Google Cloud Project Suspended Due to User Data Policy Violation

[Anton Ivanov]

We have a production application powered by Firebase and Google Cloud APIs with over 50k users. We received an email today that our Google Cloud Project has been suspended for:

"Requests permissions in a manner that may mislead users into mistaking the identity of the entity requesting the permission and violates Google API Services: User Data Policy."

There were no previous warnings or any other emails prior to this. There is also no information for what specific terms we are violating or any help for what we can do to fix this, besides the appeal button. In fact, our entire Google Cloud Console is now effectively locked out and we're not able to view any of the pages - the appeal page just shows up instead. We did submit the appeal to request more information.

We've been live for over 3 years and never had any issues. I also can't think of what we did that would violate these terms. We've used standard Firebase/Google practices for all API and authentication usage. It's also very concerning that Google would immediately suspend a project without any prior warnings or opportunity to fix issues.

Anything we can do other than just wait for an appeal response? Again, this is affecting a huge user base with a live production app that's effectively inoperable.

[Larbi (Google Cloud Support)]

Hello Anton,

You need to reach out to Billing and Payments Support team and they can definitely investigate your issue related to suspension and would be able to advise you way forward. 

[1]https://cloud.google.com/support/billing/ 

[Anton Ivanov]

Larbi,

I contact Billing Support yesterday over the phone and they couldn't help me. They said they have no access to the information regarding account suspension.

I received a reply to my initial appeal requests this morning. Once again, they lacked any specific information we could use to fix (or even understand the issue):

"Google has detected deceptive content in the redirect/home page URLs for your Google Cloud Project dealcheck-dev. The redirect/home page URLs for the domain "dealcheck" contains deceptive content."

I submitted another appeal, but I'm at a loss as far as what to do. Tens of thousands of users affected, nobody can tell me specifically what we're violating, especially since the project ran in production for over 3 years thus far...

[Anton Ivanov]

I wanted to post an update in case anybody is in a similar situation.

After 2 appeals and almost 48 hours of downtime our suspension was finally lifted. In my last appeal, I wrote a list of all possible explanations/notes/comments I could think of that are at least somewhat related to the vague reasons provided in the original suspension notice.

Something in that list must have been it, because the suspension was eventually lifted. The worst part? I still don't know what was the specific grounds for the suspension in the first place and what we can do to make sure this doesn't happen again in the future.

Nobody on phone, chat or email support was able to provide me any clear answers. I can't even message the team that lifted the suspension after the fact.

All in all, a terrible customer experience on our end, especially for an application of our magnitude...