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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

I had a strange and similar interaction with Google recently. I was asked to do the Android developer verification, but then I missed a deadline at some point. Support said that I would need to create a new Google account for all of this. I said this was unacceptable as this was a Google account I had for nearly 25 years and I didn't want to create another. They said tough luck, go make the new account. Luckily, I had recently married and was making a new account for the name change. I tried to use that account, but it wanted a different phone number to use for verification, but I only have one number and you can't use Google voice numbers. I went back and told Google I cannot use the same phone number to verify and I'm not buying a burner phone to do this with. Then they just said "Ah, ok, we'll fix your original account then" and fixed the original account. This was literally a week of back and forth. Pointless waste of time.

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I'm surprised you were able to get a person to address your issue.

I thought exactly the same! My question: How/Why were they able to speak to a human (or maybe chat/email)?

Last year our bakery business got blocked from Google Maps. Reason: Your business is not eligible...

Yep, apparently a brick and mortar bakery isn't eligible for Google Maps. Obviously bogus. I appealed over and over again, rereading the rules, watching every dumb YouTube video, fixing every minor imagined transgression I could think of and each time just got another BS automated "your business is not eligible...".

Pretty much gave up them my partner decided to try one more time. In Vietnamese.

We had both been trying, she in Vietnamese, me in English, but this time she tried it at about 10:30pm local time and apparently it got routed to a bored Vietnamese speaker in the California help center, who fixed it immediately.

So it is possible but it'll take some weird combination of luck and timing.

Damn! That is so dystopic to me. The future of businesses determined by the will of some customer support interpretations of bogus rules. Ain't that a bit black mirroresque?

This is how Apple's app approval process works as well :)

You get rejected, you can just increment the version number and resubmit. It will get assigned to a different person and maybe pass this time.

I worked at a job where we had to maintain an app for Apple's platform. We would make some minor bugfix based on user feedback and submit the app. They would come back with a denial that was based on changes or features introduced years ago. We would go tweak that specific feature in some way, resubmit and it would pass.

It's also possible/likely they're using discrimination. It's cheaper to avoid lawsuits and PR disasters by ensuring they respond faster to minority customers. That and/or Vietnamese customers tend to have higher spend/conversion, so Google gives them better service. Or her husband's Google account had some kind of score based on previous spend/statistical probability that determined he deserved better service.

I think there is zero chance these companies aren't using LLMs to sort out the "desirable" customers from the undesirables. Google in particular knows almost everything about us.

We're in Vietnam. I'm the minority here, as a European.

Some people, by some other people's measures are never minorities.

Thanks to cumulative technical progress what used to be the domain of state actors has now trickled down to big business (on some level this is a joke, but also I'm dead serious). Someday it will trickle down to the bakery.

> The future of businesses determined by the will of some customer support interpretations of bogus rules.

That's the present. The future will be trying to cajole an LLM into interpretation of bogus rules. Not sure if that's better or worse.

That is straight out of the movie Brazil.

Several years ago, one of my Gmail accounts (mainly used for non-serious purposes, such as registering on gaming forums) was stolen due to a password leak. I received an login alert via a forwarded email, but since I hadn’t set up a recovery email address, I lost control of the account. I couldn’t even find any way to reach out to someone to take action and recover my email account.

All you can do it post a thread on the support forums, and nothing happen anymore;

I think for ordinary users (rather than developers or merchants), this is even worse.

When you are logged in to the Google Play Developer console there is an area to do the verification and once you get to a stage that breaks down (as explained) it just has a support form, which then happens via email.

I suspect the story is entirely made up, based on that detail alone.

>I suspect the story is entirely made up, based on that detail alone.

... why?

Google has a zillion employees and the story didn't even end altruistically on their side, what the fuck would the point of fictionalizing this encounter be? typing practice?

I get that it's kind of supposed to be an advanced jab at google "The world will end before you speak to a human", but cast the shade on the perpetrators rather than saying that the victimized side is lying.

HN just being curmudgeonly. Nothing you can do about it except disengage with the site. All social media is bound to have the same results.

Pay me and I'll post the email thread with verified headers. My contact info is in my profile.

Otherwise consider that you're fucking wrong and have little understanding of how communication with Google works?

Also go through my history and find the other times I have sharesd this same story. Do I get paid for each time?

The Amazon version of this story I heard was support advising to create a new account, and then the person got permabanned for creating multiple accounts which is against TOS.

Had similar experience. My best guess is that the account never went through the various age verification flows (since it was that old, it predated all that) and ended up being marked for deletion- I suspect that they had a bug (legal or in code) that prevented warning emails to get out. I got lucky to detect it early, since they disabled AI a few weeks before account deletion.

My gmail account still has the "First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail." mail in it from June 2004. The account itself is over 21 years old. I wonder if I'll get forced to age verify myself any time?

You are just a row in a database. Column can’t have nulls.

   SELECT
      id,
      full_name,
      IFNULL(age_verified, acc_created < DATETIME_SUB(CURRENT_DATETIME(), INTERVAL 18 YEAR) AS age_verified,
   FROM 
      google_accounts

As the owner of a GMail account which is also of legal adult age (and a Reddit account which will be 18 this year), I am morbidly curious what will happen once these mandatory "age verification" start to be enforced.

It should be trivial for Google and Reddit to grandfather-in accounts which are more than 18 years old (arguably less, who created their account when they were, e.g. 5 years old?). However, I'm betting they will come up with all sorts of rationalisations as to why this is not possible, anything from the bullshit ("not technically feasible" my ass) or the self-contradictory ("an account may have changed owner"... so in violation of the ToS? And what's to stop an account from changing ownership after age verification?).

I admit I am prematurely riling myself up with indignation for something which may never happen. Maybe I am wrong and Google, Reddit, etc. take the common sense approach, but I have no hope in it.

Since we all know that age verification is just tracking validation, then your predictions and indignation are justified.

Mine did, once, and it hasn't been requested again. It was also, until recently, accepted by age verification services as indication of non-minor status.

For about 10 years, I have had a habit of creating a new, separate Google account for every new project I start, and then adding my personal account as a team member/collaborator. This way, the potential blast radius is (hopefully) limited.

This is the first and only time I've seen someone say they got a positive resolution. No joke, not a single post about Google account-lockouts (that I've seen) in more than a decade has had a happy ending. I'm happy for you. It's also surprising that this breaks the mold.

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