by Mike Masnick at techdirt
from the how-do-you-trust-a-company-that-can-delete-your-life’s-work? dept
Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ever engage constructively with users the company fucks over. At the time, I dubbed it Google’s “big, faceless, white monolith” problem, because that’s how it appears to many customers. Going all the way back to 2009, I had suggested that the company needed not just better customer support, but something like a user advocate.
This issue shows up time and time again. The company screws people over and generally there’s no one to talk to. Too bad. Talk to the white monolith. We’ve faced it ourselves here at Techdirt.
And, of course, in situations where someone’s full Google account is taken down, and where there’s little to no recourse, it can really fuck people over. Last year, we wrote about a NY Times story by Kashmir Hill concerning a parent who not only lost his entire Google account, but also was flagged for passing around child sexual abuse material (CSAM), after a medical professional had asked the father to take photos of his son regarding swelling. Despite flagging him as a potential criminal, he couldn’t even talk to anyone at Google to explain what happened.
Hill just recently published another such story, regarding a woman losing her entire Google account after one of her 7 year old sons, messing around with a camera and uploading the videos to YouTube, published a video of himself naked. For obvious reasons, that’s a problem, and the video was taken down quickly, but Google shut down the woman’s entire Google account and said it would be deleted.
But it’s not just issues regarding CSAM that are creating these kinds of issues.
We’ve written a few times about…
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