A decade long Google account disabled with no warning or reason | Hacker News Reader

A decade long Google account disabled with no warning or reason

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126 pointsnixass85 comments

The fact that I see stories like this happen about once every month or so makes me incredibly uneasy about Google in general. So many individuals who have lost literally all of their email correspondance, photos, and digital apps they've paid for, simply because some random algorithm decided to cancel them.

And then, notoriously there is almost no way to deal with it or get the accounts back online. Only in a few rare circumstances does someone luck out and hit the right person on HackerNews or Twitter who actually has the ability to restore things.

It's absolutely terrifying and kafkaesque in many cases.

Folks ask me why I generally try to direct them away from Google... it's stuff like this.

>The fact that I see stories like this happen about once every month or so makes me incredibly uneasy about Google in general.

Not just Google! I don't have an Oculus but have heard good things about it. But I can't get one because my Facebook account was similarly shut down without explanation in 2019. Despite its age (15 years) I barely used it, let alone for anything "controversial", but did regularly log into it. I repeatedly tried to verify my identity by submitting an image of my driver's license, without any response.

I don't want to create a fake new Facebook account. I want my own back.

>And then, notoriously there is almost no way to deal with it or get the accounts back online. Only in a few rare circumstances does someone luck out and hit the right person on HackerNews or Twitter who actually has the ability to restore things.

No luck for me so far on this front. Maybe the right person will see this one of these days.

I had a scare this weekend, when I loaded Gmail and it told me "This account is not available". Luckily it only lasted five minutes, so it must have been a temporary glitch, but I was already trying to figure out how to get in touch with people I know at Google without my Gmail account.

I've had that account for seventeen years. I signed up on the first week it went public. It has a lot of my history in there.

I've done regular takeouts as backups, but that's still not a good substitute. I pay Google money, but that doesn't really assuage me.

Wow, I just looked and my Gmail welcome message is from Fri, Dec 3, 2004, 3:08 AM. Which means that my Gmail is almost 17 years old I've got to do the takeout backups.

It is amazing how easy is for these type of companies to singlehandedly leave you without access to your own media.

To be honest, a similar thing happened to me when Microsoft decided to remove my Hotmail data after 3 months of not logging in. And also to my original linuxmail.org email... which was a cool email server that one day just disappeared (along with all my conversations) back when the inbox size was max 4MB.

This is silly.

If they pay for Google Fi and Google Fiber then obviously they can contact customer support. There's a phone number and everything.

The account was probably an error in fraud/spam detection. Yes it sucks but just call Google, man. C'mon.

In this particular case, "help me get this seen by someone at Google" and "I've resigned myself that the account is likely gone forever" is just attention-seeking.

I'm sure an account rep will escalate it and the account will be restored. It's not like Google goes and instantly deletes all the data with someone's account with they flag it for suspected fraud/spam.

> If they pay for Google Fi and Google Fiber then obviously they can contact customer support. There's a phone number and everything.

Hahahaha that's a funny take. I'm going to guess that you've never had the misfortune of needing to contact Google for support of their products.

I have contacted Google multiple times for different products, and it's been fine. No misfortune involved. Nothing amazing but nothing terrible either. Just standard customer support, you know?

The worst was when I contacted Google Fi about my Nexus 5x bootlooping, where they wouldn't help me at all until I gave them the verification code from my Fi account. Normally that would be easy, but being on the road with my phone dead was...challenging... and support did not once attempt to show any compassion or willingness to work with me to figure it out.

I've also had a case where my Google-owned phone running Google's OS on Google's phone network wouldn't download my eSim, and it fell outside the Google support script, so they couldn't help me.

I learned two things, one was always have your 2FA backup codes handy, and the other was that Google support is not helpful. I'm no longer a Fi customer and have been slowly pulling all of my subscriptions from them.

I'm sorry for your difficulties, but this is exactly the kind of situations social engineering is made of. You can't blame them for not overriding the script out of compassion or empathy, otherwise some random person with a good story could take ownership of Google accounts.

Ordering a replacement phone be sent to the account owner certainly isn't within the scope of social engineering. The fact that I couldn't do _anything_ to verify ownership outside of having access to the code from my Google account seems excessive for device replacement.

If you give them money, you get better support than j. random user.

I have Google One and get support just fine from them.

Yeah, I always think this when this stuff gets posted here and people go "oh my god, I *wish" I could pay Google for support".

You can, it's not very expensive and you get a phone number you can call if there's any issues. The times I've needed it for problems like this, they always were able to help. But hating on Google brings karma, I guess.

Not on purpose at least.

In early evolution of Drive when I was using Google for backups with their client, which was called something else that I’ve forgotten, one day when I tried to delete or overwrite something, it corrupted all of the data and it was lost. I was glad I had a different backup, and I’ve been spoiled since then by Drive because it’s not failed in past years.

Keeping another backup offline is critical.

>Keeping another backup offline is critical.

It boggles my mind that people have to even be told this. Keeping your only copies of anything on anyones service is a bad idea.

Convenient - but a HORRIBLE idea. You would think the 90's photo sharing site fiascos would have driven this home but I guess many have short memories?

A surprising number of people who are adults now were still children in the '90s.

> I'm sure an account rep will escalate it and the account will be restored. It's not like Google goes and deletes all the data with someone's account with they disable it for suspected fraud/spam.

If you left your comment here, it would have been typical HN sarcastic snark.

You are talking about a company infamous for its lack of customer support and, when you do get a human on the phone, infamous for the "sry, computer says no" dead end, so beware of extrapolating from what I assume are your positive experiences.

You mention Google Fi/Fiber in your mistake of thinking that if you can get anyone on the phone, then they can help you with your lateral issue in another system, but this is exactly the frustration with contacting Google.

I've had my account disabled without notice for supposed issues with Adsense, Adwords, Gmail, and Gcloud over the last 15 years, and your optimism would almost be endearing if it weren't so cocksure. Get burned a few times and you join the ranks of us who have learned to use different Google accounts for everything, breaking another Google ToS.

They often have at least email support for services that you pay for.

...but the service most likely to be broken in an impactful way with Google is email.

Google's changed a lot in the past 15 years. Every Google One account comes with customer service now. Nobody's saying it's perfect but the old "there's literally no way to contact Google or have them do anything" just isn't true anymore, and hasn't been for a while.

It sucks you had some bad experiences, but your snark towards me is uncalled for. Google service reps can escalate to address what you call "lateral" issues.

But none of this matters, because in this particular case the user hasn't even tried contacting Google. Maybe because if they did, there would be nothing to tweet about.

Did you have positive experience with google support yourself or do you work at google? Never heard of any positive customer support experience with google.

As I said in another comment, just normal customer service experiences. Nothing amazing but nothing terrible either.

You've probably never heard of a positive experience with them because people rarely write on a forum about a normal boring customer service interaction. People only talk about it when it goes terribly wrong.

> Every Google One account comes with customer service now.

Yes, but to get support, you have to log into your account which you can't do if they have suspended it.

There are people who make their living off of YouTube who have a rep who can't get answers about why their channel was banned. I'm not sure GoogleFibre support can do much more than send you a new router or knock a few dollars off your next bill...

>If they pay for Google Fi and Google Fiber then obviously they can contact customer support. There's a phone number and everything.

Assuming the issue you are having isn't stopping you from using Google Fiber and Google Fi as well. Otherwise you couldn't use your phone or internet.

This is one of the reasons you should be diversifying your providers, but there still is a possibility you couldn't easily contact Google.

On Reddit he commented that he has a paid Google One account for work and contacted their support but they “couldn’t” help him either.

They've been doing this for years, but think of it this way - we have no idea what thought crime this poor person committed. But surely, they did. I think the big message here is, don't get too comfortable. You never know when you've done something wrong until you get punished for it.

He probably did nothing wrong at all but was collateral damage caused by their shitty "fraud" detection AI.

The crazy part is that all thousands of employees at Google and they don’t have a single one reviewing what the AI is doing? A review team doesn’t fix mistakes? Even if they do have a team, it’s been proven impossible to get in touch with them to fix anything.

The only team which can fix this issue is the team which trawls social media and occasionally decides to fix an issue, if it becomes enough of a PR problem. Hacker News, Twitter, and Slashdot are apparently the official way to reach humans in Google support.

Of course people review these things. Review teams look at this stuff all the time, and often fix it.

But at Google scale, bad things will happen.

Google serves over five-billion queries every day, and scale for gmail is similar. One-in-a-billion events are absolutely routine.

If only there was some way to resolve issues, like having a customer support like with reps who could examine what happened. I hear Google is pretty strapped for cash, though. I have no clue how they'd pay for it, other than, perhaps, taking out a loan on the 11th ball pit or the backup three-story chocolate fountain at Google HQ.

I don’t think anyone would disagree with your point about the scale at which Google operates or that these type of things happens

However, it’s clear they are not doing enough or not doing anything at all to remedy the problem of having a path to fix things when something does go wrong.

At Google’s scale, they should not be doing automation, AI or otherwise, without support in place when it goes wrong.

"Not doing anything at all" is factually incorrect, and what I was responding to for the gp.

Would this "fraud" detection be triggered by some unauthorized user trying their account password too many times or a more sophisticated attack?

In reality though, this is a single tweet without any context or follow-up. You have absolutely no clue what happened.

You don't even know if they clicked the "recover account" link before tweeting.

I thought it's usually a bounced card transaction tripping fraud detection...

This seems like it’s meant to be commentary on censorship, but I’d be willing to bet this has nothing to do with that. Google has closed or limited accounts for all kinds of reasons over the years that have nothing to do with what the user posted online.

More than "seems" and how would you ever find out?

> we have no idea what thought crime this poor person committed

They probably read a Dr. Seuss book /s

This joke is only funny if one is misinformed. Dr. Seuss's foundation voluntarily decided to stop publishing a portion of his works to preserve his legacy. That's it. There's no culture war to be found here.

If you're a culture warrior, you have to force everything into being a cultural battleground.

>There's no culture war to be found here.

... Except eBay also disallowed sales of said books.

I'm not saying that the current owners of the rights to the books caused eBay to do so. That eBay "voluntarily" did this makes the situation worse, not better.

Funny, I've also had this happen recently to one of my accounts, only without the policy violation part: in my case, it's just that Google noticed "unusual activity."

I haven't forgotten the password, and still have access to the backup e-mail address but Google won't let me access the account regardless: it keeps asking a security question, which I believe was never set (although I can't say for sure since this account is very old, it was created when Gmail was still by invitation only).

I've mostly been using it for all kinds of membership registrations, where I don't want to enter my primary e-mail address for privacy reasons or to avoid being spammed, so it's probably not a big deal. However, the bottom line is that it's really easy to lose access to your Google account, and there's no recourse.

Edit: Tried to log in again now, and this account is only "locked," not "disabled," whatever the distinction between these two states is.

Separately, another Google account, which I had been using as my primary e-mail until a couple of years ago, is now set to forward all mail to my current address, and I noticed that whenever I log in and click the button to save the Gmail settings, even without modifying any of them, it would get disabled for suspicious activity, and I would have to recover it using the backup e-mail address -- which happens to be the same address all the mail is forwarded to. I expect it's just a matter of time before I'm locked out of this account as well, despite hardly ever using it nowadays.

Sometimes Google gives me grief when I connect to a VPN. They notice unusual activity and I have to fill in captchas.

It's time to back up my Google account.

Most people think this is a valuable feature. If you normally access your account from California, but one day you access it from Romania instead, that triggers heightened login security. Because 99.9999999% of the time this is caused by people getting their accounts owned by organized crime syndicates.

No VPN in my case but the IP address changes every 24h, and the browser is set to clear all data on exit, so I can't really say if Google's suggestion to try logging in from a "known" browser and location would have changed anything.

A good (unofficial) summary of the account recovery process, if anyone in the same situation wants to try their luck:

http://gmailaccountrecovery.blogspot.com/

Use your own custom email address. This thing keeps coming in every few weeks/months.One of the best thing that anyone can do to his online life is to make use of own email addresses. Say you use GSuite to host your custom email address and one fine day google decides to ban you for whatsoever reason, you will be able to switch to any competing service in a flick of few MX records in not more than 5 mins. Ofcourse you have to ensure that you take regular backup of your email accounts.

I do this and I agree. It's bad enough that you lose any emails or other media you didn't back up, but it's even worse if you went around for the past X years passing around Google's domain for your email, because that's power.

Email forward and use new email alias to reply whenever you receive an email.

I'm not sure what you mean, how are you supposed to e-mail forward from a Google account that has been suspended? And if you're talking about owning your own domain, that's exactly what I meant.

Sorry, that wasn't meant for people who have been suspended by Google.

It was for people who wants to switch or have important emails they don't want to lose. Always have a backup address which you forward all your emails to.

We don't know why it was disabled. It may have been in error, but there are other possible reasons.

In particular, Google will disable accounts it believes have been compromised by third parties. This is a good thing, because it prevents the attacker from downloading the entire account and advancing through even more of the attackee's life, or deleting everything.

Recovery should be available via the backup account, if one has ever set that. This user doesn't say what they have tried on the recovery side.

The bottom line is that we don't know why what happened happened. It may be a bad reason--those certainly happen--but legitimate issues can also drop users into this bad situation.

I have some inaccessible (locked? disabled?) accounts setup with backup accounts that when attempting to recover, the recovery form says "email sent" but no email arrives. I still recieve email forwarding from the inaccessible accounts.

When you operate at "Google Scale", individual users don't matter. If the fraud system has a few false positives but on the whole saves the company money, it's still a win for the company. The moment they open some sort of review process, where they actually have to pay real people to look at things, a lot of their razor thin margins on their products would completely evaporate.

One idea I had recently is to pay Google -- put up a collateral of a few $100 to get someone to review your case. Consider it a fee to have someone with the authority to fix things look at your problem. Why don't they do something like this?

The collateral idea seems good, but it might encourage perverse incentives for Google. If they know they're going to get a few hundred bucks if they disable an account, I'd fear the rate of accounts being disabled may go up. Even if it doesn't, there would be the appearance that any account being disabled was for financial gain.

I wish I had a good answer for this, though.

This is not true. McDonalds runs at a bigger scale than Google and if I have a problem with my food I wouldn’t have a problem finding a person to complain to.

The problem is google runs at a global scale with less employees than most national companies. If they hired more people, this problem would go away. But of course that would mean they would have to kill their free plans.

Pick your poison. Cheap products but the risk of losing everything, or expensive alternatives with a phone number to call when you have an issue.

The problem is that Google thinks profits are more important than providing half decent support.

The users agree because they keep using gmail despite many good paid alternatives existing.

Only because the users haven't yet experienced a situation like this where the real value of "free" gets exposed.

Everyone loves to think "that can't happen to me" then act all surprised when the inevitable happens.

Grashopper and ant with a world full of grashoppers :p

I think we probably need some kind of government regulation so that you can’t just close someone’s account without warning or access to support, or at the very least, you can’t prevent them from exporting their data and migrating to another service.

... because they are? If you can't turn a profit then you go under, regardless of if you have good support or not.

There is a hell of a margin between maximizing-profit-at-the-expense-of-customers and going under. It just happen that Google has now enough critical mass to really not give a fuck about their customers.

Yeah, most people are perfectly happy to pay $4 for a Big Mac, but ask them to pay $4 a month for GMail, and they'll be upset.

McDonald's regularly has some machine down and when I need a refund from a purchase through the app everybody says you have to ask someone else.

That’s an interesting problem and it seems related to Googles issues. McDonalds wants to move in to a more automated, less staff system and you end up where no one at the store knows how to refund external purchases or prevent people from ordering things that are unavailable.

So because they're too greedy to put decent customer service "at scale", we have to pay the tax of getting actual service done ?

I've had a similar idea. It's not terrible, but gives Google a partial incentive to abuse it. I say "partial" because the perverse incentive would be offset by the PR hit. Paying for support for a problem Google created, and having the call centers become profit centers, would impose a reputational dent.

Google could charge small amounts for new account creation. $5 per new account could probably cover an increase in human-contactable support. But that also probably doesn't work because Google doesn't want any friction for users creating new accounts.

Probably the only solution is regulation. If a company is going to offer a vital service like email, even for free, then they should be required to provide procedures for restoring the account. Procedures that involve direct contact with a human at some point if the matter isn't resolved early on. I can't see the US passing such regulation any time soon, but perhaps the EU would step up.

>individual users don't matter

Until they do, of course. Higher profile people have had Google deactivate their accounts before and they manage to make enough noise to trigger the Google PR people who call the engineers or whoever and they fix the problem.

Individual users don't matter, mostly, because they don't have the platform or reach to annoy Google enough to fix the problem.

We hear such tragic stories but never get the post-mortem of why the account was mistakenly disabled in the first place.

It’s because they have scripts that run over the whole platform to find suspicious accounts.

I have had a single doc on google docs locked for a week with no explanation other than ToS violation. It was a shared doc I was using for a school project. I think shared files are especially targeted by the scripts.

Sometimes a user is genuinely violating the tos but then their entire google account gets locked with no way to export data or migrate. If you upload violating content to YouTube, it’s not great that your gmail account gets locked at the same time. Same issue with oculus users losing their games because their fb account was locked.

The that's so hilariously stupid about the Googlers in charge of the ban policy is that they refuse to explain or put a person in between the automated systems and the final decision. They already have a TOS that reserves their right to terminate anyone for any reason, so why not just give the reason?

Sure it might cause people to want to fight more, but who cares? It's not like Google even gives them a way to contact them!

Then bad actors would use that information and it would defeat the purpose.

Before you call anybody stupid, you may want to make sure your statement is coherent and grammatically correct.

I mistakenly forgot a word, mea culpa! Perhaps the Googlers in charge of this awful policy will see my example and follow in my footsteps of taking responsibility for a mistake.

This is not a reddit ban or a Twitter suspension, it is someone’s life. Bad actors are not a reasonable excuse for this terrible policy.

Yeah - first rule of using a product - ensure you can get support for it. Google is legendary for having impenetrable support yet people still seem to keep their life inextricably tied to them?!?

I also see the typical apologist arguments popping up in the comments. This isn't a scale issue. If I have a problem with my Apple ID I can get someone on a phone within minutes. It's a business model problem. Google doesn't value individual account holders because it's not profitable for them to do so. Turns out "free" really isn't, eh? And what kind of special unicorn to you have to be to have Google Fiber all for the privilege of having a phone number to call?!?

Hell having been the account admin for a pretty large org with a substantial volume of business spend with Google I can attest that doesn't dramatically enhance the support experience either.

But if you are a normal Google services user? Ha! Insert the interstitial video from the game Smash TV - "Good Luck - you're gonna need it!"

If you're not tight on cash, I'd suggest getting a couple of external hard drives (or whatever redundant storage method you prefer) and backing up your google data through Google Takeout. It's free and gives you some peace of mind when the idea of Google shutting down your account comes up

Can someone already sue them. This crap isn't solving anything. Do we need multiple valuable business ruined by google so a lawsuit can finally hurt them in a way that they start to fix this sh*t.

That's scary. I want Google Fiber (not available in my area), but I wouldn't want my utility (Google Fiber) account & cell phone (Google Fi) plan vulnerable to an e-mail account ban.

You're not supposed to, but you get multiple gmail accounts for that - "service" accounts if you will.

Then you never use your service account and it gets disabled by the inactive account filter.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't I guess.

Reading through the GFiber TOS it's not clear that you must use a Google account - they refer often to "the email address used to setup your account" but you can have a Google account with an email address not serviced at Google.

So if you're willing to have multiple accounts it seems doable.

Google and Apple support is so bad it's not even possible to review the company at Google Reviews. I had one account banned once with no explanation and it was impossible to get an explanation, my advice is: just make a new account and accept the situation and move on with your life

Private company they can do whatever they want yada yada

Any details on the reason why?

when people ask me seriously why i keep running my own mailserver i point them at stories like this.

on a more serious note, google is (in)famous for their non-existant support. if you're dumb enough to make most of your life depend on it... you kinda deserve it, in a way.

and to those that will come and downvote... remember when amazon booted parler and everyone agreed (me included, don't get me wrong) because amazon is a private company and owes nothing to parler? well, keep in mind that google is a private company that owes you nothing... even support, google does not owe you support (strictly speaking).

The platform is just too big. Disclaimer; I'm only talking about technically. Not about breaking up their monopoly.

Youtube has been showing signs of being out of control for a few years now. To me it actually started with my mom getting a fraud ad in a google service that almost made her give up her credit card info to win an imaginary phone.

Lately I've been seeing porn on youtube, ads for young girls and even videos with out right porn that have been up for several months and have millions of views.

They mostly fly under the radar by posting in other languages like Thai for example.

This combined with the "randomly" blocked accounts tells me that the whole platform is too big. They've been expanding all over the world but haven't been able or willing to grow their oversight at the same pace.

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