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Comment by Brystephor | Hacker News Reader

I work in payments. This is pretty normal AFAIK. Doing a chargeback is a good way to be "fired" as a customer and not allowed to use that companies services anymore.

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google is not a small local shop only responsible for one tiny part of your life like a plumber. They have actively sought to make themselves integral to your whole life. When the plumber fires you, you do not lose access to your retirement account because ypu can no longer prove your identity because your phone and email both went up in smoke. That comes with responsibility. This is a quite false equivalence. Chargebacks are bad? Yes, well, so is not having human customer service.

The plumber has a wife answering the phone who can be reasoned with and who can reason with you and you can arrive at some compromise or understanding or other deal before getting to a chargeback. And that's just for a noncritical service. What compromise or understanding does google offer? For their service which they have actively made as critical as possible?

This sob story about how bad chargebacks are falls flat.

I agree that having poor customer service is unacceptable. I agree that losing your access to email is a tragic thing and extremely difficult to resolve all the other issues that come with that. I'm not really commenting on the situation other than that issuing a chargeback commonly results in a loss of access to that companies services.

Isn't this a great way to motivate users to respond by setting up throw-away accounts, with disposable forwarding emails and Privacy.com-generated credit card numbers? True, this is a multi-step process, but it also seems like something which could be automated.

I was told by experienced web developer to do exactly this: every time I need something for Google I must create new address and new identity. If something goes wrong only project related identity gets destroyed and I can access other accounts.

Until some automated system catches you with your many accounts and bans all of them?

I’ve got around 30 different gmail accounts for various non nefarious projects, i wonder if they think that’s bad?

There are often a variety of ways that duplicate accounts are detected, device ID, ip addresses, phone numbers, fingerprints, physical addresses, etc.

IIRC google requires a non-voip phone, so you’ll need a burner phone too if you want to go that route.

My experience with those generated CC numbers has been poor. A lot of sites somehow recognize them and reject them.

I don't know if I'm having a false memory but it think someone some time ago commented here on a similar topic that they got banned on Google for using a virtual card

First digits of the credit card tells you what card it is and who is the issuer. Detecting privacy.com is just a matter of knowing their ranges.

They also themselves will prevent you from using those cards to break ToS if they can detect it (i.e. multiple sign-ups for known service).

I can get unique CC number for every transaction. Normal service from my bank.

What country? What bank???

This is normal in Portugal.

I can generate single-use cards with an arbitrary limit, limit cards that can be used any number of times, and cards with a monthly renewing limit.

This works for literally any bank in Portugal via an app called MBWay.

France, virtually any major bank really: LCL, Boursorama, Societe Generale, etc.

Brazil, at least Itaú does this.

Virtual cards are often associated with fraud or malicious actions and may be rejected entirely. Generating cards probably can be done programmatically, but so can recognizing and blocking those cards.

That's not really the problem. The problem is that *customer support* suggested to do so.

Yeah there is no excuse for Google not to make an exception to the policy when Google told the poster to do the chargeback.

This is the inevitable result of automation. There is no negotiating with a piece of code.

It’s not inevitable. Of course it can be overridden.

But by who? There’s nobody to hire for that role, because the role has been automated.

I have no idea if you're being serious, but of course code can be overridden and of course you can hire someone to override it. Google has apparently chosen not to.

Hiring someone to do a thing is the opposite of automating it.

I think the chargeback here was a personal "go f yourself" move from the supervisor to a "troublesome" client, not Google.

If the customer was told to do a chargeback by a Google employee (or outsourced contractor) then it was _Google_ who told the customer to do the chargeback.

Every action by myself acting in my official capacity is an action by my company and they cannot disentangle themselves from that obligation by blaming an employee.

Google logs everything about everyone, but somehow doesn't have a record of themselves telling the user to do something.

Man it sure is a great gig being google!

That's definitely a problem. But a lot of people seem surprised that issuing a chargeback can result in a loss of access to company services. So was just sharing from my work experience.

It's normal if you're a store someone can go elsewhere to do business.

It should be illegal if you're a global monopoly where it's nearly impossible to function in modern society without an account to.

The problem I see time and time again, is that Google acts like it is completely unaware it's a monopoly.

How is google a monopoly? I get by just fine without it.

You might be fine now, but what if you want to open a physical store/restaurant/etc next year? If you're banned from Google, you'd have no control over your business profile on Google, can't respond to reviews, can't update your store hours and other details, can't advertise on maps, etc.

Do you have an Android phone? It's getting harder to use them without a Google account.

In my university, professors and old T.A. have a mix of gmail, hotmail and yahoo, let's say 1/3, 1/3 and 1/3. But students have almost 100% emails from gmail.

I't not a monopoly, but it's getting very close.

No I don’t use Android on any device.

Some people wrote letters in 1980. That ain’t a defense of Ma Bell.

There are multiple email providers. There are multiple phone providers. You want to argue this is a duopoly? Ok. But it is demonstrably not a monopoly.

Chrome‘s market share is on par with 90s windows. Google search is above that. G-apps on android is on par with ma bell.

Monopolists of the past are jealous of how many monopolies google is getting away with.

Google abuses these positions to decide what web technologies the web uses, which businesses get found on the web and which don’t, and how android device manufacturers build their phones.

An email monopoly, perhaps, but not a comms monopoly. I bet the students have snapchat, whatsapp, fb messanger, etc maybe signal or telegram too. Plus mms and phone for 2fa. But yeah, email is quite special for password recovery so its a good point you're making.

You probably don't get by without it entirely. Set up a DNS black hole for all of TLS's TLDs, and watch your local network collapse.

(Having said that, I more-or-less never log into my google account, and also don't intentionally use any of their services.)

> ...for all of TLS's TLDs,...

Curious what you meant by that? Which TLDs are that and why would my local network collapse?

My keyboard autocorrected Google to TLS. Huh.

Not everyone used windows in 1994, either. What they both have/had are significant market shares in certain markets that they abuse to maintain control.

Yes, this is true. I never knew doing a chargeback against the Google Store would get your email account banned.

Google can do what it wants, I just wanted to let people know so they think twice before doing a chargeback against Google.

Your Google Store account IS the some account as your email account.

It's definitely surprising. Chargebacks cause additional issues for a company which is why they're treated more severely than something like a late payment, refunds, etc.

It seems like a lot of folks are surprised by a chargeback causing a loss of access to the company services so wanted to share my experience that this is not abnormal. Big companies tend to do this.

Chargebacks get you banned from pretty much every single company/service.

Sure, we get this. That's not the issue.

The issue is Google told them to issue a chargeback to get his money back. That was Google's representative saying this.

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