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Google+ Account Suspensions Over ToS Drawing Fire
ideonexus writes "Reports of Google+ deleting user accounts are all over, including Limor Fried — AKA Lady Ada / Adafruit Industries (recently featured in Wired Magazine) and former Google employee Kirrily 'Skud' Robert for violating Google's identity ToS. Other users are finding themselves locked out of their accounts without an explanation of how they violated the ToS. The worst part for these individuals is that a lock-out of Google+ includes being locked out of all Google services, including email, calendar, and documents."
There have been some claims that this is an example Google being evil but this seems more like incompetence and hamfistedness than evil. This would be silly and minor if not for the reports that some of these people can't access their other Google products they use. Many people use gmail for their primary email. If any of these people use it for business they could be actively losing money from this. But this does lead to two basic lessons which are apparently not repeated enough: First, when you use a free service you get what you paid for. Second, backing things up is always a good idea.
its a good way to lose business. google should congratulate the morons running these policies. they killed google+ before it started for me.
and on another note, this situation basically drew my attention to the fact that relying on google is not a good thing.
Read radical news here
Or (more appropriately) George Orwell.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I read the article and the biggest and most fearful thing that many people who were affected by this was that all of their Google services, including Gmail were affected and disabled.
I only use Gmail for e-mail functionality because it is free and convenient and it is my primary e-mail address that has stayed universal through ISP changes and moves. I was quite well aware of Google's privacy policy and advertisement angle along with the fact that all of them will be available forever to Google, before I signed up to Gmail and have been weary every since. The offer of convenient, free, reliable, spam-free, managed by someone else, and universally accepted Gmail account had a lot of benefits since I didn't have to buy my own domain, maintain my own e-mail server, and deal with spam filtering
I still haven't been burned by Gmail but I'm now wondering that since Google has become such a large entity it is surely going to suffer the fate of a behemoth afflicted by blind bureaucracy and the e-mails that they have forever will somehow get out to agencies, companies, or people who I don't want them to see.
I'm going to seriously look into the technical and logical feasibility of install a mail server on my Linux box in my house which is going to require that I manage my own services and spam filtering along with dealing with the hoops of trying to run a mail server behind an ISP with my own domain name.
Actually, Google is attempting to woo celebrities to their platform, such as Lady Gaga.
The irony is that Lady Gaga isn't her actual name.
Which is turning out to be a big issue for those whose accounts are being deleted/suspended.
Examples like this show why it's important not to concentrate services with one provider.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
That would be fine except that some have apparently either broken a rule without knowing it and can't find out what it was, they have no way to get re-instated even where it is reasonably clear that the violation was unintentional and won't be repeated, and they lose other services they have been using without incident for some time as well.
There is also room for interpretation as to what exactly is a pseudonym. In many cases of a famous nickname, using one's actual legal name would be an obfuscation of identity. Many have used a nickname for so long that it's the one they have internally connected to self and the legal name seems like someone else.
I won't be getting a Google+ account. I don't care whether this is doing evil or sheer incompetence (I'm betting on the latter), but to lose access to all Google-related services especially Gmail, is complete and utter BS. The fact that a company the size of Google can get by without any sort of customer service is beyond me.