1y ago

Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data

www.techdirt.com Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data

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 ev…

Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data

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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.
Hey, sounds like pretty much every corporation in 2023!
I hate so fucking much how little customer service companies are allowed to have.
- "I hate so fucking much how little customer service companies are allowed to have".
  It's not a mater of how much customer service they're allowed, rather than how much they choose to have. In most cases they choose to have close to none because it's more profitable for them, so its in the best short term interest of their share holders. And yes, in most corporations, long term is thex quarter
  
  I tried for 6 months to reset my Frontier Airlines password, I contacted their support line about it. They told me to do a password reset, so I did and it said my account was locked. So the support person said "Sorry it is locked, I can't help now, try again tomorrow but contact us before you do the reset"
  So I did. Waited 2 days just to make sure 24 hours had passed, contacted support, told them about the problem, they told me to do the password reset. So I did the password reset, account locked again. Their response "Sorry your account is locked, contact us again in 24 hours about this.
  So I did. Waited 2 days just to make sure 24 hours had passed. Contact support, had them verify the account is current NOT locked. Which it wasn't, so they told me to do the password reset, account is locked. Their response "Sorry your account is now locked, contact us again in 24 hours."
  Eventually I did realize what the problem was, which is kind of my fault, but the fact my 4 attempts to contact their support directly about this problem didn't trigger some kind of "Maybe this is an issue I could bring up to the dev team" is kind of surprising. The issue is that if you try to reset your Frontier Airlines password with a password that is too long, say 20 characters instead of 16 (max), it just locks your account. No errors given on "sorry this doesn't meet our requirements" just locked. CS tried nothing to look into it, just it says locked now, not our problem.
  
  Limiting the length of a password (at least to something as low as 16 characters) sounds like an unnecessary, bad idea...
  
  Placing any restrictions at all on what makes a valid password is an unnecessary, bad idea.
  
  I think I agree, but short passwords like "x", "69", "420", "abcd", "12345" etc. would take a very short time to brute-force... Is your take that even if these are allowed, it will make all other passwords of the site more secure, since it adds more possibilities to the list, and nothing can be disregarded, when trying to brute-force any other password?
  
  Yes that's exactly it. When you reduce the total space of possible passwords you are giving a brute force attack unnecessary hints to improve their attempts with. A weak password will always be a weak password, so single digits or obvious or popular patterns should be avoided, but this should be a matter of user education rather than a hard and fast rule for account creation.
  
  Which is a matter of how little they're allowed to have. If there were some sort of minimums that might actual force them to be somewhat effective.
  Instead it's a race to the bottom of "your business is important to us, but nobody gives a fuck about your satisfaction"
  
  That's pretty heartless bro
  
  duh.
  the point of saying allowed is that consumers and the market in general should not put up with it.
  
  Consumers and the market in general won't face the customer service on average. We can't expect the change to come from there.
  My comment meant more that they should legally not be allowed to have a customer service that bad. Something like requiring at least X non-outsourced employees working on call centers for every Y customers the company serves. I'm pretty confident nowadays most companies don't even have a single one.

164 comments