I would have thought ensuring that workers at google, getting absolutely no special access to specific other accounts, is pretty much the most sacrosanct rule.
i.e. Google's unlikely to hand over the dossier they've assembled on 'what your husband has been up to that we considered bad enough to shut down their account'
Most definitely not saying this isn't a false positive - but the handling process for it it must assume it's a positive.
Now why the poster's husband can't get the info - that is somewhat worrysome.
- it's weird to be mistreated by your employer's own product (just the irony bend to it)
- if you want to appeal after a dead end, your choice is to make a huge public PR nightmare, or try to make an internal post/plea that gains traction. you'd be doing your own employer a service if you could have this issue resolved without a PR nightmare
I guess Google's ToS is between the employee's husband and Google and not the employee, the employee's husband, and Google. So there is no authorization for some random employee to "check up" on their partner, even though it sounds like escalating internally should help. (It should at least trigger, "we'd better look into this very carefully", though. If it didn't, that sounds like a problem. If it did, and the result is "yeah, this is legit", that's a very awkward position for everyone.)
I was in a similar situation when I worked at Google. My brother kind of disappeared, and my family asked if we could at least check if he logged into Gmail. I asked and was told no, and I understood why -- it's up to my brother to share what he's up to, not Google. (My brother was fine; just didn't like replying to email or answering his phone.)
I don't think it was a rule before, and I don't think it should be a rule now. This is missing an important opportunity to debug the process, since you have a separate way of finding out what's going on.
If you're not going to use that data when you get an opportunity like this to fix something, what's dogfooding and "trusted testers" all about?
It's sticking in your head in the sand out of a misguided attempt at being unbiased, instead of fixing things.
When i worked there i got my blocked payment acc unblocked with an apology pretty easily. I cant recommend using google payments (or anything other than gmail) anymore though
i.e. Google's unlikely to hand over the dossier they've assembled on 'what your husband has been up to that we considered bad enough to shut down their account'
Most definitely not saying this isn't a false positive - but the handling process for it it must assume it's a positive.
Now why the poster's husband can't get the info - that is somewhat worrysome.