

Google account gets blocked without explanation - narad
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bsdnia

======
DenisM
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.

~~~
grannyg00se
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.

~~~
DenisM
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.

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

------
cleverjake
<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.

~~~
jemka
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.

~~~
rryan
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.

------
smweber
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.

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

~~~
DenisM
Google Apps, or do you have a simpler setup?

~~~
mcherm
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).

~~~
DenisM
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.

~~~
cookiecaper
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.

------
sdizdar
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).

------
mmagin
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.

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

~~~
DenisM
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...](https://img.skitch.com/20110722-fpcfn5iw8b1ub26wm67kx4bsej.jpg)

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

------
DenisM
Full Google backup:

<http://www.backupify.com/googleappsbackup>

~~~
pavel_lishin
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?

~~~
nirvdrum
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.

------
Hisoka
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".

------
georgieporgie
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...

~~~
ja2ke
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.

