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Comment by Eyas | Hacker News Reader

This story is just absolutely ridiculous: The poster _works at Google_ and even tried to escalate internally for days, to no avail.

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I would have thought ensuring that workers at google, getting absolutely no special access to specific other accounts, is pretty much the most sacrosanct rule.

i.e. Google's unlikely to hand over the dossier they've assembled on 'what your husband has been up to that we considered bad enough to shut down their account'

Most definitely not saying this isn't a false positive - but the handling process for it it must assume it's a positive.

Now why the poster's husband can't get the info - that is somewhat worrysome.

Sure, to me the ridiculous part is:

- it's weird to be mistreated by your employer's own product (just the irony bend to it)

- if you want to appeal after a dead end, your choice is to make a huge public PR nightmare, or try to make an internal post/plea that gains traction. you'd be doing your own employer a service if you could have this issue resolved without a PR nightmare

I guess Google's ToS is between the employee's husband and Google and not the employee, the employee's husband, and Google. So there is no authorization for some random employee to "check up" on their partner, even though it sounds like escalating internally should help. (It should at least trigger, "we'd better look into this very carefully", though. If it didn't, that sounds like a problem. If it did, and the result is "yeah, this is legit", that's a very awkward position for everyone.)

I was in a similar situation when I worked at Google. My brother kind of disappeared, and my family asked if we could at least check if he logged into Gmail. I asked and was told no, and I understood why -- it's up to my brother to share what he's up to, not Google. (My brother was fine; just didn't like replying to email or answering his phone.)

Oh certainly not "check up", but try to get a human to look at it and respond to the appeal with more than boilerplate.

This is different though, his husband can't get the records himself.

When i worked there i got my blocked payment acc unblocked with an apology pretty easily. I cant recommend using google payments (or anything other than gmail) anymore though

I don't think it was a rule before, and I don't think it should be a rule now. This is missing an important opportunity to debug the process, since you have a separate way of finding out what's going on.

If you're not going to use that data when you get an opportunity like this to fix something, what's dogfooding and "trusted testers" all about?

It's sticking in your head in the sand out of a misguided attempt at being unbiased, instead of fixing things.

Someone posted a video on YouTube showing them bullying and humiliating one of my friends. I helped her report it. YouTube ignored it. I worked at Google at the time. I filed an internal ticket and YouTube ignored that, too. Years later, the video is still online.

Companies serve the shareholders. Shareholders want to spend as little money as possible on user support. I think new regulations are a good way to solve this problem for everyone. US consumer protection laws need updating for the Internet age.

I would lose my mind if this happened to me. Can't imagine how frustrating this would end up being.

Me too. This anecdote is the latest grim reminder to me that I really should be keeping my offline backups up to date, just in case.

That's why you should have email on your own domain. If they lock you out you can quickly-ish migrate to a different provider without losing your email address. Not a solution but definitely softens the blow.

Google allows this for GSuite at $5/mo I think.

That is my arrangement and I've had it in place so long I don't even have to pay the $5, I have a free private GSuite on my own domain (yes they offered this to everyone 10+ years ago). What I realized today though while reading this story, is that my DNS account is backed by this same GMail account. What if I'm attacked and someone locks out my DNS account at the same time they take the sort of criminal actions in my account that that would get Google to shut it down? I could lose my domain and all my email forever. I think I'm moving to Fastmail.

Thank you for bringing this onto my radar. I will do that this weekend, get a good email address for the most important services.

i actually think it's useful to create a flow graph of all your most critical accounts, and how you might recover them if lost. If you find many of them flow back to an account you cant control and may be shut down for arbitrary reasons, may want to reconsider your recovery/hierarchy.

yeah I have ProtonMail with 2 custom domains. It's decent I have gotten blocked from sending emails to Google custom domains. Total bullshit IMO, I think they do it on purpose.

Yes. But make sure you don't use Google Domains to host your domain. Otherwise your domain will be locked too.

Well IMO it kinda makes sense that internally of all places you might actually make it hard to address it along that specific path to avoid any kinda of local shenanigans.

There's ... some daylight between "internal escalation through channels" and "shenanigans".

Seriously?

I guess they get the same treatment

IIRC there is a special user support forum for Googlers, so it's not the same treatment.

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