The second factor email was associated with my account, I could see reset codes come through which were relayed to her but would result in an 'oops, something went wrong'. My guess is a bug due to account age / whatever.
I figured we had enough evidence to obtain a password reset, so I googled for gmail support contact details. There are none.
I then tried repeatedly to contact Google via twitter, all my tweets were ignored - probably because I only have like 20 followers.
In the end, my mother ended up porting her old mobile number to a prepaid sim, as $previouscompany had disconnected the number entirely, and used that as the second factor to reset the account.
Pretty damn frustrating that Google doesn't have any unpaid inbound support _AT ALL_.
Next time I'll consider paying a twitter influencer to impersonate me (or my mother), or paying for adspace, or using a mail service that exposes at least some form of support.
Frustrating? Yes. Surprising? No.
Afaik, there isn't even any paid support for individual customers unless you have some sort of business account. I find this a bit unreasonable, but I wouldn't expect any free service that involves a paid employee from any service I don't pay for (with money, not privacy).
They can't be making many dollars per year per user. A single support call answered by a human would take years' worth of income from said user. I'm amazed at how many people do not realize this, and still rely on these "free" services even for their jobs.
To give an example: recently, a popular blogger lost their Instagram account and it was sold to a 3rd party (because they had lots of followers, I suppose). Blogging is their day job and Instagram is a major source of readers for them, so they depend on it for their living. The account was probably stolen by using a reused password from some password dump and they didn't have 2FA enabled.
In the end, the blogger got back their account because they were a part of a traditional media publishing organization which had a business account with Facebook, Inc and were able to escalate it that way. Had they not had this account, it would have been lost.
There are lots and lots of professions where social media presence is required to bring in the customers (e.g. woodworkers these days depend on Instagram!) or even monetization from their account directly.
If you depend on Google, Facebook, Youtube, etc to earn a living, you should consider a business account or at least do your best to secure the account (2FA, no password reuse, etc).
In that they know they're making a choice with consequences and pain. But they see the strategic value of that choice (never running a support org) as outweighing the tactical pain.
Additionally, I'd guess the internal opinion is "If users need support, then something is broken and we should just fix it."
Where I think this falls down, which Microsoft learned 30 years ago, is that:
(a) Unless you're asking, you're not going to surface visibility of broken things. Users will just find a way to deal, while being pissed off. And then some product team finds out there's been a major issue for the last 5 years.
(b) Unless you're actively soliciting feedback from your customers and users, you're at high risk of building the wrong thing. We see this with enterprise GCP frequently. "Oh, you need Y feature? We never thought about that, because {insert internal way that Google does things, but no one else does}."
I expected at least one response suggesting this. I, and many others would consider email access my absolute most critical asset, it's also extremely difficult to switch providers. It's not like your real estate goes 'nope sorry you can't prove yourself, we can't replace your lost keys without validation, sorry, go buy new stuff and live somewhere else' - I imagine that would be illegal in many countries even if the place was rent free.
I understand that Google support, if it existed, would be inundated with bad tickets. However, I don't imagine having a skeleton set of support staff and a support workflow that requires users to climb mountains to communicate with a human would really impact on googles bottom line. It would have stopped me venting in various places about the issue, and might end up losing potential sales when I/others push our employers to use $not_google because their support sucks.
It's not a free service. It's a surveillance company that spies on, profiles, and sells out its users for a profit in exchange for the services it offers. Most surveillance companies with email offerings have support. If Google doesn't, then it's taking something in exchange for nothing on top of doing less than the standard most of its competitors set in this area. It will also probably keep making revenue on the locked account for a little while despite its owner having no access.
Way different ethically or professionally than a situation where the user was getting free email with the other party getting absolutely nothing in return. Something truly free.
Google tends to follow a playbook when it comes to account recovery, and if you can't check one of the boxes to get through, they won't let you back in. This is to stop account takeovers via support (which are known attack vectors people use against other companies, like cell phone providers).
While it's frustrating to lose access to you account, it is the tradeoff Google has made to try to keep your account safe.
And as far as Google employees being able to help, that channel has mainly been closed. Even if you know a Googler and have lost access to your account, the Googler will likely just tell you to follow the account recovery help page[0].
(I'm a googler, opinions are my own)
[0] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7682439?hl=en
Other companies solve this problem, Google hasn't and they should do better. Perhaps by involving a real support person.
They actually do have basic customer support for free accounts, it just isn't very easy to find. I forget exactly how it works, but I was able to help someone in a similar situation recover their account by following the 'steps to recover your account' listed here:
https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/2402620#t...
After failing the automated recovery, it came up with an option to request a manual reset, with a free-entry text field asking what was wrong. It sent messages to the account and all of its recovery options with links to cancel the request, then after a few days someone took a look and was able to help.
Even though I have friends at Google, I can't find out what's going on. Apparently that team won't even talk to other Googlers. It's maddening. Now if I need something to really go through (e.g., contacting somebody about a job) I have to send the mail from my gmail account. That feels like rewarding them, but I don't seem to have a choice.
That seems like a great idea in general :)
Personally, having experienced a similar thing but not regained access to the account, I never will.
Actively encouraging the exact opposite frankly.
My point in writing this is to say- great job thinking outside the box! Even if you can't fly to Google HQ, continue to think outside the box. Some ideas include Hire someone at taskrabbit or Craigslist, or a FB jobs page, to go to their front desk, or if unsuccessful, to hold a sign on public property in front of Google's HQ, you can get a banner or sign professionally made (online process are pretty reasonably priced). You could Skype with your stand-in. It would be really fun to get a Skype video call on a big iPad... or try something else.
Everybody thought I was crazy. I was. Crazy people get noticed, and often get results. Whatever the outcome, being able to tell an awesome story is always fun! Good luck, mate!
We're all joking about how creative you and the person mentioned in the article were.
It seems to have solved your issue and I'm happy for you.
However as we're all praising the irony and derision, really we're all sad of how broken the system is. Happy to finally be noticed as a customer is not the way a customer service should be.
Source: am the bloke who this story is about.
It's a pity that one cannot get paid support from Google and has to resort to expensive lawyers instead.
So you live there now?
What’s funny is that interactions between large tech companies can be very fluid in my experience. I guess there’s not a big power discontinuity in the big to big case...
Why does anybody need Google's solution here so badly? It sounds pretty easy to develop such a thing.
But avoiding that release process is also the reason why some deparments usually want GTM. It allows them to give GTM access to other people who can then inject stuff into your site. Once you have GTM you can let marketing / ad agencies add their own tracking points and other fun stuff to your site quickly. This unfortunately sounds like a great idea to marketing people.
Google Analytics isn't about logging in when someone is on your website.
It's about how it connects that data point to Google's huge dataset about everyone. Google Analytics tells you what kind of people are visiting your site (aka, segments): age, location, etc.
Also, more often than not, these tools aren't as capable as GA to design and watch conversion tunnels and behaviours.
And then there's the whole binding with Google Ads.
Replacing GA with only an Apache or php/node URL logger is missing the whole point of GA.
Since none of that stuff is necessary for the site to work, leaving it blocked basically never breaks the website.
I was contacted by KFC corporate HQ and given lots of coupons. Then I was contacted by regional HQ and given more coupons. Then by the franchisee. More coupons and an apology. The food quality improved markedly. For a while.
Until you ran out of coupons?
[0] you can still send telegrams: https://www.itelegram.com/
Someone on reddit explained the machines are a pita to clean so people just refuse to load it in the first place and then tell everyone it's out.
Google Boss: Hey employee 254199, I’m pleased to tell you that your request for maternally leave has been granted.
Google Employee 254199: Gee thanks, but little Tommy is now 2 fucking years old....
At least AWS are actually quite good at providing support to paying customers, such as raising API limits ...
On to bank support, who don't have a category for "service is being provided but refusing to cancel" sigh
Needless to say, never using a Google service again.
Just say it like that. "X is stealing from this account. This is a fraudulent transaction." That frames it in a way they understand and they have a box for that.
It's also just like a former employee using passwords they are no longer authorized to use. It doesn't matter that they once had that access legitimately.
The only Google services I bother with are search, maps, youtube (in a non-logged-in viewing-only capacity, not a posting-my-own-videos capacity) and the android play store (paying for apps via gift cards). I don't trust google not to cancel new services on a metaphorical moment's notice, and I don't have any faith in reaching a human being if I have a billing problem. So I make sure not to tie my life in any way to my Google account.
It feels strange to say, as an old school Linux fanboy who vividly remembers the Halloween document release, but I tend to point "I want to move my business to the cloud" friends/acquaintances to Office 365 instead. Say what one will about Microsoft's scummy behaviour over the years, but no-one can claim they aren't into Office 365 for the long haul. And while it's not exactly easy to get a human being at Microsoft to fix a problem, it's certainly easier than Google.
CityMapper comes close but isn’t there.
FastMail support is worse than Google and has fewer features.
These days I avoid putting myself in a position where I need Google support.
Not everyone is allowed, wants or is comfortable with direct access to their website code.
THING FIXED!
Media release and some of you here helped bigly yuge with the getting of Google to sort out.
Thanks to you all.
Bows
