[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How dangerous is it to trust Google?
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Ask HN: How dangerous is it to trust Google?
I want to use Google Cloud for a project, but I keep seeing
articles on HN reporting cases where Google has terminated a
customer with no recourse or investigation. Taken together, the
articles allege the following: 1. Google may directly ban your
business account without stating a reason, leaving you helpless and
bewildered[0][1][2]. 2. Google will ban all accounts it believes
are associated with an account it is banning, implying that anyone
who is associated with your business can get it banned by doing
things on their own[3], whether that means breaking Google's TOS or
being unlucky (see point 1). 3. Competitors can shut your business
down by organizing click fraud that appears to benefit you[4], and
there's nothing you can do to stop it. Because I actually _like_
GCP, I am willing to consider the other side too. Arguments counter
to the obvious implications of the above are, 1. Amazon and
Microsoft have an incentive to cast doubt on Google's reliability
as a provider, and maybe Jeffrey Bezos is making all of these HN
posts from his yacht. More realistically, I know that I am not
getting an unbiased sample by only reading the stories that get a
lot of upvotes. 2. These injustices may be so rare that they don't
factor in to anyone's risk analysis, but rather strike like
meteors. Nobody wears a bike helmet for them, although they have
hit people in the head before. 3. Someone who got banned for cause
would naturally want to try getting themselves un-banned by waging
a Twitter campaign, but this raises the question of why it only
happens with Google. I know that a lot of posters here have
performed a serious risk analysis in the course of their own jobs.
I have read comment threads decrying the individual incidents, but
never one looking at it from the perspective of what a business
should actually choose. Hopefully, that is what we can do here.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25899814 [1]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30823872 [2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390833 [3]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065 [4]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26965146
Author : whatshisface
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-03-30 17:13 UTC (5 hours ago)
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Google is really an advertising company. Everything else is just
| a secondary support entity. Your cloud hosting needs are not
| their real focus.
| toss1 wrote:
| My assessment of the threat is that it is very serious, and the
| decision to use those services depends primarily on what it is
| that you are putting at risk, and if there is an ability to
| 'spread your bets'.
|
| For a small hobby, learning, or side project, it might make a lot
| of sense, and the risk-mediation would be to be sure you have
| backups.
|
| For anything that can significantly affect your career, future,
| and/or livelihood, I'd at least want to be sure that either 1)
| Google is just one part of your system that is redundant with
| another component or easily replaced, or 2) as ocdtrekkie pointed
| out, be sure to go with a provider that has actual service.
|
| Good luck with whatever you make!
| lmarcos wrote:
| I have a personal Google account (gmail, YouTube, drive, etc.).
| For this sole reason I do not use GCP for anything, just to avoid
| "what if my GCP account gets banned... That would ban my personal
| Google account as well!".
|
| I'm moving slowly away from Google, though.
| srvmshr wrote:
| Just my 2C/: For the average joe like you and me, it hardly
| matters "statistically". You can choose whatever feels okay and
| you should be mostly fine. For every 1% having some issue, there
| are other 99% who are getting their job done without hassles.
| Google isn't exactly forcing money out of our hands. Alternatives
| exists too & so does competition among them. (Disclaimer: I don't
| work for any FAANG nor do I want to. I don't consider Google's
| policies perfect either). Being the average user - I will be wary
| of issues appearing on HN, and try to navigate away if stuck in a
| similar stickyspot (e.g Playstore account do's & donts).
|
| Google has a good tooling environment. More technical innovations
| have been adopted by their competition, as compared to Google
| adopting likewise from them. GCP infrastructure is pretty robust
| too & it satisfies most, if not all of the cases I have come
| across. My raw data-code bundle is backed up periodically to a
| cheap VPS in OVH. If I ever faced an issue, I will switch to AWS,
| Digital Ocean or something similar. Google workspace is working
| for us with minimal hassles. Integration is good enough. The
| product guides for GCP & Workspace are fair enough (I feel GCP
| provides lower barrier of entry to devops with code snippets &
| step by step guides). Sometimes there will be an issue here or
| there, but that happens to all IaaS/PaaS providers.
|
| Anecdotally, people mention AWS support to be much superior. They
| have never seen a mismanaged asset or significant billing issue.
| Amazon is seldom helpful in those cases. Also, don't get carried
| away by too many social justice ethos floating around. These
| corporations exist to make money, and so do we. Our relationship
| is transactional. Choose whatever is fair for you.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| I would generally advise against using GCP. I agree it's actually
| a great product, a better product even. But you're playing with
| fire.
|
| Google is a company that automates everything and never picks up
| the phone. That's not 100% true, but it is in their nature. As a
| search engine that's all well and good. But for a cloud provider
| it's brutal.
|
| You want somebody who is going to lean into that more classic
| idea of customer service. Amazon is the classic one people point
| to because of their fantasism about customer service. You really
| can get someone on the phone at AWS, though not a happy person.
| These things are not disconnected by the way.
|
| As an engineer go work at Google. As a customer go spend at
| amazon. Or any of the others. Microsoft does customer service
| just fine. Even an unconventional option like kubernetes clusters
| built on linode or digital ocean.
|
| A trick I've learned over the years is to appreciate companies
| for what they are and partner with them for their strengths but
| also recognize their weaknesses.
|
| Is Google going to announce one day that they are going to
| Shutter GCP after all and that everyone has 6 months to migrate
| off? No of course not! But there's also a reason you have to be a
| little nervous about making that joke.
|
| More to the point with some of your other examples, all Google's
| tech is ai powered. To the extent that it can be. AI makes
| mistakes, some days you'll be that mistake. You have to
| appreciate too with Google the old "I don't know how to count
| that low" joke. What might for you turn into a multimillion
| dollar business Google could conceivably shutoff and never really
| notice.
|
| Maybe GCP has got better at this sort of thing too but my
| intuition is to not hold out for that.
| jka wrote:
| You have to understand that Google appears as a shiny, clean
| marble citadel before deciding whether to trust them or not.
|
| The citadel provides great protection, information and solace for
| those who dwell and work within it, but it is extremely important
| to the citadel that it remains perceived in the way that I
| described previously: shiny, clean, marble.
|
| Within the citadel there may be groups who enjoy scatological
| orgies - and that's fine, those people are extremely intelligent
| and are able to think in ways that allow them to organize the
| world's information in ways that few others are -- but in return
| for the privacy that the citadel provides them, they respect the
| external appearance of the organization: shiny, clean, marble.
|
| What you have to ask yourself as a visitor to the citadel is: am
| I also willing to obey those laws, and keep my faecal carnal
| desires hidden until I'm wandering the dirty streets outdoors, or
| would I prefer to join the machine and use the cover that it
| provides, knowing that I may have to sacrifice my principles to
| do so? Or, alternatively: would I prefer to enjoy some time
| within the citadel but also some time on the dirty streets.
|
| Don't mix the two. That's my read of how to consider trust and
| Google, currently.
| bifrost wrote:
| I don't use GCP, Google Search, Gmail or Google DNS.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| > maybe Jeffrey Bezos is making all of these HN posts from his
| yacht
|
| So why just Google? Why not Alibaba cloud which has the same
| marketshare? Why not Azure which is much bigger threat because
| Microsoft can actually build competitive products?
|
| Why do you never hear about this sort of issues about other
| companies?
|
| > These injustices may be so rare that they don't factor in to
| anyone's risk analysis
|
| Yeah, you have to assess risks somehow... and if what Google is
| providing is so much better value for the risks, go ahead.
|
| > but this naturally raises the question of why this only happens
| with Google
|
| Because they want to automate as much as possible and want to
| crowd source accidental mishaps. If someone is genuine and
| important enough, they'll make noise in twitter, reddit, HN...
| and then they can fix it. It is cheaper for them to do it that
| way. If you are OK with telling your customer tomorrow that the
| service was down for a week because your former employee's ex
| wife misgendered her neighbors pet alpaca, then go ahead and use
| Google.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Your risk assessment for items 1, 2, and 3 are basically
| accurate. If Google decides you're a scammer, it's real hard to
| rectify that assessment. And because the net of Google services
| is so wide, if they do decide to ban you, the ban is wide-
| reaching... Your access to YouTube, GMail, the entire Drive
| toolchain, the Play store, using Google as an identity broker for
| OAuth to other sites, etc. is compromised. And their automated
| systems will actively hunt for sock-puppet indicators and ban
| accounts they think are owned by the same person as the banned
| account.
|
| Ironically, these two issues go hand-in-glove: because the reach
| of a Google account is so broad, they take the risk on compromise
| of an account extremely seriously. There's a reason they've been
| pushing people so hard on 2FA for years now; avoiding people
| falling prey to account compromise is much easier than rolling
| back the damage done if an account is flagged as a risk.
|
| In practice, the odds of this stuff happening _to you_ are low.
| It 's like the risk of losing your house in a tornado... When it
| happens, it's disastrous. It happens rarely enough amortized
| across the population that people still live in Tornado Alley.
|
| I can't decide for you how you feel about those datapoints on the
| risk model.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I have long held, since prior to the cloud era, that I would not
| trust my domain or web hosting with a company that wouldn't put a
| real human on the phone with me. And in the past, I've tested
| this prior to signing up. For my web host, I called support when
| I was still evaluating, at 2 AM, and got a guy on the phone named
| Chris, with a very strong Texas accent. I signed up immediately,
| and I've been a customer over ten years. (One good human
| interaction can buy you a _lot_ of brand loyalty.)
|
| This is more difficult today, and some of the providers I use no
| longer provide phone support over having a ticket system only,
| but the ability to address issues with the service should be a
| primary consideration of any company you base your own business
| on.
|
| If you're looking at signing up with a company that won't take
| your call, and a competitor exists who will, go with the latter.
| ShivShankaran wrote:
| I used GCP for 2 years. It did it's job. I hate the predatory
| nature of Amazon but I am blown away by their customer service
| and their help for our startup.
|
| I eventually decided to do away with GCP and moved to a cheaper
| cloud where the head of sales was a phone call away.
|
| The reason has to do with what you mentioned: One of the previous
| startup where I worked was completely shut down because one of
| the employees had a banned account and he signed in into company
| gsuite. Google banned the startup's play dev account.
|
| I also have the unfortunate experience of getting banned by
| Google. around 10 years ago they started banning anyone that used
| paypal and not google pay or something like that. I had linked
| paypal and google launched google pay and starting banning anyone
| that didnt use google pay. I didnt care about their deadlines and
| just ignored their email until I woke up to everything banned.
|
| I still used GCP with my banned play dev account but they
| suddenly banned by adsense account after 8 years due to banned
| play dev account.
|
| I had enough of their shit and just decided to move.
| neilobremski wrote:
| Don't get too comfortable with Google or any big cloud provider
| (including Digital Ocean). They have their own reasons for doing
| what they do and those reasons are not at all aligned with you or
| any small/startup company.
|
| I'll paraphrase a comment I saw on HN recently:
|
| "The old advice 'save often in case of loss' has now become 'save
| often to prepare for when Google shuts you off'."
|
| Use big cloud technology to learn and further your projects BUT
| DO NOT RELY ON IT (unless you like to gamble).
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(page generated 2022-03-30 23:02 UTC)