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Comment by deanmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

I had the same thoughts: even if I like Google Cloud a lot (I use it extensively at work), I don’t feel it’s safe for me to use it at home, since I don’t want to risk having my entire google account locked due to “suspicious activity”, whatever that might mean.

In fact, I recently shut down a personal App Engine service I had been using for myself for a few years just because of this paranoia. The service was not doing anything illegal, just crawling a few websites (forums, ...) I like and sending me emails when there are interesting updates. But you never know if they might determine my outbound traffic is suspicious. I also started the long process of moving my main email from a @gmail.com to a @custom.domain that currently forwards to gmail, just in case I get locked out.

It is quite bizzarre that this is the reputation google gained for themselves.

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> since I don’t want to risk having my entire google account locked due to “suspicious activity”, whatever that might mean.

Agreed. I often second guess my usage of various Google apps and services since I don't want to trigger some process that I would have no way of ever knowing.

The recent case of someone getting banned from using Apple Pay comes to mind (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841586)

Sounds like self-censorship in dystopia full of secret laws. I'm glad Google isn't running a country.

Their reputation has turned dramatically. Back in the day Penn and Teller's episode of BS about the death penalty said they might not mind the death penalty if Google were in charge of it. Maybe they were somehow being presciently ironic?

Sounds a lot more like abuse detection signals firing based on Apple Pay using virtual card numbers.

Apple says that their virtual card numbers protect your privacy because they're untraceable. Ok, but that also means that your using Apple pay is mostly indistinguishable from credit card fraud.

But, you ask, does Google really have to worry that much about fraud? Do people really phish known-good Google accounts, add a stolen card, and then buy a whole bunch of ads?

Well.... yeah. That's actually one of the primary uses for stolen credit cards.

Not only Google, just visit any online space and you will see a lot of arbitrariness, inconsistent rules, obscure decision making, etc. I honestly think that the best people to rule a country are the politicians: They are corrupt, narcisists and dangerous but at least they are somewhat professional in what they do.

I used to use google docs until they randomly locked one of the docs I was working on for a week due to one of their "suspicious activity" scripts. Really hammered in the message that if you don't host it then you don't own it.

I think the issue is you aren’t paying for it, so you don’t own it. Paid hosted services cannot pull this crap.

Paid hosted services can and do pull this crap, and it’s not just Google.

“Digital Ocean killed our company” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169

At least DO was responsible, transparent and disclosured the bug for the public. After reading through the post, I've felt much more confident to use their services, specially after that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119939

Big G's policy is to lock you, provide no further comments and no contact link.

“Transparency” due to blowup of bad publicity on HN. They’re simply not big enough to ignore this audience. They wouldn’t have given a damn if they were, just like they ignored many cases that didn’t blow up.

Sure, fine, but Google blows up hn here and there with horror stories but because of search and I guess the fact that 2024 is when they're possibly nuking cloud anyway, the companies in question still got deleted.

What's the alternative you're proposing? Are you just saying Cloud Bad?

Paid G suite can and does pull this crap. There was a comment on HN a year-ish ago, when someone's entire ~100 person company (almost?) went out of business because Google flagged the personal Gmail of the domain admin, this "spread" to their company email, Google closed it and losing the admin account made the entire domain get deleted. Not "blocked" or "pending review" - deleted! IIRC even pulling personal favors at Google couldn't save them.

Do you have a link to this story?

Here's a few:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124324

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432702

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247759

Google's main problem here is they can't tell their side of the story.

If only they had some process where a customer could agree to have Google publicly explain why an account was banned, I think we'd see many more explanations along the lines of "This customer was using Google cloud to launch Ddos attacks" or "This customer sent bomb threats to the president".

How is that a problem? What's stopping them? Google can easily write blog posts or release post mortems or have the dozens of PMs that visit HN talk about it.

Considering these links are all about people with valid businesses and apps, I doubt your examples apply for violations.

> more explanations along the lines of

I am willing to bet there would be zero explanations along those lines.

What law do you think is preventing them from doing that already? Especially where US residents with no general privacy law are concerned?

The only thing that's preventing Google from telling their side of the story is their own refusal to engage human-to-human with individual customers.

Both the law and Googles privacy policy stops them telling the world if you sent bomb threats to the president. That's still your private mail. They can't go looking it it, let alone telling the world about it.

> the law

Which law?

> That's still your private mail. They can't go looking it it,

They definitely subject it to all kinds of automated scanning for spam and potentially abuse. The nearest thing to a public statement from Google on the subject seems to be: “very specific cases where you ask us to and give consent, or where we need to for security purposes, such as investigating a bug or abuse”

i.e. there may be abuse cases where they read your mail without asking.

Downvote - Google could reply here on HN, which is one of (if not THE) top developer site in the world.

Quite a lot of paid services have done exactly this. They use vague all-encompassing terms of service designed to give them complete control. Pretty much anything can be used as a violation of those terms, allowing them to keep your money while also blocking all access and even deleting your data. Very few customers have the legal and financial resources to unblock this if it does happen.

That's actually kinda nice of them. Instead of waiting till we were totally and completely locked in to play big bad wolf, they've done it earlier while there's still time to get the message out.

I ordered a phone from Google that's been lost in delivery. I have Gmail/documents/photos/music... Should I do a charge-back? Sue them in small claims court? I should never have done business with them.

Absolutely don't do a chargeback. Try to settle it with the package carrier.

Google's algorithm can flag a chargeback as suspicious, leading you to be locked out.

This is a delightfully horrifying response... "Don't poke the trillion dollar bear, he might bite you and lock you out of your account!"

(GOOG's market cap as I write this is $985B...)

It is horrifying and it should be illegal to provide so little customer service when you encourage deep, irreplaceable investments into your platform.

At least have all your account recovery lined up before you try a chargeback. It is taken as an extremely strong signal that the account has been compromised and is being used to fraud the rightful owner.

Source: I work there.

Also: I would exhaust all my escalation options before going the cc route. With any retailer.

Having thought about this some more, I really can't recommend doing a chargeback with any company you want to keep taking your money. Afaiu this doesn't cancel the contract, so you owe them the money unless you manage to void the contract, in which case they should send the money back anyways. Then, teaching all the fraud detection systems that your exact usage pattern leads to fraud seems unpleasant too. Just too many ways for this to backfire, even if the company doesn't play offended.

This is a response from a dystopian anti-consumer future that we seem to be living in because Google thinks customer service has no value.

> Afaiu this doesn't cancel the contract

There is no contract if Google didn't send the phone. The commenter doesn't owe them money for something they failed to send.

> Then, teaching all the fraud detection systems that your exact usage pattern leads to fraud seems unpleasant too.

Or (hear me out, this might sound insane): a fucking human could talk to the customer and flag it as "not fraud". This is how every other company does it.

The solution to getting screwed by an algorithm is not to give in to the algorithm. It's to talk to a human to override it.

The ultimate solution, I hope, is that the next iteration of the federal government is pro-consumer and enforces our UCC rights and/or breaks up Google.

> There is no contract if Google didn't send the phone. The commenter doesn't owe them money for something they failed to send.

Don't know about your jurisdiction, but in most countries I lived in the law works otherwise. The moment you checked out you have a contract. Seller not sending out the goods is failing their contractual obligations. But that failure does not cancel the contract, only allows you to execute the appropriate clauses of it (some of which usually lead to refund and cancellation). On the other hand, the delivery of goods doesn't usually prevent you from cancelling the contract (you usually have an obligation to return the goods in that case). The clauses injected by laws tend to make this very consumer friendly... But the ones I remember require you delivering a notice of cancellation and I'm not sure if failing payment counts as such (IANAL, I don't even know your jurisdiction, Yadda Yadda).

Same thing happened to me once. I called google support and they send me another phone.

Same here. It seems very unlikely they would not resend a phone lost in delivery. When it happened to me, they immediately ordered a replacement device.

Just contact them and they'll send you another one, like pretty much any retailer.

Packages get lost all the time. They have a process to file it with their shipping partner.

Absolutely don't do a chargeback. They will lock out anything that requires payment, and possible more.

The “oh noes!” Lock-in arguments are comical. Everything is lock-in. And it’s unlikely google makes some radical consumer change to screw people would hurt its efforts to be the #1 or #2 player. If we just focus on building on the things these cloud providers have built we can stop being leery about things and focus on the product and quit wasting cycles on things that don’t matter like the lock-in fear.

You may have misinterpreted the comment chain. It sounds like you're talking about vendor lock-in. They're talking about being locked out of their Google account due to a Google bot incorrectly categorizing their work as spam or abuse. The implications for them being locked out is that they can't use anything related to their Google account. That could include their personal phone, personal email account and personal cloud services.

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