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Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of User's Digital Life, Shrugs
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- rwolf 15y agoI cannot find that string in the linked article, or the TweetLonger post that the article links to. What are you talking about?
- rexf 15y agoLooks like the comment was intended for this thread: Didn't Get Into TechStars? Don't Sweat it (currentlyobsessed.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2794477 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2794477
- hannibalhorn 15y agoI 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".
- Osiris 15y agoI've been using them since their beta. While I haven't had need to download any of the backups, I'm grateful to know that if something were to happen I won't have lost access to my data.
- sedev 15y agoIt'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.
- lukes 15y agoI just signed up. Thanks for reminding me they exist.
- c2 15y agoGoogle 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.
- michaelfeathers 15y agoI hate to be pithy, but if we aren't paying anything are we really customers? This isn't Google-specific, it's a side-effect of the services paid for by advertising model. I think it was Chomsky who said that newspapers don't sell news to people, they sell audiences to advertisers. It's fine because we get the news, but really we aren't the customer.
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- danilocampos 15y agoBut, 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.
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- GvS 15y agoGoogle+ makes getting backup of all your data really easy (https://www.google.com/takeout/ 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 15y agoSounds 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?
- thasmin 15y agoThey provide IMAP and POP to let you download your email.
- lukeschlather 15y agoIMAP is horribly unreliable. POP discards information. IMAP also discards information - I don't just want my email, I want my tagged email.
- zem 15y agoonce you have it locally you have all the time in the world to retag it.
- StrawberryFrog 15y agoYeah, because manually re-entering data that exists already is just what a geek wants to do with the next few months of their life. Not.
- zem 15y agoi'm just saying that it's not the same order of problem as not having the mail at all. also, the majority of my tags are applied using filter rules, which are relatively easy to duplicate on an offline archive.
- dfxm12 15y agoIt's funny because this would be a feature for Facebook that people want...
- wccrawford 15y agoThis isn't the first post on HN about this. The other one has the reply from Google. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793784 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793784
- nhashem 15y agoI 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 15y agoI 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 15y agoNot 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 15y agoSo 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)"?
- eighty 15y agoFWIW, 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/Z1UHrFgbwey https://plus.google.com/u/0/116969159384245484847/posts/Z1UH...
- rryan 15y agoAlso Vic Gundotra: http://twitter.com/#!/vicgundotra/status/94184809936601090 http://twitter.com/#!/vicgundotra/status/94184809936601090
- sssparkkk 15y agoHis 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."
- white_devil 15y ago> FWIW Not much. They're only doing damage control. I wonder whether Matt Cutts is on holiday or something, by the way..
- Matt_Cutts 15y agoI talked to the person with this complaint, then looked into it myself. The account was suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service. After digging into the situation, my personal opinion is that Google took appropriate action. I'm sorry that I can't go into more detail.
- vaksel 15y agoI 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 15y agoWhat law would people bring a class action lawsuit against Google with? The same one they used against Microsoft to make Windows less buggy?
- vaksel 15y agobeats 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.
- gerds2007 15y agoStartup idea: Sync all Google services with local hard drive
- quickpost 15y agoThese guys look close: http://www.backupify.com/ http://www.backupify.com/
- sdizdar 15y agoWe kinda started something... http://cloudHQ.net/dropbox 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.
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- Natsu 15y agoWhy 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.
- ja27 15y agoIt'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-your-google-account.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/creating-backup-for...
- thomasmonopoly 15y agoi'm not sure whether i think this is a brilliant idea, this system of creating backups, or absolutely pathetic for even needing to exist.
- paul9290 15y agoJust forward everything to a comcast or ISP email address and make that forward to a yahoo address so you have multiple backups.
- 16s 15y agoIf 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 15y agoHow 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 15y agoWhen the host burns you, just point your DNS to a new host and the emails stop bouncing in hours.
- icebraining 15y agoExactly like with Google Apps.
- sgentle 15y agoI 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 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.
- yuvadam 15y agoHow does this solve said issue? Using Google Apps means the big G still controls all your data.
- mikle 15y agoData you can download, identity is hard to change. For example: I can download all my mail from gmail (using POP or IMAP) regularly. If I lose the account I still have my mails. I can't change the mail amazon (or whatever other site) knows about unless I have access to my gmail account (I realize you can probably talk to their customer support but it doesn't scale well at all. I have about 120 different logins using my @gmail.com address...).
- mike-cardwell 15y agoHe was talking about identity, not data. If google closes your account and you control your identity, you can take it elsewhere. If google controls both your identity and your data and then closes your account, you're screwed.
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- aj700 15y agoI lost very important data to stikipad. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423821 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.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoI 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 15y agoIts 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 15y agoThat'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.
- mark_l_watson 15y agoI 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.
- srl 15y agoI'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.
- Limes102 15y agoThis 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.
- ditojim 15y agoi 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.
- dendory 15y agoThis is why i have my own personal blog, and am considering moving from gmail to my own domain email
- dendory 15y agoBtw 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.
- nevinera 15y agoHeadline suggestion: "User trusts invaluable data to free service with no SLA, upset at inevitable result"
- 6ren 15y agoMaybe "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.
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