Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of User's Digital Life, Shrugs
consumerist.com
consumerist.com
You can backup your data. You can have fallback tools and services. You cannot backup your identity. And if that identity is controlled by Google, you are tying your online existence for the duration to the foibles of a publically traded company with a shitty track record of customer support.
Tell me with a straight face that you know Google won't mess you around like this - not just now, but for the next decade. Hell, tell me you know your account won't be algorithmically disabled tomorrow. If your last name isn't Gundotra, I don't think you can. Why, then, are you taking that risk when the cost is so small?
.com domains retail for about $10/year, Google Apps Free Edition is here: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html - you can keep the services you like while retaining control of your email address.
Disclaimer: I have an @gmail.com address that I'm suddenly realising is a sword over my head.
For example: I can download all my mail from gmail (using POP or IMAP) regularly. If I lose the account I still have my mails. I can't change the mail amazon (or whatever other site) knows about unless I have access to my gmail account (I realize you can probably talk to their customer support but it doesn't scale well at all. I have about 120 different logins using my @gmail.com address...).
THE PROBLEM is that many places only accept google/facebook if not facebook alone. Although I have no freaken' idea why, it took a minute after adding google login to my site to add facebook, openid, etc..
Google owning your data is not the problem here, while you can backup it. The real problem is them owning your identity.
What if your domain registrar simply fails and loses your records?
The US government has been seizing domains associated with sites accused of violating laws; are you with a registrar who will fight that?
I'm not saying that you shouldn't own the domain for your email address--it's simply that you should realize that it solves one problem but creates others.
Once you look at things at detail, almost everything in your life is dependent on trust. Knowing how much to trust different aspects and how to evaluate risks is key.
I also primarily use an IMAP client which saves a local copy of all my email, so although the "identity" issues (and non-email data) bother me a bit, I do have at all times essentially a backup of all my mail.
If you buy a domain, nowadays, you have few options with respect to getting an email that sounds legit, mature, and isn't long and/or uses easily misspelled words.
I have a bunch of domains, but none of them are particularly appropriate for an email address I would verbally communicate to someone. bluh.org is my main domain, but when you say 'bluh' out loud to someone, you inevitably have to spell it. I once owned thereisnocharles.com, which was a goofy thing and I used that as my main email address before gmail came along. But it's long, and it doesn't sound professional at all.
I guess we could all just use something like gmail as a simple forwarder service to our owned email addresses, but even then, it's not a foolproof solution.
Solves the problem you raised.
;0)
I don't see this as a valid issue to deter anyone from getting their own domain.
Mine is bertjw@regeer.org for example.
you want to see how bad it turn when you do chin, li, etc? soon we will run out of website names!
I own (for now.. I'm not sure if that can be disputed if more people with my rather rare last name apply) lastname.name
So - you can reach me, if I finally finish my migration and stop being a lazy bastard, at firstname@lastname.name - which is rather good imo.
Sure, I've got other legacy addresses, but this could be a viable alternative to a gmail _identity_.
I found a registrar that sold this domain to me, anything you throw at it ends up on one of my machines.
My username, across the Internet, is spiffytech. I registered http://spiffyte.ch. It's fun and a little clever, but since most people haven't heard of .ch domains I'm constantly saying "w-w-w dot spiffy t-e dot c-h. No, not .com. No, put the dot between the 'e' and the 'c'. Spiffytech. Like my username.". Even to tech-savvy friends.
Sure, maybe that's an artifact of my particular domain, but I'd much prefer if I could get the .com and just tell people spiffytech.com and avoid the confusion.
Although I was once told 'sorry, you must use a Hotmail, Yahoo! or Gmail address'...
But let's be realistic... it's not like the world of internet users suffered from a supposed problem with miscommunicated email addresses before "geemail.com" came around. We managed just fine.
Will not using G OAuth and probably delete all photos from my Picasa, now that they were automatically moved over to G+.
You never know what the automatic image scanner may think it has found in those photos that violates some G+ rules. I don't want to lose all my data in my G account, only because an automated scanner thinks my friend's face was a bare female breast.
How can I reach you? You don't have Facebook!
I thought you looked familiar.
This is why I trust Apple. They might be slow, or silent, but they've never left me hanging (and I've been a customer of theres for decades before google existed.)
That said, my iCloud account is where media and non-essential information will get stored. If Apple disappears it one day, at most I'll have lost music and movies. But everything real lives somewhere I can control and backup.
I use GMAIL, but with POP access, and I store my email locally.
However, it is time to get off of gmail and move anyway. It is just such a PITA to manage your own email servers....but I expect a company that does it for a living will provide better support than a company where I'm the product rather than the customer.
Your data in Google could disappear in an instant, and you may never know why. That is just scary to me. Advertising, email, - everything - with no one to call and no recourse to get it back.
I will be actively trying to move all my services off of Google starting today.
When I was spending a few million a year on AdWords, guess who had a direct line to Google, both via email and on the phone? I could talk to those guys whenever I wanted about campaigns, get advice on improving my keyword mix, budgeting strategies, any of that stuff.
From this business' point of view, individuals just don't matter. You could piss off hundreds or thousands of them and not make any dent on the bottom line, since they're not the ones who put money into Google's pockets and they're easily replaced.
The incentives are lined up in ways that, for the most part, work fine, but if you expect Google to care about you at the scale they operate, with the business mix they currently enjoy, you'd better be on the advertiser side of the equation.
Of course that's unrealistic. But I don't care. I grew up believing in Star-Trek-style society. You know... "Social problems are gone; people are free to devote themselves to improving themselves; etc". I honestly believed that humanity would someday achieve this.
I used to believe most people were inherently good, and that they are naturally adverse to doing unethical things, and that if they did something unethical by accident, then they would go out of their way to fix it, even if they weren't obligated to. Because it's the right thing to do.
Needless to say, Real Life came as a nasty surprise.
You're a bad person for not caring about That One Guy Who You Deleted 7 Years Of His Life. But hey, our capitalistic society encourages not caring, so it must be okay, right?
Obviously my thoughts are unreasonable. I wish the world were unreasonable. Because then people might empathize with each other to an unreasonable degree, resulting in far less grief and hate within our microscopic timeline of our universe.
It is not the pubicly-held companies. It is the power of money to control, persuade, influence, or even empower.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is true that money doesn't buy happiness but even truer that not having money can cause unhappiness via stress among other things.
The problem is what people who have money decide to do with it and how they choose to influence the larger whole. Many of the people who have put their entire intellect towards making money, have desired to do so for the wrong reasons and therefore use it in a net negative way as you have put it.
I guess what I am saying, is that it falls on the individual to make the right decision, and not corporations, governments or societies as a whole.
"We did it for the shareholders" may be a unique excuse in the realm of organizations, but governments, churches, companies, school boards, communes, etc all suffer from problems like these. The difference with public companies is that folks can vote with their dollars, or in an adequately free economy, can band together and compete.
A notable example is Ivan the Terrible and his society.
No, the purpose of a corporation is to efficiently organize work.
Fundamentally, corporations, and the entire economic system, exist for only one purpose: to create a better human society. Profit is the incentive to get them to work for the greater good, but it's not the end-goal. We've temporarily lost sight of that, but sooner or later we're going to have to redefine corporations so we can keep the good (competitive drive), and discard the bad (profit at the expense of humanity).
Personally, I would be very interested to see minimum holding times for shares (incentivizing long-term behavior), and maximum lifetimes for corporate personhood (corporations should all die at some point, just like other people).
"Efficiently organizing work" is what must be done as a by product or failure is ensured in this survival of the fittest capitalistic system.
I agree that the ethics are not what they should be in the corporate culture today, but that doesn't change the nature nor the purpose and definition of corporation.
> The purpose of a corporation by definition is to
> maximize the bottom line for the shareholder
If I push up the stock price $100 over 2 years, but in the process destroy the brand in a way that causes the business to drop in value and eventually close over the next 3 years, have I increased shareholder value?
What if I cut the customer-service budget, saving money and causing customers to hate the company? What happens when an incumbent shows up in the market, and steals away most of my customer base? Did that create shareholder value?
Reciting "money++ is the only thing that matters" as the definition of a corporation is brain-dead.
That wasn't my intention, and my definition was ambiguous, you are right. I wrote that off the top of my head. To be more accurate, it is "to maximize shareholder value."
This includes building a solid brand name and maintaining a good reputation via ethical practices.
No, the purpose of a corporation is to faithfully carry out the corporate bylaws. There are many corporations that do little for the shareholder's bottom line: private schools, charities, self-styled socially responsible businesses, co-ops, government-run public service companies, profit-neutral public utility companies, and many others.
I sympathize with your idealistic sort of thinking but it is unreasonable.
Google could easily start a service department and run it as a profit center: simply require a massive credit card charge or wire transfer before they will help fix your account. That they do not is an intentional choice.
That's how it was in the 1500s.
No, the purpose is whatever the corporate charter says. It's just that most of those are pretty vague, and for a publicly held corporation it's been held that within the bounds of the charter there is a duty to maximize shareholder value (whatever that means). For privately held corporations, of course, the private holders just call the shots.
But back to charters... you may be interested in the fact that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation exist and distinctly do NOT maximize shareholder value. Also, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#Mutual_benefit_corp.... And in recent years there has been a movement to create charters that look just like your typical public corporation charter but impose certain restrictions on what the corporation is or is not allowed to do in the process of making money. Several states issue such charters at this point. Again, the corporation is responsible to shareholders but within the bounds of the charter. Which shareholders should read before investing, of course; that's basic due diligence.
So in your opinion being good to people have NOTHING to do with maximizing the bottom line from the shareholder.
I beg to differ, IMHO the most profitable business are those that provide a very good product or service to their customers(people).
I remember the pre-google days, Altavista that forced you to click 5 buttons to do the same thing you could do with google on "Advanced search", That push pop ups that will flick on the screen with vivid colors and force you to visit their stupid "portals", that sold the three first web results page to the best bidders(so they were crap).
I recall that days every single day I have to visit my old hotmail account because they are not dead. If there were not some company that gave a better service that they do(google) they will come back.
Nah, people are too busy worshiping things like Google+ and the next social network, things which really solve nothing at all.
First, I share your idealism. Being good to people, and humanity as a whole, is the most important thing we can do in our brief existence.
What's happened, though, is that perverse incentives that reward short-term thinking at the expense of long-term results have become the norm in large businesses.
Ship product X before it's ready because the Street wants to see some action before the end of the quarter – even though in an unfinished state, you'll destroy the product's reputation. (most people in Tablet land)
Fire an experienced sales force because they are expensive. The money saved will look great in our financial reporting – even though the resulting drop in customer service will gut our profitability for years to come. (Home Depot, Circuit City)
Adopt rigid policies around customer service. Don't empower front-line people to make things right. That might cost money – even though the lost goodwill will mean that customers will abandon the business and flock to better alternatives. (most retail chains, airlines)
But the good news is that there are companies who make a lot of money just by kind of being nice to people, creating a fair balance of profit for the company and value for the customer.
Zappos spends a shitload of money on phone support. It's a marketing expense. So everyone loves shopping at Zappos after awhile.
Amazon will disable their Prime $3.99 one-click shipping button if they've noticed that the free option has the same delivery estimate. So you can always feel safe shopping there.
Apple Stores are pretty flexible with return/exchange/warranty rules. Be polite, explain what you need, they'll often bend policy or waive repair fees. From a product perspective, Apple sits on products for years and kills them if they can't deliver a minimum level of user experience quality. So when they launch something new, they have lines out the door with people desperate to buy.
Whole Foods empowers their store managers to do the right thing – whatever that looks like for a given situation or market. So if the power goes out in the middle of a busy day, everyone goes home with free food so they can get on with life.
So as long as you're capable of seeing past the next three weeks, you can make money and be good to people. Which is what you need if you want to pay your employees' rent. Corporations are capable of doing a lot of good. But they've been hijacked by unimaginative, unproductive Wall Street morons who would kill a school bus full of children if it meant a higher return on the next five minutes of trading.
But our capital markets are screwed up, and corporate governance laws are a mess, leading to less accountability and mismatched incentives.
http://www.icahnreport.com/report/2008/06/corporate-democ.ht...
/me puts his geek away
I hope one day I do something like that for someone. Maybe on my deathbed or something.
I don't know; I just wish people were... better people. To each other. I know they never will be, but I'd rather hope for this fantasy than accept grim reality.
The whole product/customer thing is a boring bit of sophistry usually used to slander Google.
Google's profitability secret is a very high revenue to employee ratio. When I bought a $600 Nexus One from Google and discovered a problem with fulfilment, the grand total of support Google supplied to me was an automated email response (that itself was a dead end -- no recourse or escalation), and a link to an FAQ.
That's just how Google operates. If they can make a cron job that eliminates the need to supply support for most customers, that's what they do. It is this way whether they benefit from you via your eyeballs, or from your wallet.
You begin with what seems like disagreement, then prove my point.
A $600 device to be exposed to Google's mobile ads? Here's an email.
A few million dollars a year in ad spend? Here's a whole department of new friends.
Solving problems with AdWords can be done algorithmically. And is – there are lots of little automated touches there, from ad approval to keyword suggestion. But smart humans can give more – resulting in better financial performance for Google.
Code can rarely resolve support issues. But that's all they bothered to do because end users are not a priority. For all the reasons I mentioned.
When it benefits them financially, Google offers support. Otherwise, they don't. You can chalk this up to whatever cultural or business case you'd like.
But the end result is that unless you're pouring money into their pockets, you, as an individual, don't matter to Google. That's not sophistry – that's established fact.
I don't think that is terribly challenging viewpoint.
There are infinite degrees of nuance everywhere you look. We use language to reduce that complexity. You can call it sophistry as much as you like — the reason it's polarizing is because the reality sucks for 99% of people who need Google's help — they're not treated as customers as most people understand that term. Inconvenient but true.
Personally, I've given up hope that the world will ever be different. But if there is any hope, it will take the form of: "We will no longer tolerate your impersonal policies and rationalizations". So we should try to speak out against it.
But yeah. People are irrational cows that throw money at anything shiny. So that won't happen, and the world won't change.
Moo.
Personally, I feel this is a simple matter of personal responsibility. It's free, so you can't expect support. If you're not okay with that, pay someone and ask them for guarantees.
¹ Yes, I know there are other costs, but I don't think their value to Google covers anything similar to real support.
Google is giving you a service for free because they are selling data about you for money.
In other words if you aren't paying for the product you are the product.
How does that have anything to do with sophistry?
Google makes money because they have users, in the same way that a television network makes money because they have viewers. Both are entirely reliant upon their user base, and will desperately trying to optimize and maximize that user base.
If the GP's point was "there is a very low profit / user, and a limited impact by irate customers (at least those who don't shout from the rooftops)" then they are making an accurate statement, and it's actually what I supported -- Google doesn't care whether you're on a "free" or pay program, they'll still try to avoid talking to you.
The bit about products and customers is just completely unnecessary, again, sophistry. Google's product is a mail system and a search engine and a social product, and sometimes users pay for it (I use Apps for Domains), and sometimes advertisers pay for it. Cutifying that into comforting slogans isn't helpful.
Neglecting that is what is unnecessary.
Frankly, I think the problem is that google has no real competition. Google, really is becoming a fine example of why monopoly, regardless of whether it is merit based or otherwise, is bad, for in the end, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Obviously this is just anecdotical evidence as the only "data point" I have is my own experience and it's possible that everyone else in the world receives five star support from Google right away. None the less, it made me lose a lot of respect for them and in the end I ended up cancelling my account and asked for a refund (which is automated).
One day I was about to leave a comment on a blog when I got a message saying Google disabled my account due to the fact that they "perceived a violation." There was a little form I could submit an appeal/explanation to, and they said they would review my account within 30 days.
Being cut off from the WoW blogosphere wasn't the worst thing in the world. About three weeks later I did get access to my account. Turns out I was hacked and the hacker used my account to spam a bunch of people -- not surprising especially since I used a pretty crappy password. Luckily my actual Battle.net account was under my main e-mail address, so ultimately no damage was done.
Still, all I could think was, "man, if this happened to my main email address, I would be so incredibly hosed it wouldn't be funny."
Not sure how Dylan can say the below quote with absolute certainty...
On July 15 2011 you turned off my entire Google account. You had absolutely no reason to do this, despite
your automated message telling me your system "perceived a violation."He can say it because Google apparently can't be bothered to explain exactly what 'violation' he supposedly committed.
At least then, the guy wouldn't be completely screwed, and it's the sort of solution that scales, given that they're not interested in creating expensive support infrastructure for free products.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/116969159384245484847/posts/Z1UH...
"You bet on Google. We owe you better. I'm investigating."
Not much. They're only doing damage control. I wonder whether Matt Cutts is on holiday or something, by the way..
Think about what you could do with a tiny bit of programming knowledge and keyword knowledge to make money using these service. Then try it and get banned. Cutts works all day to ban guys like this. He's less webspam hall monitor than he is the "Ad Sheriff". The internet, and Google, is the Wild Wild West. The only thing stopping people from scraping cash from Google and other ad networks are people like him. And their algos of course.
Sorry your account got banned bro. You just got tased by the cops. Next time don't ask questions about Skull and Bones and deliver good content instead, as Cutts always says.
/opinion
This is like sentencing someone to death for shoplifting. GMail, Picasa, etc. are not about AdWords; they're a means for people to connect with each other. Unless, of course, Google is agreeing that you are indeed a product and not a user.
I just started using G+ (mainly because I'd like there to be a strong competitor to FB), but Google's antics give me cause for concern. I'd hate to get "hacked" some day and have Google completely wipe out every bit I have with them.
When you sign-up for a Google account, there's a little something called a Terms of Service you agree to. You violate them? You sacrifice all rights to any data you may or may not have on their services. That's something every Google user agrees to from day one. If you don't like that punishment, you shouldn't have signed up.
Alternatively, we could make arguments for why that is a bad idea, post them on a public forum, and hope that Google sees it.
+1's, buzz, contacts, picasa and my +1 posts?
That's less than 10 % of the data I have with Google.
== ...Gmail will only let you down a few hundred emails at a time. You can repeat the command (let getmail finish each time before you run it again) until all of your email is downloaded. ==
You honestly expect users to fetch of their mail a few hundred messages at a time ?
You also leave out the fact that if you re-run that script a number of times in a row, Google's server's will block you until you fill out a captcha and wait 24 hours.
GMail is a free service, so having limited features and options is expected. But it's troublesome that Google doesn't feel it has an obligation to respect its user's data. An admin you're not allowed to contact thinks you violated the terms and all of your mail is deleted. Business contracts, random chats with cute girls/boys from school, messages from family and friends who might not be here anymore, ... all of it is gone.
If that were the case then why can't Google disclose this to him when they close his account? (And perhaps, though this is a separate issue, then even give him a chance to defend his position -- you know, like they do in The Real World?)
Any other theories?
I got banned from Adsense just over a Year ago and I thought about making Noise. BUT I wanted to work WITH Adsense and Google. Why Burn Bridges? So I tried to use the proper channels. But very disappointing that I was Ignored the whole time.
All I do/did was make Family Friendly YouTube Videos and occasionally post on my website. MY writings, My Original Videos. No Gaming the system no extra promotion, just let the views and the subscribers build naturally. I STILL have NO idea why Adsense Disabled me.
BUT there is an Issue that Many Partners have become Victims of. Clickbombing. There is no way to View or Track where impressions or clicks are coming from on YouTube. AND even if you report the activity, you still get banned. I was having slow steady Success. Was the Invalid Activity hidden in the Success data? I have no idea.
Looks like it is time to start a revolution. This might make National News.
It took me 5 years to finally reach the minimum payout, and they banned my account right before the 2nd payout. I did not do any click fraud.
The only other explanation I can think of is "click bombing" but I did not have logs longer than a week and did not see anything unusual.
It is infuriating that not only did they steal $100 from me (it was stolen from me because I could've used the other advertisers I am using now during those months), but that I am banned without an explanation. And they have the gall to ask me to try out Adwords with a $100 coupon.
If the guy broke the rules and had that action taken against him...and Cutts agrees...he did something wrong for real. Automated mistakes happen. Obviously this was not one of those.
The only sad part about this, is that we'll never know what he did wrong. Shame.
I'll quote terryb088 from reddit in saying, 'The whole "cloud computing" model that companies like Google are pushing requires that we place good faith in the companies that provide these services. In my opinion good faith runs both ways, and any suspension of services needs to have a channel for dispute and resolution.'
The bottom line is, with so much of our personal information and other material invested in Google and its services, the opportunity to appeal (much less be given a reason for) account termination should always be available. It speaks volumes of Google's attitude towards its users that there is not such an avenue already provided.
Deleting the whole account is really unjustifiable! If OP was abusing some service of Google, then ban him from this specific service, but why take his whole data?
If there is something to learn, it's to keep a local copy of anything you have, and never be 100% depending on an online service. But then this obliterates the benefits of investing entirely in so called cloud services with any company, including Google. Ownership of your data, doesn't seem to be one of those benefits.
And how do you download all your Google Analytics data? This page on the Data Liberation page suggests that you export to XML, Excel or TSV. http://www.dataliberation.org/google/analytics But to do daily backups of all the dimensions, metrics, advanced segments etc. would be very time consuming. You could do it easier with the API, but that requires programming knowledge.
It certainly makes me question the wisdom of keeping my email in Gmail and my photos in Picasa. And anything else in other parts of my google account.
If Google is going to act like they can hold all of your data easily and effectively, why would a normal user back up their data? Would a normal user even know how? I doubt any of my friends would know where to start, or why they even should. After all, Google operates under the pretense of being a reliable service.
And let's get one thing clear: they ARE a reliable service. Up until they deactivate your account.
Let's say I decide I have to break up with my live-in girlfriend, for good and sufficient reason. Perhaps she banged my three best friends, perhaps she literally killed my dog with an axe. Doesn't matter - I have my reasons. I break up with her. I still have to give her back her stuff from my apartment. If I don't do so, I'm committing a separate offense of my own. I lose the moral high ground.
Maybe something has to be worked out - maybe a friend of hers has to come over and get it, maybe I put her shit in boxes out on the porch. Whatever. I still have to give her back her stuff. The courts agree, public opinion agrees, the police agree. Whatever she did, no matter how egregious the violation, my swiping her stuff is FUCKING FROWNED UPON and is not justified by whatever harm she did to me.
Google demonstrates no knowledge of this legal and social norm. That's what is pissing people off. Implement a system to let people download their data from closed accounts and you can delete accounts with no explanation all day long.
Stealing people's data - regardless of what they did to you - is something that most people consider to be evil. Nobody cares about whether the guy did anything wrong or not. He's seizing the moral high ground from you because you, also, have committed a wrong.
This philosophy, or at least the "out" part, should apply doubly after someone's account is terminated in this manner. Google has determined that sinning against one service warrants terminating access to other services. That may be justifiable. But sinning against one service should not warrant loss of one's data in other services.
4.4 You acknowledge and agree that if Google disables access to your account, you may be prevented from accessing the Services, your account details or any files or other content which is contained in your account.
I have no knowledge of what services he can or can't access, just that it is within Google's purview to remove access to all Google's services.
P.S. This is not Twitter and we don't use hashtags in our posts. Please act as though you have a semblance of decorum.
It is however realistic for Google to solve this by putting a violating account in a "read-only" mode, where you are able to export all you data and not do anything else.
Allowed access to banned accounts in "Read-only" mode is ripe for abuse by spammers and phishers who could benefit from still being able to access information in the violating accounts. Its the wrong kind of solution to a problem that really comes down to personal responsibility.
I think most people know deep down the responsible thing to do is have backups of all their important data... the cloud is just making people lazy. And providing a "read-only" access to a banned account will only make people lazier and more apathetic about it. "oh.. no worries.. Googles got my back" But what happens when Google is hacked, or suffers a natural disaster, or other catastrophic failure? It only serves to make the problem worse. Losing your data, to even a wrongfully banned account, is nobody's fault but your own.
There so many more reasons to backup your data before something bad happens, not after.... thats what we should be promoting
Regarding spammers and phishers, these are users violating the law and they of course have no legitimate claims to their account data.
I think you, and possibly your neighbor, might have become victims of this kind of shoddy, falsified intelligence work. Back when the "war on terror" was really hotted up after 9/11, there were tons of stories of Muslims being erroneously charged with terrorism, like the time with the "Detroit Sleeper Cell" that turned out to be just some impoverished Detroit Muslims; the FBI took wild liberties interpreting a disturbed man's doodles to be some sort of terrorist plot. Well, now the intel agencies are a little more restricted in their ability to harass and intimidate innocent Muslims (well, as long as they're within our borders). But as we've seen with the story about the 13 year-old, these agencies are still quite willing to harass and intimidate online activists, accusing them of being "hacktivists" and seizing their property. And we've also seen that companies such as google are quite "in bed" with the gov't whenever they ask them for the data in the name of "the war on terror."
TL;DR I suspect that google disabled your account at the behest of the gov't who are in turn serving credit card companies mad about being DDoSed by Anon who was mad at them for stealing money from wikileaks, who the credit card companies say violated THEIR terms of service.
The question remains, despite the link to Betsy Perry's G+ post which has been repeatedly posted in this thread in order to discredit you, is which term of service you violated in the use of your gmail account? Google refuses to answer this, which is what makes me most confident that some homeland security BS is involved here.
(Also, in the space of ycombinator users, fozzymandias and thomasmonopoly share the same coordinates. No proof.)
and the thing about anonymous in my building is very true, look it up. bushwick bk. ny post. i don't know the specifics. but i did have breakfast two days ago with someone who knew the tenants and let's just say i don't want to know and he didn't want to tell me what was going on.
But anyway, we would appreciate it if you didn't start spamming HN with this story. We know the details. We know you're upset. We don't really care.
If you must comment, one comment per threading level, please. Don't reply to the same comment more than once. And, keep it short. There must be something better to do with your life than tell everyone that Google disabled your account due to ToS violations.
It's sad. Move on.
So yes, speak for yourself. I appreciate what he's doing as well.
They insisted that their automated ban system could not make a mistake. While I realize that most people banned from any online service probably deserve it, you can tell the quality of a company by the way they handle the mistakes. And there are always mistakes.
Here's where I documented all I tried to do years ago with no success in case anyone is interested: https://sites.google.com/site/vacban/
While I don't intend on doing this myself, I'm HORRIFIED at the idea that Google would suddenly cut me off from all my data without reason.
The right to know the specific charges lodged
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Amendment_to_the_United_S...
"A defendant has the right to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation against him. Therefore, an indictment must allege all the ingredients of the crime to such a degree of precision that it would allow the accused to assert double jeopardy if the same charges are brought up in subsequent prosecution.[8] The Supreme Court held in United States v. Carll, 105 U.S. 611 (1881) that “in an indictment ... it is not sufficient to set forth the offense in the words of the statute, unless those words of themselves fully, directly, and expressly, without any uncertainty or ambiguity, set forth all the elements necessary to constitute the offense intended to be punished.” Vague wording, even if taken directly from a statute, does not suffice."
So the charges have to be specific enough. In this case, they are super general.
Pretty much all the other parts of justice are denied by google too (except the right to a speedy trial). These include the right to a public trial, an impartial jury, legal representation, the right to call witnesses in one's own favor, and the right to confront one's accusers.
Obviously Google is not required to give anyone these rights. But not even giving a semblance of them puts google on the evil side.
These rights aren't just made up for no reason - in the past people realized that just trusting leaders to do the right thing doesn't work, and gets corrupted. To stop this corruption they came up with ideas for how to make things more fair, and built systems around this. In some cases they even died to get these rights. Just trusting google to do the right thing is a scary, primitive way to deal with their power - and google seems to be wilfully ignoring that progress.
I wish I knew what terms I have supposedly violated. Google are being really mysterious, very Kafkaesque, because they refuse to tell me what I have violated and they refuse to allow me the option of appeal. I am guessing I was suspended because I posted a Google-critical thread regarding the user-names issue but the ToS don't mention anything about not being able to criticize Google. Free speech is theoretically permissible.
The most detail I can get from Google is that my suspension is due to "text and images" which alleged violates community standards. No precise details whatsoever and no option for appeal.
Yes, you can remove someone from your service if you like. But you must let them retrieve their materials. Otherwise, please trust us: We will go somewhere else. Behavior like this from FB is why we came here in the first place.
It would reduce what is now a very scary prospect for people who (like me) put too many eggs in G's basket, to a minor inconvenience rarely encountered. And I can't see that it would make life much easier for spammers.
IMAP also discards information - I don't just want my email, I want my tagged email.
Not.
If you want to keep the tags, take a look at heliotrope[1], a personal email server with tag support that can sync Gmail accounts.
I also live in an area where latency is normally measured in seconds, so I think you and everyone downvoting me are living in a slightly different Internet from me.
Heliotrope sounds like it might offer a good alternative without a six hour journey back to civilization.
Reading this link gave me the push I needed to finally backup my gmail. I've been worried about the [probably very low] risk of Google deciding to close my account, but I'm going to take it into my own hands now, and start using Gmail as my reader only.
The problem is with bots...Google automates everything, so they hit a lot of people with false positives.
I'm sure a lawyer can come up with something
Maybe something along the lines of "Google accused me as a violator of their Terms of Service when I didn't do anything wrong...this caused duress and headaches for me, to a point where I can't sign up for a service under fear that I'll get accused again for doing nothing...this has made a huge impact on my quality of life , which is why I'm seeking $2.5 million in damages"
then times that a million or two users.
Sure, it would be awful to lose my Google account but I could recover from it.
regardless, they need to communicate with their users if they close an account, and give users an opportunity to take their data.
Instead of using the cloud to backup your local data, backup your online identity locally. 1TB is about $50-$100 now; and (e.g.) Windows 7 has backup built-in. Someone just needs to extend this to the cloud.
Backupify is also an option, but they backup to their own storage which, again, is not owned by you.
I recognise that with the 'cloud', comes simplicity... but I'm not sure if I will ever be able to let go of my own data.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/creating-backup-for...
"User trusts invaluable data to free service with no SLA, upset at inevitable result"
Or is it that you just can't find the one person responsible and empowered with the ability to fix?
Everyone have bugs (another use for blog monitoring), but this one seems pretty loud.
Same for facebook.
These companies use highly automated services, if the approach feels inhumane then you are noticing the fact that it is inhumane.
Its not a malicious act for these companies to do this, its a by product of a set up circumstances that are designed to trigger a response to catch people abusing the product.
Naturally a person from time to time will trigger the automated response and appear to use as a cruelly treated victim, but what you don't see is the thousands of other people that systems like this catch. To them the system works extremely well, innocent victims here and there included.
Why it appears to suck is what is mentioned above, users are not customers, you are a product being sold. Hence they want to spend the bare minimum on user support, they want to maximsie the profit per product. On a personal level they have no interest in you.
Like a farmer to cattle. You have to treat the cattle well enough so you have sell it, but the farmer has no personal attachment to a cow as such (pets aside), they are just a product. To keep a cow healthy sometimes you have to spend some many on vet services, but you don't bring in the vet to inspect every cow, thats bad business.
Google has great customer support by the way. If you want to spend large sums of money they will send a man to company to discuss exactly how you spend it.
If the market would be more competitive (cows could walk away en masse), surely they would treat cows as humans.