No warning.
No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy."
No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative.
No recourse.
There needs to be a technology bill of rights, not just for people dealing with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, but also the myriad other technology operators which can disrupt our lives in an instant with some poorly programmed process or unanticipated edge case. Ultimately, the OP or my non-tech savvy employee or my mother should be able to get real answers and/or help from a human being when wronged by Google, a telco, or the local bank.
If you're not running a multi-million $ site, you're especially screwed for alternatives unless you're selling something and can get affiliate revenue.
If Bob wants to put up a video fixing vintage washing machines, he'll have to do it out of 100% altruism, because Google is going to take all the ad revenue.
Google have a fair number of monopolies. Just not using Google products is obviously not a viable option in many situations.
(Not that I recommend using it. I recommend the old fashioned ways of knowing where your banner ends up. And make sure it doesn't become one of 344 on some random site. So build partnerships, etc. Yeah, it sucks, it's work.)
Does the Amazon belongs to that list? All I have heard about Amazon support was only positive. Did you had different experience with Amazon?
Google et al. are feudalism reborn. Including the pressure to turn surviving yeomen into vassals (see, e.g. e-mail deliverability).
But that means that you become their subject in a certain sense. Lose the account, and your livelihood is threatened.
In my experience running a small hosting provider (we had a client that sent every month a newsletter to a few tens of thousands of addresses), gmail was not the problem, fucking outlook.com and hotmail and other Microsoft domains were.
Perhaps we should advertise to Google that this costs them money.
I for one do not use or participate in most Google things because I don't want the one service I use messed up.
The whole "tie everything together" approach they took back in 2010 or so is wrong from the get-go. If I'm in Gmail and use the same browser to go to to YouTube, I'm forced to use the Gmail id, and if I "log-out" in YouTube, my email session is also closed ... say what?
Of course, you could say they could hire 200 or 300 or 500, the point is that it would be a relatively inexpensive way to solve the problem and increase customer satisfaction.
At Google scale, it’s not just very costly, but basically impossible to provide traditional customer service. You’d have every wackjob or confused user needing help with any conceivable tech issue calling them even when it doesn’t have anything to do with google products. I run a couple of businesses having nothing to do with computers and I get confused people all of the time leaving messages asking about some yahoo email or android issue they’re dealing with. I have no doubt that Google itself would be flooded with a billion calls within about a month if they actually had a human phone number for free support.
Luckily the solution for this has already been suggested: charge some fee for premium human support. Charge whatever is necessary to make this feasible and reduce calls to a manageable volume.
Doing so has its own set of problems of course, but I believe that desperate people would rather deal with paying some fee rather than risk losing their business or digital life over a legitimate issue.
There are literally businesses that shut down because of Google’s inability to provide human support. Lives are severely impacted by google’s refusal to provide this.
Unfortunately we’re probably never going to get this from Google because their engineers huff their own farts and think that their algorithms are close to perfect. They don’t really get that the insignificant false positives they think they get are actual human beings.
They made $24 billion in profit in Q4 alone.[0]
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/technology/google-alphabe...
Also, not 1MM customers each - only folks having issues - that's a small subset of all users.
Pretty good incentive to minimise false positives.
Still no idea why though. At the time people online kept going for all kinds of conspiracy theories. Like there were over 20 people I spoke with who got their account banned for ‘suspicious activity’ when they reached 15k$/mo. Mine was exactly cut off at that point as well. I don’t know; it did teach however me I will never do anything ad based; it was a long time ago and ads weren’t considered evil, although after this I definitely considered them as such.
The hardest part of offering something like this, I would think, would be that if you were to be the one offering the service, you would likely need to be very selective about who you brought on, because trying to appeal on behalf of too many scammers (the vast majority of complaints -- though not OP) would get you ignored and ruin the whole thing. That, of course, is assuming that someone running a GARaaS service wasn't a scammer to begin with.
No thanks Google.
Seems like google thinks you have another Adsense account, so remove the “you” from the equation if you cannot find which other google account that might be.
One of my colleague got his account banned when he lent his laptop to his acquaintance who had a banned play dev account.
@app.route("/appeal")
def appeal():
return "<p>Computer says no.</p>"