[logicalmonster]

OP seems like he'll hopefully be fine, but there's probably been many people like this who aren't fine.

I'm sure many people lose their jobs when an advertiser is banned for some dumb and false reason.

I'm sure some people fall into depression and commit suicide when their life's work is destroyed.

Can't the allegedly smartest company on Earth figure out some solution to help people in these extreme cases? Especially when it seems like an honest mistake with no bad intention?

PS: The most aggravating part is that this doesn't even prevent bad actors from using various techniques (identity theft or mass-spawning lots of companies in some lax foreign jurisdiction) to continue operating. This just screws over normal people who fall into some kafkaesque trap based on some rule they didn't know about.

[afandian]

> Can't the allegedly smartest company on Earth figure out some solution to help people in these extreme cases?

I was in a different but comparable situation with Google. I closed my paid account, they claimed I owe them money, and the only way of replying is to log in with said non-existent account.

It's a trivially foreseeable situation, and trivially detected. I bet it's quite common too. If a reasonably intelligent person sat down for five minutes to think about the cancellation process they would identify this branch.

Either those expensive product and software people are incompetent, or they genuinely, deliberately, don't care about edge cases. I can only conclude that it's the second option.

The popular hypothesis is that they couldn't operate at scale without keeping customers away from humans at all costs. But I'm not sure it's true.

[maxbond]

I bet there's lots of people who do care, I think it's usually the structure of an organization that stops problems from getting solved and not the moral failing of any individual. It's entirely possible that literally everyone involved wants to get it fixed, there's a ticket with 100 comments below it detailing how the fix will be implemented, but everytime it makes it into the sprint it gets kicked out and quarter or two because something mission critical always comes up.

[afandian]

Yes, that's very plausible that things could play out that way. But when the stakes are this high, and in an organization as highly staffed as Google, that's pure negligence. Someone designed these emails I'm getting, and designed the workflow.

[himinlomax]

> I closed my paid account, they claimed I owe them money, and the only way of replying is to log in with said non-existent account.

What about sending them a physical, certified letter? Have your lawyer write it.

[afandian]

Their only legal address is in the US. I'm in the UK, and stopped short of looking for a solicitor who would be able to handle this. I'm still considering filing a complaint with the UK Telecoms regulator 'Ofcom'.

The punchline is that the American collections agency they use actually do respond to email and (I believe) dealt with it. But for it to go as far as a collections agency was nuts.

[himinlomax]

Don't they have a legal address in the UK, like for tax purposes?

> I'm still considering filing a complaint with the UK Telecoms regulator 'Ofcom'.

You should!

[afandian]

Nope. I was doing business with Google Ireland. For a while we were all in the EU though...

But the threatening emails came from Mountain View.

This page is all you get: https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/6151275

[himinlomax]

That shouldn't stop you from contacting Google Ireland. They are part of the same company and are their local legal presence after all. If you send them a certified letter and they sign for it, that's it.

[jen20]

Not caring about such basic edge cases makes them incompetent, of course.

[nr2x]

Yeah, with 190k headcount most of these people aren’t exactly head of the class.

[noitpmeder]

You're kidding right? Google's average employee is almost assuredly more capable than top performers in almost any other company. They probably have more actual "head of the class" people than any other company on the planet.

[logicalmonster]

Googlers are more capable than other top performers? Well, yes, but that comes with some gigantic caveats.

The main thing Google has been consistently great at is designing algorithms and systems to process large amounts of data efficiently. You can't take that away from them, of course.

But that's one of the smallest parts about building beautiful software.

When it comes to other important things: understanding how to build products that are loved(particularly in the social space), or understanding the human element, they've been woefully inadequate on a comical level.

[is_true]

That's till they learn the Google way, which seems to be: never contradict the algorithms