German Court: Google Must Stop Ignoring Customer E-mails

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.

Comments

well done mods.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:well done mods.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the wrong place to ask those questions... email support@slashdot.org

Re:well done mods.

[Arancaytar]

I shall be referring this matter to the German police.

Go do that; their contact address is support@polizei.de

The link is incorrect

[WilliamJozef]

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

Re:The link is incorrect

[WilliamJozef]

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

define "customer"

[lkcl]

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.

Re:define "customer"

[Anonymous Coward]

actually lots of people are google customers in the sense of payimg them money. Google play, etc

Re:define "customer"

[Dredd13]

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.

Re:define "customer"

[GroeFaZ]

A customer is someone who receives a service from a company, even if the (monetary) price for that service is zero. Google and their users have agreed on certain terms which gives the customer some rights (using the services offered by Google), and Google some rights (collecting and using the customer's personal information for ads, etc.)

Re:define "customer"

[GroeFaZ]

That may be a rhetoric criticism to be leveled against Google, but the law has a different opinion. Google and their users have entered mutual contractual obligations. Whether or not those obligations directly involve money in any way does not matter.

Re:define "customer"

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Good luck trying to contact them as an advertiser too.

Re:define "customer"

[Tanuki64]

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.

Re: define "customer"

[CaptSlaq]

I pay Google in screen space rather than USD, so that still makes me a customer

Says the guy who runs adblock on everything.

Re:define "customer"

[Andreas Mayer]

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.

Re:define "customer"

[jc42]

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.

Re:define "customer"

[Mr. Slippery]

...but some European countries (France is another one) have all these stupid little "we're special...and we don't understand the internet" rules...

Sounds like these nations understand the internet quite well. They understand that it's not magic and does not relieve companies of their responsibilities to operate in an accountable manner. "But...we do it the internet!" is not a legal escape clause, as companies like Uber are finally being taught.

Really?

[Roger W Moore]

The only difference between Google and most customer service today is that at least Google are honest about it and tell you that you will be ignored. Most other companies will just ignore your email and not tell you or leave you in a call queue for so long that you end up having to hang up and go do something else.

Re:Really?

[geekmux]

The only difference between Google and most customer service today is that at least Google are honest about it and tell you that you will be ignored. Most other companies will just ignore your email and not tell you or leave you in a call queue for so long that you end up having to hang up and go do something else.

I'd rather Google even be more honest and not even provide a support email at all.

Trying to label a email address with a permanent piss-off-we're-busy auto-response as "support" is like trying to label a mannequin as human. Kinda looks like the real thing, but you're not fooling anyone here.

define

[aaaaaaargh!]

Sure they are customers. They are paying with their personal data, which Google hords and then sells to third parties. Without the people who use Google's free services, Google wouldn't earn a cent.

Re:Google should win this if they went to court...

[Tanuki64]

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.

Re:We need more like this

[gnasher719]

You should ask for your money back.

You should ask for all your data back.

However, Google has quite a strong monopoly. That will make their case a lot weaker.

Re:The End Result . . .

[gnasher719]

On the surface this sounds like a great decision for the google users in Germany. But do you really think Google is going to change their ways? Or spend one dime to appeal this ruling? Nope! They'll just change their automated reply to "Thank you for your issue/concern. We'll look into it and get back to you if necessary."

If they don't act, they will be fined. However, in Germany being fined doesn't mean you paid for what you are doing wrong, it means the court did something to get your attention. So if after being fined they don't act, the fine will be increased until they act. There isn't really a limit, because not changing their ways tells the court "this fine was so small that we can afford to ignore it, fine us more!".

Re:definition of "customer"

[wagnerrp]

In the US, if you receive something of monetary value in exchange for a service, you have received income, and that income is taxed. If Google is not being taxed on the data it receives for its free services, then the government itself is saying there is no monetary value on that data. No value means no sale, and thus no customer. Just because you have a contract does not require that one party be a customer.

You are a vendor to slashdot

[sjbe]

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.