And people wonder why I don't want to use Google products... The fact that you might be locked of all your accounts for a random bullshit reason (with no support either) is completely insane. People reading this here on HN, please don't use Google products for any important matter or it might bite you back one day (basically only what you can afford to lose).
I've posted many times on HN an anecdote of mine regarding using Google (paid) services. Basically got my ex-employer (30 people) company on board to using google docs accounts to share documents. Since this is a corporation we decided to go with the 50$/user/year, which we duly paid each year.
Things went swimmingly well, until a user reported seeing an error message, and then not being able to access the document at all. Escalation was a joke, and after a whole week of not having access to the critical google spreadsheet, Google was still fumbling around. Finally we got the document back, because one of the employees had kept the email containing the URL of the document (sent out when a document is shared with a group of people).
If it wasn't for that old email kept by an employee, we'd probably never would have 'found' the document again. Google's support was at best incompetent.
Beware dancing with the Dragon that is Google! Backup your files, keep important document URLS!
Hope this helps a poor soul somewhere.
Where to begin with this.. hmm..
First you:
"I have a friend who creates Android apps on the side. I do something similar to this, but instead my apps revolve around cloning .apk files and restoring them". Why not be clear and just admit you're pirating software off an App Store? Ok, not the smartest activity in the world BUT did you have to do it at work?
Then Google:
"We were all freaking out, our IT guys were trying to get a hold of Google but couldn't get in touch with anyone." - So yea, unless you're one of Google's 'poster' customers, good luck trying to get help when something goes wrong!
"Their policy is to not share any information about what caused this and they will not reverse these actions." - Yup, that's Google. Unless you're one of the customers on this list: https://gsuite.google.com/customers/ you are totally screwed when something goes wrong.
I introduce the world to the ToS-DoS Attack - only a matter of time before this now gets exploited:
- Hack into a companies GSuite account and create a new account.
- Use the new account to commit a range of ToS violations.
- Wait for Google to suspend the entire GSuite account.
Wait, are we sure that this really happened? Seems very unlikely, and even the OP did not present any evidence. I would be really surprised if Google would be scanning emails, and using that to ban the gsuite account of the entire company.
A red flag for me is the claim that Google also blocked accounts that were set for recovery which seems almost close to impossible (or insane).
These stories pop up on a regular basis. Someone from Google eventually reaches out and fixes it because of all the publicity. Meanwhile, the policy (which is insane, and compounded by the difficulty of reaching a human at Google support) never changes.
I got my google account banned several times.
Several years ago I had my account payment features banned with no explanation. That in turn basically banned me from most of Google services because I could not pay for them or use them because payments were banned. No adwords, adsense, no google cloud services, no buying android apps, nothing... With no explanation, no support, and I tried hard just to find out what I did wrong.
After that I come to terms that I have to leave my email that I used for like 10 years and make a new one. But, this time I first bought a domain name and then started paying for google apps. This way if they ban me for whatever reason I could at least take my email address to some other email provider. Anyhow, sometime later youtube enabled Adsense on videos for my country. I enabled it out of curiosity, just to see what is the process of doing and using it. I don`t have videos on my channel except one random from the gym that I uploaded 1-2 years ago. So, I just enabled adsense poked at that for 1 day and left it unused. Sometime after that I got an email that my adsense and adword account is banned for violating policy (not saying which one). No explanation why, nothing!!! I tried to get an explanation like REALLY hard, but could not. You are just stuck in an endless loop of robot answers, or not getting answers at all. They even have google forms for complaints which point me to some URL that I am banned from viewing, lol. And there is some other form that no one answers when you fill it and I filled it 10 times.
Long story short, I slowly started migrating from Google services. This is really maddening and scary that they can just cut you off from your data without explanation. I use Google Photos heavily and even a possibility that they could cut me off from my photos at any time is sickening. That is why I bought NAS which backups my Google Photos to physical drives in my apartment. Now I just need to find something comparable to Google Photos and leave that service for good...
And this is why I have my own domain, specifically for my email address. It doesn't have a website or anything, just a single email address, for my personal use.
That way I have full control of my domain name, right up until the point where I forget to renew it, and a domain squatter takes it from me.
There really must be something better than either of these systems. Being at the whims of Google isn't good, but having your own domain name has its own set of problems.
This also highlights why companies need to ensure that their systems are platform agnostic. This is why I don't trust things like Slack for business critical applications. Once you're locked in, it's bloody hard to get out.
Greetings. This is Alex Diacre here from G Suite Support. This has been flagged for my team and we’re looking into it. If anyone G Suite customer has trouble accessing their account they can always contact Google Cloud Support here: https://support.google.com/a/contact/admin_no_access (this is a special form to use when you cannot access)
It not exactly new that Google has zero customer support and not the first (and for sure not the last) horror story about automatic bans on Google services. If anyone treats Google accounts in any way as permanent or reliable - "this" may happen to you too. It may even happen will no fault at all from your side - e.g. someone would have a linked youtube account and bigcorp will take it down for a copyright on a white noise video and then whole linked account structure will crumple down like house of cards. Or any of the thousands alternative reasons.
It's insane that a mere ToS violation (not even anything criminal or large scale) on a different Google product got not only his account banned, but all related accounts across all Google products banned also.
It makes me really worry about things I have done that are truly against their ToS. For example after Google Cloud Platform announced a $300 credit promo for new users, I made another gmail account just to try them out. I don't think what I did is unethical or even against the spirit of their promo so I didn't bother to hide the connection back to my real gmail. Will google use this to ban my real google account one day? Probably not, but before this story I naively believed the answer was definitely no.
When mission critical parts, tools, or infrastructure is moved to "the cloud" (aka computers owned by someone else that you do not control) - often replacing in-house tools with a SaaSS[1] - a second source[2] is rarely discussed as a requirement. The "cloud" doesn't magically solve path dependency.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source
edit: my father once mentioned that when he was working at Honneywell in Minneapolis (making home automation in the 80s), some of the engineers frequented a local bar called literally "The Second Source". "Sorry boss, I'm busy this afternoon - I have a meeting at the second source!"
Time to
1) grab/download the entire mailbox from Gmail 2) delete the mailbox at Gmail 3) export all gdrive data, use the export function 4) delete the gdrive data
5) register with fastmail, yandex or protonmail 6) start mailpile on your raspberry pi or similar 7) use mailpile as frontend for yandex/protonmail/other-imap account.
8) nextcloud as good enough but shitty replacement for gdrive
Self-hosted ftw.
I'd really like to hear Google's side of this story, since the story as-written doesn't seem plausible.
Alternative title: Today I realised why going all-in on Google's platform is maybe not a great business decision.
Also note: this isn't me personally.
having unrelated personal accounts locked because they're set as the recovery account for an account that was tangentially related to a ToS violation is absolutely unacceptable. there's no plausible reason for that other than to inconvenience as many people as possible.
So on the last day at my shit job in the shit office, I should just go ahead and abuse the refund policy? Sounds crazy to me..
Question for those with a bit more knowledge in this area: How large does the company have to be so that you're excluded from those kind of enforcement actions? With most companies (e.g. Microsoft), large enterprise customers get very different terms and are excluded from all the usual "customer service". Is that the same with Google? Otherwise I couldn't imagine that this would make it into any large companies.
I made a similar experience with Google, just on a way smaller scale. I still use their service on a very small scale, but I would newer use them for a larger scale. While their services are mostly very convenient to use, some of their rules are ridiculous and even if you make a small mistake, they will ban you for lifetime. One example I have is when we built a little website for a school project. It was an obvious fake site about smart homes by a company that was basically developing the terminator. I included a Google ad on the site just to make it look more realistic. When it showed ads for robotics (which I'm very interested in) I clicked on it and so did my classmates. We suddenly had about three Euros in ad-revenue, when I got banned by AdWords (or AdSense, I always confuse one with the other). I wrote an email apologizing and explaining everything and thought they would just reset the account to zero, but nope. I now have a lifetime ban from any Google Ads service. I even asked again several years later when I've had a bigger site that I wanted to put some ads on, but apparently my actions where so incredibly evil, that I will never be able to use those services ever again (if I don't create a new Gmail account that is). That doesn't keep them from sending me vouchers and ads to use those services, of course. Well, good thing there are a lot of alternatives which I am happily using without any incident and I learned my lesson soon enough.
I pay $5 a month for a custom domain gmail account and last year I had an issue connecting to their POP3 service. Opened a support ticket and got extremely high quality support immediately. Basically, my experience was the opposite of all the horror stories which always get echoed in these support threads.
> As a joke, every time my friend releases an app (usually paid), I buy the app and clone it with my software, and then refund it. After that, I send him an e-mail with the cloned version through Gmail with something along the lines of: "Look at this cool app I found on the store, it was completely free! Try it out!", or stupid shit like that. It was a bit of a stupid inside joke that kind of stuck for a while and was only between us.
This sounds so strange, and surely it wouldn't get you banned. Why would someone keep doing the same joke.
Re-reading the story, it seems to me they had a manual solution, linking personally made Google email accounts to serve as a corporate email (rather than using GSuite), which is probably why all the accounts were seen by the automated banning system as all owned by the reddit OP.
If they actually got GSuite they might have had a semblance of support. Still a crap response from Google as usual.
Things like these can happen with any service provider. The key difference is that no other company has so many popular services linked together. Using Google this way basically means putting all one's eggs in one basket. We all know it's an unwise thing to do. An yet, people do it every day, for convenience.
Personally, I set up separate Gmail accounts for their different services. First, I don't want them to profile me automatically (they do it through correlation anyway, but let's not make it too easy), and second, in situations like these, only some of the eggs are broken.
Not up to date on Google Play developer terms but doesn't a customer requesting a refund makes the developer still liable for Google fees ? If so that's a very shitty thing to do to your friend.
This is a potential problem for medium size businesses. Very large companies that use Google Office products have dedicated support people at Google.
This also doesn’t have to be a problem for individuals. I often use gmail, but only by forwarding my fastmail to it. I can stop using gmail at anytime (which I do often when not travelling and don’t need the extra services). I also back up my Google data periodically, so the only absolute loss for getting locked out of my account would be the digital content purchased at Google Play.
But, for small and medium businesses, beware.
Stories like these document how immature Google is for the B2B market.
No sane company can risk being obliterated by Google's bully ToS and ignorant support.
But what is account association? Do my accounts associate when I log into one and then into another via google’s log in form (the one with stupid login/password separation)? Or did they connect all the accounts by hand via something like backup email?
What if my buddy logs into gmail on my laptop, logs out, and then one of us violates ToS?
If this was indeed GSuite then it really seems like a lawsuit in the making. It wouldn't be hard for a judge to nullify Google's TOS either as they quite often include terms that are illegal in some jurisdictions.
Will definitely be sharing this story with our team in the morning.
The fact that this is/was upvoted so highly shows how deeply ingrained the "believe first, fact check later" mentality is in humans when the piece in question aligns with our personal worldview. This is exactly how fake news spreads.
I wonder what would have happened if that guy's company also used Google Cloud (as in "Google Cloud Platform").
Would have google ketp all of their data and services hostage?
This is freaking scary. Just one rogue employee and everything goes down.
I don't buy the "we couldn't get a hold of Google" claim. I contact Google via telephone, chat and email all the time for clients - never had a problem making contact or having my issue resolved. Odd.
OP said you can log in to banned accounts but can't do anything. I would expect an email from Google that tells me why account got banned and whom to contact. If they are not doing that then that's pretty dumb.
Using a service that can be withdrawn at random without recourse is irresponsible. Whoever makes a decision like that needs a lesson in risk management. Blows my mind.
IMHO testing payment works and getting apk then sending it to owner (proving its working) is pretty ok situation. of coursw you will request refund...
given these days deployment stuff can get infected easily (remember a framework contained malware in many apps in appstore)
there is services providing testflights for such stuff, but if npm/yarn/pypi/insert pkg manager here loads infected package, you're done
Just call customer service ...
To me, what's telling about this is not that it may or may not have happened, but that people could believe it happened (even through a skeptical lens), and that some people believe that this sort of thing wouldn't happen if you had Microsoft or Amazon accounts, at least not in the same way.
So, what are the best alternatives? I know about MS office and I think Zoho has email, who else is out there?
This is when I really wish Amazon had a free email service to compete. Their customer service always rocks!
Google’s “customer service” policies have always been trash.
IMO it’s a part of the culture there that will never change. Good reminder to switch as many services as possible from Google before something irreversible happens to our entire company and all of our personal email accounts / domains.
SkyNet, you signed up voluntarily.
> and our boss is looking to migrate away from Google
only if it is not too late. 'Don't be evil' was removed from the code of conduct's preface in 2018.
I commented 2 days ago on other thread:
Your kids share their assignments to it, your company uses it for all comms, you use it for private messages, you tell it your secret desires via searches, it knows who you're with at any point of time with android location ... Google Home? My home? SkyNet must be destroyed now.
This is why you self-host as much as possible.
Similar thing happened to me. Google randomly disabled my account for no reason. There was absolutely no way to contact them. From that day onward, I do not trust Google or anyone to keep my data.
At least, I got a small product out of the experience: https://thehorcrux.com/why-i-built-horcrux-app/
I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned/promoted a product for decentralizing GSuite.
FastMail for mail Office 365 for office
Don't use Google, diversify with better products in each category.
I love how the default way to get an actual human to respond to a real problem at google is now:
1. Be famous
2. Make a stink on social media
I feel like I'm back in high school.
Why the toilet scene?
:)
By the way, the day I went off gmail, I used a script like this to download all my emails: http://taoofmac.com/space/projects/imapbackup
"some of their personal e-mails are also blocked as well. "
Never, never ever use a gmail account for anything important. I learned it the hard way and once nearly lost a domain because of this.
gandi.net offers domains with free IMAP email service
infomaniak.com is also good for email. Switzerland based.
" our IT guys were trying to get a hold of Google but couldn't get in touch with anyone."
ROTFL.
Google was recently asked to mandate diversity and equal pay. The mgt of Google is against it: https://i.redd.it/htqi8nuk6xx01.jpg
Not the point of this post, but man... the new Reddit design is so bad.
It's like someone new to HTML tried to re-create a Facebook page using a scan of a screenshot, and just changed it enough to try and say it wasn't a total knock off.
He didn't do anything wrong and the way and excuses how Google refuses to provide any support for their paying customers is just not acceptable.
It is pretty clear that Google refuses to provide any support to actually minimize its own costs, it is so obvious.
> our IT guys were trying to get a hold of Google but couldn't get in touch with anyone.
Try your legal team, if your badly-run company has one (I am not a lawyer). lol
None of this makes any sense, I simply don't believe it.
G Suite for Business is an enterprise product costing $5-25/user/month with 24x7 phone support, escalation paths, contractual SLA's, etc. It competes heavily and directly with Microsoft. A company doesn't get "banned".
This smells like black PR to me... playing on Google's lack of support/transparency around free consumer accounts and trying to get people to associate it with their Enterprise division.
I mean come on, just the way it's written: "One of the girls at work was fucking bawling her eyes out since she couldn't access her e-mail either." and the final "I do not know why Google has a scorched-earth policy when it comes to this kind of stuff, but I fucked up and our boss is looking to migrate away from Google even though we just recently signed on not too long ago." It just feels too obvious.
(Also, G Suite for Business accounts don't have recovery e-mails -- your admin takes care of your account -- so the supposed personal bans sound made-up too. EDIT thanks to ballenf below -- by default users can't set recovery e-mails, but a G Suite admin can enable that option for their domain.)