
Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of User's Digital Life, Shrugs - tshtf
http://consumerist.com/2011/07/google-deletes-last-7-years-of-users-digital-life-shrugs.html
======
sgentle
I think there's an important lesson here that you can take home right now: If
your primary email is an @gmail.com address, you have your head firmly in the
lion's mouth.

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.

~~~
mrcharles
The problem with having your own domain for email is the communication factor.
When I tell someone my email is charles.lastname@gmail.com, there's no
miscommunication. Worst case I have to spell out my last name, but generally
if someone's asking for email they already have my last name.

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.

~~~
darklajid
What about the .name TLD?

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_.

~~~
a_m0d
There is also the .me TLD - not sure if it has the same intentions as .name,
but it is less used so more widely available. I own my lastname.me domain, and
so I can (if I ever set it up properly) send mail to firstname@lastname.me,
which is slightly shorter but works just as well.

------
c2
Google has a support problem. I'm amazed after almost a decade of offering
services like email and advertising, they still haven't done anything to
develop a reasonable support system for customers to address issues like this.
Maybe they have a few open lines with their top 1% of customers but the
attitude that "it's free, you are a meaningless statistic in our giant revenue
stream so too bad" for the rest of their customers in unacceptable.

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.

~~~
danilocampos
But, see, the trouble here is that these users _aren't customers_. They're
product sold to advertisers.

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.

~~~
palish
The world would be a better place if if companies focused on "people", and not
on "money".

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?

~~~
wallawe
I sympathize with your idealistic sort of thinking but it is unreasonable.
Corporations (which is what Google is) are responsible to shareholders. The
purpose of a corporation by definition is to maximize the bottom line for the
shareholder. It has nothing to do with being good to people. The only way that
this guy's problem will get solved is if enough people catch wind of his
situation that it affects the fairly popular status of the Google brand. I use
a lot of their services myself and would be just as infuriated if this
happened to me, but you have to keep in mind what the purpose of Google is
essentially. Now, if you want to talk about the down/upside of our
capitalistic society and corporate greed that is another conversation to be
had.

~~~
palish
I believe the idea of "publicly-held companies" is a net negative for
humanity. It encourages immoral behavior.

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.

~~~
firemanx
I have to disagree with you. "Publicly-held companies" don't encourage immoral
behavior. _People_ encourage immoral behavior. I know that some folks like to
think of people as "basically good", but I don't think history has held that
out. Humanity has proven time after time that regardless of the social
structure or organization, their tendency for immoral behavior pervades each
one.

"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.

~~~
pnathan
A review of government and society prior to about 1600 (ie, the bulk of human
history) does not suggest that people are inherently very nice.

A notable example is Ivan the Terrible and his society.

------
nhashem
I used to play World of Warcraft and I used a separate email address for all
my WoW activities on web -- emailing, blogging, commenting on blogs, etc.

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."

~~~
joshfinnie
I have to wonder how many complaints of Google shutting down accounts is due
to the person getting hacked and the hacker commiting the violation.

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."

~~~
CamperBob
_Not sure how Dylan can say the below quote with absolute certainty..._

He can say it because Google apparently can't be bothered to explain exactly
what 'violation' he supposedly committed.

~~~
omaranto
So you're saying that when he wrote "you had absolutely no reason to do this"
he meant "you gave me absolutely no reason to do this (and may or may not have
one)"?

------
Natsu
Why doesn't Google just give people a way to download their email & contacts
after they've been locked out? I assume it's already bouncing any new email.

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.

------
eighty
FWIW, Brett Slatkin at Google reached out via Google+ to try and help this
guy. Looks like they made the connect:

[https://plus.google.com/u/0/116969159384245484847/posts/Z1UH...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/116969159384245484847/posts/Z1UHrFgbwey)

~~~
rryan
Also Vic Gundotra:
<http://twitter.com/#!/vicgundotra/status/94184809936601090>

~~~
sssparkkk
His reply gives me the shivers, partly because I'm afraid I won't be able (if
I were ever to be locked out) to generate enough attention to warrant a
response by Vic himself. But mostly because of the incredibly reassuring way
he chose to word his response:

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

~~~
zem
that's refreshingly direct and personal in tone.

~~~
sayrer
yeah, it really is.

------
srl
I'm not sure why this problem (the general problem - the risk of valid
accounts being arbitrarily blocked) isn't an easy fix for google. Most
spammers/fraudsters seek efficiency, so just take that efficiency away. When
an account is first suspected, start requiring a CAPTCHA for every email sent.
Then, when the time comes to block, let there be an annoying but doable
automated procedure for unblocking (perhaps involving emails sent from the
addresses of several of your frequent contacts), with a time delay - after
your first block, it takes 5 hours to unblock, after your second, 1 day, and
so on.

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.

------
GvS
Google+ makes getting backup of all your data really easy
(<https://www.google.com/takeout/>). I'm really worried about Google horror
stories but I like using their services, so I'll just settle with doing
regular backups.

~~~
kenjackson
Sounds like a great service. Then I went to use it... it doesn't backup
email?! I got my contacts and some random stuff that I didn't know I had (and
don't care about). But where's my couple of gigs of email? Is there a
different service for that?

~~~
eli
There are scripts to do it via IMAP, but it takes a very long time and it's a
bit of a pain to set up.

~~~
yankcrime
Not at all, it's utterly trivial with something like OfflineIMAP. Of course,
depending on the size of your mailbox it'll take a little while for the first
synchronisation but after that it's incremental.

~~~
TillE
Or just use Thunderbird and tell it to download all messages
("synchronization").

------
wccrawford
This isn't the first post on HN about this. The other one has the reply from
Google.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793784>

------
hannibalhorn
I use Backupify to at least maintain a copy of everything with a second,
separate service, just in case. It's free at my volumes, and I think a prudent
idea for those of us with everything in "the cloud".

~~~
sedev
It's kind of hilarious and sad that, judging by their home page, it's possible
to build a business on selling "In Case Google Stabs You In The Face"
insurance.

------
vaksel
I don't think we'll see a change in Google's approach to ignoring customer
service, until they get hit with a class action lawsuit

The problem is with bots...Google automates everything, so they hit a lot of
people with false positives.

~~~
jrockway
What law would people bring a class action lawsuit against Google with? The
same one they used against Microsoft to make Windows less buggy?

~~~
vaksel
beats me.

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.

------
dfxm12
It's funny because this would be a feature for Facebook that people want...

------
mark_l_watson
I also rely on Google for most online services but I do take a few
precautions: I use my own domain for email and route it to GMail and configure
outgoing email to look like it is from my domain, I backup GMail, Docs,
Blogger blog, and Picasa on a regular basis, and I route my Blogger based blog
to blog.MYDOMAINNAME.com.

Sure, it would be awful to lose my Google account but I could recover from it.

------
ditojim
i wouldnt be surprised if it turns out he did something to violate google's
tos.

regardless, they need to communicate with their users if they close an
account, and give users an opportunity to take their data.

------
6ren
Maybe "reverse backup"?

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.

------
gerds2007
Startup idea: Sync all Google services with local hard drive

~~~
sdizdar
We kinda started something... <http://cloudHQ.net/dropbox> Basically real-time
synchronization between Google Docs and Dropbox (and other services). You can
also synchronize Basecamp to Dropbox. Gmail and other Google and 37signals
services are coming soon.

Backupify is also an option, but they backup to their own storage which,
again, is not owned by you.

------
Limes102
This is why I have my own server... If everything gets deleted, it's my fault
(I should have been backing up). I'm not going to punish myself for not paying
attention to my non-existent terms of service.

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.

------
dendory
Btw with Google+ this will only be more common. Now it's not just a matter of
did you spam someone with your Gmail account or did you break the Adsense
ToS... but did you post anything at all on Google+, status update, photo,
link, etc, that Google didn't like.... boom, no more Google account for you.

------
dendory
This is why i have my own personal blog, and am considering moving from gmail
to my own domain email

------
ja27
It's a little old now, but I followed this and created a "backup" Google
account a while ago, just in case.

[http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/creating-backup-
for...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/creating-backup-for-your-
google-account.html)

~~~
thomasmonopoly
i'm not sure whether i think this is a brilliant idea, this system of creating
backups, or absolutely pathetic for even needing to exist.

------
aj700
I lost very important data to stikipad.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423821> He's ignored me on facebook when
I've asked about it. When my inheritance comes through I'll see him in court.

------
16s
If you do anything remotely important via email, you should own you own domain
name, and pay for a hosted email solution. I can suggest tuffmail. They are
awesome and affordable.

~~~
aashay
How is this different from using Google Apps for your domain? You're simply
giving your email hosting to tuffmail as opposed to google.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
When the host burns you, just point your DNS to a new host and the emails stop
bouncing in hours.

~~~
icebraining
Exactly like with Google Apps.

------
paul9290
Just forward everything to a comcast or ISP email address and make that
forward to a yahoo address so you have multiple backups.

------
nevinera
Headline suggestion:

"User trusts invaluable data to free service with no SLA, upset at inevitable
result"

------
guard-of-terra
I wonder why google lets that happen. They don't have blog monitoring or
something? Or are they too arrogant to fix a problem even when it's clearly
there (for one person, anyway).

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.

~~~
rjd
Its not they let it happen, its the fact that it designed to happen.

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.

~~~
guard-of-terra
That's what having a monopoly doing to them.

If the market would be more competitive (cows could walk away en masse),
surely they would treat cows as humans.

