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Knowing someone inside Google is not enough. I know because I am that someone. When I tried to help a friend whose account had been locked, my internal tickets got no response whatsoever.

Maybe if you know someone in the exactly right team but even this isn't a given. Unauthorized messing with user data gets you fired.

> Unauthorized messing with user data gets you fired.

This is actually very good to know and maybe Google should even blog about it. I end up in a lot of conversations with friends in a stalemate about Google and personal information.

When I make the argument people should be paying more for the software they use and i.e. paying Google for a GSuite account is one of the best decisions people can make.

Many people do not understand when they have a contract with Google and are paying for services, Google doesn't snoop around in personal data.

The policy applies to any user data, gsuite isn't special for snooping concerns.

> Google doesn't snoop around in personal data.

Why would you trust a company based on stalking users to not do so when their bottom-line depends on it considering they have plausibly-deniable ways to do so without getting caught? (and as the Facebook phone number fiasco proved, even if they do get caught the penalty is a slap on the wrist and can be factored in as costs of doing business)

Ran into that too!

We were spending about a million dollars a year on AdWords. Part of Google's requirements are that we give clients access to the Ad accounts as well. One client did not have Google accounts, so we registered some for them, granted them access, and provided them to them.

Of the dozen or so accounts we set up for that client (it was a group of car dealerships under one high-level umbrella, so separate but together), one got suspended almost immediately by the accounts team.

We submitted a ticket with the accounts team regarding it, and when it was still banned a few months later I finally reached out to our contact at AdWords. She submitted a follow-up ticket with the accounts team.

By the time I left that job about 4 years later, she still had not received a response.

>and literally my only recourse at this point is apparently to sue them to get my $26 back.

Have you considered to just let your bank reverse the transaction and let Uber sue you if they've got a problem with that?

Uber would just ban his account for life if he pulls this, most likely automatically without any effort to investigate and definitely not going to any courts.

I have done it and Uber has frozen my account until I cough up the money. It has not been a fun month.

Funny thing is, I'm in a city where Uber is fighting a competition with Lyft. I've already converted six different people with my story. Clearly customer experience and retention is not their priority...

Will Uber not ban him for life if he sues them?

They could, but if the court says the guy did nothing wrong after all, it would look rather bad on Uber to retaliate by banning him at that point against court's opinion and potentially opens them up for another lawsuit. Personally I don't see any business sense for Uber in doing this, unlike banning for chargebacks.

> it would look rather bad on Uber

It will only look bad if that person has enough clout to make the story that visible. But most people don't which is why Uber, Facebook, Google, etc. can do whatever they want with your account and offer you absolutely no recourse. The balance of power in these relationships is tilted so much to one side that nothing short of strong regulation will help the regular user.

By look rather bad, I think they mean the next lawsuit you bring against Uber would be their malicious handling of your account.

Now a typical business can probably stop doing business with you simply because they hate you (not your 'kind', just you personally), but can Uber?

They are likely embershed in so many regulatory frameworks that require them to serve the general public fairly, that they won't be able to cut off service simply because you won a lawsuit against them.

>a typical business can probably stop doing business with you

I think any private company doesn't have the legal obligation to serve you or many of the rules that apply to public/government institutions. See Cloudflare refusing to serve right-wing extremist websites, or Youtube taking down similar videos and channels. The only justification they need is that you failed to comply with the terms and conditions of the service. The leverage some have is judging them in the court of public opinion.

It's different when its done as retaliation for a lawsuit. The courts look less than favourably upon that, in general.

Only if you can prove it. And I have to wonder if clauses that force binding arbitration are considered illegal. Plenty of big companies use(d) them even on their own employees.

Tried. They refused to reverse it since Uber actually delivered both orders. Apparently there's no dispute code they can put through to MasterCard for this (or at least they're not willing to find one).

I pointed out that by that logic if a vendor I'd done business with in the past like Amazon were, at this point, to simply charge me for and ship me a thousand books of their own volition as long as they actually delivered them they're telling me there's no recourse. They stand by it.

If you have documentation of the double charge and of your attempts to get a refund, your credit card company will certainly do a chargeback and return your funds.

Yeah this situation is what the dispute system is for. You complain to your bank, the bank sends that to the merchant’s acquiring bank via Visa or whatever, and then someone at Uber will take notice of your dispute in some fashion and you’ll likely eventually get your money back.

A company can choose to ban you from their service for this. Uber eats, probably not an issue. But imagine the inconvenience of not having Uber for the rest of your life. Or worse, Airbnb which doesn’t even have a close competitor.

I would begrudgingly take the loss to continue having access to their marketplaces. These companies have notoriously terrible customer service and they don’t really have any reason to fix it.

Just use a different card. There are services for the banned.

Besides get use to the horror of not ever using Uber when they close up shop or raise prices which is coming soon and would have come sooner if they could bankrupt lyft.

Uber certainly are more sophisticated in banning than just matching card numbers, their techniques have already been battle tested in outsmarting regulators where Uber was operating outside of local laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyball

> imagine the inconvenience of not having Uber for the rest of your life

Imagine thinking you need Uber to live your life...

I've been banned for Uber for filing a security report.

Honestly, I've given the money that I spent on Uber to Lyft (and Carey car services).

It's not the end of the world.

This is a point of view from someone who can afford alternatives. Taxis have long been the transport of last resort for the destitute/homeless and with Uber replacing taxis this does become a serious issue for many.

> Taxis have long been the transport of last resort for the destitute/homeless

WTF? Taxis are expensive. Destitute people take the bus, ride bicycles (in various conditions), or walk.

Yes, but in some situations the cab is all they have. Read the memoirs of taxi drivers, many have been published. Part of the high cost of being poor.

Many people would save money by not having (insuring, taxing, maintaining, fueling) a car and instead using taxis.

Only if you're the one paying.

The ADA requires 'paratransit' service for persons whose disabilities prevent them from using accessible, non-commuter, fixed route bus service. In many cities paratransit is handed off to taxi services.

Sure, but that isn't going to involve Uber at any level.

I don't use uber, or any other taxi app. Depends a lot on where you live and whether public taxis and public transport infrastructure is well developed. I can imagine this would be a nightmare in the USA, it was when I lived there pre-Uber days, waiting for a bus could take 45 mins. Out here in Asia, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong etc, there really isn't a big need for Uber, sure it's useful, but plenty of alternatives that are just as convenient.

Uber will ban you even if charges are reversed due to someone using a stolen card. It happened to someone I work with.

Such customer service! So much better than the taxi “cartels”! More disruption, please!!

Most people - even those in the US - will never use Airbnb. Being unable to use their service because you did a chargeback or sued them when they overcharged you is not a real loss.

Counterpoint: I did multiple chargebacks against these monkeys for very similar reasons and they haven't banned my account yet, so maybe it works differently in the Europe or UK?

My final straw with airbnb was this article https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43k7z3/nationwide-fake-ho..., so I went to their site and requested that my account be deleted.

Even on that article, the 2nd to last paragraph was:

> Even after a month of digging through public records, scouring the internet for clues, repeatedly calling Airbnb and confronting the man who called himself Patrick, I can’t say I’ll be leaving the platform, either. Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel.

With another platform offering rentals but taking a 30% cut, a trick I found was to google the address or name, often they'd be listed there as well. Then I'd call them and ask if they have a room, and if they could offer me a discount (I was travelling around Iceland, many people doing the ringroad would just show up in the afternoon/evening and leave the next morning). Obviously this doesn't work with anonymous airbnb providers.

Tried. Since they actually delivered both orders it's not a "double charge" and according to my bank MasterCard's dispute process has no code to allow them to charge this back.

> What scares me most about all these stories and personal experience, is it often seems the only way to get these actual issues resolved is to know someone that works at the company

This is a self-inflicted problem and whoever suffers it had it coming.

It has been explained endlessly [1] why to avoid this kind of platforms due to their non-accountability. There are other free, reasonable, forms of communication. If somebody insists to keep using facebook/google, etc.; so bad! At best, their sad story will be useful to warn others against these predatory companies.

[1] https://stallman.org/facebook.html

Even Stallman agrees that you can't blame the people being used by these platforms. You're misinterpreting Stallman's message.

I remember RMS using "victim co-perpetrator" in his piece about wearing ties. It looks to me like the perfect category for people who use hostile platforms which take advantage of network effects.

This sort of “if you aren’t eternally vigilant, it’s your fault” attitude is really not the way to go. People are busy and have stuff to do, places to be. Expecting everyone to read various essays on the ethics and practices of every single consumer service is unrealistic and has bad consequences.

This is kind of the principle upon which society is built. I should be able to trust that the food at the grocery store is safe for me to eat; I shouldn’t need to conduct deep research into the supply chain to ensure it won’t poison me.

Sure, I was not clear about that and this was not my intention. Of course a grand-mother with limited technological savvy is not at fault here.

However, a technical writer, and a developer, such as is the case, is not only supposed to know about facebook's callousness, but to be active explaining it. The fact that even developers use facebook as if it was a socially acceptable possibility is an extremely sad state of affairs.

Uber charged me $95 out of nowhere and I've fought their customer service for a month without any satisfying resolution. I'm trying to delete my account but it's being blocked because I disputed the $95 charge.

For cases like Facebook or Google I have a friend who works there to sort things out, but I don't have any connection in Uber. It's so frustrating.

Dispute it with your card issuer. That's the only way to deal with such scum. Too many chargebacks will get them in trouble with their acquirer bank and threaten their ability to take payments.

I'm pretty sure a company like Uber is operating with enough volume (leverage) to be insulated from this.

It still doesn’t mean they’re immune, it will just take a ton of chargebacks before they get kicked out. I’m sure that they are tracking the metric and even a 0.1% increase in chargebacks (which is still huge considering their volume) will raise some eyebrows and make them reconsider treating their paying customers like garbage.

But how do you get there? You have to wait for some legitimately illegitimate charge and then get banned for life by invoking the chargeback, so ... how can that be scaled to impact Uber?

The only realistic shot at this is through shaming this behavior - the ability for monoliths to lock you out of large swaths of services is a serious, serious problem.

> But how do you get there?

Most of us don't have personal vendettas against Uber or similar companies and want to take them down.

But if they do treat you like shit, then it should be your right (and duty) to fight back to discourage such behaviour in the future.

The goal isn't to take them down with tons of chargebacks, simply to make the chargeback rate correlate with the bad customer service. They clearly don't care about the latter but will definitely care about the former. If it does take them down however it won't be a big loss and will clear the space for a better competitor to step in.

I did dispute the charge. Then Uber wouldn't let me either use the app or close the account until I coughed up money.

Dump them and use an alternative? Not sure why you’d give them more money after they basically stole from you the first time.

Yep. I've completely converted to Lyft.

What about asking for a chargeback if you paid via credit card?

I won a chargeback when Uber [Jump] bikes charged me $50 for riding 0.0 miles while the bike was locked.

My guess was that their LTE provider was switching between towers right near the top of Capitol Hill [Seattle] and another tower that was not line of sight. So it just ran out the clock until it hit some kind of fail safe at 3hrs or whatever and stopped. Of course there was zero notification that I was still being charged. Hopefully this is now fixed.

It doesn't have to be a credit card to charge-back, in the UK anyway.

It just helps, if it's a larger sum, since your arrangement's with the creditor not whoever 'you' paid.

My bank's charged back erroneous debit card charges without any issue a few times.

Sue them? Surely that's out of the question...you agreed to binding arbitration, right?

Winning might be out of the question.

"even if I don't get my $26 back, it will certainly cost them more than $26 just to respond so at least the cosmic accounting will balance out"

How in the Nine Hells does any legal language entitle the company to charge him for something he did not buy?

Imagine buying something that costs over a thousand dollars and the company going “Oops we charged you twice well haha suck it.”

Binding arbitration doesn't mean you don't have recourse. It means the recourse is arbitration.

> Uber Eats double-submitted my order after throwing up a bundle of internal server errors

Same thing happened to me. I checked twitter and reddit and easily found various other people with the same problem, so it's nothing new, Uber just doesn’t care about fixing it and would rather torture paying customers with their atrocious customer support. I've heard contacting the Uber support twitter account works better than the in-app support, but I gave up before then and issued a chargeback.

Did you actually receive the double order, or just once?

In the same situation, I received the double order. Driver said it's not his problem and take it up with Uber. From reading online stories, if you try denying the second order after it's started you will still be charged twice.

as others have said, they'll ban you and they are so big that a small article here and there will not do anything to them.

Maybe, an Attorney General can take on them after a lot of users report being banned after disputing fraudulent charges?

There might be a bias that people telling these stories, the ones that make it to your eyes, are more likely to be attached to the journalism and connected community.

Lucky for me my GF has worked at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Amazon! It had never occurred to me how useful that could be.