I had a strange and similar interaction with Google recently. I was asked to do the Android developer verification, but then I missed a deadline at some point. Support said that I would need to create a new Google account for all of this. I said this was unacceptable as this was a Google account I had for nearly 25 years and I didn't want to create another. They said tough luck, go make the new account. Luckily, I had recently married and was making a new account for the name change. I tried to use that account, but it wanted a different phone number to use for verification, but I only have one number and you can't use Google voice numbers. I went back and told Google I cannot use the same phone number to verify and I'm not buying a burner phone to do this with. Then they just said "Ah, ok, we'll fix your original account then" and fixed the original account. This was literally a week of back and forth. Pointless waste of time.
Last year our bakery business got blocked from Google Maps. Reason: Your business is not eligible...
Yep, apparently a brick and mortar bakery isn't eligible for Google Maps. Obviously bogus. I appealed over and over again, rereading the rules, watching every dumb YouTube video, fixing every minor imagined transgression I could think of and each time just got another BS automated "your business is not eligible...".
Pretty much gave up them my partner decided to try one more time. In Vietnamese.
We had both been trying, she in Vietnamese, me in English, but this time she tried it at about 10:30pm local time and apparently it got routed to a bored Vietnamese speaker in the California help center, who fixed it immediately.
So it is possible but it'll take some weird combination of luck and timing.
Damn! That is so dystopic to me. The future of businesses determined by the will of some customer support interpretations of bogus rules. Ain't that a bit black mirroresque?
It's also possible/likely they're using discrimination. It's cheaper to avoid lawsuits and PR disasters by ensuring they respond faster to minority customers. That and/or Vietnamese customers tend to have higher spend/conversion, so Google gives them better service. Or her husband's Google account had some kind of score based on previous spend/statistical probability that determined he deserved better service.
I think there is zero chance these companies aren't using LLMs to sort out the "desirable" customers from the undesirables. Google in particular knows almost everything about us.
Had similar experience. My best guess is that the account never went through the various age verification flows (since it was that old, it predated all that) and ended up being marked for deletion- I suspect that they had a bug (legal or in code) that prevented warning emails to get out. I got lucky to detect it early, since they disabled AI a few weeks before account deletion.
My gmail account still has the "First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail." mail in it from June 2004. The account itself is over 21 years old. I wonder if I'll get forced to age verify myself any time?
As the owner of a GMail account which is also of legal adult age (and a Reddit account which will be 18 this year), I am morbidly curious what will happen once these mandatory "age verification" start to be enforced.
It should be trivial for Google and Reddit to grandfather-in accounts which are more than 18 years old (arguably less, who created their account when they were, e.g. 5 years old?). However, I'm betting they will come up with all sorts of rationalisations as to why this is not possible, anything from the bullshit ("not technically feasible" my ass) or the self-contradictory ("an account may have changed owner"... so in violation of the ToS? And what's to stop an account from changing ownership after age verification?).
I admit I am prematurely riling myself up with indignation for something which may never happen. Maybe I am wrong and Google, Reddit, etc. take the common sense approach, but I have no hope in it.
500000000th person discovers google is not creating youtube for you, but for them to make cash. Crazy story. Really shocking and definitely not one of the most standard complaints in existence.
Anyways, there's absolutely no such thing as "I can't stop paying for this". Just do a chargeback on your card. It's not a real problem.
It was after the hundredth post like this that I de-Googled my life. It was only a matter of time until something happened to my account, and I had so much of my life tied up in their services. The biggest and best change was buying my own domain and changing my email address. Now no one can ever remove access to my emails.
I've been on this path for years, with varying degrees if faulure. How did you manage it?
Some bits are harder than others.
Most of my important email was migrated to a Protonmail account. With the exception with a couple of things tied to government services that don't have a path of changing your email, which sucks.
Android: Next time I switch devices I am going for GrapheneOS. Technically still an Android, sandboxed Google services and all, but a step in a better direction.
Android Auto/Waze: There's no competition here, sadly.
YouTube: Another thing that is very difficult to replace beyond just reducing my YouTube usage. I can use stuff as Newpipe or self host Invidious, but technically it is still YouTube.
Also mixed success, but it depends what you want to achieve. My goal was to minimise risk of life disruption, and I think I succeeded. Some people are on a quest to keep their lives private, and that is harder.
Email: The most important component here is owning your domain. Then you can switch between providers. I'm using iCloud now because I can have email addresses for the whole family for very cheap and it integrates well with my Apple devices.
Search: Kagi.
Maps: I still use Google maps. The alternatives are just not as good here in Denmark.
Phone: iOS. I really want to try GrapheneOS but our government uses a national ID app which only works on official Android and iOS builds. It's very annoying to function without that app.
YouTube: Still use it as well, but with ad and sponsor blocks on computer and mobile. I have an Apple developer account and sign my own sideloaded YouTube apps.
Cloud storage: I switched to iCloud, but I keep a full local copy of everything in case I lose access to my account. I also built a home NAS and keep the movies on that. Basically anything which I don't mind losing so much.
Docs: I use Office applications primarily now instead of Google Docs.
You probably do agree that this should not be normal. And not the expected way to get your money back? There is no blocklist option at my bank, so I'd have to do that every month in perpetuity?
Simply because I cannot login and cancel my account?
side note, these are things I feel should be:
1. Illegal: "noreply@" addresses. My inbox is not a dumping ground and email is two way, not one way.
2. Required: phone numbers on you website, easily found, that are picked up by humans.
So how is this supposed to convince me to give YouTube money directly or indirectly by buying a subscription and disabling my ad blocker? Stories like this reinforce my decision to never give YouTube a single cent.
I agree. The answer is regulation that outlines rules of engagement for "free" (you are the product) online services.
Australia is famous for having very strong consumer protection laws for purchased products (physical goods). It has been discussed many times here. How does this work in the digital universe?
Sad story but this has been written by an LLM (to original short story has been inflated by and LLM to turn into an "article").
Speak w/ your bank and ask them to block future charges - easy.
It's really annoying that there is so much AI generated music on youtube.
The problem though is more that you get tricked into listening to it by "creators". These people just squeeze money without adding anything positive to the game.
On the other hand it would be interesting if you could generate your own music spcifically for the mood you currently have.
I'd imagine if you have a card payment reverted to Google and they ban you in return, you're in a world of pain (that you are in the right probably doesn't matter).
Google has a degree of seperation value stored on every account. Once the algorithm determines its been wronged it increases the radius so expect your household members and work colleagues accounts to be at risk when you try this.
Definitely not bullshit. I have a friend who was banned simply for returning a Pixel phone after accidentally ordering 2. Some automated mechanism flagged it as potential fraud and nothing worked to reverse the ban. Going to the bank to block payments, remove authorization, or God forbid, do a chargeback for the money they already took after banning you is playing Russian roulette with your Google account.
It's also the only way to stop Google from stealing your money short of going to a lawyer.
By comparison, Goldman, the bank operating Apple Card in the U.S., has previously refused to perform that block future debits process for me; they simply didn’t have the capability. I ended up closing my account with them to stop the charges, which worked perfectly. I envy Australia’s apparent regulation to compel merchants to do so.
As an additional data point, in the UK I can just login to my banking app and remove the authorisation for a particular vendor (or, for people who don't use online banking, I could phone up to do the same thing).
> Easy fix, wait for the next billing, contact the bank explaining what happened, and block that and future debits
You'd also want to mail a letter to Google documenting that you're cancelling your subscription. Cancelling a payment method alone doesn't void a contract.
I doubt Google would do this. But there are plenty of trashy litigation-finance shops that buy up these abandoned contracts for pennies on the dollar and then try to collect. Even if you never give them any money, it would trash your credit for a while.
Yeah. Recurring card purchases are hard to stop. They can keep going even after the card has been cancelled or expired. The direct debit guarantee is so nice in comparison.
I some countries, however, this may penalize you, credit score wise or whatever.
This option, in my opinion, should truly be the last resource, after exhausting (and documenting) every other route.
Very important: public routes, like Twitter Support, even better (make sure every step is traceable if the only option left is, indeed, blocking debts on your credit card).
You haven't signed any agreement or opened any lines of credit - I would be amazed if there was any jurisdiction in the entire world where this would affect your credit.
Heuristically, that sounds naive. Actuaries do not typically think "oh, that's enough data". If Experian could track whether you iron your shirts, it too would show up in your credit score.
Subscriptions are not a contract of payment. Your bank pre-authorizes these payments, simply ask them to remove pre-authorization. If they can't do that, then the bank is spending your money without your consent.
I use disposable digital debit cards for my subscriptions. These can be issued by fintech companies like Wise. If something like this happens to me I'll just delete the card.
> That argument is not unreasonable on its face. Artists should have rights. Their work should not be scraped, repackaged, and turned into infinite output without consent. But that is not the whole story. These companies don’t want to stop AI Music generation, they want to own it.
I'm not sure I agree with that assumption - flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business. While I disagree with a lot of what they do, I do assume that they have an interest in protecting music made by artists, not music generated as a product (though of course they also produce music like products with a lot of their human "artists").
> flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business.
This is questionable. Did generated code decrease the price of software products?
I get what you mean but I don't really think they are comparable, since one of them is art and the other is typically product development. Art factors in the person behind the art piece, software (or other products) does not. The value of art is tied to the skill, creativity and experience required to make it as good as it is (at least in most people's mind).
But also, the main claim of the advantages of code generation is that it will make software development cheaper, and will end up making software cheaper. This is currently not necessarily the case because the quality of the code generation is not really there to make actual (reliable) product development cheaper, but it helps a lot with rapid prototyping. Or as I see it, more things are being prototyped and never finished. What also factors into this is that there are not many incentives for big tech companies to lower their prices, because a lot of what they're offering are tools that we need. This is also not the case with generated music.
Was browsing when all of a sudden my account got suspended for no apparent reason.
This was a premium account too, and I had last posted a tweet last year. I would maybe comment here and there once a week.
Ok cool you suspended my account. But when I tried to access my billing details to cancel the premuim sub, I got a "Something went wrong" error.
All these big tech companies have the same billing issues after bans/suspensions. Once they decide you're persona non grata, they don't give a f about cancelling your billing.
There are multiple topics mentioned in this article. One is quite curious, which I had missed before, I must admit:
Universal Music Group is currently at the center of a growing legal fight against AI music platforms like Suno and Udio, accusing them of training on copyrighted music without permission. [...] The claim is straightforward. These systems learned from real artists without paying for it, and now they can generate songs that compete with the originals
To be honest - I really doubt that Suno-like company created music they taught their systems on. The AI companies are usually using our property (text, music, code) to teach their models and then sell them to us. Quite different view than a constant admiration on how the AI helps us coding...
Could not get through the article because it looks like LLM generated text squared.
But I assume people will have protections against this? One can just let their credit card company know to block out the next payment, or dispute the charges; I am assuming the user will have adequate proof that they aren't able to get to their subscription account.
While what Google is doing here is scummy, I'm assuming that multiple consumer reversals will make at least a minor dent to their financial reputation with the banks? Did this even need so much AI text?
> I was told that if an account is linked to another account that receives copyright strikes,
I still remember how mad people were when that linkage between YT accounts and Google accounts took place, and, of course, it looks like they were right. Shitty behemoth of a company.
Yep, apparently a brick and mortar bakery isn't eligible for Google Maps. Obviously bogus. I appealed over and over again, rereading the rules, watching every dumb YouTube video, fixing every minor imagined transgression I could think of and each time just got another BS automated "your business is not eligible...".
Pretty much gave up them my partner decided to try one more time. In Vietnamese.
We had both been trying, she in Vietnamese, me in English, but this time she tried it at about 10:30pm local time and apparently it got routed to a bored Vietnamese speaker in the California help center, who fixed it immediately.
So it is possible but it'll take some weird combination of luck and timing.
I think there is zero chance these companies aren't using LLMs to sort out the "desirable" customers from the undesirables. Google in particular knows almost everything about us.
You get rejected, you can just increment the version number and resubmit. It will get assigned to a different person and maybe pass this time.
It should be trivial for Google and Reddit to grandfather-in accounts which are more than 18 years old (arguably less, who created their account when they were, e.g. 5 years old?). However, I'm betting they will come up with all sorts of rationalisations as to why this is not possible, anything from the bullshit ("not technically feasible" my ass) or the self-contradictory ("an account may have changed owner"... so in violation of the ToS? And what's to stop an account from changing ownership after age verification?).
I admit I am prematurely riling myself up with indignation for something which may never happen. Maybe I am wrong and Google, Reddit, etc. take the common sense approach, but I have no hope in it.
Anyways, there's absolutely no such thing as "I can't stop paying for this". Just do a chargeback on your card. It's not a real problem.
Some bits are harder than others.
Most of my important email was migrated to a Protonmail account. With the exception with a couple of things tied to government services that don't have a path of changing your email, which sucks.
Android: Next time I switch devices I am going for GrapheneOS. Technically still an Android, sandboxed Google services and all, but a step in a better direction.
Android Auto/Waze: There's no competition here, sadly.
YouTube: Another thing that is very difficult to replace beyond just reducing my YouTube usage. I can use stuff as Newpipe or self host Invidious, but technically it is still YouTube.
Email: The most important component here is owning your domain. Then you can switch between providers. I'm using iCloud now because I can have email addresses for the whole family for very cheap and it integrates well with my Apple devices.
Search: Kagi.
Maps: I still use Google maps. The alternatives are just not as good here in Denmark.
Phone: iOS. I really want to try GrapheneOS but our government uses a national ID app which only works on official Android and iOS builds. It's very annoying to function without that app.
YouTube: Still use it as well, but with ad and sponsor blocks on computer and mobile. I have an Apple developer account and sign my own sideloaded YouTube apps.
Cloud storage: I switched to iCloud, but I keep a full local copy of everything in case I lose access to my account. I also built a home NAS and keep the movies on that. Basically anything which I don't mind losing so much.
Docs: I use Office applications primarily now instead of Google Docs.
Simply because I cannot login and cancel my account?
side note, these are things I feel should be: 1. Illegal: "noreply@" addresses. My inbox is not a dumping ground and email is two way, not one way. 2. Required: phone numbers on you website, easily found, that are picked up by humans.
This isn't the cop-out you think it is. Plenty of profit-making businesses have great customer service. Google's crap service is entirely on itself.
The article is partly about a _misuse_ of AI, and partly about just how bad the system around accounts and appeals is in general.
Put it in plain words. "I have been paying... they made it impossible to access stuff I paid for and made it impossible to unsubscribe."
That's textbook fraud. They'll be fined and give you your money back.
Australia is famous for having very strong consumer protection laws for purchased products (physical goods). It has been discussed many times here. How does this work in the digital universe?
YouTube is clamping down on AI content because they know people hate it and leave YouTube.
There is no money in generative AI. Google needs to advertise to humans and not to Rathbun.
That is why Disney cancelled the Sora deal.
It's really annoying that there is so much AI generated music on youtube. The problem though is more that you get tricked into listening to it by "creators". These people just squeeze money without adding anything positive to the game.
On the other hand it would be interesting if you could generate your own music spcifically for the mood you currently have.
At least in Australia, this shouldn't be a problem.
I agree there may be no other option, I'm just warning to be ready and prepare for the possible loss of "connected" (in Google eyes) accounts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45157001
It's also the only way to stop Google from stealing your money short of going to a lawyer.
You'd also want to mail a letter to Google documenting that you're cancelling your subscription. Cancelling a payment method alone doesn't void a contract.
I doubt Google would do this. But there are plenty of trashy litigation-finance shops that buy up these abandoned contracts for pennies on the dollar and then try to collect. Even if you never give them any money, it would trash your credit for a while.
Things like this would probably not be via direct debit though
This option, in my opinion, should truly be the last resource, after exhausting (and documenting) every other route.
Very important: public routes, like Twitter Support, even better (make sure every step is traceable if the only option left is, indeed, blocking debts on your credit card).
> That argument is not unreasonable on its face. Artists should have rights. Their work should not be scraped, repackaged, and turned into infinite output without consent. But that is not the whole story. These companies don’t want to stop AI Music generation, they want to own it.
I'm not sure I agree with that assumption - flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business. While I disagree with a lot of what they do, I do assume that they have an interest in protecting music made by artists, not music generated as a product (though of course they also produce music like products with a lot of their human "artists").
This is questionable. Did generated code decrease the price of software products?
But also, the main claim of the advantages of code generation is that it will make software development cheaper, and will end up making software cheaper. This is currently not necessarily the case because the quality of the code generation is not really there to make actual (reliable) product development cheaper, but it helps a lot with rapid prototyping. Or as I see it, more things are being prototyped and never finished. What also factors into this is that there are not many incentives for big tech companies to lower their prices, because a lot of what they're offering are tools that we need. This is also not the case with generated music.
Was browsing when all of a sudden my account got suspended for no apparent reason. This was a premium account too, and I had last posted a tweet last year. I would maybe comment here and there once a week.
Ok cool you suspended my account. But when I tried to access my billing details to cancel the premuim sub, I got a "Something went wrong" error.
All these big tech companies have the same billing issues after bans/suspensions. Once they decide you're persona non grata, they don't give a f about cancelling your billing.
But I assume people will have protections against this? One can just let their credit card company know to block out the next payment, or dispute the charges; I am assuming the user will have adequate proof that they aren't able to get to their subscription account.
While what Google is doing here is scummy, I'm assuming that multiple consumer reversals will make at least a minor dent to their financial reputation with the banks? Did this even need so much AI text?
I still remember how mad people were when that linkage between YT accounts and Google accounts took place, and, of course, it looks like they were right. Shitty behemoth of a company.
What a joke. People, start putting a license fee on your YouTube videos for AI training. Play their game.