Comment by Derek_MK | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Derek_MK | Hacker News Reader

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Wow, I've never been able to get a real person at Google to review a case of supposedly breaking ToS. My Google account got suspended for "traffic pumping". I didn't know what "traffic pumping" was at the time but after looking it up, it looks like they thought I was a bot for a phone carrier trying to commit fraud: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_pumping

For reference, I haven't ever used the Google account for anything like Google Duo, Allo, Hangouts, etc. There was an appeal system linked in the message saying "You broke the terms", but when I filled it out, about 24 hrs later I got a response saying "You can't appeal if you broke the terms", which seems inconsistent at best.

I managed to track down a Google support employee and basically told him "Hey, it should be obvious that I'm a real person and not a bot for a phone carrier". His response at first was "The appeal should work, let me know if it doesn't". I told him that it didn't work, and his response was "Well we're not allowed to help you if the automated system says you broke the terms. You must have broken the terms."

Happy for you getting anything out of them other than a brick wall, at least.

EDIT - To pre-empt some questions that may come up: I was using a unique, randomly generated password for my Google account. Plus, you have to be able to login to the account to see the "You broke the terms" message, so the password was definitely not changed.

"Trust The Computer. The Computer is your friend!"

We're descending into the parody dystopia envisioned in this game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)

In the early 90's, if I were to tell people that a mega-corporation would seek to take over all the world's information, and they would subject users to this Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare treatment straight out of the movie "Brazil," they'd think my brain was taken over by "Paranoia" the role playing game.

Unfortunately, most still would believe that.

I have half a mind to run a Paranoia game over lunch.

I'm sorry. Knowledge of that website is limited to citizens with Ultraviolet access, and I see you only have Red. Please report to your nearest Computer station to discuss next steps.

You know you can get anyone's google accounts banned by going to their website and setting up a bot to click their adsense. Or going to their playstore and clicking report. Or going to their youtube and clicking report.

You can pay to get your competitors banned permanently. That's what probably happened to your account and to my colleague's account as well.

But... It's a personal account, with no business value whatsoever. The only thing I could think of is someone trolling, but someone would really need to hate Bionicle video game speedruns, because that's pretty much all that was on my YouTube account.

Sorry man, you know how it is; competition is brutal in the overcrowded space of Bionicle video game speed runs. I had to do it in order to get the views.

"you must have broken the terms"

Is this attitude prevalent in Google: pure trust in automated systems? Engineers should know better than any that software is not perfect and it's insane to have blind trust in it.

I can totally understand it in cases where the alleged offense is something like uploading copyrighted content to YouTube, where there is clear evidence and an audit trail saying "Here's what you uploaded, here's when you uploaded it, and here's the point where the rights holder registered it in ContentID, etc"

But this is a case where they thought my account was a bot. And I contacted the guy, as a very real person. At that point it's pretty much just sticking one's fingers in one's ears yelling "NANANANANA"

> I can totally understand it in cases where the alleged offense is something like uploading copyrighted content to YouTube, where there is clear evidence and an audit trail saying "Here's what you uploaded, here's when you uploaded it, and here's the point where the rights holder registered it in ContentID, etc"

Probably not the best example. There are countless reports of ContentID falsely claiming copyright violations. I personally had a gaming video muted for violating some copyright by some company I never heard of when the only thing playing were ingame sound effects (no music).

> something like uploading copyrighted content to YouTube

Even that ain't clear cut. For example, if I upload a song to YouTube that's a remix of another song, and someone else uploads their own remix and registers it with ContentID, there's a risk that my remix will be flagged as "infringing" upon the other remix even though it is not a derivative of the other (and the other does not hold the copyright on the shared samples that triggered the ContentID detection).

I happen to know this because one of my own songs got erroneously flagged for this exact reason. Thankfully I was able to reach out to the company that submitted the ContentID registration on behalf of the "original" author, and they were able to rescind it (uploading remixes of songs to their ContentID management platform was in violation of their terms of service, so it was an open-and-shut case); else, I would've had to risk my own account getting flagged to death, since going through YouTube's appeals process would've been the only other option.

I've had copyright claims against Creative Commons music before. The automated systems are trash.

You don't get paid $300K without being a true believer.

Having previously worked at Google and seen how they communicate internally - yes, many people absolutely do make that kind of money there without agreeing with everything they do, and while objecting to much of it. However that doesn't mean that the people making internal objections always get to overrule the people making the mistakes. Clearly not.

To be clear, at Google there are cases where internal objections do affect what Google does; but nowhere near always.

(Note I haven't worked at Google for almost 4 years now and am not speaking for anyone other than myself in this comment.)

without agreeing with everything they do

Yeah I didn't say this.

I meant that many Googlers, even ones with such high compensation, aren't true believers.

It's cheaper that way--for them. So what if a % are banned by mistake? It would cost $xxmillion a year to lower the false positives but that's a lot etc etc...

I've had staff at an unnamed $10B tech company in CA tell me that they 'trusted their system' and that 'the data never lies' after one of their staff members made a process mistake by failing to log some information a few minutes earlier at a support kiosk while we were getting our passes set up. The practical result of the failure, if unremedied, would have been that I was out $3,000 and a week of my life was burned.

What ensued was an hour long debacle with staff yelling at my girlfriend until she broke down crying. She was accused of stealing, defrauding them, ruining the event. It was not pretty to the point that I had to physically restrain a friend of mine from starting an altercation.

I repeatedly, politely, and calmly asked them to speak with the support staff member who handled our issue to see if there was an issue. The manager told me "he's an idiot. His opinion doesn't matter. The computer isn't lying."

Eventually, after a lengthy period of time in which the manager insinuated I was a laundry list of undesirable things, relented. He went to go speak with the staff member and in doing so saw that our passes were literally sitting on his desk in plain view. They hadn't been logged as out of circulation, so our new passes weren't working yet.

He returned, told us he fixed the issue, did not apologize and walked off. A day later the company suffered one of their biggest PR gaffes to date while the manager in question sat in the front row aghast.

Turns out nerds (and I use that term with the greatest affection) can be stupid too.

Essentially they provide no meaningful non automated support of any variety and only respond when people post stories on social media.

The logical solution is to depend on them for nothing important because any service you depend on to make money may be withdrawn at any time with no notice of any kind.

Continue enjoying excellent services like search and maps while continuing to block the adds that may or may not contain malware.

The fact that this means google has no opportunity to derive any meaningful revenue from this sort of relationship isn't your problem. When they want to earn money they can figure out how to have actual support.

A unique random password doesn't matter much, as a lot of hijackers use password obtained using malware or phishing. Practically no account is hijacked through brute-force attack nowadays - in most cases it's impossible, and even when it's possible, it's unnecessarily costly and time-consuming for hijackers.

What you want is u2f (hardware security key), and if you don't want u2f for some reason (e.g. cost or usability), use some other 2-factor authentication methods. No amount of "randomly generated" password will make a difference for malware or phishing, which account for majority of account hijacking.

"If an item does not appear in our records, it does not exist."

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