How Instagram closed my account and gave it to a football celebrity
medium.com
medium.com
No notice, no communication, nothing.
When I contacted the person at GitHub who did it he refused to answer any questions or explain anything.
So watch out... If you have the same name as an employee's drinking buddy, prepare to have your account removed without notice or explanation.
Sincerely,
the other rbishop
They have rules that after an account is inactive for a significant amount of time it is subject to removal.
I know this because I reclaimed a VERY inactive account. It had one repo that was forked years previously and never had any updates. And the user never contributed to any repos or anything. No activity of any type in years. So, I contacted GH support asking about the account and they removed the account and told me I could register it if I was fast.
IIRC, activity on private repos isn't exposed on the user's page. Is it possible for a non-employee to tell the difference between a truly inactive account and one that has activity on only private repos?
I would very much hope that GH would attempt to contact the account holder before they deleted the account!
I was surprised how easy it was.
That being said, I would have gladly contacted the account holder but GH removed that capability a long time back. Instead I had to resort to the TOS rules that allowed inactive accounts to be removed.
World's population grow fast and practically no new first or last names have been introduced in the last years, therefore the chances of having another person with your exact same first and last names and more exposure than you is growing exponentially. Plus, thanks to the Internet, if someone with name X does something "remarkable" that name X will be associated to that individual forever, creating a "digital shadow" over those future individuals with the same name.
I remember someone who had my exact same first and last name, and he had bought the domain [fist_name][last_name].com ... The annoying problem was that person was also a developer and his website was awful. I was always worried that someone could google me, find his site and, as he was a developer too, think that poor site was mine.
A friend of mine has a common name. Unfortunately this moron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Peterson in California has his own Wikipedia entry.
I just searched Google for that name, no quotes, and the entire first page of hits is about the moron in California. I guess the bright side is that my friend can fly under the radar.
I plan to give my child a new last name for this reason so he/she could have unique google hit. But I am not sure what the legal implications of this are.
I say that because my name is pretty unique -- most hits on my name are relevant to me -- and I have to be very careful about anything I make public. Even more so than most probably have to be.
Fortunately, I'm a pretty boring person and it's not been much a problem.
The bad case IMO is sharing an unusual but not unique pairing with someone who you really don't want to be confused with. Back pre-web, a friend of mine in NYC shared a name with someone who was involved in a fairly serious local baseball scandal. My friend received everything up to and including death threats on his voicemail.
[1] According to "deep web" searches, not entirely but the one or two other cases have no web presence and may well be deceased.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1987/2088/regulation/9/ma...
In the UK, there is no legal formality around changing one's name (you can change it by deed poll if you want a piece of paper, but you change your name by simply using the new name), so they could change it themselves anyway whenever they feel like it.
Not saying that this isn't terrible customer service by Instagram, and they definitely should have given better notice, but when you agree to these terms of service you accept that THEY OWN your username... You signed up for this; it shouldn't be a surprise that they actually have these terms for a reason.
GitHub, in its sole discretion, has the right to
suspend or terminate your account and refuse any
and all current or future use of the Service, or
any other GitHub service, for any reason at any time.
Such termination of the Service will result in the
deactivation or deletion of your Account or your
access to your Account, and the forfeiture and
relinquishment of all Content in your Account.
GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to
anyone for any reason at any time.
We are not Instagrams customers. We are the product that Instagram and Facebook sell to their actual customers, the advertisers.
The term exists for a good reason, but the reason it's done in such a biased way because the user has no negotiation power.
I'm in a similar situation with google suspending my gmail account because I tried to make play store purchases while traveling (apparently this is a "suspicious access pattern").
Now I'm out 5 years worth of emails and have no way of contacting google (Despite being a paying google apps customer and registered on their payroll system). Frankly, I'd rather like to be able to pay to receive some support from these companies.
Oh well, at least they made my emails bounce.
tl;dr why don't web companies offer paid support to their users?
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Unable to access a Google product
If you've been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has been suspended. Read on for more information. Your access to this Google product has been suspended because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service. For specific product guidelines, please visit the homepage of each Google product you're interested in for a link to its Terms of Service.
Google reserves the right to:
Disable an account for investigation. Suspend a Google Account user from accessing a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system, if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated. Terminate an account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice. Next steps for suspended accounts: If you believe your access to this product was suspended in error, contact us.
I'd venture to guess that they do have customer service, but you do t fall in to the customer category. Now if you started a $100,000 'branding campaign' with them- the you'd be a customer.
I think I fit at least some definition of "customer".
And I'm still not asking for free support, I'd gladly pay Google 2k an hour to get someone to assist me.
(My GCE spending has been far bigger than a hobby project)
I've got a mixed feeling about this.
On one hand, because a friend and I operate a mostly-free opensource online service, I can appreciate the cost associated with even reading customer e-mails and triaging which one is important to reply to. For a free service, especially one that has millions of users, it's just not economically justified to run effective customer support. And it's not a good move to take someone's account away, but then again, it's a free service so pretty much the account belongs to the company, not the person.
On the other hand, not being able to get any support from Google when their APIs change and break our stuff is annoying (keeping it polite :).
Perhaps there is a model there for services such as Instagram to offer paid support. I'd gladly pay for Google developer support if that was an option, but it doesn't seem that they care enough to offer it.
You do know that Google offers 24/7 phone support for paying customers, right?
And to be frank, I'm not sure if I can read stuff like:
> That they have a contract with Facebook whereby the poster gets to use Instagram in consideration of the quantifiable amount that Facebook earns from selling any and all data that the poster gives them?
in any way that gives you the benefit of any doubt. I mean c'mon. The poster said that there was an "unconventional transaction" happening. Since when does a "transaction" imply such a contract? It comes across as you purposely being obtuse either because you enjoy trolling or due to some OCD-like need to be "right" on the Internet. If neither of those are true, then I apologize, but would suggest that you reflect on how you are coming across to others.
On the other hand, they're a lot more transparent than Google, their special sauce does not include their infrastructure, most of which is open source or they've open sourced, and no doubt due to their singular focus and relatively smaller size you can get contact real people rather easily, sign up for updates on their software and infrastructure, etc. Google is so big that, as you've discovered, they don't have to care.
FTFY
After being picked up by some of the bigger tech sites, they returned the username to her.
They say that if the name you want is on an account that seems inactive you should consider periods, numbers, underscores, or abbreviations to come up with an available name.
They say he violated their terms of service. I took a quick look at the TOS, and don't see anything that having the same name as a celebrity and using your name for your Instagram account would violate. I suppose it is possible that he violated some other term completely unrelated to this whole name thing, and that's why he got kicked off, and then they gave it to the football player even though the football player already had an established, verified, active Instagram account using the same name he uses for his verified Twitter account.
There is one TOS term that his name could be construed as violating, if one were take a ridiculous reading of the term. That's Basic Term 12: "You must not use domain names or web URLs in your username without prior written consent from Instagram". The football player has the andresiniesta.es domain. If we take "domain name" in the rule to include the domain name with the TLD portion removed, then any username with the string "andresiniesta" in it would be covered.
https://instagram.com/andresiniesta8
Appears to be fixed now. It would be interesting to hear a follow up.
On the web page, it says "Your username or password was incorrect." Upon trying to recover my password with my email address I get " That e-mail address or username doesn't have an associated user account. Are you sure you've registered?" When trying with my username instead I get "Sorry, this user is not active."
I decided to try to login with the app, and there I got a message basically stating that my account was disabled because of not following the Terms and Conditions (same as OPs, don't remember the exact wording in English). They don't tell you what you did to break those conditions. They do tell you however, that there is no possible way to contact them or to get your account back. All your images are gone, your friends can't follow or contact you again and there is no way you can reactivate the account or get access to the user name. No email was ever sent notifying me of this happening, ever.
Worst "customer" experience ever.
If you hadn't logged in for a few years why would you expect it to still be open? It's a perfectly reasonable policy to recapture unused accounts.
startup idea: Make it easy for "normal" people to have their own "Instagram" or blog.
A friend made the same true, idealistic, and completely impossible proposal on his blog:
Most users operate under the assumption that there is some sort of guarantee that their account will continue to exist and they will have a consistent day-to-day experience. That is a BIG part that makes the service actually "useful".
I restrict access to my instagram account to approved followers. Now I wonder if someone could take over an handle of one of my friends and then have access to my posts.
I doubt it's a bug. Someone probably complained saying something like "Hey, this guy isn't Andres Iniesta. Someone's squatting on his name to get extra hits." If that's the case anyone following that account must have meant to follow the athlete.
They should have contacted the author first, of course, but companies offering free services don't have the money for customer support.
5 hours after writing this article, my account has been restored, but still no news from Instagram about what happened or an apology.
Free services seem easier to hit critical mass with a low barrier to entry, yet unless it is a paid-by-end-users service, end users seem to get trampled like this.