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Comment by throwaway146384 | Hacker News Reader

Google should hire someone to fix their automatic account blocking system. It doesn't seem like their current engineers are able to prevent such false positives or create a working system for appeal. They can even use Adsense to advertise for such a position.

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> It doesn't seem like their current engineers are able to prevent such false positives

Perhaps we should advertise to Google that this costs them money.

I for one do not use or participate in most Google things because I don't want the one service I use messed up.

The whole "tie everything together" approach they took back in 2010 or so is wrong from the get-go. If I'm in Gmail and use the same browser to go to to YouTube, I'm forced to use the Gmail id, and if I "log-out" in YouTube, my email session is also closed ... say what?

Google noticed humans make mistakes, why employ error-prone humans when Google can automate mistakes. Google wise, pats itself beep beep

or simply hire a hundred customer support reps to monitor an email. That would cost like 10 engineers.

They would have to handle over a million customers each. At Google scale this becomes very costly, and they are after all a data mining company, not a company that supports people.

I work a customer support job for a tech company and on my team we handle about 2 million customers each. The key is that not every customer needs live human support, and among those who do, they don't all need it at the same time.

Of course, you could say they could hire 200 or 300 or 500, the point is that it would be a relatively inexpensive way to solve the problem and increase customer satisfaction.

> At Google scale this becomes very costly

At Google scale, it’s not just very costly, but basically impossible to provide traditional customer service. You’d have every wackjob or confused user needing help with any conceivable tech issue calling them even when it doesn’t have anything to do with google products. I run a couple of businesses having nothing to do with computers and I get confused people all of the time leaving messages asking about some yahoo email or android issue they’re dealing with. I have no doubt that Google itself would be flooded with a billion calls within about a month if they actually had a human phone number for free support.

Luckily the solution for this has already been suggested: charge some fee for premium human support. Charge whatever is necessary to make this feasible and reduce calls to a manageable volume.

Doing so has its own set of problems of course, but I believe that desperate people would rather deal with paying some fee rather than risk losing their business or digital life over a legitimate issue.

There are literally businesses that shut down because of Google’s inability to provide human support. Lives are severely impacted by google’s refusal to provide this.

Unfortunately we’re probably never going to get this from Google because their engineers huff their own farts and think that their algorithms are close to perfect. They don’t really get that the insignificant false positives they think they get are actual human beings.

>At Google scale this becomes very costly

They made $24 billion in profit in Q4 alone.[0]

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/technology/google-alphabe...

Oh no! Costs! Won't somebody think of the innocent Capital!

Also, not 1MM customers each - only folks having issues - that's a small subset of all users.

> They would have to handle over a million customers each.

Pretty good incentive to minimise false positives.

And how do you mine, and profit from, data that someone stopped giving you after the lack of customer support pushed them away from your service? Improved support = improved customer retention = more data to mine.

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