
Android user locked out of Google after moving cities - Jerry2
https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5dif8j/psa_google_can_lock_your_account_forcing_you_to/?st=ivrx9yoo&sh=5afe2044
======
muse900
Its very disturbing for me as a google user and an android phone bearer seeing
many of those posts coming up.

So in all fairness if I ever get my account locked for whatever reason, I need
to make noise on reddit and yc news to get it resolved?

That really makes me feel uncertain about the google apps I use day to day.

They need to change something soon on their policies or they'll start losing
customers.

P.S there was a post here the other day about someone that got his account
closed due to a breach of service etc. I don't mind that obviously google can
close your account if it feels you are violating their terms, what shouldn't
be able to do is to lock access to your data or the option to extract your
data off their servers.

~~~
mhurron
> So in all fairness if I ever get my account locked for whatever reason, I
> need to make noise on reddit and yc news to get it resolved?

That is beginning to be increasingly required for everything. We had an issue
with our land line when it would rain. Called the phone company, was 'fixed'
every time, until it rained again. This went on for 12 months or so. Suggested
to my wife she complain on their Facebook page. They called us, there was a
truck out the next day, found the issue and actually fixed it. Never would
have happened without the public complaint.

~~~
jmcdiesel
The problem with this kind of thing is this...

If its going out when it rains, its likely wiring on your house, not plant.
Its probably past the point of demarkation (where you become liable for the
line) ... 99% of the time this is the case (ex phone field tech)

You just raised enough attention to make it worthwhile to soak up the cost of
replacing YOUR line for you...

Congratulations, you may have joined the ranks of entitled people who use
public pressure to whine their way into getting what they want...

~~~
mhurron
> If its going out when it rains, its likely wiring on your house, not plant

Ya, it wasn't and they knew it wasn't, they had already admitted that point.
The phone company can actually tell when there is an issue on their end you
know.

The issue was some of there equipment was missing a lid. So when it rained, it
filled up faster than it drained and shorted the circuit. The solution was put
the lid on that should be there.

But please, don't let facts (that you didn't know) get in the way of you
continuing to rant as a previous field tech get in the way of telling people
to suck things up because for some reason you still don't feel like doing that
job.

Oh and I am fully aware of the difference in responsibility at the NID.

~~~
WWLink
Phone company techs are extremely defensive. (This is often the case with
cable company techs, too). Source: I used to regular DSLReports. Holy crap. XD

------
tmptmp
I have full sympathy for the person. Recently there was a news on HN about
Google cloud being cheaper by 50% [1].

We must be very much worried about Google's record of ill treatment of its
users, both paid/free. You cannot and should not rely on Google for anything
critical to your business unless you are close friends with someone working at
Google and that too at a higher up position to be able to get out of such bad
situation relatively easily. I had commented there something that I will not
repeat here. [2]

I hope (I may be a fool to hope so still) this type of frequent bad-light may
make Google amend its ways.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12993021)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994769)

~~~
egeozcan
What I can't understand is, whether the frequency of this happening is
increasing or the news of it finding wide coverage.

> You cannot and should not rely on Google for anything critical to your
> business unless you are close friends with someone working at Google

I personally think that you shouldn't "rely" on any third party for the
critical things. The critical things are your competitive advantage and you
should be in control of them, right?

~~~
oasisbob
Critical things aren't necessarily your core competencies, nor your market
advantages.

~~~
logfromblammo
More like having electricity in your main office. You don't necessarily need
to own your own power source and battery bank if the reliability of the public
grid is good enough for your business.

But if the public grid is only 98% reliable, and you need power 99.9% of the
year, you do need a hot backup system.

Google isn't providing the service that is down for many customers x% of the
time, but a service that can fail catastrophically and permanently for x% of
customers.

As long as anyone can say that a Google robot permanently cut them off from a
service that is important to them, without any meaningful recourse, you simply
cannot trust Alphabet with critical pieces of your business, even to the
extent that you can trust your local power utility to keep the lights on in
your office. There are plenty of businesses that can operate without a backup
generator. But _nobody_ can trust Google, PayPal, Amazon, Stripe, L4, Square,
et al to be their sole service provider for some function critical to the
business.

Those businesses are trying to be Internet utilities, but are neither as
trustworthy as nor as reliable as a regular utility. Would you be comfortable
buying gas from the gas company if every so often they intentionally burn a
customer's house down, then tell any aggrieved survivors to suck it up and get
lost?

~~~
a3n
> Those businesses are trying to be Internet utilities,

I think those businesses are fighting tooth and nail to _not_ be (seen as)
utilities, because they don't want the oversight and regulation of a utility.

~~~
logfromblammo
They are trying to be _de facto_ utilities without being _de jure_ utilities.

All the money and control, none of the responsibilities or regulation.

------
ti32x
I am currently locked out of all paid Google services because I committed the
crime of changing countries while holding an active Google Developer
Account/Wallet. I've talked to them over the phone, and they were entirely
unhelpful.

In contrast, Amazon's phone service is great. Get yourselves sorted google.

~~~
mdp
I had a similar problem. There's literally NO solution other than opening up a
new account.

It was a wake up call. I've since moved most of my digital life onto other
services.

~~~
angry-hacker
Please tell me how to avoid this case. (according to Google)

~~~
a3n
One solution is to try not to need those services.

------
Aoyagi
Well, something similar happened to me as well. I moved (just a few
kilometres, too). In fact, it happens in about half of the cases when I'm
logging in in some new location.

I want to log in (to Youtube or whatever) from the machine and the browser I
always use, just from a different IP. Then I get asked for a phone number (any
phone number) to verify that it's me[1], which in itself is a nonsense. That
"another way to sign in" includes asking me for a date when that account was
created (what???) and sending a code to email, which sometimes works,
sometimes it does not.

I mean, when I was moving, I fully expected to never be able to get my
account. What an utterly rubbish service. And people actually put significant
amount of money to it?

[1] [https://puu.sh/rrKyG/678746a09e.png](https://puu.sh/rrKyG/678746a09e.png)

Edit: And how do you "call a rep" anyway? I haven't seen anything even
remotely resembling live support, i.e. one that isn't community-based or self-
service.

~~~
gregorias
Hi Aoyagi,

I work at Google, and I would like to take a look at what happens to your
account during login. The situation that you are describing sounds surprising
to me.

If yes, then could you provide a contact point so I may contact you with my
corporate credentials (corporate e-mail) to verify myself?

~~~
CaptSpify
What everyone here is asking: Why does it take someone posting on HN to get a
response? Why can't you just have a basic customer service system set up?

~~~
samat
Not cost effective, obviously.

------
throwanem
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."

\- Lily Tomlin [1], before a robot came along that could do the same job
cheaper

[1] [https://youtu.be/CHgUN_95UAw](https://youtu.be/CHgUN_95UAw)

~~~
mjevans
Also true for all of the other natural monopolies in your area, 'cable'
included.

~~~
throwanem
Tell me about it. But at least I can get Comcast to fix themselves without
having to complain to the whole Internet successfully.

~~~
JadeNB
> But at least I can get Comcast to fix themselves without having to complain
> to the whole Internet successfully.

Maybe you can, but lots of people can't:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=Comcast%20service%20stories](http://www.google.com/search?q=Comcast%20service%20stories)

(At least you can easily get a representative to say personally that they
won't be helping you!)

~~~
throwanem
Maybe it helps that I have customer service experience myself? All I can say
is that I've never had trouble with them. But I suspect that'll change as soon
as anything happens that can't be solved by Tier 1 or a truck roll.

------
atemerev
I think that the root of the problem is that most of Google's core services
developer are Americans, with American cultural peculiarities.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that for an average American, moving to
another country is something that less than 1% of population does, and it is
like once a lifetime event.

Here in Europe, on the contrary, it is relatively common to stumble upon a
German guy living in France, or a Brit living in Germany, or any combination
whatsoever, and many are changing their place of living more than once,
especially in the academic environment (I have 5 residence cards of different
European countries).

The same goes with the localization approach. Google or Apple always want to
give me services in the language of the country I currently live in, instead
of remembering my priority language (English, even if I am not a native
speaker), and sticking with it, even if I am now in Spain or Italy.

Changing countries is really common in Europe. Probably we need more European
companies in the Internet space to adapt to our way of living.

~~~
rconti
I'm not sure I'd call it an "American cultural peculiarity". I imagine it's
much the same in other physically large countries. It's also a consequence of
immigration/residence policy. Even before the EU, I'm sure it was quite a bit
easier to get residence in another European country as a European, vs as an
American or Mexican or South African.

~~~
atemerev
Well, I am Russian now living in Switzerland (and occasionally Spain) who used
to live in Denmark and Italy before.

Casual, matter-of-fact immigration is a fact of life these days.

------
angry-hacker
Well, fortunately this man got help, but this is the customer service of
automate everything -- win the lottery of creating enough buzz for the
media/Reddit to pick it up, or you're fucked. Suddenly, having your call
forwarded for help to Asian calling-center doesn't sound such a bad idea...

~~~
philovivero
That would be a mistake. Companies have replaced humans that can actually
solve your problem with humans that just placate you and occasionally sell you
on something else.

I had a problem with T-Mobile, where I tried to convert my month-at-a-time
plan to a family plan, and T-Mobile completely disabled my phone, irrevocably
broke my SIM to the point where I had to buy a new one (paying the setup
fees).

I spent HOURS on the phone (someone else's phone - mine wouldn't work) with
various reps in various departments before I finally just ejected and changed
to another phone company.

They even filled their subreddit with paid shills who will just shout down
anyone who comes there with a problem.

Honestly, Google isn't doing that bad in comparison.

~~~
angry-hacker
Honestly, considering human nature, it's better to have someone to yell at
(sorry, reps) and ask for the boss than sending e-mails to a black hole
(Google).

------
GlickWick
Yeah, have had similar problems, dealing with Google support is a nightmare.

I can't use Google Ads at all anymore. I once had an account for a business in
NY, and I was listed as the point of contact for it. Lost access to that
account when I moved (locked out due to changing location, Google refused to
offer any means to recover it), and now I can't sign up for Google Ads with my
name on any account. It simply informs me that I'm already using the service
on another account, and that I should use that for Ads.

~~~
detaro
And I suppose without an account you can't contact the support for Google Ads
to see if maybe they can fix it? (Since people always argue that Google
support is only shit for the free products)

~~~
GlickWick
Correct. Since I can't get through account creation at all I'm mostly stuck.
I've tried social media, but without much luck there as well.

------
9248
And that's why I moved most of my website registrations to a name@mydomain.com
address and host the server myself on a $4/mo VPS. Still, my domain name is
tied to my gmail address. Now I'm paranoid I'll lose access to my gmail, and
my domain name quickly after. (remember the @N guy?)

Unless I manage to learn some social engineering skills or hire myself a
marketing team I doubt I'd be able to get my stuff back. I'm no social
butterfly, I'm not pretty and I've got some serious Eastern European accent.

So I'm considering maintaining two mail servers with different companies and
different registrars, both pointing at each other. Such that in case I lose
one, I can recover with the second.

Am I crazy?

~~~
morganvachon
What I'm planning to do is move the services I have registered with my Gmail
account to a Fastmail account, and migrate my Gmail archive to that service.
They handle contacts and calendars too, and their basic service is $3/month.
That's cheaper and easier than running one's own mail server.

I've been test driving their service for a few days and so far it feels much
more intuitive and faster than Gmail. It also works properly on every browser
I've thrown at it, and their Android app is nice. I'm going to spend the next
few days pruning my Gmail archive before transferring it so I don't have to
buy the 25GB plan from Fastmail, then I'll tell all the services that use the
Gmail address to use the Fastmail address instead. That second task will be
the most time consuming and frustrating one, but it's worth the effort to
break the chains of the big G.

(Edit: Corrected the price for Fastmail's basic service)

~~~
FireBeyond
Good luck. I did the same and now I have all sorts of issues when employers
send Calendar invites to my (ex-Google, now Fastmail) email address. I cannot
accept them due to weird errors, etc. Not the best look if you're ostensibly
an Operations guy. :)

~~~
nmjenkins
We're not aware of any general issues like that. Please open a support ticket
with the full details and we'll happily investigate:
[https://www.fastmail.com/action/support/](https://www.fastmail.com/action/support/)

~~~
FireBeyond
I'm absolutely certain it's not you, but some lingering record in Google that
thinks there's some mismatch when I go to accept.

------
Tepix
If you're tired of having your data taken hostage and want to host your own
stuff, you can set it up easily with sovereign
([https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign/](https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign/))

------
draw_down
If they had a way for people to talk to them and fix these situations, those
affected wouldn't have to garner a bunch of attention in order to get it
fixed. Just a crazy dream I guess.

~~~
djaychela
I think it's all about staffing levels. This [1] maths isn't something I've
checked, but it does make sense, alas, you'd need 20,000 staff to deal with 1
query every 3 years from 0.1% of a billion users.

[1] [https://www.seroundtable.com/google-support-staff-
limits-139...](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-support-staff-
limits-13916.html)

~~~
anbende
I did a little back of the napkin math and came up with something similar.
However, 20k staff would cost Google between $1b and $2b per year, which they
absolutely have. They've been consistently posting quarterly earnings of
around 5b, 20b per annum.

They just don't want to pay for it, and the users don't care enough to force
them to.

In addition, I think google could probably solve the problem with paid
support. That would limit volume and pay for itself. Then people who are
having a serious problem (like being locked out of their Reb account) could
have some recourse. Unless they already do this and I'm not aware?

~~~
scholia
One option is to use premium rate phone lines, That way, people pay for
support via their phone bills. It's far from perfect but it might be better
than nothing...

------
anondon
Creating noise on HN, reddit is a sure way of getting their attention, but
there has to be a better way to deal with issues when everything is automated.
Does Google have a single point of contact for such issues?

~~~
Spooky23
They are a rough company do deal with. I think they do a lot of internal
chargeback that people give a shit about so even when you find a sympathetic
ear, the person on the other side gives no shits.

------
paganel
It's always a challenge when I travel for pleasure to other European countries
(I'm from SE-Europe) and when Google tells me I cannot log-in into my email
account when using my phone. Luckily most of the times I also carry a laptop,
which surprisingly enough does not have the same limitations, but it still
sucks.

------
rubberstamp
Key points:

Asks to provide scanned id and cc info to restore account access. But google
fails to reinstate account.

This user was actually able to get hold of google customer reps who told him
only way is to start afresh, talks to supervisor and supervisor "assures" that
everyone there in his department absolutely cannot help and that my only hope
is to reply to the emails and try to appeal to them.

All purchases made with old account will not be moved into new account if user
opens new google account, which by the way requires a new credit card too as
old cc info is associated with blocked google account!

What!! Does google even read their own stupid resolution process??

He was able to contact google customer care but they couldn't fix it until the
user got some love on reddit and twitter.

I have nothing to say, really

------
johansch
So all it takes to get stuff like that resolved is to get on the HN _and_ the
/r/android front pages.

------
zwetan
You, as a user, are geolocked, it's not only Google, it's everyone.

The only excuse they have to do that is the different countries legislation,
but besides that, like any geolocking, it's just not fit for "I can access my
stuff, my services, from anywhere in the world because ... internet!", nope
... you can't.

I had the problem with Google, google dev license with a wallet, moving to
another country ? well then create another google account, no other choices,
period.

Can't we have the option to be a google dev in 2 different countries ? no you
can't.

Same for Google Ads, even more so if you connect ads to a bank account to get
paid.

Same with Apple, same with Facebook, same with Paypal, same with Microsoft
Xbox, etc.

Some tricks can work: using a Google Apps for your domain email when you move
to another country, alter slightly your name or use your middle name to create
another account for the same service but from another country (and a different
bank account), alter your gmail with old google trick +something eg.
username+fr@gmail.com and username+uk@gmail.com etc.

If you move often it get old pretty quick.

------
secbyinsanity
I've been caught out by this before. This could be resolved by allowing
city/country/IP range level whitelisting of login locations ahead of travel,
or by providing a list of temporary download tokens for later authentication
from unusual locations.

And no, I'm not giving you my number.

~~~
talmand
Or, even better, they can have proper customer service since the problem was
eventually sorted out which suggests it could have been sorted out with the
very first phone call. It's not like resolving a billing problem caused by
moving hasn't been done hundreds-of-thousands of times before. Maybe Google
should ask the assistant manager of a bank how it's done.

------
pritambarhate
I think Google should offer paid consumer support for their free services for
instances like this. I wouldn't mind paying $40-50 if I get locked out of my
gmail for 2 days.

I use my gmail for many important services as my main email. Looks like time
has come to change that.

------
dilemma
This is an example of Artificial Stupidity; what we get when the pipe dream of
AI fails.

------
alphabettsy
And I thought Privacy was the main reason to avoid Google when possible...

------
technological
Just FYI: I know the pain it has caused the user.

Eventually his account was unlocked

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5dif8j/psa_google_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5dif8j/psa_google_can_lock_your_account_forcing_you_to/da59egv/?context=3)

Quote from above link

""To protect our customers from fraud and abuse, we routinely monitor account
behavior on Google Play and take action on potentially suspicious activity.
Unfortunately, in your case, your account was wrongly flagged and suspended. I
have just reopened your account..." "We strive to provide excellent care to
all our customers but we have obviously failed you in this instance. I
sincerely apologize for the stress and inconvenience this has caused you. You
can reply to this email if you have any questions and concerns. "

~~~
dimino
Who is "I" in the "I have just reopened your account"? Because apparently
whoever that person is ended up being the "right" person to contact.

Figuring out where he/she works (what department) would be helpful in
determining how to navigate this issue for future users.

~~~
mjevans
Exceptions are costly in any circumstances, and will be abused by attackers
wherever possible.

I don't know of any company or even government that has a solution for this
issue that isn't too costly in at least one of: false positives, false
negatives, monetary cost, time cost, or some set of the previous failures
during the 'error handler'.

Ultimately, the root cause of this failure is the lack of a strong 'digital',
opt-in, national/global identification system. Along with your government
issued plastic would be a government signature on your digital signing keys.
That would make "identity theft" far less possible and would vastly reduce the
false positive/negatives for cases like this where you are establishing that
you are who you say you are for banking/related activity.

------
cft
I wonder if this account holder had a couple of medium sized Android apps on
Google play. Would he lose the apps and all the work behind them? Makes it
scary to develop small and medium size Android apps.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Actually the Play Store Developer account is often the _source_ of people's
Google accounts getting suspended. As a point of note, you should always
publish apps on a completely separate account from the Google account you use,
and keep all details like address, phone, and payment accounts separate, as to
avoid either one being affected by the other.

With both the Play Store and the Apple App Store, since only one company
decides whether or not your app is listed, developing a mobile app can be a
pretty risky investment, since one company can make all your work worthless in
short order.

------
bluesilver07
The sad part is, he doesn't seem to be the only one. There are other people
having the same problem.

------
ocdtrekkie
Google's behavior will continue until enough people leave to seriously impact
their bottom line.

------
thro32
Google has horrible customer support. That is well known fact for almost a
decade.

I workaround most of those issues by using VPN. Google always thinks I am
sitting in datacenter in Germany.

~~~
Tepix
Just wait until they lock your account because the location of the IP and the
GPS disagree...

