Google account gets blocked without explanation | Hacker News Reader

Google account gets blocked without explanation

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44 pointsnarad33 comments

This reminds me how once, around 2005, Microsoft deleted all my email and the address book in hotmail account after 30 days of inactivity. I'm not touching anything that comes out of their MSN/live/whatever division with a ten foot pole, and I will never tire of telling this story. And Google's going in the same direction now.

The problem with these events is not that companies took actions to conserve their resources. They certainly do. The problem is that somewhere in those companies there are people that think "Oh, it's ok, I will nuke 5 years of this guy's data, and we don't really need to provide a way for him to export any of hist stuff. Who cares? I certainly don't. Bang-bang. Checked in! Time to go home.". A company that has this kind of employees can never be trusted.

Now that the trust is broken they would have to do something extraordinary to repair it. A compassionate tweet and restoration of one wrongfully disabled account is not going to cut it.

Is it reasonable to expect that any free service owes you much more than that? Google and Microsoft can blast away my entire 5+ year history of hotmail and gmail all they want. Anything really important is backed up on storage that I actually own.

Maybe I'm more paranoid than most but here are a couple of internet rules that I keep in mind:

1. Any thing in "the cloud" is subject to evaporation.

2. Anything posted online is open and free information to the entire world. If it is clearly specified otherwise, you can try your luck but don't be surprised when your luck runs out.

He did mention he paid for additional storage, so he's a patron. Understandably, there are business expectations attached to that.

It is reasonable to expect them not to be jerks. Google saved a penny in doing this, and they caused hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours of losses to the victim. It's "my penny is more important than your hundred dollars" mentality that's the problem.

It's simple - don't be a jerk. If you want to terminate relationship with a user, let him leave and take his stuff him. Just because the two of you did not get along and you happen to have the power, does not mean you should inflict misery on the other guy.

Plus, the damage in loss of reputation is very real.

http://twitter.com/#!/vicgundotra/status/94184809936601090

@thomasmonopoly You bet on Google. We owe you better. I'm investigating.

While it seems ridiculous that it happened, its neat that someone that high up is looking into it.

Attitudes like that exacerbate the problem. It would have been "neat" if somehow Mr. Gundotra's involvement was prompted early on. Perhaps by a chance meeting at a conference and he overheard Dylan's issue and took it upon himself to look into it. But that's not what happened. Dylan took every single step possible. Even went way beyond what should be remotely necessary. Just to get an answer. And after all of that a Senior VP of the company is somehow notified (obviously by an informal channel) and decides to help. Most people won't be so fortunate as Dylan to garner that type of attention.

There's nothing "neat" about that.

About 80% of the way through his essay, he mentions that a Googler did originally try to help him. I presume that was before he started spamming Twitter? I think I read somewhere (Twitter?) that it was Matt Cutts that originally tried to help him -- not an SVP but still a very influential guy.

It only took spamming the entire internet on twitter to get someone to notice. If you look at @thomasmonopoly, you'll see what I mean.

Every so often an article like this comes up, and I think to myself, "Maybe I should export my emails from Gmail and start using a personal domain for emails" and otherwise secure my data just in case this happens to me. But what are the chances, right? And Gmail is so convenient!

I think this time I'm going to actually do something. Probably not ditch Google entirely, but ensure I'm not entirely dependent on them.

I would do the same, but the sad fact is that I'm more likely to lose all my data than Google is, even with the occasional mistake like this.

You can still use Gmail and use a personal domain for emails. Best of both worlds.

Google Apps, or do you have a simpler setup?

Uh.. I just add an extra alias to my gmail account pointing to my personal domain and send using that email via Gmail.

Simpler. I set up my personal email on a domain I own to forward to my gmail account. In gmail, I "claimed" my email (it sent me a message with a link which I clicked). After that, I can send from gmail and Google will sign it as coming from my personal email (on the domain I own).

What do you use to forward your email from your own domain to gmail? That's what's stopping me, and that's why I went the Google Apps route.

I do the same thing and I run a postfix server to reforward the mail to my gmail account after it hits my domain. I actually don't have any redundance or backup server-side and rely on the mail client to sync content to disk. While Google disabling my account may put me out for a short time, it will only be however long it takes to reconfigure postfix to actually store my mail (or forward somewhere else) instead of just forwarding.

Shameless plug...

Regarding Google Docs, you can use cloudHQ for Dropbox (http://cloudHQ.net/dropbox) to continuously synchronize all your Google Docs to Dropbox. We will add Gmail and Picasa soon ("just" need to migrate code from showzey.com site).

I don't think it is smart to just "move out" and stop using Google. However, to have everything replicated to something you have a full control (not to some AWS storage or one more service) is a good practice. Dropbox seems as an excellent choice since it will be replicate all data to your home computer (and it works).

This sort of thing is why I find myself uncomfortable being reliant on any service where I don't have a paying relationship (and some real human customer support) with the service provider.

This is why google takeout is part of my backup strategy. http://www.google.com/takeout

It doesn't look like it backs up anything important like email or calendar or docs. This is what I see when I click through (it's a Google Apps account):

https://img.skitch.com/20110722-fpcfn5iw8b1ub26wm67kx4bsej.j...

I use offlineimap to download my e-mails to my computer. I should do it more often, though.

Full Google backup:

http://www.backupify.com/googleappsbackup

Where does it store the data?

Also, looks like it's only for Google Apps - what are my options if I just want my pavel.lishin@gmail.com account (and all associated data) backed up?

Backupify uses AWS, if I recall correctly. Services like this will become an absolute must, I expect.

They do plain GMail too, along with a handful of other services (flickr, facebook, twitter). It looks like their emphasis is now on Google Apps. I just took a look and if you click the "social media backups" link (unintuitive), you can find GMail in there.

Data is stored on Amazon S3, according to their home page[1]. So, yeah, it's backing up one cloud to another which HAS had outages, but it does reduce risk/exposure.

[1] Features

...

Nightly Backups using Amazon S3

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Google is a very paranoid company. I once had an Gmail account locked as well years ago, for no particular reason. It was a good thing it wasn't my primary account.

Recently, I've also had instances where they log me off Gmail while I was in the middle of typing an email because they detected "suspicious activity".

Is there any way to avoid this at a company where huge scale of 'free' products is the norm? It doesn't seem feasible to provide proper customer service in that business model, and that business model seems to be where things are headed...

For the company, sure - they could have better policies in place, could outline clearly which part of the TOS was violated, etc.

For the customer? Well, you can try to write a story and tweet it around, and hope someone notices.

Of course there is. It's quite simple - if a user account is creating problem, put that account in read-only and give the user a few months to export his data and move on. Thus the account cannot continue to cause harm, and yet any innocent victim suffer an inconvenience of migration, not a disaster of total loss.

How much financially is a customer worth to Google?

I know its a coarse metric, but in the "Twitter should have paid ad-free Pro accounts!" conversations, people always point out that if you look at Twitter's userbase versus its valuation, customers are worth more to Twitter as advertising eyeballs than customers would be willing to pay to become ad-free subscribers.

If that's the case -- if people are actually worth more to the company "for free" -- then the company should take care of those users when they try to leave.

I don't know if that metric actually holds water, even in the Twitter examples where it's frequently used, but the point remains that while customers aren't directly paying money for Google services, they are not without value when it comes to Google functioning. Google isn't offering its services to the public as a public service.

Google is missing an opportunity here. If they offered a paid service where for an annual subscription I can REACH someone when I need to (subject to a reasonable max number of contacts per year) then I would pay fairly well for that. I would also not use the service unless I REALLY had to. And I wouldn't expect the subscription to guarantee that everything was resolved in my favor, just to guarantee that I got an opportunity to speak with someone and make my case.

If Google doesn't want to be in this business (because customer service is NOT one of their strengths) they could work deals with 3rd parties who would be glad to provide "customer support" for Google. But they'd have to be willing to talk to the 3rd parties. If they are willing to talk to NO ONE, then we wind up with situations like this one.

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