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.
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.