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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.
Did a mod even check the link to see if it went to what it claimed?
Correct link should possibly be: http://www.computerworld.com/a...
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.)
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
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.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
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.
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.