Getting Google to ban our entire company

https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_getting_google_to_ban_our_entire_company/

by highace • 8 years ago

538 336 8 years ago

reddit.com

highace• 8 years ago

Alternative title: Today I realised why going all-in on Google's platform is maybe not a great business decision.

Also note: this isn't me personally.

ocdtrekkie11• 8 years ago

The idea that one dude on his phone can torch your entire company with no apparent recourse is borderline insane. The fact that an issue with Google service x can cause you to lose access to Google services y and z is absolutely obscene.

I don't understand why anyone could possibly take this sort of risk with their company. As long as Google remains the irresponsible company that it is, they simply cannot be engaged with for any business purpose whatsoever.

It's possible, of course, this guy isn't actually what triggered the lockout, but it really wouldn't change the issue: That 150 Google accounts can get banned, including both personal and work accounts, and that Google can refuse to explain why.

The OP's bosses should be looking for a good law firm, because there's money in this case.

tasubotadas• 8 years ago

But Google is so diverse now...

agentdrtran• 8 years ago

I work with G Suite and this story 100% did not happen.

bsaul• 8 years ago

Absolutely. The guy taking the blame on himself really is amazing to me. He has completely accepted the crazy automated rules google decided for their service, and thought he was the culprit.

Guys, just because something is anounced and written in an EULA , doesn't mean you're actually to blame. Sometimes rules are insane and created by people for really bad reasons (such as not wanting to spend a correct amount of money on customer support for your services, in order to be even more profitable).

marticode• 8 years ago

These stories pop up on a regular basis. Someone from Google eventually reaches out and fixes it because of all the publicity. Meanwhile, the policy (which is insane, and compounded by the difficulty of reaching a human at Google support) never changes.

ocdtrekkie11• 8 years ago

As long as people still sign up to put their data and their businesses futures in Google's hands, they have no reason to get better. Money is flowing in, and fixing their problems would cost them a lot of that money.

dx0345• 8 years ago

If this blows up enough I can believe it changes. Not because Google wants to, but because suddenly people getting fired realize that they can cause significant damage that way.. If this suddenly happens a few hundred times within a week, Google will have to act or will lose a lot of clients.

verbify3• 8 years ago

Standard practice when someone is fired is to remove all their access credentials during or before they're told they are being fired.

askvictor4• 8 years ago

G-suite accounts have very responsive tech support (phone and email). Either they're not using G-suite or they're clueless about their tech-support contacts.

jacksmith210062• 8 years ago

Have to distinguish from G-Suite accounts. Google has customer support that is actually very good in my experience.

Kind of surprised people expect different for something that is free.

donttrack2• 8 years ago

So on the last day at my shit job in the shit office, I should just go ahead and abuse the refund policy? Sounds crazy to me..

unpopular423• 8 years ago

First, you need to make your company rely on 200 consumer Gmail accounts for their business. I mean, if you can get them to that level of idiocy, nothing really helps, right?

xfer2• 8 years ago

Do you know there is a thing called Gsuite for business? Let me change your sentence to "First you need to make your company rely on 200 nodes on AWS for their busineess". I am not sure who looks really stupid here?

donalhunt• 8 years ago

this is core to the story...

If the company was using consumer accounts, then this is exactly the behaviour that is expected (very easy to create a bunch of accounts that are all associated with each other). Both the company leadership and IT team/vendor should hang their heads in shame.

If the company was a paying gsuite customer then this type of action towards a corporate customer seems odd but not unusual. The OP committed TOS violations but may have no awareness of what TOS violations other customers were committing (if you allow that sort of culture, you reap the rewards... etc).

I find it hard to believe it is the latter scenario because the admins of the account would have been notified multiple times before any adverse action was taken (there have been many stories of individuals / companies getting banned after ignoring emails to change behavior / actions that violate TOS).

antihero3• 8 years ago

Fun fact: The entire UK government relies on Google Suite internally.

Fuck knows how that works with PATRIOT.

flukus5• 8 years ago

I wonder how long a student who didn't finish his assignment does the same and locks an entire school out, including their Chromebooks. A lot of schools seem to be migrating to google services.

realusername2• 8 years ago

And people wonder why I don't want to use Google products... The fact that you might be locked of all your accounts for a random bullshit reason (with no support either) is completely insane. People reading this here on HN, please don't use Google products for any important matter or it might bite you back one day (basically only what you can afford to lose).

dx0345• 8 years ago

I still love GMail, the interface works better for me than for others. Just use your own domain (with a third party registrar) and you can just swap the front-end if Google decides to ban you.

Same with a small company, as long as you have control of your domains and regular backups of the emails, having a fail-over isn't that hard. In this case the real damage is personal accounts, the business accounts could probably be up within a few hours at another provider (plus some more hours until backups are restored).

realusername2• 8 years ago

That's a good advice, always have a backup plan for that (and custom domains + email backups are working great as a backup plan).

pzh• 8 years ago

This reminds me to download and remove all my emails from Google’s GMail servers. Does anyone know of a good automated solution to do this on a regular basis?

yeahsure• 8 years ago

Maybe not what you want, but you could do this using a regular pop3 client and set it to delete copies from the server.

kjeetgill• 8 years ago

There's a fairly direct way to dump all of your Google data here: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en

I used it for a grepping through years of emails.

perakojotgenije• 8 years ago

http://gmvault.org/

josteink3• 8 years ago

Gmail (still) supports IMAP, so tools like offlineimap should work just fine.

https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap

B1FF_PSUVM• 8 years ago

Google Takeout can probably be scripted somehow.

squarefoot• 8 years ago

That was the standard de facto way of accessing mail before web interfaces ruined it all: a lot faster than using a browser and you get full access to all your mail for complex searches etc.

Any offline client will do; I use Claws Mail since ages where I migrated all my email also from past clients such as Eudora under Windows XP. http://www.claws-mail.org/

It's multiplatform, very fast and stable and can keep, index and search huge datasets of emails (mine is over 60K messages since mid 90s) in seconds. Backing up/exporting the email database needs only saving the Mail directory in the user's home; I've successfully moved mail directories between Linux and Windows installations of Claws Mail without a hitch. It made Outlook users drop their jaws when they realized how fast it is and they no longer needed to delete years of mails because the client became slow as molasses.

All you have to do is configure it to access Google servers like any other client then check the option to delete the mail on the server once it has been downloaded. IIRC this option is checked by default.

whyagaindavid3• 8 years ago

I therefore created a icloud and outlook account. Google allows you to forward all emails to anywhere. That way all three companies have to block you... Hope not

gkya• 8 years ago

POP3? You can use the gmail pop3 server via your mail retriever program, and set it to not keep mail on the server (which is generally the default). All mail suite software (Thunderbird, Outlook, Evolution, etc.) and individual mail retrieval programs (e.g. mpop, fetchmail, getmail, etc) support it.

setquk• 8 years ago

Agree entirely.

This should apply to all cloud services. If you use them for anything critical, total migration and DR should be part of your exit strategy for if anything like this happens. Everything you have in the cloud should be backed up in neutral formats off line on your property.

I’ve had a couple of run ins with google and personal accounts a few years back. Once my sign in was broken for two weeks. I couldn’t sign in with it showing a non descript error. I couldn’t find or get anyone to help. If this was anything business critical then it would have been pack up and go home.

Google apps support is notoriously crap as well. Been there, done that, left quickly.

c12• 8 years ago

Not that everyone can afford such things but a few companies I have worked for in the past have mirrored their entire cloud infrastructure across more than one provider (aws, google, azure, etc).

One was co-located at one data center that had connectivity issues and they had all traffic automatically rerouted to their development stack in the office which operated as production while their colo sorted out issues.

ladzoppelin• 8 years ago

As a Google Apps/For work admin I also have experienced really hostile policies and support in the past. Its really shortsighted of Google because now they want companies to use their GCP platform which I find insane.

dvfjsdhgfv6• 8 years ago

One thing that makes me always wonder is that Google can get away without proper Customer Service. Usually if that kind of thing happens and an employee refuses to disclose the details, you talk to their manager and so on, and if the company still refuses to restore the service, you get it to the court for illegal termination of the contract. I mean, you can't terminate the contract with another company without explaining why (and no, "you violated the terms but we can't tell you exactly what" is not an explanation.)

plantain• 8 years ago

Except this story doesn't add up, because Google's customer service for even small companies on Google Apps is pretty good.

flukus5• 8 years ago

"We have the right to disable your account at anytime, for any reason and without notice" is pretty standard for anything cloud based. IME the business leaders in charge of decisions to move to cloud infrastructure are even less likely to read the terms of service than a general user is.

giancarlostoro4• 8 years ago

Suggested alternatives? Anyone ever had a similar / bad experience with Microsoft?

swebs2• 8 years ago

I've had nothing but horrible experiences with Microsoft. Frequent down times, high latency, surprise licensing fee increases, vendor lock-in, software that gets worse every year. I wouldn't wish Outlook or Skype on my worse enemy.

Also if you don't pay up, they might raid your office and take your computers.

https://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-sued-over-mafia-like-anti...

wrycoder• 8 years ago

I always recommend fastmail. I’ve used them for decades with no issues. On the rare occasion they have an issue, they go all out to fix it quickly and keep the user community informed. I once asked them to trace a delivery problem through their server logs, which they did in less than an hour - they politely showed me where I screwed up! I can be logged in and making changes from multiple platforms simultaneously and everything works flawlessly. In addition, I think they are honest when they claim they don’t scan or sell my data.

Their web app is very good. (Previously, I was using Gnus.) I also use iOS Mail to access fastmail via IMAP, because the VIP “folder” feature is great for cherrypicking.

gnicholas3• 8 years ago

Reliance on google is dangerous for sure. A couple months ago my startup’s popular Chrome extension was unceremoniously yanked from the Chrome store. It took weeks to get the situation resolved, and even then it was only because I live in Silicon Valley and know people at Google who could ping the Chrome team until it was fixed. In the meantime, our most popular product was sidelined.

We have since ported to Firefox Quantum to be less reliant on Google.

https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/google-yanked-my-chrome-ex...

Hoasi• 8 years ago

Reliance on google is dangerous for sure.

It is also unnecessary. While I understand the convenience, there are plenty of better solutions to use over Google, especially for a software company.

jrnichols• 8 years ago

and know people at Google

That seems to be how a lot of these stories (and stories like these aren't really uncommon on reddit or HN) of getting locked out of Google stuff are resolved.

If you don't know someone, you're hosed. How many times have people without inside contacts or reddit/HN accounts gone through this? We'll never know.

abrookewood3• 8 years ago

This is exactly right. Amazon or Microsoft would never do this to you if you were using one of their services. And if, for some reason they had to, you could talk to them about it.

I really hope someone for Google is listening ... I WANT you guys to be successful so that we have more competition in the market. But honestly, you just keep shooting yourselves in the feet.

If you treat Consumers like crap, then you must expect Enterprise customers to be concerned that you are going to do the same thing to them.

It's not like this is an isolated story either ... Google dropping the ban hammer on someone is a recurring theme and it makes me question whether I should be looking at alternatives.

dnomad• 8 years ago

Amazon or Microsoft would never do this to you if you were using one of their services. And if, for some reason they had to, you could talk to them about it.

Do you seriously believe this?

You understand people get locked out of the cloud accounts with Amazon and Microsoft all the time. And with Amazon and Microsoft they lose much more than access to their (free!) email account, they lose access to Kindle Books and Software Licenses that they've paid for with real money. That's a much bigger deal.

The moral of this story is that US citizens and businesses have zero recourse when they run afoul of web-based services. They have no real legal rights to their digital property. If the US had some kind of GDPR-like law that allowed customers an irrevocable right to their own data then this wouldn't be such a big deal. Indeed it might even spur some competition. But today you've got absolutely nothing. Today the onus is completely on each person to protect their own digital assets.

p49k• 8 years ago

Just a reminder that a guy was locked out of his Amazon services, plus $140,000 of cash and inventory from his shipping business, because he changed the name of the profile on his Kindle Fire to "baba". He was stuck in autoreply hell and wasn't able to get resolution until he made a huge stink on social media as is happening here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/amazon/comments/5gvgdl/using_a_amaz...

oldcynic• 8 years ago

The same Amazon who have had publicity for shutting down your entire account, along with associated services, if you have the "wrong" profile of returns?

Sure I know some will abuse returns policies, just as some buy an outfit in the high street, go out, and return it after the weekend. With the amount of defective by design, counterfeit and plain iffy product in Amazon's co-mingled marketplace inventory I expect there's been false positives just by being unlucky in product choices.

gormz2• 8 years ago

What's a good gmail alternative?

nol13• 8 years ago

lycos!

No, really. even though free accounts ending. Actually not even sure if you can sign up at the moment. Has basically 'just worked' for years though, hopefully they stay in business. :/

CryoLogic2• 8 years ago

Zoho is excellent and fills almost all the gaps of GSuite.

taneq• 8 years ago

Your own email account on a VPS or other web hosting? I've been doing this for my work email for years, moved my personal email over at the start of the year and so far it's worked perfectly. Thunderbird's support for long email threads isn't as good as Gmail's but that's about the only downside I've seen (and that's a downside of Thunderbird, not of the approach to email).

ganeshkrishnan2• 8 years ago

Exact same thing happened to our previous startup cohort. To top it off the dev already had a banned account before he joined the startup and had a "poisoned" banned play account. He logged in via google multi-login account to the startup and in a few days google banned the entire startup. The whole seed funding, adsense, docs everything gone up in smoke. Funny thing; only adwords was not banned and they kept siphoning off funds for non existential apps. The Founders found everything banned and didn't bother to check if adwords was also banned; and it wasn't. Sneaky google. Sneaky

dmak5• 8 years ago

How did you resolve it? Did anything happen to the employee?

progval• 8 years ago

Sounds like a nice way to sink a competitor.

antihero3• 8 years ago

It was a story like this years ago that prompted me to switch to FastMail. Have never looked back.

dx0345• 8 years ago

Question for those with a bit more knowledge in this area: How large does the company have to be so that you're excluded from those kind of enforcement actions? With most companies (e.g. Microsoft), large enterprise customers get very different terms and are excluded from all the usual "customer service". Is that the same with Google? Otherwise I couldn't imagine that this would make it into any large companies.

jankotek• 8 years ago

It is not about size. Google has horrible customer support.

dx0345• 8 years ago

I read recently that this is only the case if you don't pay for any of the products?

wtfstatists• 8 years ago

Nah its just stupid programming from Google. You will spook GMail if you try to access from different country. It will lock you out. Good luck trying to remember details about your decade old email account.

You thought knowing and maintaing strong password is enough to guarantee access. Well Google disagrees with you.

teddyh• 8 years ago

As I said three years ago¹, I think Google is too large to have actual customers, per se, since any group of paying users is still too small for Google to need to pay attention to.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9911461#9912754

tobyhinloopen2• 8 years ago

A company I work for does have personal support from Google. They get invited to private Google presentations for new products as well.

This company employs about 1000 people and is active in half of Europe, with somewhere around 20 million users of their software. (rough estimates here) The company switched from Google to Microsoft before, and back to Google.

Currently, they also use Google Cloud for hosting, including their proprietary APIs/services like their entity storage.

We even have all kinds of "Google"-branded goodies from these events :)

toomanybeersies2• 8 years ago

And this is why I have my own domain, specifically for my email address. It doesn't have a website or anything, just a single email address, for my personal use.

That way I have full control of my domain name, right up until the point where I forget to renew it, and a domain squatter takes it from me.

There really must be something better than either of these systems. Being at the whims of Google isn't good, but having your own domain name has its own set of problems.

This also highlights why companies need to ensure that their systems are platform agnostic. This is why I don't trust things like Slack for business critical applications. Once you're locked in, it's bloody hard to get out.

pentae• 8 years ago

How do you know the OP wasn't using his own domain? It's pretty much standard fare for G Suite.

sudhirj• 8 years ago

Think GSuite only works on your own domain. If you want gmail.com that's just regular Gmail.

toomanybeersies2• 8 years ago

I was meaning more for individuals, rather than businesses.

If your business is in G Suite, it is possible to migrate off as you do have your own domain name, just point your DNS records to your new server, and generate new mail accounts.

I was meaning more for personal use. I don't want my personal email address to be at the whim of Google, which it would be if I used an @gmail.com email address.

Obviously my email hosting is still at the whim of the host, who, like Google, can just cut my service if they want, but that's always a risk. I could host my email on DigitalOcean, but DO could cut my service. So I could host it on my home computer, but (ignoring spam filtering problems and uptime) my ISP could cut my service.

jore• 8 years ago

I also think am own domain and email is the better option and I cannot understand why a company of 100-150 employees would use google mail. Is it because of searching, sorting options or something else that is much better with gmail?

lawl• 8 years ago

A company I worked for (about this size) did it because cloud and gdocs and supposedly cheaper than buying exchange and office licenses and paying someone to admin it.

As much as I dislike MS, that still seems better than having your data held hostage.

ocdtrekkie11• 8 years ago

If you manage to forget to renew a domain on GoDaddy, you have only yourself to blame. Even if you have auto renew on, they start nagging you about it months in advance. Downright annoying, but I am always acutely aware of when a domain is expiring any time in the next... Year or two.

suhastech2• 8 years ago

I build a small personal email backup solution. This is exactly what I suggest the users to do. If you have a profession that has a lot to do with the internet, having an own domain is almost compulsory.

https://thehorcrux.com/about/

flyinghamster• 8 years ago

I've been doing that for years. Unfortunately, there's a fly in the ointment that seems to have been triggered by moving to a different virtual host on the same provider. AT&T has my new IP address on its own private RBL for some reason, even though a multi-RBL check at mail-abuse.org shows zero hits. SPF+DKIM apparently isn't good enough for them.

I have no problems sending mail to people on Comcast, Yahoo, GMail, or anywhere else - just AT&T domains.

I don't send out large volumes of email, nobody else is abusing my server, and attempts to resolve this go nowhere.

ocdtrekkie11• 8 years ago

My web host leaves all IPs they own, including statics, on an RBL that lists and blocks dynamic IPs until you explicitly request they remove your IP from it. Essentially it ensures they don't have to worry about 99% of their IPs being used by spammers.

znpy3• 8 years ago

That way I have full control of my domain name, right up until the point where I forget to renew it, and a domain squatter takes it from me.

This is why i renew my domain for nine (9) years at the time. Currently, my passport expires earlier than my main domain. Yup, I got my priorities straight.

adtac• 8 years ago

Any particular reason why nine years instead of the 10 years dommain registrars allow?

notatoad• 8 years ago

having unrelated personal accounts locked because they're set as the recovery account for an account that was tangentially related to a ToS violation is absolutely unacceptable. there's no plausible reason for that other than to inconvenience as many people as possible.

guessmyname• 8 years ago

I read that and got genuinely preoccupied.

I immediately started reviewing the recovery options of my corporate account and de-linked all my personal information (personal email address, personal phone number for two-factor authentication, etc). I prefer to have my corporate account hacked for not having 2FA enabled than to risk my personal Google account to be locked. I went ahead and created a non-personal account with another email provider for the recovery options and tomorrow morning I will request my employer for a corporate phone number to set-up 2FA.

dannyw• 8 years ago

Don't worry. even if you don't have any recovery emails set up, Google's anti-abuse systems still link accounts that it believes are related (same cookies, same Chrome SafeSearch / phone-home headers and IDs, etc).

perl4ever• 8 years ago

I had an interesting problem with my gmail account - I had a backup email address and my phone linked to it. Then I needed to reset my gmail password, but I no longer had access to my backup email (was at an organization I left).

So, even though I still had access to my phone and even though I was still logged in to the gmail account, and even though I had many archived emails, I could never log in to it again and had to abandon it. Automated recovery didn't work and of course they wouldn't say why.

Having a backup seems like a trap or catch-22 when it becomes the single point of failure.

kuschku2• 8 years ago

Similar here, except the phone number ran out (prepaid numbers run out after 6 months unused here).

I tried everything, messaged friends at Google, nothing.

In the end the only solution that worked was waiting until a new person by random chance got allocated the same phone number, calling them, and getting them to send me my reset code they got via SMS.

zawerf• 8 years ago

It's insane that a mere ToS violation (not even anything criminal or large scale) on a different Google product got not only his account banned, but all related accounts across all Google products banned also.

It makes me really worry about things I have done that are truly against their ToS. For example after Google Cloud Platform announced a $300 credit promo for new users, I made another gmail account just to try them out. I don't think what I did is unethical or even against the spirit of their promo so I didn't bother to hide the connection back to my real gmail. Will google use this to ban my real google account one day? Probably not, but before this story I naively believed the answer was definitely no.

jakeogh• 8 years ago

They should offer it as a feature.

sdhgaiojfsa• 8 years ago

It's insane . . .

Yes. So insane one suspects it may not be true.

ucaetano2• 8 years ago

not even anything criminal or large scale

Yeah, engaging in corporate piracy, just a minor violation.

eh78ssxv2f4• 8 years ago

Wait, are we sure that this really happened? Seems very unlikely, and even the OP did not present any evidence. I would be really surprised if Google would be scanning emails, and using that to ban the gsuite account of the entire company.

A red flag for me is the claim that Google also blocked accounts that were set for recovery which seems almost close to impossible (or insane).

pmlnr• 8 years ago

This is not the first case like this:

https://plus.google.com/+RichWarren/posts/QkKTxAbKGdq

falcon620• 8 years ago

Personal gmail (which is used in your example) != gsuite (which is used in company settings)

eh78ssxv2f4• 8 years ago

I think the post that you linked to describes a much simpler case: One Google account violated the policies and could land Google in bad water (privacy laws around children as well as COPPA), so they blocked access to that specific account. It can be argued that it is reasonable. It can also be argued that Google should put more engineering effort in collecting less information especially when account holder is minor.

However, blocking access of other co-workers as well as blocking access to personal accounts (which are simply set as recovery accounts, and could as well be accounts of spouses/partners) because of some other account holder's mistake is completely different. So, I would argue that the incident described in Reddit is indeed the first case.

hutzlibu4• 8 years ago

"A red flag for me is the claim that Google also blocked accounts that were set for recovery which seems almost close to impossible (or insane)."

Why should that be impossible? They are clearly linked (you have to own to other account, to accept it beeing used as the recovery account of the first one).

And the intention of google is probably to fight scammers etc. - and I can imagine it disrupts them a bit, if all associated accounts get banned. So I can imagine that it is a real case ... of collateral damage

Edit: stating of how I see the situation from the perspective of google, does not mean I approve it, and neither collateral damage in general

IshKebab• 8 years ago

Because the implication when you set up a recovery account is that it will only be used for recovering your account. It never says anything like "do you want to link these accounts". It is totally implied that you could use a friend's account for example and banning them for something you did is insane.

xfer2• 8 years ago

Google is not scanning emails, he used his work google account to "abuse" the refund policy.

DROP_TABLE_user• 8 years ago

Of course Google scans emails for illegal content. See for example https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/04/google-ch...

jimrandomh• 8 years ago

I'd really like to hear Google's side of this story, since the story as-written doesn't seem plausible.

dvfjsdhgfv6• 8 years ago

Everybody wants to hear it, but Google can't tell it. One part of the fight with the bad guys is never to tell them how they got caught, so they never know how to protect themselves.

fauigerzigerk2• 8 years ago

There's a difference between telling someone what they did wrong and telling them how they got caught.

The former should be a legal requirement. But I'm not sure what actually happened in this particular case. We don't even know if it concerns a G Suite account and what the company was or wasn't told about why they got banned.

scardine4• 8 years ago

Sure. Let's go ahead and turn the world into a Kafkaesque nightmare where you are prosecuted but has no right to know why. Justice system is perfect so if the man says you are guilty it's because you are. /S

themaninthedark• 8 years ago

Security through obscurity is a bad design.

swebs2• 8 years ago

Their policy is to not share any information about what caused this and they will not reverse these actions.

There's their side of the story.

raverbashing3• 8 years ago

I don't remember of Google providing a PR response to any moderately controversial mistake they made.

They most likely don't have anyone to speak for the company except on bigger issues. Even their product forums are staffed with "community experts" who no one knows if they're Google, community or a 3rd party service and no one with enough authority and knowledge to properly manage things.

pbhjpbhj2• 8 years ago

"except on bigger issues"

Internet: You're accused of not caring about any but the very largest of corporate customers, nor individual customers, and damaging companies that use your products.

Google: We don't respond to such minor issues.

It's a massive issue IMO. They know what they're doing, they just don't want to be overt with it as that will damage their rep.

alexdiacre6• 8 years ago

Hi jimrandomh

Alex here from G Suite Cloud Support at Google. We're limited on what we're able to share in public forums related to specific customer situations.

ucaetano2• 8 years ago

From a post higher up:

TL;DR: After extensive investigation, case review and working with a variety of internal teams, we’ve have not found any supporting evidence to corroborate these claims.

Greetings. This is Alex Diacre again from Google’s G Suite Support team with a followup. In order to protect the privacy of all our customers and users, it is our policy not to disclose information relating to specific customer accounts in public forums. But given the amount of attention this post received, I’d like to offer some insight on the results of our investigation on this matter:

-The original poster on Reddit (OP) did not identify him/herself or the customer account. We have made several attempts to reach out to the OP through PM, but have yet to receive a response. (If the OP or someone from his/her company is reading this, please get in touch with me).

- We have tried to identify the customer based on the information in the original post, including an extensive review of recent support cases, but have not found any cases resembling the description.

To note, Technical Support is available to G Suite customers 24/7 via chat, phone and email. We’re happy to work with the OP to investigate this matter further; until then, we have not found any supporting evidence to corroborate these claims. Technical Support can be accessed at https://gsuite.google.com/support/*

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dvfjsdhgfv6• 8 years ago

Things like these can happen with any service provider. The key difference is that no other company has so many popular services linked together. Using Google this way basically means putting all one's eggs in one basket. We all know it's an unwise thing to do. An yet, people do it every day, for convenience.

Personally, I set up separate Gmail accounts for their different services. First, I don't want them to profile me automatically (they do it through correlation anyway, but let's not make it too easy), and second, in situations like these, only some of the eggs are broken.

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dgiol• 8 years ago

That's unlikely to work. You are still putting all your eggs in one basket. This seems to be a variation of the setup this company has/had.

Unless you are using different browser profiles or installations, and IP addresses for each account every single time you use them, it's very easy for Google to see that requests are coming from the same computer. If you were shut down, they would be able to do it as in the example, all accounts closed at once.

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auslander8• 8 years ago

different browser profiles or installations, and IP addresses for each account

People underestimate power of IP tracking. Use VPN. Plus, a must, have uBlock Origin in medium blocking mode (3p-scripts and 3p-frames blocked). Today EVERY website makes several google*.com API calls.

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dvfjsdhgfv6• 8 years ago

Well, it works somewhat. I keep my main email account separate from adwords, adsense, GA (although I now replaced it by Matomo, there is no reason whatsoever to use GA now), and Google Play. Ditto for their other services. I had a problem with one of the accounts a while ago - Google didn't "recognize the device" (this often happens as I have strict browser cleanup policies) and I lost access to the account because it was linked to a phone number I lost 10 years ago and forgot to change the number in the account settings. In this case, I lost access to just one account and I didn't care that much. If I used one account for everything I'd have gone mad.

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elorant• 8 years ago

The key difference is that Google's customer support sucks. I can't think of any other service where a client with 150 accounts can't get on the phone with a human being and get things sorted out pronto.

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askvictor4• 8 years ago

If they're a client (with a G-suite account) then they can definitely get on the phone to tech support (I've done that numerous times). If they have 150 personal gmail accounts for free then that's something different. You get what you pay for.

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auslander8• 8 years ago

SkyNet, you signed up voluntarily.

and our boss is looking to migrate away from Google

only if it is not too late. 'Don't be evil' was removed from the code of conduct's preface in 2018.

I commented 2 days ago on other thread:

Your kids share their assignments to it, your company uses it for all comms, you use it for private messages, you tell it your secret desires via searches, it knows who you're with at any point of time with android location ... Google Home? My home? SkyNet must be destroyed now.

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raverbashing3• 8 years ago

It's funny how GMaps is insisting to have me set a 'home and work' location as of lately.

Thanks but no thanks. Of course they already might have an idea, but seems it's not enough for it to be certain.

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auslander8• 8 years ago

If it prompts you to set it, it means your browser is Already logged in in some tab (Auth cookie set). That is Bad idea.

Login only when necessary and Always use private browser windows and tabs, it kills all sorts of cookies/storages.

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jkaplowitz2• 8 years ago

only if it is not too late. 'Don't be evil' was removed from the code of conduct's preface in 2018.

That is technically true but leaves the wrong impression. The code of conduct got reworded, leaving "Don't be evil" in a single prominent mention at the very end.

"Removed" is only accurate for the preface; for the whole document, "deemphasized" is more correct (and that's only because many people don't read to the end where they'd now be left with "don't be evil" visible after doing so).

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auslander8• 8 years ago

Impression is still right.

While your clarification is technically correct :D, I was talking about the Trend of moving it to less prominent places over time.

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auslander8• 8 years ago

Did I left wrong impression ? Compare:

1) "Don't be evil." Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But "Don't be evil" is much more than that... The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put "Don't be evil" into practice... - at the very beginning.

This whole section in now gone, as if never happened ... web.archive.org/web/20180121070136/abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

2) "And remember… don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right – speak up!" - at the end of lengthy document, After the Conclusion section. abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html

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ssijak• 8 years ago

I got my google account banned several times.

Several years ago I had my account payment features banned with no explanation. That in turn basically banned me from most of Google services because I could not pay for them or use them because payments were banned. No adwords, adsense, no google cloud services, no buying android apps, nothing... With no explanation, no support, and I tried hard just to find out what I did wrong.

After that I come to terms that I have to leave my email that I used for like 10 years and make a new one. But, this time I first bought a domain name and then started paying for google apps. This way if they ban me for whatever reason I could at least take my email address to some other email provider. Anyhow, sometime later youtube enabled Adsense on videos for my country. I enabled it out of curiosity, just to see what is the process of doing and using it. I don`t have videos on my channel except one random from the gym that I uploaded 1-2 years ago. So, I just enabled adsense poked at that for 1 day and left it unused. Sometime after that I got an email that my adsense and adword account is banned for violating policy (not saying which one). No explanation why, nothing!!! I tried to get an explanation like REALLY hard, but could not. You are just stuck in an endless loop of robot answers, or not getting answers at all. They even have google forms for complaints which point me to some URL that I am banned from viewing, lol. And there is some other form that no one answers when you fill it and I filled it 10 times.

Long story short, I slowly started migrating from Google services. This is really maddening and scary that they can just cut you off from your data without explanation. I use Google Photos heavily and even a possibility that they could cut me off from my photos at any time is sickening. That is why I bought NAS which backups my Google Photos to physical drives in my apartment. Now I just need to find something comparable to Google Photos and leave that service for good...

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jarym3• 8 years ago

Where to begin with this.. hmm..

First you:

"I have a friend who creates Android apps on the side. I do something similar to this, but instead my apps revolve around cloning .apk files and restoring them". Why not be clear and just admit you're pirating software off an App Store? Ok, not the smartest activity in the world BUT did you have to do it at work?

Then Google:

"We were all freaking out, our IT guys were trying to get a hold of Google but couldn't get in touch with anyone." - So yea, unless you're one of Google's 'poster' customers, good luck trying to get help when something goes wrong!

"Their policy is to not share any information about what caused this and they will not reverse these actions." - Yup, that's Google. Unless you're one of the customers on this list: https://gsuite.google.com/customers/ you are totally screwed when something goes wrong.

I introduce the world to the ToS-DoS Attack - only a matter of time before this now gets exploited:

- Hack into a companies GSuite account and create a new account.

- Use the new account to commit a range of ToS violations.

- Wait for Google to suspend the entire GSuite account.

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flukus5• 8 years ago

I got the impression that step 1 isn't needed, it was more:

1. Create a google account and set your recovery email to the victims.

2. Use the new account to commit a range of ToS violations.

3. Wait for Google to suspend the entire GSuite account and every linked account.

For step 1 I don't think there is (or at least wasn't) any validation, I found out a family member had me as their recovery address when they changed passwords.

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hknd3• 8 years ago

A "victim" would need to approve being used as a recovery account. (click link in mail etc.)

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jarym3• 8 years ago

Wow. Well this just keeps getting better.

No wonder Google don't want to discuss their suspension practices - just another form of '(in)security through obscurity'.

If the hearsay is correct then this appears to be a hole the size of a galaxy!

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giancarlostoro4• 8 years ago

They recently started to notify the other email, they wouldn't stop emailing me to verify on my new recovery email after I added it in.

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josefresco5• 8 years ago

" So yea, unless you're one of Google's 'poster' customers, good luck trying to get help when something goes wrong!"

This is just plain wrong. I contact Google for tiny, insignificant clients on a routine basis. This claim has no basis in reality if you're using paid G Suite.

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jarym3• 8 years ago

I am involved with paid GSuite at 3 organisations (one of which is a big fish customer) and I can tell you the difference in experience is night and day.

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tehwebguy2• 8 years ago

Any incidents where Google terminated the paid account? No longer a paying customer at that point.

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aogl2• 8 years ago

This is when I really wish Amazon had a free email service to compete. Their customer service always rocks!

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pdkl952• 8 years ago

When mission critical parts, tools, or infrastructure is moved to "the cloud" (aka computers owned by someone else that you do not control) - often replacing in-house tools with a SaaSS[1] - a second source[2] is rarely discussed as a requirement. The "cloud" doesn't magically solve path dependency.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source

edit: my father once mentioned that when he was working at Honneywell in Minneapolis (making home automation in the 80s), some of the engineers frequented a local bar called literally "The Second Source". "Sorry boss, I'm busy this afternoon - I have a meeting at the second source!"

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dbg31415• 8 years ago

Not the point of this post, but man... the new Reddit design is so bad.

It's like someone new to HTML tried to re-create a Facebook page using a scan of a screenshot, and just changed it enough to try and say it wasn't a total knock off.

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ktpsns• 8 years ago

It's just the layout of the particular subreddit. The overall reddit layout has not changed.

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jwilk2• 8 years ago

There is a new Reddit layout, but it's not enabled for everybody yet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741867

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jwilk2• 8 years ago

Use old.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com to get the old layout.

If you use HTTPS Everywhere, you can abuse it to make redirects like this automatic.

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RVuRnvbM2e• 8 years ago

Firefox has this awesome plugin for exactly this purpose: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

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CryoLogic2• 8 years ago

In greasemonkey or tampermonkey:

  if (window.location.host.indexOf('old') === -1) {

   window.location.host = window.location.host.replace('www', 'old');

  }

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wruza• 8 years ago

But what is account association? Do my accounts associate when I log into one and then into another via google’s log in form (the one with stupid login/password separation)? Or did they connect all the accounts by hand via something like backup email?

What if my buddy logs into gmail on my laptop, logs out, and then one of us violates ToS?

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suhastech2• 8 years ago

Similar thing happened to me. Google randomly disabled my account for no reason. There was absolutely no way to contact them. From that day onward, I do not trust Google or anyone to keep my data.

At least, I got a small product out of the experience: https://thehorcrux.com/why-i-built-horcrux-app/

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megablast• 8 years ago

As a joke, every time my friend releases an app (usually paid), I buy the app and clone it with my software, and then refund it. After that, I send him an e-mail with the cloned version through Gmail with something along the lines of: "Look at this cool app I found on the store, it was completely free! Try it out!", or stupid shit like that. It was a bit of a stupid inside joke that kind of stuck for a while and was only between us.

This sounds so strange, and surely it wouldn't get you banned. Why would someone keep doing the same joke.

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dmak5• 8 years ago

Why not? You never had a family member or a friend who never lets you live down some silly thing that happened at a Christmas party?

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dandare• 8 years ago

Stories like these document how immature Google is for the B2B market.

No sane company can risk being obliterated by Google's bully ToS and ignorant support.

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amelius• 8 years ago

Just call customer service ...

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antocv2• 8 years ago

Time to

1) grab/download the entire mailbox from Gmail 2) delete the mailbox at Gmail 3) export all gdrive data, use the export function 4) delete the gdrive data

5) register with fastmail, yandex or protonmail 6) start mailpile on your raspberry pi or similar 7) use mailpile as frontend for yandex/protonmail/other-imap account.

8) nextcloud as good enough but shitty replacement for gdrive

Self-hosted ftw.

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jorgemf• 8 years ago

yesterday was too late to make backups...

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giancarlostoro4• 8 years ago

I'm still surprised there's no better alternatives to Nextcloud out there yet.

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ocdtrekkie11• 8 years ago

There are. I use Sandstorm.io and Cloudron is also out there. They're modern containerized platforms you can run any number of other open source web apps on.

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antocv2• 8 years ago

I am surprised as you. Perhaps people who get started working on it quickly end up working on distributed file systems in general, and disappear in that hole.

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tortasaur• 8 years ago

Nextcloud could be better in some areas, but I don't see how it's bad. I'm very happy with it for personal cloud storage I can trust.

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xugo• 8 years ago

Not up to date on Google Play developer terms but doesn't a customer requesting a refund makes the developer still liable for Google fees ? If so that's a very shitty thing to do to your friend.

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yladiz• 8 years ago

To me, what's telling about this is not that it may or may not have happened, but that people could believe it happened (even through a skeptical lens), and that some people believe that this sort of thing wouldn't happen if you had Microsoft or Amazon accounts, at least not in the same way.

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Spearchucker• 8 years ago

Using a service that can be withdrawn at random without recourse is irresponsible. Whoever makes a decision like that needs a lesson in risk management. Blows my mind.

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telltruth• 8 years ago

OP said you can log in to banned accounts but can't do anything. I would expect an email from Google that tells me why account got banned and whom to contact. If they are not doing that then that's pretty dumb.

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Nebasuke• 8 years ago

Re-reading the story, it seems to me they had a manual solution, linking personally made Google email accounts to serve as a corporate email (rather than using GSuite), which is probably why all the accounts were seen by the automated banning system as all owned by the reddit OP.

If they actually got GSuite they might have had a semblance of support. Still a crap response from Google as usual.

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Yizahi• 8 years ago

It not exactly new that Google has zero customer support and not the first (and for sure not the last) horror story about automatic bans on Google services. If anyone treats Google accounts in any way as permanent or reliable - "this" may happen to you too. It may even happen will no fault at all from your side - e.g. someone would have a linked youtube account and bigcorp will take it down for a copyright on a white noise video and then whole linked account structure will crumple down like house of cards. Or any of the thousands alternative reasons.

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sharecropper• 8 years ago

I grew my vegetables on a neighbours allotment, he even lent me tools to make the process easier. After a while, out families crops were solely grown there.

One day, we were kicked off the allotment, out access to the crops gone in an instant.

I tried to remonstrate, but just got a waving hand in the face.

I am hoping if I publicise it enough in the local gardening forums, the allotment owner might feel a slight bit of pressure to act in this case, but apparently others who used his land didn't dare so well without someone trumpeting their case.

If only we had maintained the knowledge how to tend our own garden.

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josefresco5• 8 years ago

"It not exactly new that Google has zero customer support"

It's also not true. Maybe for "free" services but paid G Suite accounts have telephone, live chat and email support. I've used it frequently.

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stordoff• 8 years ago

I pay for a single user account, and have received good customer support relating to some DKIM issues (including multiple follow-ups months later when a related issue was fixed, without my prompting).

Characterising that as "zero customer support" is unfair.

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jk23232• 8 years ago

"some of their personal e-mails are also blocked as well. "

Never, never ever use a gmail account for anything important. I learned it the hard way and once nearly lost a domain because of this.

gandi.net offers domains with free IMAP email service

infomaniak.com is also good for email. Switzerland based.

" our IT guys were trying to get a hold of Google but couldn't get in touch with anyone."

ROTFL.

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znpy3• 8 years ago

I wonder what would have happened if that guy's company also used Google Cloud (as in "Google Cloud Platform").

Would have google ketp all of their data and services hostage?

This is freaking scary. Just one rogue employee and everything goes down.

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dis-sys• 8 years ago

He didn't do anything wrong and the way and excuses how Google refuses to provide any support for their paying customers is just not acceptable.

It is pretty clear that Google refuses to provide any support to actually minimize its own costs, it is so obvious.

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jk23232• 8 years ago

By the way, the day I went off gmail, I used a script like this to download all my emails: http://taoofmac.com/space/projects/imapbackup

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duiker101• 8 years ago

Pretty sure there's an option in the Google settings to download all your data from any of their services

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sschueller• 8 years ago

Yes, but you can use this script to make a continuous backup so you can keep using google but have your data when they decide to shut you off.

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josefresco5• 8 years ago

We use Thunderbird Portable.

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mark_l_watson• 8 years ago

This is a potential problem for medium size businesses. Very large companies that use Google Office products have dedicated support people at Google.

This also doesn’t have to be a problem for individuals. I often use gmail, but only by forwarding my fastmail to it. I can stop using gmail at anytime (which I do often when not travelling and don’t need the extra services). I also back up my Google data periodically, so the only absolute loss for getting locked out of my account would be the digital content purchased at Google Play.

But, for small and medium businesses, beware.

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gsich3• 8 years ago

This is why you self-host as much as possible.

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reza_n• 8 years ago

I pay $5 a month for a custom domain gmail account and last year I had an issue connecting to their POP3 service. Opened a support ticket and got extremely high quality support immediately. Basically, my experience was the opposite of all the horror stories which always get echoed in these support threads.

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pdkl952• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

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tjpnz• 8 years ago

If this was indeed GSuite then it really seems like a lawsuit in the making. It wouldn't be hard for a judge to nullify Google's TOS either as they quite often include terms that are illegal in some jurisdictions.

Will definitely be sharing this story with our team in the morning.

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josefresco5• 8 years ago

I don't buy the "we couldn't get a hold of Google" claim. I contact Google via telephone, chat and email all the time for clients - never had a problem making contact or having my issue resolved. Odd.

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billyjoejoe2122• 8 years ago

It seems the problem was, they were banned, so Google no longer considered them a customer. Which is a Kafkaesque nightmare scenario. But the thread (on reddit) was locked and the guy hasn't updated since yesterday. None of the people involved with Google (one guy at reddit said he worked with the GSuite team and would look into it, some guy on here said he was with Google services and is looking into it, etc.) will update out of the risk of losing their jobs. So I'm afraid the only hope we have for an update is if the original guy comes out and gives a play-by-play after this is resolved.

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crazygringo3• 8 years ago

None of this makes any sense, I simply don't believe it.

G Suite for Business is an enterprise product costing $5-25/user/month with 24x7 phone support, escalation paths, contractual SLA's, etc. It competes heavily and directly with Microsoft. A company doesn't get "banned".

This smells like black PR to me... playing on Google's lack of support/transparency around free consumer accounts and trying to get people to associate it with their Enterprise division.

I mean come on, just the way it's written: "One of the girls at work was fucking bawling her eyes out since she couldn't access her e-mail either." and the final "I do not know why Google has a scorched-earth policy when it comes to this kind of stuff, but I fucked up and our boss is looking to migrate away from Google even though we just recently signed on not too long ago." It just feels too obvious.

(Also, G Suite for Business accounts don't have recovery e-mails -- your admin takes care of your account -- so the supposed personal bans sound made-up too. EDIT thanks to ballenf below -- by default users can't set recovery e-mails, but a G Suite admin can enable that option for their domain.)

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ptero• 8 years ago

I suspect the company was using the free consumer version. That comes with little escalation, etc. They probably should have used something different for business email for a company with 100+ people, but this is not the point.

The valid point, if true, is that an action of one individual caused a major disruption for a lot of other people that are connected to him only via google algorithms or some other vague means.

Banning non-violating business accounts from the business that breaks ToS is kind-of OK (but should be followed by a human interaction to check); banning personal accounts for folks because of their business ties is not. My 2c.

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cptskippy5• 8 years ago

The free edition was discontinued in 12/6/2012 and only supported 10 users. The new lowest tier, G Suite Basic, has 24/7 phone support.

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ballenf• 8 years ago

G Suite Business accounts absolutely do have recovery emails that can be, and often are, personal accounts. I'm in my gsuite account looking at the setting right now. And wondering if I should change it.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the whole incident as conspiracy. It sounds relatively plausible to me, but agree that there are clear holes in the guy's knowledge or explanation.

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Someone1234• 8 years ago

Can also confirm. Here is a screenshot (with personal details removed): https://i.imgur.com/cn7yiet.png

Just click Profile in top right -> My Account -> Sign-In & Security -> Signing in to Google and scroll down just a little.

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glogla• 8 years ago

And wondering if I should change it.

It's probably too late. If it was once there, they will keep it forever.

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ajross• 8 years ago

It sounds relatively plausible to me

Grandparent gave a ton of reasons, though, why this situation is particularly implausible. Why exactly do you disagree?

Again, B2B services like this are bound by actual, legal, signed contracts and real, monentary consideration, not EULAs and "free with ads" business models. Service providers don't have the freedom to unilaterally "ban" you, and that's literally one of the things you pay for.

It didn't happen, at least not as detailed in the post.

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starpilot• 8 years ago

I think it's real, though much of the story involves the "optimal Reddit protagonist": https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/2hbwoh/the_...

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Symmetry• 8 years ago

I doubt its black PR, the possibility of blowback seems to high relative to the gain. Rather, people making up tall tails on the internet to entertain people is entirely banal. And because lies and distortions can be much more interesting or outrageous than the truth they have a sad tendency to spread.

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kinsomo• 8 years ago

None of this makes any sense, I simply don't believe it.

Something similar happened to Josh Marshall, who wrote an article about it: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm:

So let’s review. We are paying customers of Google. We were forwarding emails from the site’s main address to all staffers. But because we receive a lot of spam, the spam that we were forwarding to ourselves marked us as a major spammer and led to Google banning all our emails with no notice in advance or notification after the fact.
You might imagine that once we got through to someone at Google and explained this ridiculous situation they’d fix it. Well, no. Once we got through to someone they explained what happened. They told us a few remedial actions we could take. Once we did that, over time the algorithm would cease to think we were spammers.

The article also has this really apt quote for understanding Google and many companies like it:

Google is so big and its customers and products (people are products) are so distant from its concerns that we’ve gotten caught up in or whiplashed by rules or systems that simply don’t make any sense or are affirmatively absurd in how they affect us. One thing I’ve observed with Google over the years is that it is institutionally so used to its ‘customers’ actually being its products that when it gets into businesses where it actually has customers it really has little sense of how to deal with them.

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pdeuchler• 8 years ago

I don't disagree with most of the takeaways here, but to be clear that email ban was entirely TPM's fault. They even admit to the cardinal sin of email sending: using one address for everything:

Many of you know that we have one company email address here at TPM. It’s the one linked at the top of the site. It’s the lifeblood of the whole operation.

I also know from personal experience they used to send newsletter/marketing/transactional email from the same address, which you should never do. They probably got a little spammy with some marketing or newsletter emails and got their domain blocked by Spamhaus or another intermediary, and like every other ESP google has automated systems to blanket ban when they see you pop up in a spamhaus list. Pretty simple.

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fenomas• 8 years ago

I mean come on, just the way it's written ... It just feels too obvious.

This is a hugely weak argument. Any legitimate complaint about bad service is likely to sound similar to a false accusation of bad service - that's the whole point, right? Sure a bad actor might say a girl was bawling her eyes out, but there's no reason why a real complainant wouldn't as well.

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tamrix• 8 years ago

This comment sounds like pro Google PR if anything.

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rrcaptain• 8 years ago

Eh. I doubt it's a PR move. More likely just some redditor making shit up.

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tehwebguy2• 8 years ago

Google’s “customer service” policies have always been trash.

IMO it’s a part of the culture there that will never change. Good reminder to switch as many services as possible from Google before something irreversible happens to our entire company and all of our personal email accounts / domains.

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phendrenad2• 8 years ago

our IT guys were trying to get a hold of Google but couldn't get in touch with anyone.

Try your legal team, if your badly-run company has one (I am not a lawyer). lol

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kelvin03• 8 years ago

I've posted many times on HN an anecdote of mine regarding using Google (paid) services. Basically got my ex-employer (30 people) company on board to using google docs accounts to share documents. Since this is a corporation we decided to go with the 50$/user/year, which we duly paid each year.

Things went swimmingly well, until a user reported seeing an error message, and then not being able to access the document at all. Escalation was a joke, and after a whole week of not having access to the critical google spreadsheet, Google was still fumbling around. Finally we got the document back, because one of the employees had kept the email containing the URL of the document (sent out when a document is shared with a group of people).

If it wasn't for that old email kept by an employee, we'd probably never would have 'found' the document again. Google's support was at best incompetent.

Beware dancing with the Dragon that is Google! Backup your files, keep important document URLS!

Hope this helps a poor soul somewhere.

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dmak5• 8 years ago

Why couldn't you just search drive? It's not that big of an organization.

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kelvin03• 8 years ago

Just to be clear, ALL our documents were wiped out from view. We could not search anything.

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hungerstrike2• 8 years ago

This is basically the opposite of Microsoft. I've only had to call Microsoft less than a handful of times in my career because for the most part, their stuff just works... however on those occasions when I did call them I was able to get quickly through to a person and have my issue resolved within 24 hours.

As a matter of fact, with every MSDN subscription - you get two support incidents worth $500 each and if you tell them it's an emergency, they'll stay on the phone with you until the matter is resolved.

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pc86• 8 years ago

if you tell them it's an emergency, they'll stay on the phone with you until the matter is resolved.

That seems like a terrible idea. How many times has someone entered a "CRITICAL URGENT" support ticket regarding not being able to change their background image, or being blocked from downloading a game or something?

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cloudwizard• 8 years ago

My experience with Microsoft was different. Back in the day, I installed IIS server ( MS official web server) and it wiped my system. I called customer support and they said that I needed to reinstall to fix it. I re-installed everything. Installed IIS and everything was wiped again. Customer Support said that they could not help and I should wait for the next patch.

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Bobbleoxs2• 8 years ago

I remain neutral on the story's truthfulness but I think there's a difference between the quality of Google's engineers and the customer facing employees they hire.

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ghostbrainalpha• 8 years ago

Are you doubting that a Google spreadsheet disappeared from Google documents, and that support reps had a difficult time finding it?

That seems like a pretty weak criticism to make up. And the account your questioning has a history here, and is not promoting another product, so why would they make that up?

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firmgently• 8 years ago

I've seen comments similar to this before. Why would it matter? As an end user, knowing it was Department A rather than Department B that gave you a crappy experience is meaningless.

The company is responsible, whether that's down to culture or management or whatever else. If they focus on getting the best engineers but don't put the same effort into setting up the best customer service, that is very telling.

Enjoyable user experience isn't a high enough priority for Google. They have the resources and they choose where to focus them.

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dmak5• 8 years ago

I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned/promoted a product for decentralizing GSuite.

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organicmultiloc• 8 years ago

I love how the default way to get an actual human to respond to a real problem at google is now:

1. Be famous

2. Make a stink on social media

I feel like I'm back in high school.

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lgregg4• 8 years ago

So, what are the best alternatives? I know about MS office and I think Zoho has email, who else is out there?

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GFischer3• 8 years ago

I'm using Zoho and have a good experience so far, they had some issues in the past but at least my experience with support is good.

When I looked into it, there weren't many appealing options. I wanted to use Yahoo but they had just spun out and wasn't too friendly.

I couldn't get a Microsoft platform for e-mail without them bundling Office365 and other stuff I didn't want, if not I'd have gone with them.

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lgregg4• 8 years ago

What types of issues did you encounter?

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flukus5• 8 years ago

If you think switching to other cloud solutions is the answer here then I think you missed the problem. The core problem with any of these services is that you no longer have control over your data.

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lgregg4• 8 years ago

I do understand the underlying problem, it's more or less looking for the one that treats the service as that... a service rather than myself as their product.

I could start my own mail server, but I'm not at that point yet.

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alexdiacre6• 8 years ago

Greetings. This is Alex Diacre here from G Suite Support. This has been flagged for my team and we’re looking into it. If anyone G Suite customer has trouble accessing their account they can always contact Google Cloud Support here: https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access (this is a special form to use when you cannot access)

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danirod• 8 years ago

Once again, it seems the only way to reach actual human support on the Google ecosystem is by having a "locked out of my account" thread trending on some social network.

It simply blows my mind that one of the most powerful tech companies in the world is still doing these mistakes. Not even the G Suite tier, which I would assume it's a more professional tier than the free one.

(Disclaimer: I'm assuming this Reddit post is true, which may or may not be the case here.)

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alexdiacre6• 8 years ago

Hi danirod

For G Suite Basic, Business and Enterprise customers we provide 24 x 7 support via chat, phone and email.

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profmonocle2• 8 years ago

Hi Alex, is there a chance we could get some follow-up on this? I manage the G Suite account at my company, and the idea that an irresponsible or disgruntled employee could take down our whole account is very worrying. (Especially since our G Suite accounts are tied to our GCP account.)

Assuming the story isn't simply made up, I'd rest easier knowing whatever caused the problem (both the initial mass banning and Google's unwillingness to help) has been fixed.

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alexdiacre6• 8 years ago

Hi profmonocle

We're limited on what we're able to share in public forums related to specific customer situations.

If you're not already doing the following we recommend the following steps to protect your G Suite account - have more than one super admin - ensure an up-to-date recovery email is in the account profile - ensure an up-to-date recovery phone is in the account profile - ensure account profile is properly updated - use two factor authentication for all users (ideally user security keys) - at a minimum, ensure that your G Suite administrator users are using two factor authentication

Lots more info on G Suite security best practices can be found here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/7587183

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alexdiacre6• 8 years ago

TL;DR: After extensive investigation, case review and working with a variety of internal teams, we’ve have not found any supporting evidence to corroborate these claims.

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natch2• 8 years ago

Phone Support
Available to G Suite administrators only. Log in to your admin account for verification.

If an account is banned, how would they log in to their admin account?

I have nothing to do with OP, don't know who they are, etc... Just curious how this would work when you don't display their phone number until they log in, and their login credentials might not work. Same for email and chat, according to the text of the page you linked (https://gsuite.google.com/support/).

Yet you mention these as ways to get support. Am I missing something?

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pvtmert• 8 years ago

IMHO testing payment works and getting apk then sending it to owner (proving its working) is pretty ok situation. of coursw you will request refund...

given these days deployment stuff can get infected easily (remember a framework contained malware in many apps in appstore)

there is services providing testflights for such stuff, but if npm/yarn/pypi/insert pkg manager here loads infected package, you're done

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mito88• 8 years ago

Why the toilet scene?

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Fanmade• 8 years ago

I made a similar experience with Google, just on a way smaller scale. I still use their service on a very small scale, but I would newer use them for a larger scale. While their services are mostly very convenient to use, some of their rules are ridiculous and even if you make a small mistake, they will ban you for lifetime. One example I have is when we built a little website for a school project. It was an obvious fake site about smart homes by a company that was basically developing the terminator. I included a Google ad on the site just to make it look more realistic. When it showed ads for robotics (which I'm very interested in) I clicked on it and so did my classmates. We suddenly had about three Euros in ad-revenue, when I got banned by AdWords (or AdSense, I always confuse one with the other). I wrote an email apologizing and explaining everything and thought they would just reset the account to zero, but nope. I now have a lifetime ban from any Google Ads service. I even asked again several years later when I've had a bigger site that I wanted to put some ads on, but apparently my actions where so incredibly evil, that I will never be able to use those services ever again (if I don't create a new Gmail account that is). That doesn't keep them from sending me vouchers and ads to use those services, of course. Well, good thing there are a lot of alternatives which I am happily using without any incident and I learned my lesson soon enough.

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miaklesp• 8 years ago

FastMail for mail Office 365 for office

Don't use Google, diversify with better products in each category.

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Rainymood• 8 years ago

The fact that this is/was upvoted so highly shows how deeply ingrained the "believe first, fact check later" mentality is in humans when the piece in question aligns with our personal worldview. This is exactly how fake news spreads.

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Getting Google to ban our entire company

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