For all it’s number of employees and the billions of dollars that it makes, Google is pretty poor when it comes to providing customer service. That’s if you can find anyone to provide a service. Google relies on forums and help pages with little backup if they don’t help. Indeed, even their social network accounts are only a one-way experience, with no assisting being made available.
But, let’s be honest, when it comes to reporting to them a breach of their Terms of Service and, potentially, illegal use of one of their product names, they’ll be a lot easier to contact. Right?
Nope.
In both cases, it’s to do with YouTube, so that’s where I started. I can find their Terms of Service but nothing there to indicate how I can report breaches of it.
Next, I turned to their general contact page…
Now, in my opinion, that’s a pretty poor contact page. Pretty much every link their takes you to help screens and NOT ways of contacting them. The only link there of relevance to my situation is “Report inappropriate use of a Google trademark”, which covers half my query. Click on that…
[Slow clap]
I really did search everywhere I could but could find no way of reporting either of my issues. In the end, I turned to the YouTube community forum. Even that assumed that I was talking about a specific video and wanted to know, for example, which platform I was referring to, before letting me post.
I posted and, 3 days later, had a response from someone, but not anybody who works for Google (which, as a “community” forum is, I’m sure, how Google wants it to work).
As it isn’t your rights allegedly being violated you don’t really have the standing to report it (and I can’t think of an available form that allows for this)
And that is Google support in a nutshell.
It’s also the end of my journey – use of THEIR copyright and breach of THEIR TOS is not impacting me, so I don’t intend to pursue it any further. I thought it was the right thing to report but it appears they are pretty uninterested in knowing.
3 replies on “How do I contact Google?”
Strange, I posted a video involving a rant by Verhostadt and Hitler on YouTube. I swapped the soundtracks. But this video was blocked within a matter of seconds because “It violated their rules”.
It’s funny how things can be blocked when it suits them, but when the user finds something wrong they have to jump through hoops and most of the time you can’t even find those hoops.
I heard recently that they hired that waste of space CLEGG as head of Global Affairs. God help us all!!!
Clegg works for Facebook, not Google.
Hi David,
Yes. Silly me he does – thanks for replying.
I also posted the same video on Facebook and it was blocked there as well. It seems that the Germans don’t want to know about their history and I’m sure that we know the danger of history repeating itself.
BTW: Would you like to see the video that was blocked? Is it possible to send it to you?
I’m not interested, thank you, Pete.
I don’t think most people would be surprised that Germany blocks that kind of content – it’s pretty well known.