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Comment by DannoHung | Hacker News Reader

Google needs a fucking customer support line already. Make it a 900 number if they need to and charge $20 per call, but for the love of cheese the number of times something goes horribly wrong and there is little to no recourse is silly. They refuse to let people pay for their services and thus establish a billing verification channel but they're asking users to put tons of important information into them with no recourse if something does happen.

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You are not Google's customer. You are their product. Google make their money by selling your data and your attention to advertisers. Charging you money and treating you like a customer creates a conflict of interest that they really don't want to deal with. Google's strategy of "scalable customer service" is no accident.

And THERE is your answer. They cannot sell info for a <13yo. So therefore they demand you be 13. To them its a liability. My 4.y.o. uses the web constantly and is becoming quite proficient at it. I would be pissed if they disabled her account too.

This is a commonly heard statement, but it doesn't actually make sense. Like any company which sells advertising, there are two levels of product: the products they charge money for (e.g. ads and customer info), and the products which attract people who enable the former - gmail, search, etc.

If they do a bad job at creating and servicing products which draw people to the site, people will not go there and Google will not make money. So, is gmail 'not a product'? No, that's absurd.

Not true if you think about — look at any other traditional company that lives off of advertising like a TV network or even a newspaper: At the end of the day they don't really have the same sort of customer service that you might see at a restaurant where you can send it back. And in some of the worst cases there's even a distain for the viewers. The opposite of this might be an Apple where you pay for a product and get A+ customer service.

Lack of customer service is not related to whether something is a 'product', or 'you are the product'. It's simply a lack of customer service.

Downvotes aside, I'd just like to point out that lack of customer service is not related to whether something is a 'product', or 'you are the product'. It's simply a lack of customer service.

I have been Google's customer. I have managed over twenty accounts with them. The largest has spent about 4m to date (the rest amount to much less). The situation is no different there.

Customer service per dollar spent is lower than anywhere else on earth.

The idea that Google (or any major tech company!) has ever even considered selling user data is highly damaging to our industry. I don't expect that kind of baseless paranoia on Hacker News.

Google's whole business model revolves around selling user data. They don't do it directly, handing over browser histories to the marcom group at Pepsico; they do it indirectly, and in a manner that largely preserves privacy. But that doesn't impact the original commenter's point at all. He's right: at Google, you're the product, not the customer.

Agreed, but there's a world of difference between ad targeting and selling data, and public perception to the contrary hurts the web industry.

Can't tell if you are sarcastic or not? No really..

(in case you are not)

Yes Google sells user to their paying customers -- advertisers. How do you think they make all those billions of dollars / year? Why are they providing you with free Gmail, Maps, and high quality search results? The answer is that they sell you to their customers. If you are in gmail and sent your mom an email telling her what kind of printer cartridges to buy, don't be surprised if you see an ad about printer cartridges. They indirectly sold your data "interested in printer cartridges" to their "real" customer -- the company that makes printer cartridges and is looking for someone to buy them.

Are you sure ? Does the data has to be sold ? Can't just an algorithm run through your data and get the most relevant ad ?

They indirectly sold information about you. It doesn't mean that their paying customer will know your gmail address, but their are selling you as a collection of all your preferences to their customers. If their customer cannot be convinced that Google can find out users' preferences very well and target the ads properly, they might choose some other company.

Can you prove that ? I doubt that they sell data, they probably sell the keywords.

I got downvoted into oblivion for saying the same thing on this thread. HN has changed.

Maybe it's been repeated too often.

I feel that's probably the issue too. It's been said on a bunch of submissions about Google. I've seen it 4-5 times already.

It was a clever comment but it's an oversimplification.

You can of course say the same thing about any company that sells advertising and it will have an element of truth to it.

I've worked on Google Search for several years, and I can assure you that neither I nor most colleagues I know see things this way. I can't think of a single example where our search results have changed or not changed based on how it would affect Adwords customers. I personally believe that most of our products designed for end users work this way. Even many people I've talked to working on advertising see a large part of their job as improving the advertising experience rather than just revenue.

Within search at least, the issue of customer service is scale. It's a challenging problem with millions of users. We do a good bit already, through feedback forms, staffed U2U groups, video questions and answers, and other venues. We recognize that not everyone can share information on a forum either, and so some of these feedback forms are private.

Gmail does the same, although I'm less familiar with their support offerings. A good starting point might be http://mail.google.com/support/. I'd imagine Google+ will grow in terms of it's forms of feedback and support, and the team seems to be quite responsive on a number of issues already. http://www.google.com/support/+/ might also be a good starting point there.

I'm not familiar enough to comment on the original issue, but I would guess that this has more to do with law in the US, specifically COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. IANAL.

I couldn't agree with you more. My family owned an autoparts business in the worst part of the country, where we had multiple robberies and shootings resulting in fatalities. When we were building the online business, Googles automatic listings had my mothers home address listed as the business address. This was very dangerous for my mom and not very comforting. It took them over 2 weeks to change the information (I know the process has changed for business listings). At the time though I felt thoroughly helpless. I called some sort of google help number then and they basically told me they couldn't help.

We use GAE as a paying customer. There is absolutely no solid line of communication with anybody on the team when something blows up.

"Use the forum".

Yes Google, that's a sound idea, why don't I post a bunch of a business proprietary information on your user forum...brilliant.

A little over a week ago we had a user post a Wormwall to Reddit and it had something like 130 thousand requests in a couple of hours. Because Google (unbeknownst to us) caps GAE accounts to 12 instances, we ended up scaling to precisely 12 instances, then crapping out. A full 60% of requests to our site were not even served.

I know, I'll get on the GAE site and look up some kind of professional support number, or email address or something. Nothing. A few hours of banging around (all while our site was literally catching fire) and I finally found a form where I can request an increase in instances.

9 days later? Nothing. No response. No increase in instance cap. No communications whatsoever. A complete and total black hole.

It's so absurd it's ridiculous.

Just being pedantic here but your site was not literally catching fire.

The reason using 'literally' in this way is so annoying is that 'literally' is used to indicate 'as amazing as the following sounds it actually happened, it is not a figure of speech', so when people go ahead and try to use it as a figure of speech they are lying to the reader and showing their ignorance of the word.

No...really...there were flames...and smoke...and everything.

So... why are you using AppEngine instead of another service?

Trust me, between the new pricing scheme and the piss poor support, we have this discussion nearly every week. I have a feeling by year's end we'll have made the transition. Right now, the ridiculously cheap hosting costs are literally the only thing keeping us there.

I think this is what they are expecting, when people outgrow them they will just move on to some other service. Sucks for the users but Google is trying to cater to the masses I feel. Most people aren't maxing out their GAE instance counts and all, they mostly just die off before that.

That basically means you guys are successful or at least more than the others. ;p

I don't know about this. Their new pricing scheme seems to imply they are after larger players -- like major brick and mortar stores who don't want to mess with keeping their own hosting infrastructure up and running. Google needs to make enough money to guarantee 5 9s uptime...something GAE is not even close to offering today.

We're definitely too small for that scheme and so are many folks. The funny thing is that our recent traffic spike would have gone over our free quota (easily), so we would have ended up paying Google some money for the scaling. But because of the ridiculous instance cap we never even hit the top of our free quota that day.

That's exactly why I use Fastmail.fm rather than Gmail. I pay them some small amount of money each year, and in exchange they provide actual customer support. Nothing ever has gone wrong, but they're there if I need them.

Incidentally, their TOS says:

This Service is provided to individuals who are at least 18 years old or minors who have parental permission to open and maintain an account.

Which seems much more reasonable.

This Service is provided to individuals who are at least 18 years old or minors who have parental permission to open and maintain an account.

Great clause you found. Hope they honor that one, and change/remove other contradictory clauses. (edit: fix italics)

Just to be clear, when I said "their" I meant Fastmail.fm, not Gmail.

Google actually provides a paid service, google apps. I wonder - If the father set up an account on his own domain with google apps and gave his son an account, would the TOS still apply? I'm guessing not. And in any case, there would probably be a way to retrieve the data after having the account locked.

Google Profiles (and so Google+) is not available for Google Apps accounts anyway. It's actually one of the few Google products/services still not available https://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...

Any idea if and when Google Profiles will be available for Google Apps? Anyone?

True, but he still wouldn't have compromised his email account. That was the main problem here.

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