Last year our bakery business got blocked from Google Maps. Reason: Your business is not eligible...

Yep, apparently a brick and mortar bakery isn't eligible for Google Maps. Obviously bogus. I appealed over and over again, rereading the rules, watching every dumb YouTube video, fixing every minor imagined transgression I could think of and each time just got another BS automated "your business is not eligible...".

Pretty much gave up them my partner decided to try one more time. In Vietnamese.

We had both been trying, she in Vietnamese, me in English, but this time she tried it at about 10:30pm local time and apparently it got routed to a bored Vietnamese speaker in the California help center, who fixed it immediately.

So it is possible but it'll take some weird combination of luck and timing.

Damn! That is so dystopic to me. The future of businesses determined by the will of some customer support interpretations of bogus rules. Ain't that a bit black mirroresque?

This is how Apple's app approval process works as well :)

You get rejected, you can just increment the version number and resubmit. It will get assigned to a different person and maybe pass this time.

I worked at a job where we had to maintain an app for Apple's platform. We would make some minor bugfix based on user feedback and submit the app. They would come back with a denial that was based on changes or features introduced years ago. We would go tweak that specific feature in some way, resubmit and it would pass.

> The future of businesses determined by the will of some customer support interpretations of bogus rules.

That's the present. The future will be trying to cajole an LLM into interpretation of bogus rules. Not sure if that's better or worse.

It's also possible/likely they're using discrimination. It's cheaper to avoid lawsuits and PR disasters by ensuring they respond faster to minority customers. That and/or Vietnamese customers tend to have higher spend/conversion, so Google gives them better service. Or her husband's Google account had some kind of score based on previous spend/statistical probability that determined he deserved better service.

I think there is zero chance these companies aren't using LLMs to sort out the "desirable" customers from the undesirables. Google in particular knows almost everything about us.

We're in Vietnam. I'm the minority here, as a European.

Some people, by some other people's measures are never minorities.

Thanks to cumulative technical progress what used to be the domain of state actors has now trickled down to big business (on some level this is a joke, but also I'm dead serious). Someday it will trickle down to the bakery.

That is straight out of the movie Brazil.

Several years ago, one of my Gmail accounts (mainly used for non-serious purposes, such as registering on gaming forums) was stolen due to a password leak. I received an login alert via a forwarded email, but since I hadn’t set up a recovery email address, I lost control of the account. I couldn’t even find any way to reach out to someone to take action and recover my email account.

All you can do it post a thread on the support forums, and nothing happen anymore;

I think for ordinary users (rather than developers or merchants), this is even worse.

When you are logged in to the Google Play Developer console there is an area to do the verification and once you get to a stage that breaks down (as explained) it just has a support form, which then happens via email.