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German Court: Google Must Stop Ignoring Customer E-mails

Posted by samzenpus on from the I-won't-be-ignored dept.

jfruh writes If you send an email to support-de@google.com, Google's German support address, you'll receive an automatic reply informing you that Google will not respond to or even read your message, due to the large number of emails received at that address. Now a German court has ruled (PDF) that this is an unacceptable response, based on a German law saying that companies must provide a means for customers to communicate with them. Update: 09/12 15:47 GMT by S : Updated to fix the links.

12 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. well done mods. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Did a mod even check the link to see if it went to what it claimed?

  2. The link is incorrect by WilliamJozef · · Score: 4, Informative

    The link in the article goes to something completely different (free wifi laptop).

    1. Re:The link is incorrect by WilliamJozef · · Score: 5, Informative

      Correct link should possibly be: http://www.computerworld.com/a...

  3. define "customer" by lkcl · · Score: 4, Informative

    from what i understand of the definition of "customer", a "customer" means "someone who is paying for a service". here, there's no payment involved, therefore there is no contract of sale. i would imagine that it's fairly safe to say that we're most definitely *not* quotes customers of google quotes.

    if on the other hand these individuals are actually _paying_ google for service and are not receiving a response, _then_ i could understand.

    1. Re:define "customer" by Dredd13 · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you're not paying for the service, you're not a customer.

      Google's advertisers and business partners are their customers.

      You're not the customer. You're the product.

    2. Re:define "customer" by Tanuki64 · · Score: 3, Informative

      You don't know that the law according to which Google needs to provide an email address and react to mails to this address in a timely manner, does not restrict in any way this requirement to customers. In Germany any commercial website needs an 'Impressum'. With 'commercial' so loosely defined, that more or less all sites need one. Even those sites, which in theory don't need one, are at a severe legal risk if they don't have one. In short: The law clearly states that the 'impressum' contains an email address you actually read and use. No wriggle space at all.

    3. Re:define "customer" by Andreas+Mayer · · Score: 5, Informative

      from what i understand of the definition of "customer", a "customer" means "someone who is paying for a service".

      The law isn't even talking about customers. The term is "Verbraucher" which is better translated as consumer.

      The judge explicitly stated that the law in question does apply to non-paying users.

    4. Re:define "customer" by jc42 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Simply contact the account manager that has been assigned to you. It's no problem at all to contact Google if you're actually bringing in revenue for them.

      In my experience, it is still a problem. Some years back, I signed up to run some google ads on a few web sites that I was responsible for, added their code to my pages, and got a few hundred dollars a month for the orgs that I was helping run the sites. After a while, I got a notice from google that the sites were violating some unspecified terms in their TOS, and the money stopped. I sent a good number of emails to various google support addresses, asking for details of the claimed violation. I never heard back from anyone at google. So I removed the ads from the sites.

      Presumably the small amount they paid these orgs to run their ads was a small portion of what google got from the advertisers. But this apparently didn't justify wasting their people's time explaining to us what we were doing wrong. The wording in their TOS docs were ambiguous enough that, as a programmer, I couldn't figure out what might be wrong, and I couldn't see any way of testing changes to the code to see if I could turn the contract on and off by changing a site's behavior. If their response time has a quantum of a month, it's difficult to test the effect of changes.

      We suspected that their problem with us was that we had a rather low click-through rate. The ads I saw were remarkably irrelevant to the topics of the sites, and no amount of playing with keywords changed this by much. Our keywords did work well with google search to direct people to the sites, but this apparently wasn't good enough to also direct the right ads to the sites. Mostly, I just shrugged, and said "So much for google's vaunted targeting of ads".

      But our inability to get any response at all from their support people didn't do much to fix whatever they thought the problems might have been.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  4. Not customers. by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1, Informative

    Nope. We are not Google's customers - those are the advertisers.

    We are the product.

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  5. Re:Google should win this if they went to court... by Tanuki64 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Google can argue that they've met the requirements of the law by providing a means for customers to communicate. No where in the law does it require Google to respond

    No, Google cannot.

    2. Angaben zur schnellen Kontaktaufnahme

    Paragraph 5 Abs. 1 Nr 2 TMG sagt dazu woertlich:

    "Angaben, die eine schnelle elektronische Kontaktaufnahme und unmittelbare Kommunikation mit ihnen ermoeglichen, einschlieÃYlich der Adresse der elektronischen Post."

    Translation:

    2. information for quick access

    Paragraph 5 para 1 no 2 TMG says literally:

    "Information to enable a fast electronic contact and direct communication with them, including electronic mail address."

    You can hardly more clear than that. And if Google answers:

    Google will not respond to or even read your message

    it definitely breaks the law, since this is not even a one sided communication.

  6. Re:define by swillden · · Score: 1, Informative

    They are paying with their personal data, which Google hoards and then sells to third parties.

    Google doesn't sell or otherwise share data with third parties. Google uses it to decide who to show third-party ads to.

    --
    Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  7. You are a vendor to slashdot by sjbe · · Score: 4, Informative

    Of course I'm one of slashdot's customers. Slashdot would be out of business if we (the customers) stopped coming to their website.

    I'm an accountant.

    Unless you are sending cash to slashdot, your relationship to them is most accurately described as that of a vendor or a supplier if you prefer that term. You provide data to slashdot in exchange for entertainment which is a form of in-kind exchange. Slashdot then uses that data to sell advertising to their paying customers. From an accounting perspective by providing this forum to you, you would be on slashdot's books as either Cost of Goods Sold or more likely some kind of Operating Expense. This effectively makes you a vendor to them, not a customer because they don't sell you anything.

    It can get a little murkier if you have a paid subscription but they still advertise to you because then you become both a customer and a vendor. Which you are depends on the transaction in question. Logically it would make sense to have the subscription be treated as a contra-expense because then you don't have to have this dual relationship. But it's more likely that they would book it as income and have the user on the books as both a customer and (indirectly) as a vendor.