Ask HN: How dangerous is it to trust Google?

I used GCP for 2 years. It did it's job. I hate the predatory nature of Amazon but I am blown away by their customer service and their help for our startup.

I eventually decided to do away with GCP and moved to a cheaper cloud where the head of sales was a phone call away.

The reason has to do with what you mentioned: One of the previous startup where I worked was completely shut down because one of the employees had a banned account and he signed in into company gsuite. Google banned the startup's play dev account.

I also have the unfortunate experience of getting banned by Google. around 10 years ago they started banning anyone that used paypal and not google pay or something like that. I had linked paypal and google launched google pay and starting banning anyone that didnt use google pay. I didnt care about their deadlines and just ignored their email until I woke up to everything banned.

I still used GCP with my banned play dev account but they suddenly banned by adsense account after 8 years due to banned play dev account.

I had enough of their shit and just decided to move.

I went on holiday to Paris over two years ago and reviewed a number of places on Google Maps while there. I had a lovely experience and never left a negative review or did anything unusual on Google Maps.

I received an email a day after I got back home from Google saying one of my recent five-star reviews reviews had violated Google Maps policy. My account was disabled and I nearly had a heart attack when I lost access to Google Cloud Platform. I couldn't find a way to find out more or dispute it and ended up moving my business to AWS.

> maybe Jeffrey Bezos is making all of these HN posts from his yacht

So why just Google? Why not Alibaba cloud which has the same marketshare? Why not Azure which is much bigger threat because Microsoft can actually build competitive products?

Why do you never hear about this sort of issues about other companies?

> These injustices may be so rare that they don't factor in to anyone's risk analysis

Yeah, you have to assess risks somehow... and if what Google is providing is so much better value for the risks, go ahead.

> but this naturally raises the question of why this only happens with Google

Because they want to automate as much as possible and want to crowd source accidental mishaps. If someone is genuine and important enough, they'll make noise in twitter, reddit, HN... and then they can fix it. It is cheaper for them to do it that way. If you are OK with telling your customer tomorrow that the service was down for a week because your former employee's ex wife misgendered her neighbors pet alpaca, then go ahead and use Google.

In terms of statistical risk, being banned for a dumb reason is "probably" rare enough that you're reasonably rolling the dice with a company like Google.

My thought-process in choosing to use them or not would revolve around whether or not I'd want to reward their behavior. It's one thing for Google to be working really hard to provide some kind of reasonable customer service to solve occasional problems and just being unable to do so because of their scale. That would suck, but be understandable in that it's a hard problem.

But Google directly spits in the face of paying customers daily in evil, scammy ways. And when Google employees post here about this topic, it's clear they huff their own farts about how good their algorithms are and how rare false positives are. They don't appear to give half a shit about the businesses and lives they destroy.

This is a personal value judgement: but I think a reasonable one. This despicable, scammy behavior cannot be rewarded by this community.

I'm not sure if it's that rare. I've been strictly warned for clicking my own ads on my app. It wasn't a lot of clicks, perhaps $3 worth. But the way they dealth the warning feels like they have the right to shoot my tires out after running a red light. I switched to the Facebook ad network and everything went fine.

Just my 2¢: For the average joe like you and me, it hardly matters "statistically". You can choose whatever feels okay and you should be mostly fine. For every 1% having some issue, there are other 99% who are getting their job done without hassles. Google isn't exactly forcing money out of our hands. Alternatives exists too & so does competition among them. (Disclaimer: I don't work for any FAANG nor do I want to. I don't consider Google's policies perfect either). Being the average user - I will be wary of issues appearing on HN, and try to navigate away if stuck in a similar stickyspot (e.g Playstore account do's & donts).

Google has a good tooling environment. More technical innovations have been adopted by their competition, as compared to Google adopting likewise from them. GCP infrastructure is pretty robust too & it satisfies most, if not all of the cases I have come across. My raw data-code bundle is backed up periodically to a cheap VPS in OVH. If I ever faced an issue, I will switch to AWS, Digital Ocean or something similar. Google workspace is working for us with minimal hassles. Integration is good enough. The product guides for GCP & Workspace are fair enough (I feel GCP provides lower barrier of entry to devops with code snippets & step by step guides). Sometimes there will be an issue here or there, but that happens to all IaaS/PaaS providers.

Anecdotally, people mention AWS support to be much superior. They have never seen a mismanaged asset or significant billing issue. Amazon is seldom helpful in those cases. Also, don't get carried away by too many social justice ethos floating around. These corporations exist to make money, and so do we. Our relationship is transactional. Choose whatever is fair for you.

AWS enterprise support (paid) has been excellent for us over the past 7-ish years and entirely worthy of the name “support” is my summary. Over 7 years, we’ve had a few cases where we needed to rely on them and they did right by us every time, even in a few cases where the problem’s source could be found in our mirror.

I was pleasantly surprised that even their developer support plan is great.

When I had issues with using their services, they replicated what I was doing, and either help me fix mistakes I made, or (in most cases) offer a workaround, if it's something that their API doesn't support.

Thanks for sharing.

My experience with GCP support was what I expected: none. Even in the case of P1.

Don't get too comfortable with Google or any big cloud provider (including Digital Ocean). They have their own reasons for doing what they do and those reasons are not at all aligned with you or any small/startup company.

I'll paraphrase a comment I saw on HN recently:

"The old advice 'save often in case of loss' has now become 'save often to prepare for when Google shuts you off'."

Use big cloud technology to learn and further your projects BUT DO NOT RELY ON IT (unless you like to gamble).

I would generally advise against using GCP. I agree it's actually a great product, a better product even. But you're playing with fire.

Google is a company that automates everything and never picks up the phone. That's not 100% true, but it is in their nature. As a search engine that's all well and good. But for a cloud provider it's brutal.

You want somebody who is going to lean into that more classic idea of customer service. Amazon is the classic one people point to because of their fantasism about customer service. You really can get someone on the phone at AWS, though not a happy person. These things are not disconnected by the way.

As an engineer go work at Google. As a customer go spend at amazon. Or any of the others. Microsoft does customer service just fine. Even an unconventional option like kubernetes clusters built on linode or digital ocean.

A trick I've learned over the years is to appreciate companies for what they are and partner with them for their strengths but also recognize their weaknesses.

Is Google going to announce one day that they are going to Shutter GCP after all and that everyone has 6 months to migrate off? No of course not! But there's also a reason you have to be a little nervous about making that joke.

More to the point with some of your other examples, all Google's tech is ai powered. To the extent that it can be. AI makes mistakes, some days you'll be that mistake. You have to appreciate too with Google the old "I don't know how to count that low" joke. What might for you turn into a multimillion dollar business Google could conceivably shutoff and never really notice.

Maybe GCP has got better at this sort of thing too but my intuition is to not hold out for that.

I have long held, since prior to the cloud era, that I would not trust my domain or web hosting with a company that wouldn't put a real human on the phone with me. And in the past, I've tested this prior to signing up. For my web host, I called support when I was still evaluating, at 2 AM, and got a guy on the phone named Chris, with a very strong Texas accent. I signed up immediately, and I've been a customer over ten years. (One good human interaction can buy you a lot of brand loyalty.)

This is more difficult today, and some of the providers I use no longer provide phone support over having a ticket system only, but the ability to address issues with the service should be a primary consideration of any company you base your own business on.

If you're looking at signing up with a company that won't take your call, and a competitor exists who will, go with the latter.

I have a personal Google account (gmail, YouTube, drive, etc.). For this sole reason I do not use GCP for anything, just to avoid "what if my GCP account gets banned... That would ban my personal Google account as well!".

I'm moving slowly away from Google, though.

Your risk assessment for items 1, 2, and 3 are basically accurate. If Google decides you're a scammer, it's real hard to rectify that assessment. And because the net of Google services is so wide, if they do decide to ban you, the ban is wide-reaching... Your access to YouTube, GMail, the entire Drive toolchain, the Play store, using Google as an identity broker for OAuth to other sites, etc. is compromised. And their automated systems will actively hunt for sock-puppet indicators and ban accounts they think are owned by the same person as the banned account.

Ironically, these two issues go hand-in-glove: because the reach of a Google account is so broad, they take the risk on compromise of an account extremely seriously. There's a reason they've been pushing people so hard on 2FA for years now; avoiding people falling prey to account compromise is much easier than rolling back the damage done if an account is flagged as a risk.

In practice, the odds of this stuff happening to you are low. It's like the risk of losing your house in a tornado... When it happens, it's disastrous. It happens rarely enough amortized across the population that people still live in Tornado Alley.

I can't decide for you how you feel about those datapoints on the risk model.

You have to understand that Google appears as a shiny, clean marble citadel before deciding whether to trust them or not.

The citadel provides great protection, information and solace for those who dwell and work within it, but it is extremely important to the citadel that it remains perceived in the way that I described previously: shiny, clean, marble.

Within the citadel there may be groups who enjoy scatological orgies - and that's fine, those people are extremely intelligent and are able to think in ways that allow them to organize the world's information in ways that few others are -- but in return for the privacy that the citadel provides them, they respect the external appearance of the organization: shiny, clean, marble.

What you have to ask yourself as a visitor to the citadel is: am I also willing to obey those laws, and keep my faecal carnal desires hidden until I'm wandering the dirty streets outdoors, or would I prefer to join the machine and use the cover that it provides, knowing that I may have to sacrifice my principles to do so? Or, alternatively: would I prefer to enjoy some time within the citadel but also some time on the dirty streets.

Don't mix the two. That's my read of how to consider trust and Google, currently.

I expect you'll get plenty of answers here, and I suspect they'll all be along the same lines;

I don't trust Google.

Of all the companies I've dealt with, they speak their intentions the clearest - they don't care about me or my needs. There is no customer support (since we are not customers) - even if we give them money for GCP etc, we are seen as Users not Customers.

They're famous for killing products, they're famous for changing pricing (hello Google maps), they're famous for no phones.

I'm happy to be their user - search (and ad words) still works for me - but there's simply no way this is a company I want to do business with, and given any alternative I'll use that instead.

I get it, 99.lots % of people will never have a problem. The ones that do are completely screwed. Risk is not just about probability, but also about impact, and the penalty for failure for Google is existential - and that seems like too high a risk for me.

I think the real problem is cheap H1B labor. The customer service ethos just isn't there. For anything important, I'd directly hire an American IT professional to install my own cloud services on my own servers (such software does exist, even open source), than hire willfully capricious CCP pigs like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft forever holding an ax over my head. Just sayin'.

My assessment of the threat is that it is very serious, and the decision to use those services depends primarily on what it is that you are putting at risk, and if there is an ability to 'spread your bets'.

For a small hobby, learning, or side project, it might make a lot of sense, and the risk-mediation would be to be sure you have backups.

For anything that can significantly affect your career, future, and/or livelihood, I'd at least want to be sure that either 1) Google is just one part of your system that is redundant with another component or easily replaced, or 2) as ocdtrekkie pointed out, be sure to go with a provider that has actual service.

Good luck with whatever you make!

Google is really an advertising company. Everything else is just a secondary support entity. Your cloud hosting needs are not their real focus.

I don't use GCP, Google Search, Gmail or Google DNS.