{"id":187285,"date":"2013-04-19T19:35:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-20T00:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/04\/19\/google-has-done-the-impossible\/"},"modified":"2013-04-19T19:35:00","modified_gmt":"2013-04-20T00:35:00","slug":"google-has-done-the-impossible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/04\/19\/google-has-done-the-impossible\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Has Done the Impossible\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pcworld.com\/article\/2035665\/google-gets-consumer-service-ultimatum-from-german-consumer-groups.html\">made me want to be a German<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Google received an ultimatum Thursday from German consumer organizations that want it to start answering questions from its users via email.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZBV) has asked Google to sign an undertaking that it will provide customer service by responding individually to users questions sent by email, said Carola Elbrecht, VZBV\u2019s project manager for consumer rights in the digital world at the VZBV.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Signing such a document would expose Google to fines if it breached the undertaking. On the other hand, said Elbrecht, \u201cIf Google does not sign it, we\u2019re going to court.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Germany\u2019s Telemedia Act requires businesses to provide an email address to allow customers to contact them quickly.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">But, said Elbrecht, \u201cIt is not enough to just provide an email address that leads into emptiness, you also need to be able to communicate over it.\u201d Responding to users attempting to get their questions answered with automatic replies, as Google does in Germany, is not sufficient, she said. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Seriously, dealing with issues on Blogger, or Gmail, or pretty much <b>any<\/b> Google product, you have no way of contacting a human being.<\/p>\n<p>Their response is &#8220;check out the forums and support pages.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The forums are where people go when they <b>don&#8217;t<\/b> have the answers, and it&#8217;s exceedingly rare when a Google staffer deigns to read and answer a question, and the support pages are frequently incomplete and\/or out of date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google has made me want to be a German: Google received an ultimatum Thursday from German consumer organizations that want it to start answering questions from its users via email.The Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZBV) has asked Google to sign an undertaking that it will provide customer service by responding individually to users questions &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,984,985,1025],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-europe","category-regulation","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187285"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}