This is my problem with de facto utilities that are not regulated like utilities. Google can have enormous impact on your business and personal life but you cannot get proper communications with them. If something goes wrong you can't fix it, even if it's your fault because often you don't know what you did wrong. If it's their mistake, you might get a chance if your issue gets attention by a large audience.

It feels like there should be a legal recourse where you get compensated for damages due to service design choices of the utility. I'm sure in many places you can get compensated if the energy company cuts your electricity and doesn't clearly say the reason and what you can do about it.

You can lose your business, you can loose access to your digital assets that you built all your life and for what? So that some employees at Google can have easier time managing an issue(not disclosing the reason for account restrictions probably makes the scammers life harder too and you are just a collateral damage that doesn't even show up in the analytics).

Can you imagine E.ON cutting off the energy of the English futbol fans because it's easier for them to internally manage the surges during the games due to the tea kettles and not give them any explanation whatsoever?

Edit: Interestingly, UK GDPR seems to have some protections agains automated decision making[0].

[0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

Yet, while this is often the cited reason, it is simply not true.

There is no way on Earth, that scammers don't find out about such restrictions trivially, easily. So all this really does, is inconvenience the honest, and do zip, zero, nada to hassle the miscreants.

edit: more thought here, likely this is just an excuse, to not properly train reps, or to not deal with the issue at all.

It is the equiv of "think of the children!", but corp speak instead of politi speak. "Sorry for the bad service, security issue!"

A billion in topline revenue should do the trick. Once you hit that level you have to provide individualized human support. You're allowed to charge money for the support but it has to be available to anyone willing to pay at least a modest fee to communicate with a real person.

If you don't like it fuck you, you have a billion dollars get the fuck over it.

If a lonesome Pizza Hut franchise can afford to give me customer support, then so can Google, no questions asked. Yet you'll still find people white-knighting for them.

It is absurd that it is impossible to speak to a human at Google unless you have a loud enough platform. Amazon is similar too in many cases. As an Amazon seller the robot once decided that the price for an item on sale wasn’t correct. I told the robot it was in fact correct. The customer support person who I was able to reach after an incredible runaround told me through text only communication that the solution was to change the price either higher or lower. There was no way they could manually verify it. The robot had decided. In the end it took multiple guesses of adjusting the price to figure out what the Amazon robot would accept. This is beyond stupid.

No, this is your problem with monopolies. The fix is anti-trust enforcement, not slapping the word "utility" around.

Google is not going to change, they are one of the trillion dollar babies and they can just ignore us. Just like apple. What anti-trust enforcement could cause them to change? I'm skeptical the new EU rules about how "open install of apps to breakup app-store monopolies" will work to effect change.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/robert-borks-america...

Google’s monopoly isn’t “natural”. It’s temporary.

When that infrastructure rejects you or your product, you are in trouble because everything is build around the assumption that you will be reachable over Google.

Google is not a utility any more than Apple or Spotify is a utility. And if we're going to break up both of those companies, we may as well just dissolve every other Fortune 500 company while we're at it.

Now you're getting it.

> we may as well just dissolve every other Fortune 500 company while we're at it.

Sounds great. Let's start with Chevron.

> Sounds great.

Now you're grossly missing the point. The problem isn't the status quo, it's the system. Tearing down Standard Oil will leave a power vacuum, and adequate incentive from suppliers and processors will just make another monopoly. If your goal is to get rid of those companies, that's a pretty counterintuitive way to do it.

Personally, I think our world needs to start taking digital standards more seriously, like ISO but taken to the next level. We let ourselves get in these positions because we don't force these companies to provide interoperability or data ownership. Capitalism can work in the tech sector at this scale, but we need better regulation and more strict rules around proprietary interfaces. At least, that's the accelerationist mindset; we can languish in technological fiefdom for as long as we'd like, I'm sure FAANG doesn't mind.

That is my point. A system in which any of the fortune 500 companies can come into existence is grossly broken on multiple levels. Companies should be afraid of getting more than 10% of a worldwide market for fear of real anti-competition laws coming into effect rather than the farce we have now, or of vertically integrating too much, and should only make proprietary interfaces as a last resort.

A company being in a position to unilaterally change web standards, and force a monopoly on their web browser to further monopolise their advertising business should be grounds for splitting it into pieces at the very least, and seizing it in its entirety as the expected oitcome if they exercise that power.

> Capitalism can work in the tech sector at this scale,

The surveillance state and pending apocalypse we live in where you get jailed for successfully fighting in court says that it really can't. Any regulation or democratic control is ephemeral when you are systematically assigning more power to megacorps on a daily basis.

Partially /s. But in general, democracy isn’t doing too well, and a lot of it is due to a massive segment of bored, decadent, and petty populace that would rather watch the world burn if it owns their political enemies. At least with megacorps there is room for competence and science.

This is what the megacorps being in control looks like because they're the ones that led us here through ownership of media and thus any political candidate with a chance. Facebook, microsoft and google are only just getting started in the same space, and it is already many times worse than fox ever was.

The first time I tried using Microsoft Ads, I used a debit card in which foreign payments wasn't enabled and as soon as I clicked make payment my account was banned, No recourse through support just like how OP faced with Google. But that was in my past life, I don't want to see Ads, So I don't show Ads now.

I've been unable to close my Facebook Account, Because I couldn't take backup of my business page and there's no way to reach to them.

I totally see that. But on the flip side we see utilities like phone companies unable to block abusive robocalls and scammers.

(My thoughts are my own, and they are rarely well-formed)

Add an abuse button to the phone.

Every call costs a dollar to connect, no matter where it comes from - another carrier or international or whatever.

You get the dollar back if the receiver doesn't press the abuse button.

The dollar can be waived if the company knows the call is coming from an individual household with low call volume.

Perhaps even connect the call to a automated message that says, "we're sorry, <voip telco> has had its services disconnected for fraud. Goodbye"

But US phone companies don't want to do that because of the potential revenue loss.

Wanted calls get a refund.

Then this becomes a backdoor way for the bigger players to discriminate against new, smaller players that are otherwise legit and doing their best to keep spammers/scammers off of their network.

E-mail spammers went to jail, I don't see why robocallers don't go to jail. It's way easier to locate them anyway. If we can fight spam mail, spam calls can be dealt with too.

Robocalling seems like a much more tractable problem to solve though.

The point is, we are not hopeless. Actually, the e-mail thing was and is quite more problematic with accusations of gatekeepers(domain blacklists) asking for money but at least you know what's happening an how to solve it.

Of course if you are actually talking about scammers then I can understand your perspective, even if I'm not sure I would agree either.

Some people can be better at dealing with that kind of annoyances, good for them.

On the other hand, I would like strong punishment for people who make inconsiderate noise(bikes, prayers, street vendors) or directly reach me without addressing me directly(spam mails, robocalls). The problem with those is that they saturate my attention without having anything for me in it. It is very cheap for them and very expensive for me. That's why I try to make it expensive for them too, usually by engaging with them and making it unpleasant and unprofitable conversation and even making them spend money on stuff like shipping only to have it returned.

For those, jail is the civil alternative. I would be completely fine with anything more brutal, I have no sympathy. How can I have sympathy when their engagement is not a human one, its automated impersonal engagement designed to drain my time and resources for their gain.

I don't want to live in that society. I, too, get very annoyed when there's an unreasonable amount of outside noise encroaching into my private space, but the right way to fix that is to address the societal ills that cause people to engage in antisocial behavior. Yes, that's a lot harder than just throwing everyone in jail, but that is the only way you're going to create a healthy society.

Scams are already illegal under anti-fraud laws.

Why should spam that isn't already criminalized (fraud/illegal porn distribution) be treated as a significant crime?

It allows callbacks from numbers you’ve called recently which is nice.

For texts there’s “Filter Unknown Senders”

Only if you let them. Life without a Google account doesn’t require meaningful sacrifice.

Perhaps Brex is miscategorized as a privacy card.

But expending even the smallest amount of effort to determine that isn't something Google feels like spending time or money on.

There is absolutely nothing that Google offers that you can’t get from somewhere else.

You're just left guessing as to what the problem may have been, not that you can do anything even if you did know. I've had the same problem with eBay.

Problem is it encourages the very behaviour they want to stop. If you're going to have an account thats central to your business, but can get shut down at any time, it just encourages burner accounts so you aren't left high and dry when the inevitable happens.

As soon as it's illegal to make design mistakes, there will be no more innovation or updates, everything stays exactly as it is. The Department of Design Friendliness will audit you quarterly. Improvements get designed and approved by government committees. It's like a scene out of the movie Brazil.

There seems to be this mindset of a certain class of folks that feel these companies [Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, etc.] are somehow entrenched for centuries and the only option . They're not. They're barely 20 years old in most cases. That's nothing historically speaking. A third of them will be failing into niches over the next decade. Capitalism sucks in many ways, but it is really good at "creative destruction". True monopoly power is rare.

Many are extremely vulnerable to disruptive competition as most of their revenue is from a single source: ads. Take that away, and they crumble. As Facebook and Twitter are discovering now that Apple/iOS default to blocked app tracking. Google search quality has plummeted and people are turning to alternatives like Reddit.

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon are less vulnerable to ads, but they too have vulnerabilities.

Google isn't a utility: you don't need to use it, nor do most people. Google search is dying in favour of alternatives like Reddit. Google mail is only one of many options. Android phones are only one of many options.

The solution for a better service is to build (if you're an entrepreneur) and use (if you're a consumer) better services!

Maybe they die and get replaced but in between that happening you are still having to deal with the realities of the situation you are currently. People just want shit that works and for most of them it does most of the time. But some people get absolutely fucked and there is no good excuse for it.

People get fucked with Google accounts all the time, yes. The excuse is that Google is made of humans. As is the government. Or Apple and Microsoft for that matter. Some of these humans are better at software than others. If you think this is an easily solvable problem through laws and regulations, that regulators are going to get software design and support processes right… I think you might not have studied the history of of such laws and regulations. The good ones take decades to get right.

The benefit of not enshrining these companies as a public utility, and thus guaranteeing a mandatory mediocre experience for decades, is that it encourages the use and creation of alternatives. That dies when you legislate features.

I don’t even think the problem is that the company is made of humans. The problem is that when the black box algorithm makes a decision that locks someone out of their account or some service/feature there is no recourse. The humans are the solution to the problem, but you can’t get them to look at it unless you have a platform to stand on. It’s disgusting.

Regulations mandating a support channel of some sort is reasonable.

Also, I don't think it's reasonable to say a person needs to be free of ALL those companies. Decentralized for-profit organizations are how we get things done as a society, mostly. Pick the companies you trust/value. My point was mostly about avoiding ad-revenue-driven companies.

As a teen (back in '09), I ran a domain parking network that was used by a modest number of users (about 50 users with ~300 domains total). At the time the Google AdSense TOS allowed any site that had "content" (there was no stipulation about it being original), so my network worked by displaying random wikipedia articles that are relevant (using a very simple algorithm) to the domain in question, along with several adsense blocks and a few other features. Each domain was also a fully functional wikipedia mirror, and content was properly attributed etc.. Anyway, most months I would get a payout of around $800 that I would then distribute to my users (I took a 20% cut). At 11:30 PM the night of payouts one month, they decided to change the TOS, revoke all of my earnings, and suspend my AdSense account. I sent an email to my users explaining the situation and I actually paid them all out-of-pocket for the missed earnings because I had the money to do so from doing random web design for local businesses and I felt quite bad -- some of my users were in dire rent situations, etc., and I was in regular contact with them so I wanted to make them whole even if it meant I would lose a good bit of money since I was a teenager without these sorts of problems.

Anyway, one of my friends ran his own online service (a network of web proxies) and he actually specifically advertised on my network because for some reason the traffic converted well for his particular service. I had him check his AdWords spend several weeks later and we discovered that he was never refunded for the ads that ran on my network, even though those earnings were taken away from me. In other words, at least back then Google probably didn't refund advertisers in cases of clickfraud, etc., unless the advertister specifically knew they were being defrauded. At least that's what appeared to happen based on the info I had access to haha. They are super shady.

I'm currently having an issue because I used the same amex card on multiple Google accounts (within a corp gsuite instance), and I must have triggered something because now that card won't work anywhere with Google. And it fails with a useless "try again later error".

Same then happened with a standard visa card. These corporate cards haven't worked for over a year.

I wish they would just do some extra bit of verification rather than blacklist the cards without explanation.

Corporate cards have some of extra handling to deal with them. I know I tried to buy a WASD keyboard using a corp card, and their payment processor didn't let me use it either.

Looking around, it looks like when a Corp Card is issues (Capital one example[0]), they can lock the card to only be allowed with certain MCC (merchant category code). These are the codes that say what kind of product is being purchased. So it's possible the issuer of your corp card locked your card to certain MCCs. If your card in MCC locked, the merchant and processor likely won't know this until the payment has been tried, and there is a good chance the network/bank didn't send back a useful error code.

[0] PDF: https://www.capitalone.com/commercial/decomm/media/doc/treas...

A funny story. Because they shoehorned this functionality into a fixed length messaging spec instead of repeating segments, we could only send like 12 items. Anything after that was just approved. If I remember correctly the same spec applied to EBT purchases as well. I'm sure they use a different message format now and you totally can't get away with buying 12 things and then beer with an EBT card.

If I generate a one time use card from enterprise account, it shows up as PERSONAL CREDIT GOLD, interestingly.

Okay. I get the why, but not put that in your TOS or just block it by default then? Should save a huge amount of time/trouble on both sides.

Google likely uses privacy cards as one signal of whether an account is spammy. If you’re a customer who spends $1M a month with Google and you add a Brex card, it’s going to be far less likely to trigger an account suspension.

If, on the other hand, you’re this guy, with a brand new account and you start off with a privacy card, that puts their internal systems over the threshold for what they consider “spam” - bam, instant suspension.

I don’t think this is personally fair to new customers. Unfortunately, Google is always going to be geared to large customers and not to smaller ones. Most smaller companies will never encounter this situation anyway since they will use hard cards.

The underlying logic seems to be to lay traps and pitfalls for bad actors to fall into rather than having a transparent and evenly-enforced set of rules. i.e. if we tell scammers they can't use privacy cards, instead of just silently banning anyone who uses them, then how can we tell scams apart from real users?

All of this is just a further reminder to me to avoid doing business with Google.

Yes they would. Their goal is POWER and NOT dollars, which are worth less and less every day.

Just like corporate controlled mass media, the goal is POWER and NOT dollars. Dollars are the plausible deniability -- "it's just for the money!" is a mis-direction.

Using a privacy card is not an acceptable indicator of fraud or anything in a country with due process and a supposed presumption of innocence.

This is about enforcing approved behaviors in the Corporate Nanny state.

The exchange rate depends on power and lack of ethics.

Power is the goal.

In areas where they benefit from their monopoly, such as search advertising, it may not matter much in the short term, because people don't have a choice. But in areas where people do have a choice, such as cloud services or Workspace, it does matter.

It seems like a risky strategy to keep damaging your own brand while relying on monopoly rent to cover up any short term financial impact.

The author regularly uses the same CC with many other google services

> The same credit card on the account, a corporate Mastercard from Brex, is attached to Google Cloud, Google Workspace, and Google Domains. Collectively, Google services have successfully charged that same card over $2,000 since that email.

(They're trying to grow a second revenue generator — GCP — but it's not been the success they've hoped; especially compared to Azure. Microsoft had the B2B relationships already in place, while Google has mostly been a B2C company, so they've been struggling to win clients.)

Aren't bans from Google services always eternal in the sense that trying to circumvent them by e.g. creating different accounts just gets you in even hotter water? Plus, it is very easy to detect when someone reinstates an ad (or Play Store app / YouTube channel) for something that was already banned under a different account.

If you make a new account just make sure the recovery phone number and email address aren't ones which have a bad history.

If you want to make a new ads account make sure in addition the postal address doesn't match a bad one.

If you want to make a new payments account, make sure none of the credit card numbers in the account match a bad one.

Note that because different teams within Google don't talk to one another, you don't for example need a new postal address if the issue is on the payments side.

I am not making this up. Some indie Android developers have ended up in pretty Kafkaesque situations with their livelihoods (Play Store accounts) terminated without any explanation or human recourse, and with any attempts to circumvent the ban only leading to more trouble.

Is this a figure of speech, and not a literal situation? If you’ve already been banned, failing to circumvent that ban ultimately only leads to the same outcome: still being banned?

Or is there further punitive actions taken?

Let's say they fix that at some point in future. Suddenly you will find yourself banned.

I get why this is hard for Google - there are probably thousands of scam accounts who've been banned making scam appeals all the time. They don't want to give those people a script to follow to get all their accounts unbanned, but if you are giving them money, they should generally be able to afford to have a real human look at your case.

Like say you walked into Wal*Mart and selected some merchandise from the shelf, then walked to the register and paid using a Vanilla Visa card, as you noted there was a Visa sticker on the door when you entered. While you are picking up your bag from the bagging area a security guard roughly picks you up and throws you out the door and tells you to never come back. You ask why but their only response is "You were being suspicious."

The customer is left bewildered, angry, and hurt.

This is mostly irrelevant in countries that use chip and pin.

What they likely do is have several flags that push an account closer to being autobanned, so it's not just one thing, but a combination that gets you knocked out. I'd imagine a list like:

  Using scammer friendly credit card: -10 points

  Used a TOR exit node: -20 points
  
  Account age < 2 years: -15 points

  Account spend < $1000US: -10 points

  Service being advertised is not well known to Google's data mining: -10 points

  etc...

Google does indeed discriminate on your payment method.

Most likely due to them having too much data to process they analyze the data from abusers and these kind of cards seem to stick out like a sore thumb.

That's not true, it's their choice not to process the data manually.

Google loves to leverage developers and code to fix every problem, including (especially?) customer service. In particular, they hate manual labor and seek to automate everything -- which is a horrible approach when it's applied unilaterally to all aspects of business relationships and customer service.

At some point, Google needs to grow up and learn that being clever only takes you so far. As it is, Google leaders seem to love computers and money, not people. I'd wager 20:1 that anyone at Google reading this thread takes action by tweaking algorithms, not by restructuring the company to help customers in person.

But cleverness and free tools will no longer be enough, since they're invading people's privacy (as ad revenue motivates them) and failing in customer service.

Too much data to process than they are willing to put time in to

When handling with huge streams of data, like in for example a SOC it's the 'big' streams and patterns of data on which is zoomed in.

For this reason the system is made (and learns to) discriminate against payment methods that are known to be abused.

Is this bad? Well.. do you want these scam ads to be around to hurt for example, your grandma?

Perhaps it's a necessary evil to make it all work.

Yeah the automation is a big problem but this seems to be essential for their scalability to work and be able to provide us all with the services they offer.

I wasn't using that feature here, but it might be the case that the information that arrives at Google is just the issuer so they classify all Brex cards as “privacy” cards?

Considering that many banks are doing this sort of service to protect you against data breaches, I can't see how this is actually an appropriate policy.

The solution is to use multiple clouds. Switching from one SPOF to another doesn’t help.

With AWS I know I can always get someone on the phone who can, or if they can't they will find someone who can, explain any billing or technical question.

I don't know your situation but unlike any of the Google stories, you found out that you needed to submit a document and then you gained access? Google refuse to tell people what the problem even is.

Some comments in here imply that, but there is no evidence anywhere other than randoms on the internet. There isn't even any implication from those people that changing card providers at this point would resolve this.

> The paperwork I had to submit

Who told you to submit paperwork? It already sounds like you had a terrible but better experience.

How can you run your ads through AWS? Or a better question, what other ad networks that are comparable to what Google offers are there? Because to me it seems almost like a monopoly in regards to how impactful Google's services are - sadly they aren't regulated as such.

Surely they should be able to see that OP is an actual customer and not some sort of scammer.

Unless these are actually all astroturfing stories by Microsoft and Amazon, I will stick to the companies who will actually speak to me if I have problems. They have internal communications, so my support ticket will actually reach other teams, and even working in a start up I can get conversations with finance and technical employees to get problems solved.

Google can have the advertising dollars since they are the 80 ton gorilla, but I can't see how anyone can trust them with anything critical to the running of your business.

Well that's my point - you might end up in a situation where you cannot use them for advertising and where you won't have many viable alternatives.

And it seems like Google will just get away with automation like that, either due to manual support just not being possible at that scale, or for other reasoning of theirs, without mechanisms in place for you to bypass the automation and actually get a solution for your problem, unless you operate at a certain scale.

Edit: closest alternatives that I found:

  - Microsoft Advertising: https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us/get-started/sign-up-with-microsoft-advertising
  - Amazon Ads: https://advertising.amazon.com/
  - Facebook Ads: https://www.facebook.com/business/ads
  - LinkedIn Ads: https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/ads
  - Instagram Ads: https://business.instagram.com/advertising

My theory is below, but I have not researched or looked into virtual cards.

The problem with virtual cards or privacy cards: What's stopping a single physical card from having multiple virtual cards generated for it? So if someone had a card they knew could only be charged $100 and googles threshold is at $200, they could make 10 virtual cards and add the physical card resulting in 11 payment methods. Now they can theoretically get $2200 worth of ads (if all ad campaigns reached the threshold at the same moment).

In other words, fraud risk can go up significantly.

If you know someone who write's merchant software they should be able to get you the ranges from their payment processor's specs.

Visa/Mastercard likely don't supply a way to link a physical card to it's virtual card generations (that'd be a security risk), so Google doesn't know that virtual card A is associated with physical card B.

Can somebody which knowledge of this explain problems with "privacy" cards and why scammers love them?

Scammers don't care about privacy cards. They'll use anything they can get their hands on, metaphorical or otherwise. If it doesn't have their details attached, it's fair game to them.

And people try to sort it out. I mean what's wrong with people? :DDDD

Just give your money to someone else.

So, I've started using LibreFox recently. Signed up for IBM Cloud after verifying my credit card and lo and behold, an account suspension letter was delivered after an hour. I guess it has something to do with their algorithm triggering accounts signed up using privacy focused browsers.

What's the user agent for LibreFox?

this sounds like security by obscurity. Why are people ok with this?

I do not how Google fraud system works but I know that Brex privacy feature is signal which is not good (from my experience in our company).

Sidenote: I also noticed that PayPal doe not like Brex privacy CC for subscriptions.