I place my trust in Google. Whoops.
I picked up the New York Times today and found an article reporting on Gmail users that, for no apparent reason, get locked out of their accounts–sometimes for a number of weeks. Worse, Google has no customer service line that users can call to help walk them through the issue.
I picked up on two issues here:
1) we’re placing a huge amount of trust in this “free” service, so
2) is it to be expected that the company provides little transparency and no personal service because it is “free”?
As a person that willingly admits to an overabundance of trust in Google’s seemingly robust interfaces, I was a bit distraught by this article and side with the author, Randall Stross:
As customers, we bring the same expectations to Google’s personalized information services, like Gmail or Google Docs, its word-processing service, as we do to our bank’s Web site. These are places that hold information very dear to us. My bank recognizes that losing access for days at a time is unacceptable. It provides me with round-the-clock phone support for account problems. So, too, should Google, even if I pay the company not in the form of a monthly account fee, but with my attention, which Google commercializes by selling slices to its advertisers.
In response to my initial questions, the jury is still out. But when put into the context of the library world, this type of service would not fly.
