

Google reminds users to "Call Dad", makes users angry - psawaya
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/chat/thread?tid=527272d524946cb3&hl=en

======
schrototo
My father recently died and while things like these may trigger some slight
pain, that's just life. You have to get the fuck over it.

It's never worth accommodating the easily offended, especially on the
Internet.

~~~
djcapelis
It's the difference between seeing something that annoys you and moving on and
having something that someone else stuck into your reminder list that you
can't delete. No one is complaining about Google's fathers day doodle, people
are complaining that Google put in reminders they don't want into a space they
view as theirs and there's no way to get rid of them.

I'm glad you presumably had a good relationship with your father when he was
alive. It might be worth remembering that this type of thing can be really
rather painful and/or awkward for people who had fathers that weren't very
nice people, were never around and they can't contact or came from a family
with two mothers.

No one's saying people shouldn't talk about Father's day, but hijacking your
user's reminder lists and sticking in stuff they can't get rid of because you
think it's cool is just not a very nice thing to do.

~~~
baddox
The issue you describe is legitimate: having an unsolicited reminder that
can't be deleted is a bad choice, period. The parts about being offended
because of a lousy or recently late father are unnecessary and unhelpful
appeals to emotion.

~~~
branden
Those are completely valid appeals to emotion, because it is the emotional
context of the reminder that makes it significant. If you don't understand why
someone might feel bad after seeing that show up in their todo list, then you
don't understand the problem.

That said, as someone with pretty unhappy history with his father, I think
what Google did here is fine. But really, not every emotional appeal is a
fallacy.

~~~
baddox
When there is a perfectly good objective argument to be made (in this case,
that undeletable reminders is a bad user experience), I do think an appeal to
emotion is ineffective if not fallacious.

In this case, the particular emotional appeal seems either insincere or
unreasonable. Are people who have bad or deceased fathers offended by the very
notion of Father's Day and the marketing around it? I doubt it, but even if
they are, I think it would be entirely unreasonable, and rare enough for
Google to risk or ignore.

Remember, anyone can choose at any time to be offended by anything, whether or
not other people would consider them reasonable. People can also feign being
offended to attempt to bring attention and credibility to an otherwise
legitimate argument. Anyone who publishes any text on the Internet is liable
to have someone claim the text to be offensive. I don't think any reasonable
person would see this reminder and think that Google was mockingly telling
them to call their abusive or dead father.

~~~
djcapelis
That's the difference between posting something in a space people view as
public and a space people view as their own personal area. People have much
more of a right to be offended about the later. You're offering your users a
space to call their own, anything you put in there that offends any of them is
an intrusion and leads the user to realize that the control of that space is
entirely up to you and not them. When you've offered that space to them and
they find out your offer is not what they thought it is, it is understandable
they get annoyed.

The reason it's important to talk about the emotions is that the emotional
calculations change when the space or message is a personal one as opposed to
a public one. It's the difference between someone coming up to you on the bus
and asking you if you've called your father and a poster on the side of the
bus asking if you've called your father. When you put your message in
someone's personal space, you don't get to just say "eh, it's probably only a
small fraction" because you're specifically communicating with specific
people.

It is important to understand the emotional components of software.

~~~
baddox
I don't buy that Gmail is or is supposed to be a personal area. There are
prominent ads, and Google frequently sends out messages to everyone's Gmail
about new Labs features and such. Sure, your Gmail is more personal than, say,
the cnn.com homepage, but it's still pretty clear that mass messages aren't
off the table.

------
nostrademons
I was just talking with my mom about this this morning. My father passed away
about a year and a half ago. I still very much miss him.

I really hate to be That Guy that complains about the little things that are
supposed to brighten our day. Particularly because I work for Google and have
at various other times been the guy implementing these little things that then
get complained about. I wouldn't want to see Google never do these things,
because there will always be some minority of the user base that will be
offended, and that's just life. Otherwise we get a boring faceless
corporation, and that would be a shame.

But when I saw this, my reaction was very much the same as the posters on the
support forum. It hurt. Because I totally would call him, if I could. But I
can't. And that really, really sucks.

~~~
unreal37
This reminds me of when Facebook reminded you to reconnect with friends, some
dead. Glad they removed that feature.

-1 to Google for this idea, but I wouldn't open a ticket or get enraged about it.

~~~
silencio
I've used FB's reconnect and "people you may know", among other features and
on other sites, to great success. But it was the one time that FB reminded me
to reconnect with a friend close to the anniversary of his passing that is
what I think of when I think of those types of features.

Facebook, Google, etc. don't just know if someone has passed away, if a parent
or both parents were abusive or at all a part of your life for whatever
reason, or even something like if you broke up with someone else the night
before. It's hard to get _angry_ about a feature that otherwise works out well
because those services don't have that information.

The only thing I _can_ get angry about is the way these services handle
requests to close/memorialize accounts. The aforementioned friend FB suggested
I reconnect with was one that had an extensive online identity, but his family
for whatever reason hasn't done anything (if they even know about all of the
accounts). So I've sent notice to FB, LinkedIn and more to try to close or at
least freeze the account. Most of them haven't paid attention to non-family
requests so far. Doesn't matter that I am connected to him on all the social
sites, have all his then-contact/personal information and death notices, and
sent from the email address on a domain he linked to on his website (which is
in these profiles). There has got to be a better way to handle this problem :(

~~~
swah
Perhaps a service (imalive.com) where you have to click a button every
day/week/month otherwise it closes all your accounts...

------
huntero
When you operate on the scale of Google or Facebook, getting "cute" will
inevitably end up with some angry users. But without little touches like this,
the company would move closer and closer to the IBM-esque corporate monolith.
And neither the users nor Google want to see that image.

That said, maybe this one was pushing it. I saw that this morning and thought,
"Oh, here we go..."

~~~
Klinky
Actions speak louder than words. If they don't want to look like an IBM-esque
monolith then they shouldn't act like one. Would IBM be less of a monolithic
beast if they had commercials with puppies in them, yet never changed their
polices or actions?

Personalizations are cute so long as you have a personal relationship with who
is doing it. If Google was a three man team who interacted with their userbase
on a regular basis then these acts of personalization would mean more. But a
26,000 plus employee company having faceless developer #014345 implement
feature #21542154, is much harder to pull off as being personal or cute.
Especially considering how impersonal Google is towards customer service. It
can come off like a socially awkward geek trying to make conversation...

Here let's remind you about your great father(or possibly your dead, abusive
or absent father) to show how human & personal we are as a company, but if you
actually have a problem with one of our products or services good luck
actually getting a personal touch then.

------
jrspruitt
"Call your dad on fathers day" as politically incorrect? This seems like
overkill. There is a 1000 other vastly more important things to get worked up
over. Its not like Google took your dad away or made him someone you despise,
and then flaunts how great it is having a dad you'd want to honor on fathers
days in front of you. It's a little something to give their service a slight
personality. Perhaps its like Field of Dreams, give people somewhere to
complain, they will complain, which is fine, but complain about the problem,
the people that caused it, not the things that remind you of it, which end up
getting those things taken away from the majority of people that would enjoy
the rather innocent reminder.I could see being pissed off if you were in jail
for a crime you didn't commit, and you were being forced to celebrate the 4th
of July or something, but this is not even close to that.

------
mdpm
There are a few sides to this one:

On the practical, implementation detail side of this, users should have been
allowed to remove the item. I'm sure the reason that didn't happen is simply
because of the way it was implemented, and implementing the item as something
that was actually per-user would simply have pushed into the 'not happening'
zone.

As regards, morals, sensibilities and where the hell 'right' is on the larger
picture the answer is 'who knows?' - Personally, I think the fact that a
slight prompting would have resulted in millions of tiny acts of goodness, and
a few larger ones of users being upset, but there's no particular metric one
can apply there. My intuition says the balance falls largely on the side of it
being a net postitive for their users at large, and their families too.

As far as those offended go, I'm sort of reminded of the parallels with
doctors and malpractice suits - hundreds of lives saved, helped, made more
comfortable, and it' can take one slip-up to undo all of it. No, it's not a
'gtfover it', but it's not so much the message appearing as the inability to
control it that led to a small slight being taken as an offense. Anger is
almost always fear, and fear almost always a simple desire to not be hurt, and
the inability to stop it continuing to prompt them - that likely just
resonated with the aspects of whatever hurt in the first place, whether it was
mortality, abuse or anything else.

No one meant any offense, and there was a person, and then people who thought
they'd do something they thought would be good, and might make a few people
happier (and possibly serve their employer's larger aims too).

They didn't do a bad thing. They did a good thing, badly.

------
m0nastic
I'm not sure how I feel about this (although I don't use Gmail, so thankfully,
it doesn't matter how I feel).

I like the fact that Google adds little touches that try to remind you that
their employees are actual human beings.

I can be sympathetic to people who this might make uncomfortable (Father's Day
is a pretty bad day for me), but I'm not sure how reasonable it is to try and
shield yourself from things like this. I mean, presumably, you don't break
down into tears every time a commercial airs advertising a "Father's Day"
sale?

It just seems like a futile endeavor. It would be like if the color Yellow
reminded you of some terrible memory. You'd kind of just have to deal with it.

------
protomyth
I think it is a good lesson to small companies in that you shouldn't add
things to what people consider "mine" or expect the normal family situation
applies to everyone. The doodle is ok, but adding reminders crosses the line.
Some of the forum postings are just sad and to think some managers decision
added one more bit of pain is not something you want.

~~~
jasonlotito
The flip side is the number of people that called their father because of the
reminder, and what positive impact this had. Sorry, I can't help feel any
sympathy for people pitching a fit over this. It reminds me of that woman who
chastised the free lemonade kids.

~~~
iamdave
_It reminds me of that woman who chastised the free lemonade kids._

Sorry, I don't know the story behind this one, but would like to. Link?

~~~
scott_s
It looks like the original article was taken down, but this is the reddit
thread on it:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/cmizs/sweet_little...](http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/cmizs/sweet_little_girls_give_away_free_lemonade/)

By the way, Google still impresses me sometimes. I found this by searching for
"women chastises free lemonade kids" and the first hit was this thread, and
the second was the reddit thread.

~~~
estel
And now it's recursing. Google strikes again.

------
beatpanda
You know, as soon as I saw that, even though my dad is perfectly healthy and I
hadn't called him yet today, I was a little creeped out. I couldn't put my
finger on why.

The doodles are one thing, but Gmail is supposed to be a tool, and I think
people expect different things from that.

~~~
bobbles
I think having a generic banner such as a "Fathers Day" doodle wouldnt really
upset as many people. I think there's something more personal about the
specific 'Call Dad' that would certainly make me feel more emotional if I saw
it pop up in my contacts list.

People get bombarded with "fathers day" "mothers day" "valentines day" every
year and it's easy to brush it aside...

------
Aga
Many commenters seem not to notice that this upsets not only those whose
fathers have recently passed, but even more those whose fathers have left them
or abused them.

------
jsz0
I found it a bit creepy simply because I view the Google services as pure
utility completely segregated from my real life. I use them in the same way I
use my microwave or toaster. If I woke up this morning and my microwave said
"call Dad" I would have the same reaction. It's not a big deal of course but
it's just kind of weird. It shows what a huge challenge Google has to ever
develop a coherent social strategy when such a harmless message causes a
little controversy.

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dget
I think a big part of the issue is that a person's Gmail is treated as
something much more personal than a TV ad or anything else. I think this is
the piece that people blasting complaints as "too sensitive" are missing.

To have a unremovable "personal" message there as part of the interface feels
weird to start with, but it feels even more like a violation if it's offensive
(as with this case).

------
gavanwoolery
In other news, users love to bitch about everything.

~~~
exit
and much of the culture around here is built on the innovation of bitching
about people bitching about something.

------
michaelpinto
Google just doesn't get social media — this is the type of stuff that Facebook
was doing wrong over two years ago and quickly fixed. Instead of trying to
imitate Facebook they should re-focus on fixing services they already have
like Blogger. It's mind blowing to think that Blogger is now in the slow lane
behind the likes of Tumblr and WordPress. Google is starting to remind me of
Yahoo! in a bad way — a place where good products go to die. My advice for
them would be to buy Twitter, but they'd only mess that up over time...

------
oomkiller
People that get angry about things like this should really just chill.
Google's probably created much more happiness than sorrow with this feature,
by reminding kids to call their dads.

------
rhizome31
If Google say "Call Dad" to users who don't have a dad, it's a bug. Bugs are
bad. Google should fix it.

------
ciupicri
Google reminds about Father's Day, yet it failed to remind me about a birthday
over both SMS and email.

~~~
AgentConundrum
I noticed this recently as well, but only last week did I bother looking into
it.

It seems the only way to fix this is to disable all of your notifications,
save that, then go enable them again. Afterward, your notifications should
work again.

------
darklajid
A technical question, if I might:

Anyone in here that knows how these reminders where targeted? I didn't check
GMail yesterday, so I've no clue if they would've been shown to me. And
frankly, it would've been the wrong date.

Looking at the mess that is [1], was this rolled out to US people only? Using
geoip or information from user profiles? Because I cannot imagine that a
global reminder would've made much sense, ignoring the current discussion if
it was a bad thing in general.

1:
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Father%27s_Da...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Father%27s_Day#International_history_and_traditions)

------
ralfd
Imagine Batman login to his gmail account and then seeing this reminder…

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monochromatic
Google surely must have anticipated that some people would react this way.
Good on them for going ahead with this reminder anyway.

~~~
RexRollman
I disagree but not because it caused offense. I just see no reason why Google
should be adding reminders when only the end user should be doing that.

------
pointillistic
Wait, are we still in America where every surface in the virtual and real
world is covered with ads? In general I have a problem with the ad supported
universe, it turns the creative expression into a commodity to sell shoes and
lipstick.

I wish I can could my dad about this.

------
president
people get angry over the smallest things these days

~~~
vacri
Hey! My dad was quite tall, thank you very much!

------
sahaj
I honestly thought it was a cool new feature of gMail where I can get
reminders about calling people that is tied into gCal.

------
tomelders
I lost my faith in people reading his.

------
aj700
All these geniuses at Google and nobody realised it was a dumb idea? They
haven't all gone to Facebook. Marissa Mayer needs a tighter grip on the still,
only just, minimalist homepage. I'd prefer no doodles at all, but I demand no
power hogging js doodles!

------
diN0bot
sometimes when watching hulu or youtube i see ads that i find offensive. it's
not the same situation, but i do wonder where to draw the lines mentioned in
the discussions here.

------
tejask
It is true that this may hit feelings of some people. If we are blaming them,
lets also blame Apple(app store) and a lot others. Unfortunately we have to
learn to adapt and let go of these things... Internet is quite insensitive

------
ahoyhere
You know what Google could have done?

They could have shown a message that said "It's Father's Day! Do you want to
add a to-do to call your dad or someone you love?" And then you could click
"No" or "Yes."

Then it would have been a case of PERMISSION, rather than INVASION.

Emotions matter. With a damaged emotional center in your brain, you cannot
make decisions as simple as "which shoes should I put on" -- and thus became
utterly paralyzed. To deny that emotions matter is not only inhumane, but
extremely illogical in light of all the research that proves otherwise.

And a sense of control is one of the most important feelings in the world.
Research has shown that removal of the feeling of control actually causes
elderly & sick people to DIE much, much faster and more often. Even in things
as significant as being the own caretaker of the plants in their room, or
choosing the date & time a student volunteer visits them. And if you give the
nursing patients control, and then take it away, they die at a higher rate
even than those who never had control to begin with.

Over & over, studies have shown that emotions have great primacy in human life
(and power over the so-called logic!).

Google runs roughshod over emotions constantly, and the one of control most
egregiously. This is just yet another example. All they had to do was to make
it a CHOICE -- and expand "dad" to "someone you love," and they could have
avoided hurting people and all this negative PR.

Another aspect of emotions is that people treat everything -- software,
computers, animals, other inanimate objects -- as if they have personalities &
are alive. That's what we're wired to do: to interact with beings. And so
people will hold grudges against faceless companies and even tools.

And yes, it is wrong, if you think that hurting people unnecessarily by being
an antisocial oaf is wrong -- when you could, by investing just a little bit
of effort, and by respecting SCIENCE, do a vastly superior job.

------
AltIvan
I am sure that the rainbow that show ups when you search "gay marriage" on
google is going to upset some people... guess they need a new option to please
those people ("Dont show me the gay rainbow").

~~~
m0nastic
To play Devil's Advocate:

What if you logged into Gmail and saw a reminder that said "Be sure to go vote
for the bill supporting Gay Marriage Today" that you couldn't delete?

~~~
burgerbrain
What if I entered a privately owned local mall and saw such a sign?

Neither of these would concern me in the slightest.

~~~
m0nastic
Presumably then, you're a reasonable person. I can assure you though, that if
a shopping mall put up a sign like that they'd be flooded with complaints.

Ultimately, it's a cost/benefit analysis for the company involved.

Gay marriage is a contentious issue presently, Father's Day isn't really. You
can find a subset of people who are offended by any implication of supporting
any idea or cause.

That's why I'm a little torn on this issue. You can object to the fact that
Google is putting a non-deletable reminder into people's tasks. You can also
object to the fact that Google is taking a Pro-Father's Day stance. I happen
to think the first objection is more reasonable (but I can sympathize with the
second one, even if I think it's not a really great example of a company
offending people with a stance).

~~~
shaggyfrog
> Gay marriage is a contentious issue presently, Father's Day isn't really.

That is not the issue. The problem isn't about being reminded that Father's
Day exists. The problem is the undeletable, unsolicited imperative to each and
every user that they "call Dad", irrespective of how valid that statement is
for any arbitrary user.

~~~
burgerbrain
That's at worse what, a UX flaw that doesn't interfere with normal operation?
What is the big deal?

------
ascendant
I'm so tired of sensitive people complaining about everything. We all have our
problems, being reminded to "call dad" is not a reason to act like Google
showed up to your house and kicked your dog.

