[VRay]

ugh, that's annoying.. At least you made it onto HackerNews, so your problem might get silently resolved in the shadows

It really sucks that Google can't be bothered to provide 5 minutes of human support despite taking such an enormous cut of all revenue from these apps

[quambene]

Right, my history of suffering went on for 11 months.

Unfortunately, I don't know anyone at Google and I didn't made it to HN.

[duhast]

1. It wouldn’t be 5 minutes. This could easily take hours to resolve.

2. Even with human support, companies like this would continue to be incentivised not to share what exactly triggered the ban in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse. You can’t provide services to billions of people without automation.

3. Human reviews would be performed by humans. Have you ever met humans? You’re replacing an imperfect system with another imperfect system except now things are slower and cost more.

[lbriner]

> not to share what exactly triggered the ban in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse

That's kind of true but I think that a company the size of Google could afford to assign someone to look into providing more information in a scenario like, "you are using geo-location without asking permission". Since the need for permission is not a secret, telling the vendor this causes less friction and makes people hate you a bit less.

Sure, you might also have a "secret" system that does something like "if failed 5 times in a row, blacklist them" but that is just security by obscurity and doesn't seem to stop that many people. Also, in the case where the vendor is an easily verifiable company selling, presumably, something that is fairly easy to view/check, it doesn't seem to be asking for much to either get a human or to get some automated messages.

Apparently they employ 140K people! That is a lot of people to not provide any human support.

[inetknght]

> in order to protect their systems from spam and abuse

Spam and abuse would fall afoul of the CFAA in the US and similar laws in the EU.

Outside of the US? Well maybe those apps shouldn't even be available in the US or EU.

Spam and abuse only happens because the criminals perpetuating it do it without real consequence.

[pixl97]

On number 2, why?

If your program is abusive, have the abuser remove the function until it's no longer abusive. The entire we cant tell you does seem like crap.

[metalised]

That's what I was hoping about my similar problem with facebook, but alas ... no kind HN denizens have offerred any help yet :)

Post is still here if anyone's interested or can help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29876423