"It must be possible to [...] contact customer support"
I'll stop you right there. While I feel for the folks affected by this, they're not customers. And there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Broadband access and an email inbox aren't human rights in the US - even if they should be, we're just not there yet. And Google has no business incentive to provide customer support to the freeloaders.
I think it's crappy that there's no recourse too. But like it or not, users assent to this when they sign up. The solution here is education - people need to be told outright that they have significantly reduced chances of recourse when they're using somebody's service for free.
Society seems to have abetted the notion that all citizens will have Gmail accounts, down to the issue of Chromebooks in elementary schools. What exactly are we teaching people by dropping them off inside these gardens to bang on the walls?
It goes further than Google or Gmail. We need processes that make actual sense. "But the government forms I need to fill out are online-only!" First mistake. Whoever signed off on that in government should be fired immediately.
This isn't a Google problem, despite how easy it may seem to blame the faceless boogeyman. It's an education problem, a process problem, and a common-sense problem.
I'll stop you right there. While I feel for the folks affected by this, they're not customers. And there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Broadband access and an email inbox aren't human rights in the US - even if they should be, we're just not there yet. And Google has no business incentive to provide customer support to the freeloaders.
I think it's crappy that there's no recourse too. But like it or not, users assent to this when they sign up. The solution here is education - people need to be told outright that they have significantly reduced chances of recourse when they're using somebody's service for free.
Society seems to have abetted the notion that all citizens will have Gmail accounts, down to the issue of Chromebooks in elementary schools. What exactly are we teaching people by dropping them off inside these gardens to bang on the walls?
It goes further than Google or Gmail. We need processes that make actual sense. "But the government forms I need to fill out are online-only!" First mistake. Whoever signed off on that in government should be fired immediately.
This isn't a Google problem, despite how easy it may seem to blame the faceless boogeyman. It's an education problem, a process problem, and a common-sense problem.