I went through a similar hell getting compliance to use a certain Google API after getting algorithmically flagged. Months of back and forth, with conflicting approvals and rejections. The same automated emails over and over sprinkled with emails from humans who kind of understood.
I will never again use any Google service for business purposes if I can avoid it.
I do consulting and use GCP on behalf of clients so I’ve been through this process of creating a new account about half a dozen times now, and your experience is mine, every time. Blocked, submit information to verify identity, hear nothing back, chase, eventually get chastised for chasing in the wrong way / submitting to the wrong people, and eventually manage to get approved.
Google are famous for bad support so it’s not surprising but it’s perplexing that it is so consistently bad. I continue to use GCP though and know I’ll someday be paying for trusting Google despite constant reminders not to.
I once had an issue with Google and GAE on a corporate account. Spent 3 hours hunting down a contact form and had no response for 7 days if that makes you feel any better.
Different issue with Google Apps: We work with some big pharma companies. During the free evaluation, Google flagged two of our partners and one of our project managers as spammers and silently suspended their accounts. We hosted our email somewhere else.
SAME! I have a product that I'm trying to launch and everything works except that it needs OAuth consent approval. There is currently a bug in my Google console preventing me from completing the step that the most recent email said to do, and I've responded with that several times and it just feels like I'm shouting into the void.
Not mentioned: paying customers getting randomly banned and losing some or all of their Google account and primary email.
Also the whole email scraping thing.
I will never use a Google service as a mission critical part of my life ever again because of all this, they just have no interest in customers.
Google is terrible at support. I had to wait 2 months to get my oAuth application reviewed. I had to write an email in all capitals to get their attention.
I feel your pain. I had a similar thing happen with my AdSense account. They said they had detected invalid activity and my account was closed. I appealed once and lost. Even though I hadn't done anything wrong, it wasn't worth the energy to me to fight for it.
I love Google products, but their lack of decent support kills me.
What is worse is the use of "no-reply" email addresses and the total lack of recourse when the algorithm gets it wrong.
We see it every day from folks who get locked out of their Google accounts to the shenanigans carried out by online marketplaces (including both service and product marketplaces).
I also got locked out of my google account - not because of a violation (automated flag or otherwise) but because google decided my login location was too different. I know my password and have access to my recovery email but I am put into and endless login loop of ‘unable to verify’. I contacted support which had me fill out a form and that was maybe 6 months ago. I’ve moved on now but I’ll never use a google product seriously ever again.
I heralded this warning to many people before - doing business with Google is a liability.
Every company I've ever had any pull in, using Gsuite or GCP was marked as a risk in the risk register, and mitigations were put in place to manage that risk.
I had a painful multi-week-long email thread with Google support because I kept getting Google Fi emails even after going through the unsubscribe link in the email despite having never been a Google Fi customer and not living in a country where Google Fi was offered.
They claimed that my only recourse was to mark the messages as spam, and that there was no internal path to escalate the issue. They finally relented after my repeated insistence that what they were doing wasn’t legal in my country.
This is just the general trend with things running on Google owned services. I don't think I've ever had to deal with a more customer/user hostile company. I've had an Android app get payments blocked and had to deal with repeated back-and-forth resending of the same documents over and over before they unblocked it. I never did get an answer on why any of that was necessary or why it was impossible to ever speak to anyone about the details related to the issue.
It's bad enough they just wholesale kill services that people love and rely on. The whole "the algorithm has decided to kill your account with no explanation" risk makes it feel like we're already dealing with a dystopian reality in some respects.
I'd been in a similar issue on the Android store and found that the best solution was to try to game whatever bot is flagging you. Support was completely unable to provide clarity and getting escalated by internal Google employees just led to more unhelpful emails from higher levels of support.
I was positive that I was in compliance but I could also see that a bot was flagging something. So I kept tweaking code and resubmitting. Eventually what worked was taking the offending code block and hiding it at the server level.
It's such a face palm. I literally call out to the server to run some logic that should be completely safe to run in the app.
Thing is, with other providers, all I'm getting is email. With Google, I'm getting a bunch of services, all interconnected, and any of them could potentially get my entire Google account banned. One of the fuck ups I can recall is a bunch of people getting their Google account banned because they typed in chat of a Youtube livestream and some algorithm falsely picked it up, cutting them off from everything.
I was worried about this as well (to a point that when Google reached out to me, I told them thanks but no thanks, given all this). They eventually wore me down and the process was actually quite painless. I have been here for 3 years now, quite happily.
I know GSuite is on a whole tier lower standard of support, but man do we have horror stories there. Here's a fun one:
One of our engineers needed to send out a couple hundred individual emails to other people inside our company. So, being an engineer he automated it, wrote a little script to send the emails via SMTP. I guess some system within Gmail flagged it as suspicious behavior and froze our account. Oh hey, now no one in the company can send or receive email. Great. IT tries to contact support. They told him to send an email from our account to open a ticket. We can't send emails. Took several hours of phone tag to eventually reach a human who wasn't on a helpdesk flow chart. His response? Google can't/won't do anything just wait for the automated systems to eventually release the freeze in the next few days.
So yeah, no company emails for the next day or so. Google thought that was a perfectly OK way to run an enterprise software service.
Google is incredibly bone-headed and if there's something wrong with your account, there is generally no way to fix it.
More than ten years ago, I signed up for Adsense - it didn't work. Despite using my Google account for a ton of stuff, I kept getting obscure error messages. When they changed the interface about 3 years ago, I tried again. This time, the UI sent me into a Kafkaesque endless loop. A few months ago I tried again, this time I was put into review and haven't heard from them since. I'm certain there is some horrible, deadly flag somewhere deep in the metadata Google keeps of me, but I have no way of finding out why or what to do about it.
The frustration Google casually inflicts upon its users is infuriating, and I'm not only talking about this account stupidity.
I will never again use any Google service for business purposes if I can avoid it.
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