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Comment by dx034 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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A company I work for does have personal support from Google. They get invited to private Google presentations for new products as well.

This company employs about 1000 people and is active in half of Europe, with somewhere around 20 million users of their software. (rough estimates here) The company switched from Google to Microsoft before, and back to Google.

Currently, they also use Google Cloud for hosting, including their proprietary APIs/services like their entity storage.

We even have all kinds of "Google"-branded goodies from these events :)

As I said three years ago¹, I think Google is too large to have actual customers, per se, since any group of paying users is still too small for Google to need to pay attention to.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9911461#9912754

It is not about size. Google has horrible customer support.

Nah its just stupid programming from Google. You will spook GMail if you try to access from different country. It will lock you out. Good luck trying to remember details about your decade old email account.

You thought knowing and maintaing strong password is enough to guarantee access. Well Google disagrees with you.

It is nothing stupid/spooky. Remember Google develops for mainstream. They are happy. Just enable 2FA all your issues will go away. Oh, try not to use shady VPNs.

> Just enable 2FA all your issues will go away.

If migrate to a different country and dont have access to your old number you will be in world of pain.

But if you enable 2FA and lose, factory-reset (or shock, migrate away from) your Android device...

Getting access to anything is suddenly hell. I explicitly disabled 2FA after encountering this bullshit once. Won’t risk losing my account again.

The trick with Google's 2FA is to keep a copy of the setup code and/or QR picture somewhere -- preferably printed and in your fire safe.

Personally I've also got it floating around one of my Linux devices with a small program I can run against it to display the codes, which came in handy when I switched phones and forgot to reload the GA app. (Yes, I know that this defeats some of the security of the second factor, with it supposedly being "something you have" that can't be easily reproduced).

It's a good thing that using a single factor doesn't put you at any increased risk of "losing my account again" as a result of it being easily stolen...

Ive never had issues with losing my Google-password nor having my long, complex password guessed over a more than 10 year period of having that account.

I’ve almost lost my Google account twice in less than a year due to Google’s terrible 2FA implementation.

I’ll take my chances thank you.

Damn and I downloaded a picture of the 2FA thing. Now you are spooking me about 2FA, maybe I should disable it on my googly accounts.

I read recently that this is only the case if you don't pay for any of the products?

(you mean pay with money and not only with your data, I assume)

I don't like the notion of paying with your data. You pay with your attention (ad views) and your money (purchases off ads). Data helps making this more efficient but you don't pay Google at all. I also don't pay a TV station that shows me ads or a free newspaper.

And I don't like the notion of google offering free services, when they are a commercial company and not a charity.

And "helps making this more efficient" ... well, a tiny bit more. Knowledge is power. Google posesses a lot of knowledge.

But even "only the ads". There are worlds between showing someone random ads, or a highly tailored custom one, made out of all the online and much offline activity of that person.

And knowing allmost all about what a company is doing and controlling their communication is potential valuable in various ways as well.

Yeah, personally the few times I've talked to google (once for a gift card issues and once for some phone help they've both been easy to contact and helpful.) I've never really tried to reach Google for help with Gmail so no idea how hard that is. But if I was desperate I would contact Google via one of the other contact points and get a redirect to the correct, hopefully, that would work.

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