More than all the antitrust regulations being thrown at Google, I'd like to see regulators force Google to provide users customer support.
I would recommend a $5/month email service. It would be nice if free Gmail gave even more free stuff, but only a paid for service can really expect paid support staff.
Having said that, this seems like a terrible idea from a security perspective. There may well be no way to design a service that is resistant to social engineering and lets you unlock your account via a phone call.
Surprise! There is. https://workspace.google.com/intl/en_ie/pricing.html
> Google Workspace Standard Support—Standard Support is included with your Google Workspace license. It provides support with a 4-hour service-level objective (SLO) for P1 cases. If you're interested in faster response times and additional Support services, Enhanced or Premium Support might be a better fit for your business.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/10105075?hl=en&ref_topic...
A good question is what does P1 case means. Locked out of email or "sorry Google, I just wanted to say your global email network is down, when it's gonna be up?"
EDIT: it's not $5 in the US (between $6 and $7). I've called support a bunch of times.
Google's 2FA system combined with their lack of support terrifies me as a security-literate user. Here's one example: I was traveling and signed into Google from a new location. Google prompted me to verify myself via two-factor auth, and the only method they allowed me to verify by was by opening up the Google app on my iPhone and by confirming the provided number. I tapped "try another way", and gone was the option to verify via authenticator app.
I'm lucky that I had my phone on hand but I was dumbstruck. What if I lost my phone? I'd be screwed, locked out of my account with no way to fix it, even after following the best security practice of enabling 2FA via authenticator app, because Google took it upon themselves to say "screw your choice of security, open our app on the phone" (also, thereby coercing me to link my two devices to my ip address/location for analytics/targeting reasons, I'm guessing).
I could have done everything right and still gotten locked out of my account.
Even if the initial push for 2fa was security, by dev#1, you can be positive dev#2, 3, 4, xxx, 100 came running, and thought "tracking".
Google owes everything it is, to being the sleaziest, sneakiest, slymiest company they can be.
If the internet is an information highway, google is a van, stopping, and asking your kids if they want candy.
Were google a business in your physical neighborhood, tracking people as they do, they'd end up with a molotov cocktail through their window. No one would abide such behaviour, but the average Joe has no idea, and cannot understand, and thus, does no object.
Google is doing to our society, what the new settlers to North America did to Native Americans. Offer them beads, and plets, in exchange for riches, using our own ignorance against us.
Google is a primay example of the "slippery slope". They were given an inch, and they took us out back, and beat us with a 2×4.
If you trust your business to google, you're nuts.
And to the comment I replied to, yes, it is all for tracking.
Edit: yes OK I admit I don't like Google, just to ensure my bias is clear.
Why?
You make it sound like Google is a pauper, doling out free e-mail accounts and not making any money off of it.
Just because it's not billing your credit card doesn't mean you're not paying for GMail. You just pay for it indirectly through advertising.
If only a paid service can expect paid support, then how does Google make hundreds of billions of dollars every quarter? If GMail wasn't making any money, it would have been shut down years ago.
(Remember, the cost isn't "How do we field calls from a fraction of our 1.5 billion users," it's "How do we tell whether that phone call is an actual user, or just an attacker treating our phone service as yet another attack vector?")
I remember being *stunned* in a positive way by Google's out of the box thinking back when they *invented* "self-service" account management, aka "no phone support provided". I thought that it was a brilliant move and that this little search company was really going places.
I hope I might be forgiven for failing to anticipate the consequences for our least affluent sisters and brothers.
I am now of the opinion (for many, many reasons) that human-interactive customer support is a mandatory cost of doing business when your business is materially important in the lives of the customers (both paying and not paying customers).
That Gmail is "materially important" is well established already, yes?
Yet somehow companies of similar scale like Amazon, Apple and Netflix manage to provide robust customer service.
If they want to continue to harvest their customer's data they can provide those customers with support.
Also, those Google devices aren't free. You buy a Google device, get no support, and the devices are updated for way fewer years to boot.
You keep mixing things up. The topic is the viability of high touch GMail support, not support for Google's home-grown devices.
Amazon is similarly an order of magnitude fewer users than Gmail accounts (and tends to address this issue by pushing the hard-to-address auth problems onto the seller... There are known exploits for just pushing exorbitant costs onto the seller via buyer fraud). Amazon has a couple hundred million customers... Gmail is in the billions.
I am, perhaps, just simply old enough to remember when not everyone could have a Gmail account. Low touch customer service that works 99 plus percent of the time was necessary to open the floodgates for free. I have never seen a practical explanation of how to scale providing the service otherwise. There's room for improvement, but (a) every simplification of authentication must be balanced against how it can be abused to steal accounts, and (b) I cannot conceive of a solution that would rival high touch customer service, and that scales to the billions. If one exists, I look forward to being extremely pleasantly surprised (having myself been on the receiving end of losing my phone while away from home for an important event: yes, it really sucks, Google's trust model is they trust you zero without some corroboration if all you show up with is the password). But I've watched them hammer at the problem long enough to suspect it's uncrackable at the billions-scale.
They simply choose not to.
I'd be interested to see a workable solution but, to-date, I never have.
This doesn’t seem that hard. Charge for support if they have to (eg charge per minute or call).
In terms of working out if a call is an attack, far juicier targets such as banks are able to manage, I think they can work it out.
This would be one solution. But it would require Google to hold significantly more PII, explicitly, on every Gmail user than they do right now (and make the process of opening a Gmail account take a bit of time, like it does at a bank). This is one of the better suggestions I've heard, though it would threaten the integrity of the existing 1.5 billion accounts unless Google grandfathered them into a "low-identification" status.
Google makes more than enough money selling everyone's personal data via advertising to afford to provide customer service.
They simply choose not to.
Haha, google doesn't provide good customer service for able bodied, so they provide the equal service for disabled.
Big tech needs a reckoning from consumer protection. Oh wait, those laws and the government agency were gutted. Nevermind.
Being a relatively new parent, the lack of consumer protection regulation in things like kids apps, youtube ads, and similar is APPALLING. I recall from my youth TV programming was highly regulated, arguably a bit too much, but at least the advertising industry had to stay within bounds.
App and youtube ads are the wild west, especially freemium games using any and all addictive mechanisms to extract money from kids and their parents.
Aside from that, big tech can't have it both ways. They can't be major providers of "cyberspace" services and provide no means for customer service or protection from their security automated services locking out someone. Why this isn't subject to large civil penalties, massive class action lawsuits, and even criminal violation of federal law is beyond me.
Terms of Service can't cover all of those, but then again, I haven't read them so...
Online services are steadily gaining importance equal to things like banking. Can you imagine a bank locking you out of your accounts and providing no means to get YOUR MONEY? Well, replace money with information. Why can't you get access to YOUR INFORMATION?
I understand the ToS providing the rights to analyze and use YOUR INFORMATION as part of the service, but we need federal legislation equal to the EU laws that I think do a better (but from what I can tell incomplete) job of delimiting the rights you have to YOUR INFORMATION.
What we are seeing is a symptom of the system of corporation government that is unbalanced by design wrought in hell.
Maybe, just maybe, if people are sobbing, maybe there's a good reason why! And maybe, just maybe, if you don't want to receive such support, you can advocate for a system in which you could opt out of all such processes entirely, instead of arguing that any form of account remediation shouldn't exist.
They could preauthorize a random token amount on credit card with matching details, have you call the number on the back of your card to figure out that amount and then you have to input that number to authorize the access in an oath like flow.
Please tell me if you see something wrong with my procedure?
edit: I saw something wrong, I have forgotten about the vast unbanked population in the rest of the world as we don't have that problem in Canada¹
1) https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/worlds-most-...
a) google will have to require a credit card in order to open an email
b) person opening an email account must actually have a line of credit, e.g.: many of the people mentioned in the OP will not have it
c) opens a new attack vector on google accounts, e.g.: people who secured their emails using 2FA app for example can now be attacked via a credit card process
This isn't to say that this is an unsolvable problem, it's not, but it's definitely worth talking about.
Post offices are geographically ubiquitous, already deal with identity verification, and already have to maintain the trustworthiness of their workforce.
I'd like to see a system where (a) an account [whether GMail, Facebook, Schwab or Bob's Online Pet Food Mart] can be tied to a real-world identity and (b) when you lose access, you can go to the local post office to verify your identity and get a one-time recovery token for a given account.
This sort of solution (and your post office idea) can be, but they don't satisfy the last resort customer service role, for people who haven't set these kinds of recovery options up.
I feel 2FA is a class libraries should be teaching. I am off to my local library to volunteer as a resource for that specific purpose. Anybody going to join me at their local library?
I was going to make the recovery code comment myself, but instead I did a search to see if anyone else had done so. Kudos. If would vote this comment to the top of the discussion if I only could. IMO it should be (part of) a PSA.
Proof of identity should be a government function, and that we likely have millions of people in the US with no way to prove their identity has real-world consequences beyond the flaw in my post-office-account-recovery-scheme; it affects access to benefits, as you said, as well as voting and being able to even prove your citizenship. That should be fixed too, but I'm not sure we can do any better for internet identity verification than the post office fallback.
Its time to bring this stupid, dystopian nightmare we’ve created to an end.
(a) still be a government agency, not a wholly-owned subsidiary,
(b) already provide email via government servers and clients in kiosks at the post office (and the personnel to staff the service and handle high-touch troubleshooting) instead of relying on private corporations and organizations to be the sole providers of what has become a necessary service, and
(c) provide basic banking services, knee-capping the payday lending and check-cashing industries.
... but it isn't that kind of country right now.
Customer support is a cost sink that usually isnt empowered to do anything. Its more PR tactic to make people feel they are "heard" without resorting to twitter.
In the email/business apps space, google is clearly not a monopoly. Presence/quality of customer support seems a very reasonable grounds to have normal competition over.
Too bad. If you have a business (and Google is a business) that goes business with the public (which Google does), you should offer some form of customer services. It's what we human beings call "the right thing to do."
Yes, customer service costs money. It costs money for the dry cleaners, the restaurants, the banks, the car washes, the design firms, and every single other company on the planet. It's a basic part of the financials of running a business, and is called "cost of doing business."
Imagine if Google's vendors stopped offering Google customer service. Janitor didn't show up today? Well, clean your own office toilet today, technie. Surely, there's a YouTube tutorial for that.
Just because Google's a "tech" company, people on HN pretend like it's OK to not provide customer service. Bullshit. It has billions and billions and billions of dollars that it can throw at the customer service problem, but it doesn't for one simple reason: Greed.
How about the restaurant down the street maximizes its shareholder profits by not honoring your reservation? How about the dry cleaner optimizes its workflow by only being open three minutes a day? How about your kid's school right-sizes its workforce responsibilities by kicking your kid out on the street when you got stuck in traffic and couldn't pick him up at the exact moment the school bell rang?
If Google is so wonderful, full of so many smart people, then how come it can't solve its customer service problem? Ignoring the problem isn't a solution. You can do better™.
At their scale, this exact scenario happens all the time. The back-stop is that Google chooses to stop doing business with unreliable service providers.
This is also an option for Google users. Gmail competitors are just a click away.
... You are actually ascribing a larger amount of have-their-shit-togetherness to Google than may be strictly true. Without telling too many stories that aren't mine, I'll say "Usually. They usually don't." ;)
But to extend your analogy a bit... Google doesn't lose physical access to their headquarters because security is not a third-party vendor. They keep the mission-critical stuff in-house. That would translate, analogously, to individual homeless or elderly people running their own mail servers (infeasible)... Or, perhaps, libraries running mail servers and providing accounts for patrons tied to their library cards (might be actually, maybe, feasible?).
> When people start using Gmail, they don't expect to someday lose access to their online banking and utility bills and all the rest, and by the time it does happen to them and they decide to look for a competitor, a lot more damage has been done due to missed bills, etc.
You're absolutely right, and the back stop is almost certainly to make people aware of this very significant risk factor in using Gmail instead of alternatives.
> If regulation improves the terms the users agree to so they have some way to get reasonable help from customer service and Google finds that too expensive, they can either charge for Gmail or shut it down.
If such regulation is impossible at the scale of serving 1.5 billion customers, which I assert it is until somebody can provide a practical road map for getting to that scenario, then your recommended remedy for "Gmail doesn't work reliably for a subset of its users" is "Deny its benefits to all of its users." That seems strictly worse than a solution where we encourage people to be conscious of their risk tolerance before signing up for service with a company that can't guarantee they won't get locked out of their account with no easy method to unlock it.
Having a human to ramble at about vauge complaints is very different
The need for unbounded growth is not a valid justification for not acknowledging humans.
Now, I'm not sure what would be the solution. Regulation requiring some level of support? "Right to talk to a capable human" or somesuch? Sounds a bit arbitrary. In the meanwhile, I'm trying to un-Google myself and use more respectul alternatives, as well as raising awareness in my immediate circle.
If you're not able to do business at Google Scale without providing human support (and similarly, not treating support personnel like absolute garbage, as we see with call center operators for ISPs and whatnot), then maybe you just can't operate at that scale?
This goes even further: things like free-to-play games that use psychological manipulation to culture addictive personalities and whatnot seem ethically wrong to me. If your business model depends on absolutely fleecing vulnerable people, then maybe it shouldn't be viable?
I guess the base premise is I don't think companies should "have the right to make all the money in the world".
To be clear, I'm not advocating for the solution above, but I sure believe the problem described _is_ in fact legitimate within my morals.
In the physical goods world, there is no company that is allowed to dump products onto market and pretend like their customers do not exist. If their product cause harm to the consumer, their products will get recalled or they'd get sued.
Google has somehow allowed itself to infinitely scale their users but also infinitely shrink their liabilities/duty by binding all users to their ToS which foists arbitration on all of them.
The article states some types of harm causes, and those people are struggling for an few dollars, they can’t sue Google.
I do not claim that some sort of utopia of ultimate consumer protection exists. It does not for google, nor for physical goods companies.
Yeah, lawyers are just lining up to represent those homeless folks, elderly grandmothers, and people who just don't get tech.
Except they're not.
Clearly you've never been poor.
Represent them for what precisely? The tort of not providing a good user interface?
I don't think wealth has much to do with the lack of google being sued here. Wealth may buy better lawyers, but it doesn't create grounds for a lawsuit out of thin air.
> Clearly you've never been poor.
Life often sucks and is not fair. It is not google's responsibility to eradicate poverty
Lets pause on that thought.
Why is there a moral imperative to offer customer service (provided they dont misrepresent that they do)? What is the basis for a moral obligation?
Its not like there is a line in the bible saying "thou shalt offer tech support". Admitidly im not convinced by religious arguments, but i dont see any more modern moral source either.
> Imagine if Google's vendors stopped offering Google customer service. Janitor didn't show up today? Well, clean your own office toilet today, technie. Surely, there's a YouTube tutorial for that.
That's not really a customer support inquiry. That said, one of two things happen - either they are ok with it, or they are not. If they are not they negotiate other terms or hire a different cleaning company.
I'm not saying you have to like google's policies, just that its not unethical for google to have policies you don't like.
> Bullshit. It has billions and billions and billions of dollars that it can throw at the customer service problem, but it doesn't for one simple reason: Greed.
Wait. Are you telling me that a private corporation in america is trying to maximize profits? The horrors. I would have never guessed. What next? Is the sky blue?
> How about the restaurant down the street maximizes its shareholder profits by not honoring your reservation?
A) that action does not maximize shareholder profit.
And b) its wrong because they promised something and didn't deliver. The sin is in the reneging.
If google promised customer support and didn't deliver, that would be wrong. But google didn't promise customer support.
> How about the dry cleaner optimizes its workflow by only being open three minutes a day?
Sounds like a shitty dry cleaner, but i fail to see the ethical issue. If the dry cleaner doesn't meet your needs, don't use it.
Quite frankly, i think this entire thing reeks of entitlement. Just because someone offers to sell you a service, doesn't mean they have an obligation to provide it in the fashion you want. Their obligation is to not mislead, and be honest about what they are offering. Maybe what they are offering works for you, maybe it doesn't. If it doesn't dont do business with them.
> If Google is so wonderful, full of so many smart people, then how come it can't solve its customer service problem?
Because they don't want to and there is nothing wrong with that.
You seem to be working with a different definition of "wrong" than the rest of the planet.
There are people becoming homeless and losing government benefits because of Google.
Either you didn't read the letter, or you are a deeply amoral person who should seek professional help.
How would you define it then?
I know this is sort of a trick question, as defining morality is something moral philosophers have struggled with since forever.
Generally though, i think that if you give something to someone for free, you're not responsible to teach them how to use it or make it accessible to use (Unless you promised otherwise).
e.g. We don't think Linus is responsible for teaching a course on how to use Linux.
> There are people becoming homeless and losing government benefits because of Google.
Is it really because of google? I would think the primary party to blame here would be the government that seems to insist using email to communicate about benefits. This seems highly inappropriate given the audience they are trying to serve.
> Either you didn't read the letter, or you are a deeply amoral person who should seek professional help.
You can be sympathetic to the situation without thinking google is at fault here. Or alternatively think the situation is really sad and unfortunate but think that imposing a duty to provide support is a bad solution.