Comment by sauteedbiscuits | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sauteedbiscuits | Hacker News Reader

sauteedbiscuits

What is troubling about this is not that Google mistakenly removed the account.

What is troubling is:

1: This guy had to go to the fucking MOON to get his account back, ranting and raving on twitter like a mad man- and it took nearly a week!!

2: Google's support sucks- God help any of us who is in a similar position.

3: Even getting Google's attention is not enough. Since there is no formal appeals process, you have to harass Google employees in a informal method. Matt Cutts even said on a HN thread that "Google took the appropriate action" - So what is it? Did he break the TOS or not? This is the whole issue. Without a formal process, you just get knee jerk reactions. Any person other than this guy would have stopped trying after Matt essentially said he wasn't getting it back.

4: Even after all that, he did not even know why his account was deleted for a week.

5: For all Google's talk about data liberation, they suck with this. Takeout only gives you access to useless social crap and if you want to download your email its a long process that involves reading guides, using POP, IMAP, etc.. How about just giving me a link to download my mail?

6: No warnings, no contact- This could have all been solved if Google asked first and shot later.

* Link to where matt_cutts looked into this and still decided he cant have his account back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465

It is absolutely true that Google has their support issues, and they should be criticized for them, but...

Do you seriously think there is any other US provider (i.e. subject to US child pornography laws) that would have behaved any better? Given the allegation, it probably was legally risky for Google to keep his data at all. There are laws that criminalize even the "innocent possession" of child pornography. Had things gone another way, I presume Google would have argued they were preserving evidence, but they have to be very, very careful regardless. I'm absolutely certain there are many providers who would have behaved worse (account closed, no comment, no investigation, no appeal, data given to the police then deleted).

In the alternative scenario, many of the things you want Google to do could easily be illegal. After an allegation, any warning, contact or access to data could easily have been construed as aiding and abetting a crime in progress and/or obstruction of justice (particularly by an ambitious, headline-seeking prosecutor). What you don't seem to understand is that, once the allegation was made Google couldn't do squat for @thomasmonopoly without risking criminal charges until they determined the allegation was false. And that determination was going to take time no matter how you slice it.

Personally, I find it hard to think of what Google could do better in this sort of situation. My two suggestions (and I'm not sure they're practical):

1. Commit to manually reviewing every automatic suspension for these kinds of potential criminal allegations.

2. Be clear about when an account is being suspended and investigated versus suspended with a final determination made.

Why not remove/disable the offending material? From what I've read he didn't have any calendar appointments like "Friday 12:30pm Take windowless van to the candy store". Why kill access to completely unrelated services because an automated (possibly error-prone) process flagged a picture?

None of this is news. People complain about Google's lack of support all the time; it is a well known issue.

Also, complaining about having to use POP or IMAP to pull out your email? Seriously? It's a standard, it lets you import them into any email program you want, and just giving you a compressed archive of everything would be a nightmare of compatibility if you wanted to do anything with it but read the messages in a text editor.

Matt Cutts did look into it.

But he very specifically didn't say that he had "decided [Thomas Monopoly] can't have his account back".

This is presumably because that decision isn't even Matt's to make. (He is the head of the webspam team at Google.)

It's well established that Google's support system is close to non-existant for non-paying customers. Does it suck? Yes. There's definitely tons of room for improvement. But at the end of the day they're still providing you with tons of free, accessible products that are some of the best in the business (paid or not). This isn't much more than any other free service provider on the internet offers these days: half-official forums for free customers, direct support lines for the paying.

But regarding "freeing" your data from Google, it's hilarious trying to see people argue that it's somehow difficult or hidden. It's not. Takeout lets you grab all of your social information. Any popular desktop mail client can connect to Gmail over IMAP and automatically download every last e-mail in your account. I click one checkbox on Google Docs and then hit download to have a backup, or I can connect through WebDAV using a popular FTP client. There are similar easy solutions for Picasa, Calendar, and the rest. Just because they don't provide you with one shiny big button to do all the work for you doesn't mean they don't provide you with very accessible ways to backup your data offline.

At the end of the day, an automated system did what it was designed to do. Google should definitely work on it's customer service channels, but until then I'll happily continue to use their free services and backup on a scheduled basis.

I question that Google took the appropriate action. The default action for an apparently legitimate account[0] that violates the ToS in such a manner should be to block access to the content in question - perhaps even related content until a human can review it. It should never be to entirely disable the account without warning.

[0]I'd be shocked if Google doesn't use data mining and heuristics to discriminate between legitimate accounts and spammers, pornographers, etc....

This isn't just the case of a ToS violation, it's a potential federal crime. I doubt very much that you actually looked up what US law requires in this situation.

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