governments and corrupt church hierarchies. It's arguable if we've succeeded yet, but given recent examples elsewhere that resulted in millions upon millions dead, I'd say we are on the better side of that one.

Businesses on the scale of a Facebook or a Google or Walmart simply did not exist anywhere, at any point in time in human history up to that point. But they rightly left these matters to the civil authorities, and the governed.

So no, the Constitution is not an utter joke. Our politicians and our indolent populace are.

> Businesses on the scale of a Facebook or a Google or Walmart simply did not exist anywhere

Dutch East India Company?

The Founding Fathers sought to “limit and reduce corrupt church hierarchies”?

That’s not blindingly obvious.

I believe a typical Founding Father would shudder at the thought of the government having anything whatsoever to say about the manner in which a church administered itself.

>given recent examples elsewhere that resulted in millions upon millions dead, I'd say we are on the better side of that one.

Surely you must be joking.

Public and private point fingers at each other in public. But in private they are all part of the same machine. But still if we keep shouting freedom we might convince our self we are free.

The point is to not have the entity that has the monopoly on violence - being able to arrest, detain, and perhaps kill you legally - also have the right to silence you or prevent all sorts of other activities that would make it easier for them to arrest, detain, and kill you whenever they feel like it.

HN Googlebot: <see story about Google> <ctrl-F for main thrust of story X> So a dark trick to get people to X to feed the surveillance/ads/guillotine/CIA/NSA/CCP/Vladimir Putin machine?

New trick to get people to upload an image of themselves?

They already had one of those[0,1], and received enough data from it to discontinue the free aspect[2].

0: https://www.howtogeek.com/227084/how-to-use-google-photos-to...

1: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/9547620?hl=en-GB#gb...

2: https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/

Well, their social network (Google+) didn't really take off.

I understand what you're saying and I'm not having a go at you but "really, really, really fucking bad second order effects" are what exactly? Telling anyone that people in 300 years will judge them negatively isn't really going to motivate them to change. I'm personally at the point where there needs to be a set of horror stories written in non-tech language about data people share directly impacting their life. But what are those stories?

... feeds high res biometric data of your face to the highest bidder.