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hfwang@google.com

Send me an email with whatever your username is (but not your password ;) I'm not a phisher). I can try to poke someone and see if I can learn anything, but no guarantees.

PS: Also use http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/request.py?ara=1 if you haven't already. I've heard that sometimes it helps, so it can't hurt.



Also: if anyone else runs into problems, let me know. No guarantees that I can fix anything, or even be able to answer your questions/talk about what triggered the account problems though.

And also: sorry. I know it sucks. People at Google know it sucks. I'm pretty sure people who are directly involved in this stuff are thinking about it.

PS: Oh god I hope I don't drown in email ;)


Email sent. Thanks for any help you can give :)

Hopefuly there are some clever people working on it. The things I take issue with are:

1. No reason is given... (In my case I actually saw some password reset emails sent to my backup email. So I assume someone was trying to force access).

2. All logins are frozen - my own fault for using a single google login for lots of things - youtube,blogger,adsense,adwords,gmail etc - I'm locked out of them all, for the simple reason that google told me it'd be "easier" to use my existing google details to login.

3. No human support... Canned response emails with a line "We will investigate" 48 hours later just doesn't cut it.

Like I say, hopefully the top teams at google are looking at this one. It's really a way to kill paying customers. I'm seriously going to take this as a big lesson myself.


Great, but what about all the people who don't use Hacker News?


Look at it this way, I've read every page on the internet (how do you think the crawler works?)

If you complain about it online, I'll be there ;)

In seriousness: I don't know. I try to be helpful about these sorts of things as a sort of pay it forward kind, where if I ever have problems with a large faceless corporation I hope someone will step in and help me out. I tried to do the same when I worked at startups (and especially there, few people know someone who works there).

This is obviously inherently unscalable, but in many respects, tech support is as well. I don't know what the plans are (this seems a pretty big pain point for everyone), and I'm sure people who do know can't talk about it...

I'm not sure what you want me to say. I care deeply about some of the products I work with/use (not just Google's mind you), and as much as possible I try to help out people when they're stuck. Broad policy changes are outside of my control, and I apologize for that.


Here is a policy change for you to consider/champion.

How about not blocking an entire account for an infraction in a single field. If someone did something wrong with their adwords account block their adwords not their email. And if someone sent emails you suspect are SPAM don't shutdown their blog, just disable sending emails from the account...


Would be nice to have a warning also. "Hey, you're doing X and if you don't stop, we'll disable your account!"


I know nothing about abuse protection, but I think they don't want to do this because it would reveal how the abuse detector worked.

Imagine if everytime you changed your website, you'd get an email from Google saying "I liked this change" or "I didn't like this change" (aside from being utterly creepy), it'd make reverse engineering the whole thing trivially easy.


Facebook does this.


I thought everybody had a friend at Google. I've been in the valley too long.


somehow I think I know you ;)


oh, hi!

a pity you went to the dark side ;)


on this thread, i'm not so sure about that :) never knew you lurked here.




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