6 ms·

Google account gets blocked without explanation

44 points by narad 15y ago

sdizdar 15y ago
Shameless plug... Regarding Google Docs, you can use cloudHQ for Dropbox (http://cloudHQ.net/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).
Hisoka 15y ago
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".
smweber 15y ago
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.
- wccrawford 15y ago
  I would do the same, but the sad fact is that I'm more likely to lose all my data than Google is, even with the occasional mistake like this.
- Hisoka 15y ago
  You can still use Gmail and use a personal domain for emails. Best of both worlds.
  - DenisM 15y ago
    Google Apps, or do you have a simpler setup?
    - Hisoka 15y ago
      Uh.. I just add an extra alias to my gmail account pointing to my personal domain and send using that email via Gmail.
    - mcherm 15y ago
      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 15y ago
        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 15y ago
        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.
cleverjake 15y ago
http://twitter.com/#!/vicgundotra/status/94184809936601090 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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
- csarva 15y ago
  It only took spamming the entire internet on twitter to get someone to notice. If you look at @thomasmonopoly, you'll see what I mean.
cleverjake 15y ago
http://twitter.com/#!/vicgundotra/status/94184809936601090 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.
DenisM 15y ago
Full Google backup: http://www.backupify.com/googleappsbackup http://www.backupify.com/googleappsbackup
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  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?
  - mdesq 15y ago
    Backupify uses AWS, if I recall correctly. Services like this will become an absolute must, I expect.
  - nirvdrum 15y ago
    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.
  - michaelcampbell 15y ago
    Data is stored on Amazon S3, according to their home page[1]. So, yeah, it's backing up one cloud to another which HAS had outages, but it does reduce risk/exposure. [1] Features ... Nightly Backups using Amazon S3
ajray 15y ago
This is why google takeout is part of my backup strategy. http://www.google.com/takeout http://www.google.com/takeout
- DenisM 15y ago
  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.jpg https://img.skitch.com/20110722-fpcfn5iw8b1ub26wm67kx4bsej.j...
  - aristidb 15y ago
    I use offlineimap to download my e-mails to my computer. I should do it more often, though.
DenisM 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - pitdesi 15y ago
    I find great fault with your calling these services "free." They are free to the user but we pay for them (and they make money) by us looking at targeted ads that they are serving us. The issue is that they hold far more command over us than other free services out there (like OTA TV, for example).
  - libria 15y ago
    He did mention he paid for additional storage, so he's a patron. Understandably, there are business expectations attached to that.
georgieporgie 15y ago
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...
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  For the company, sure - they could have better policies in place, could outline clearly which part of the TOS was violated, etc. For the customer? Well, you can try to write a story and tweet it around, and hope someone notices.
- DenisM 15y ago
  Of course there is. It's quite simple - if a user account is creating problem, put that account in read-only and give the user a few months to export his data and move on. Thus the account cannot continue to cause harm, and yet any innocent victim suffer an inconvenience of migration, not a disaster of total loss.
- ja2ke 15y ago
  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.
- mcherm 15y ago
  Google is missing an opportunity here. If they offered a paid service where for an annual subscription I can REACH someone when I need to (subject to a reasonable max number of contacts per year) then I would pay fairly well for that. I would also not use the service unless I REALLY had to. And I wouldn't expect the subscription to guarantee that everything was resolved in my favor, just to guarantee that I got an opportunity to speak with someone and make my case. If Google doesn't want to be in this business (because customer service is NOT one of their strengths) they could work deals with 3rd parties who would be glad to provide "customer support" for Google. But they'd have to be willing to talk to the 3rd parties. If they are willing to talk to NO ONE, then we wind up with situations like this one.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
mmagin 15y ago
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.

44 points by narad 15y ago

Shameless plug... Regarding Google Docs, you can use cloudHQ for Dropbox (http://cloudHQ.net/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).

Hisoka 15y ago

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".

smweber 15y ago

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.

wccrawford 15y ago
I would do the same, but the sad fact is that I'm more likely to lose all my data than Google is, even with the occasional mistake like this.
Hisoka 15y ago
You can still use Gmail and use a personal domain for emails. Best of both worlds.
- DenisM 15y ago
  Google Apps, or do you have a simpler setup?
  - Hisoka 15y ago
    Uh.. I just add an extra alias to my gmail account pointing to my personal domain and send using that email via Gmail.
  - mcherm 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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 15y ago
        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.

cleverjake 15y ago

http://twitter.com/#!/vicgundotra/status/94184809936601090 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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
csarva 15y ago
It only took spamming the entire internet on twitter to get someone to notice. If you look at @thomasmonopoly, you'll see what I mean.

cleverjake 15y ago

DenisM 15y ago

Full Google backup: http://www.backupify.com/googleappsbackup http://www.backupify.com/googleappsbackup

pavel_lishin 15y ago
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?
- mdesq 15y ago
  Backupify uses AWS, if I recall correctly. Services like this will become an absolute must, I expect.
- nirvdrum 15y ago
  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.
- michaelcampbell 15y ago
  Data is stored on Amazon S3, according to their home page[1]. So, yeah, it's backing up one cloud to another which HAS had outages, but it does reduce risk/exposure. [1] Features ... Nightly Backups using Amazon S3

ajray 15y ago

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

DenisM 15y ago
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.jpg https://img.skitch.com/20110722-fpcfn5iw8b1ub26wm67kx4bsej.j...
- aristidb 15y ago
  I use offlineimap to download my e-mails to my computer. I should do it more often, though.

DenisM 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- pitdesi 15y ago
  I find great fault with your calling these services "free." They are free to the user but we pay for them (and they make money) by us looking at targeted ads that they are serving us. The issue is that they hold far more command over us than other free services out there (like OTA TV, for example).
- libria 15y ago
  He did mention he paid for additional storage, so he's a patron. Understandably, there are business expectations attached to that.

georgieporgie 15y ago

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...

pavel_lishin 15y ago
For the company, sure - they could have better policies in place, could outline clearly which part of the TOS was violated, etc. For the customer? Well, you can try to write a story and tweet it around, and hope someone notices.
DenisM 15y ago
Of course there is. It's quite simple - if a user account is creating problem, put that account in read-only and give the user a few months to export his data and move on. Thus the account cannot continue to cause harm, and yet any innocent victim suffer an inconvenience of migration, not a disaster of total loss.
ja2ke 15y ago
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.
mcherm 15y ago
Google is missing an opportunity here. If they offered a paid service where for an annual subscription I can REACH someone when I need to (subject to a reasonable max number of contacts per year) then I would pay fairly well for that. I would also not use the service unless I REALLY had to. And I wouldn't expect the subscription to guarantee that everything was resolved in my favor, just to guarantee that I got an opportunity to speak with someone and make my case. If Google doesn't want to be in this business (because customer service is NOT one of their strengths) they could work deals with 3rd parties who would be glad to provide "customer support" for Google. But they'd have to be willing to talk to the 3rd parties. If they are willing to talk to NO ONE, then we wind up with situations like this one.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

mmagin 15y ago

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.