Aussie ISV buys ads to wake up Google support
crn.com.au
crn.com.au
The second factor email was associated with my account, I could see reset codes come through which were relayed to her but would result in an 'oops, something went wrong'. My guess is a bug due to account age / whatever.
I figured we had enough evidence to obtain a password reset, so I googled for gmail support contact details. There are none.
I then tried repeatedly to contact Google via twitter, all my tweets were ignored - probably because I only have like 20 followers.
In the end, my mother ended up porting her old mobile number to a prepaid sim, as $previouscompany had disconnected the number entirely, and used that as the second factor to reset the account.
Pretty damn frustrating that Google doesn't have any unpaid inbound support _AT ALL_.
Next time I'll consider paying a twitter influencer to impersonate me (or my mother), or paying for adspace, or using a mail service that exposes at least some form of support.
That seems like a great idea in general :)
Frustrating? Yes. Surprising? No.
Afaik, there isn't even any paid support for individual customers unless you have some sort of business account. I find this a bit unreasonable, but I wouldn't expect any free service that involves a paid employee from any service I don't pay for (with money, not privacy).
They can't be making many dollars per year per user. A single support call answered by a human would take years' worth of income from said user. I'm amazed at how many people do not realize this, and still rely on these "free" services even for their jobs.
To give an example: recently, a popular blogger lost their Instagram account and it was sold to a 3rd party (because they had lots of followers, I suppose). Blogging is their day job and Instagram is a major source of readers for them, so they depend on it for their living. The account was probably stolen by using a reused password from some password dump and they didn't have 2FA enabled.
In the end, the blogger got back their account because they were a part of a traditional media publishing organization which had a business account with Facebook, Inc and were able to escalate it that way. Had they not had this account, it would have been lost.
There are lots and lots of professions where social media presence is required to bring in the customers (e.g. woodworkers these days depend on Instagram!) or even monetization from their account directly.
If you depend on Google, Facebook, Youtube, etc to earn a living, you should consider a business account or at least do your best to secure the account (2FA, no password reuse, etc).
I expected at least one response suggesting this. I, and many others would consider email access my absolute most critical asset, it's also extremely difficult to switch providers. It's not like your real estate goes 'nope sorry you can't prove yourself, we can't replace your lost keys without validation, sorry, go buy new stuff and live somewhere else' - I imagine that would be illegal in many countries even if the place was rent free.
I understand that Google support, if it existed, would be inundated with bad tickets. However, I don't imagine having a skeleton set of support staff and a support workflow that requires users to climb mountains to communicate with a human would really impact on googles bottom line. It would have stopped me venting in various places about the issue, and might end up losing potential sales when I/others push our employers to use $not_google because their support sucks.
So why not pay for it?
Are you able to name a reputable email provider which isn't >$60/year or self-managed? My 65 year old mother probably wouldn't be interested in either of those two, but would be willing to pay for per-use support lines for the one time in 13 years which rendered her account inaccessible.
And lets not forget my father, who couldn't access his _paid_ Telstra/O365 standard-user work email. When I called the Telstra support line they gave me administrative access to the entire instance, no proof of ID necessary (I literally said I'm not associated with the company and calling on behalf of my father).
To be honest, I'm not sure which is worse now that I think about it.
Called them to get access to our account after a problem, and they gave me admin with no verification at all. Just provided the account name, was asked for new password. Like... WTF?
Tried telling their security people, who then denied it happened, let alone it being a problem.
Our DNS hosting was moved away from Dotster shortly afterwards.
My laptop has a warranty that costs $60 year and I get nothing, nothing!, unless I break it. And don't even get me started on my car insurance!
But then when I actually needed supoort, they couldn't do anything but read forum posts to me. They were not empowered to escalate to actually resolve anything more complicated than "where's the button for X".
Even if you pay, Google still treats their users like shit.
Let's turn this around. Why is Google offering a free service that doesn't meet reasonable expectations for how that service works?
My repeated experience is that Google is good at things like search, where people get what they get and individual humans don't matter to the company. But they're bad at things that require treating people like people.
After being a happy Google hardware customer for years, I just had a purchasing experience that was so bad that I'll never buy from Google again. Their hardware and software won me as a customer; their customer service not only lost me, but was so bad it has made me more wary of doing business at all with any part of Google.
For me, this is in the "do or do not, there is no try" bucket. They don't really want to deal with humans, so they half-ass it. I wish they'd just stay out of those kinds of businesses, as their dominance and indifference to profit can mean crushing competitors and preventing the emergence of a real marketplace.
Even if I'm not using any of the other features, that seems like the cheapest support plan ever.
They say "Google experts"... so who staffed the phones? Are we talking actual customer support who are empowered to run playbooks and cut tickets, or what?
There is someone on the line and follow-up emails too.
But actually fixing things is a crap-shoot.
I've had an issue with Google One family accounts for a month now.
I can not invite anyone into my family, so far no solution. Instead they keep throwing free storage at various family members because they can not escalate very much.
It's not a free service. It's a surveillance company that spies on, profiles, and sells out its users for a profit in exchange for the services it offers. Most surveillance companies with email offerings have support. If Google doesn't, then it's taking something in exchange for nothing on top of doing less than the standard most of its competitors set in this area. It will also probably keep making revenue on the locked account for a little while despite its owner having no access.
Way different ethically or professionally than a situation where the user was getting free email with the other party getting absolutely nothing in return. Something truly free.
In that they know they're making a choice with consequences and pain. But they see the strategic value of that choice (never running a support org) as outweighing the tactical pain.
Additionally, I'd guess the internal opinion is "If users need support, then something is broken and we should just fix it."
Where I think this falls down, which Microsoft learned 30 years ago, is that:
(a) Unless you're asking, you're not going to surface visibility of broken things. Users will just find a way to deal, while being pissed off. And then some product team finds out there's been a major issue for the last 5 years.
(b) Unless you're actively soliciting feedback from your customers and users, you're at high risk of building the wrong thing. We see this with enterprise GCP frequently. "Oh, you need Y feature? We never thought about that, because {insert internal way that Google does things, but no one else does}."
If the EU ever gets around to forcing Google to support their users regardless of how they are enriching Google the moral of the story will be they saved billions by waiting until litigation. Just like taxes.
They actually do have basic customer support for free accounts, it just isn't very easy to find. I forget exactly how it works, but I was able to help someone in a similar situation recover their account by following the 'steps to recover your account' listed here:
https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/2402620#t...
After failing the automated recovery, it came up with an option to request a manual reset, with a free-entry text field asking what was wrong. It sent messages to the account and all of its recovery options with links to cancel the request, then after a few days someone took a look and was able to help.
Even though I have friends at Google, I can't find out what's going on. Apparently that team won't even talk to other Googlers. It's maddening. Now if I need something to really go through (e.g., contacting somebody about a job) I have to send the mail from my gmail account. That feels like rewarding them, but I don't seem to have a choice.
Personally, having experienced a similar thing but not regained access to the account, I never will.
Actively encouraging the exact opposite frankly.
Google tends to follow a playbook when it comes to account recovery, and if you can't check one of the boxes to get through, they won't let you back in. This is to stop account takeovers via support (which are known attack vectors people use against other companies, like cell phone providers).
While it's frustrating to lose access to you account, it is the tradeoff Google has made to try to keep your account safe.
And as far as Google employees being able to help, that channel has mainly been closed. Even if you know a Googler and have lost access to your account, the Googler will likely just tell you to follow the account recovery help page[0].
(I'm a googler, opinions are my own)
[0] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7682439?hl=en
Other companies solve this problem, Google hasn't and they should do better. Perhaps by involving a real support person.
If you involve a human, you're going to get socially engineered. It's not a question of "if", but "when" - especially if you're a high-value target where user accounts are valuable.
I was contacted by KFC corporate HQ and given lots of coupons. Then I was contacted by regional HQ and given more coupons. Then by the franchisee. More coupons and an apology. The food quality improved markedly. For a while.
Until you ran out of coupons?
[0] you can still send telegrams: https://www.itelegram.com/
Someone on reddit explained the machines are a pita to clean so people just refuse to load it in the first place and then tell everyone it's out.
What’s funny is that interactions between large tech companies can be very fluid in my experience. I guess there’s not a big power discontinuity in the big to big case...
My point in writing this is to say- great job thinking outside the box! Even if you can't fly to Google HQ, continue to think outside the box. Some ideas include Hire someone at taskrabbit or Craigslist, or a FB jobs page, to go to their front desk, or if unsuccessful, to hold a sign on public property in front of Google's HQ, you can get a banner or sign professionally made (online process are pretty reasonably priced). You could Skype with your stand-in. It would be really fun to get a Skype video call on a big iPad... or try something else.
Everybody thought I was crazy. I was. Crazy people get noticed, and often get results. Whatever the outcome, being able to tell an awesome story is always fun! Good luck, mate!
They had promotion on flights on their aussie website, but you can’t spend airpoints on aussie site. Same flight on NZ website was nearly 2x.
Didn’t work with Wizzair when they changed my flight time, notified I don’t need to do anything and then charged 30€ for check in.
Didn’t work with Air India - they don’t even have Twitter (just wanted to change my flight date and you can just imagine how bad their call center is).
If only those services weren't seeded with compromised accounts, I wouldn't even feel bad about it.
Flight is in couple of days, will see...
We're all joking about how creative you and the person mentioned in the article were.
It seems to have solved your issue and I'm happy for you.
However as we're all praising the irony and derision, really we're all sad of how broken the system is. Happy to finally be noticed as a customer is not the way a customer service should be.
Source: am the bloke who this story is about.
Lots of Google employees on HN who jump in defending everything Google does - so maybe your issue will get attention soon.
Sorry though, that you are going through this.
Nothing. Has. Changed.
Fuck you Google. Fuck. You.
You're too small for them to care, yet.
Are you working a full-time job and doing this as a side hustle?
Source: am Australian, live in the US, had to stop saying it except when on discord with friends back home.
It's a pity that one cannot get paid support from Google and has to resort to expensive lawyers instead.
So you live there now?
On to bank support, who don't have a category for "service is being provided but refusing to cancel" sigh
Needless to say, never using a Google service again.
Just say it like that. "X is stealing from this account. This is a fraudulent transaction." That frames it in a way they understand and they have a box for that.
It's also just like a former employee using passwords they are no longer authorized to use. It doesn't matter that they once had that access legitimately.
The only Google services I bother with are search, maps, youtube (in a non-logged-in viewing-only capacity, not a posting-my-own-videos capacity) and the android play store (paying for apps via gift cards). I don't trust google not to cancel new services on a metaphorical moment's notice, and I don't have any faith in reaching a human being if I have a billing problem. So I make sure not to tie my life in any way to my Google account.
It feels strange to say, as an old school Linux fanboy who vividly remembers the Halloween document release, but I tend to point "I want to move my business to the cloud" friends/acquaintances to Office 365 instead. Say what one will about Microsoft's scummy behaviour over the years, but no-one can claim they aren't into Office 365 for the long haul. And while it's not exactly easy to get a human being at Microsoft to fix a problem, it's certainly easier than Google.
CityMapper comes close but isn’t there.
FastMail support is worse than Google and has fewer features.
I've pointed out a number of errors in their FAQs, some technical and some spelling and grammar related.
They have always acknowledged the issue.
3 months later, the issues still remain. Oh well.
It really is, when first looking through a website to see if they have their stuff together.
Actually I use Fastmail, and am a big fan. I've never had an issue reaching support. Of course I've rarely had to, the service is pretty reliable.
As for features, I could flip that around on Gmail. Does Google rigidly adhere to imap/carddav/caldav standards so that standards-compliant clients have no problems whatsoever in connecting, or are there still cheerful little "quirks" when trying to use non-official clients with Gmail?
Google Boss: Hey employee 254199, I’m pleased to tell you that your request for maternally leave has been granted.
Google Employee 254199: Gee thanks, but little Tommy is now 2 fucking years old....
At least AWS are actually quite good at providing support to paying customers, such as raising API limits ...
These days I avoid putting myself in a position where I need Google support.
Why does anybody need Google's solution here so badly? It sounds pretty easy to develop such a thing.
Google Analytics isn't about logging in when someone is on your website.
It's about how it connects that data point to Google's huge dataset about everyone. Google Analytics tells you what kind of people are visiting your site (aka, segments): age, location, etc.
Also, more often than not, these tools aren't as capable as GA to design and watch conversion tunnels and behaviours.
And then there's the whole binding with Google Ads.
Replacing GA with only an Apache or php/node URL logger is missing the whole point of GA.
But avoiding that release process is also the reason why some deparments usually want GTM. It allows them to give GTM access to other people who can then inject stuff into your site. Once you have GTM you can let marketing / ad agencies add their own tracking points and other fun stuff to your site quickly. This unfortunately sounds like a great idea to marketing people.
Since none of that stuff is necessary for the site to work, leaving it blocked basically never breaks the website.
THING FIXED!
Media release and some of you here helped bigly yuge with the getting of Google to sort out.
Thanks to you all.
Bows
Not everyone is allowed, wants or is comfortable with direct access to their website code.