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."

Comments

This wouldn't be a big deal except

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:This wouldn't be a big deal except

[David Gerard]

The trouble is you are debating "being evil" over "doing evil". That is, "Don't Be Evil" rather than "Don't Do Evil" is a distraction - it means that when Google does something that's just fucking obnoxious, people start debating the inner content of their hearts rather than that they're doing something they should damn well stop doing. Excellent piece of derailing, that slogan.

Re:This wouldn't be a big deal except

[doomy]

The problem is that El Goog has almost no existing customer support service. If your account is compromised and or disabled by Google itself, there is no place to seek help. The only place you could ask for help would be the Google support forum, which is actually run by users, no one hangs around there that can do administrative level work. The next issue is that G+ has automated real name identification system and account an suspension system based on several automated features, currently due there is almost no way to appeal an account suspension due to a non-existing customer support system. To test this system try changing your name (preferably on a throwaway account) multiple times, you'd find out that it would automatically suspend access to your account once that passes a certain threshold. The biggest issue is that once someone creates a G+ account, all their existing Google content comes under that account, thus a suspension of the G+ account means goodbye to gmail, YouTube, blogger, Calendar and so on.. all content is disabled and it's almost impossible to get it back (unless you are a celebrity or your story gets published in media).

Morons. let me deactivate my account.

[unity100]

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.

Re:Mark Twain...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reports of my account suspension are greatly exaggerated.

--
Mark Twain

No kidding

[Sycraft-fu]

Makes me reconsider if I wish to use it. If Google shut down my G+ account, or Facebook shut down my account or the like I'd lose no sleep over it. I really am not in to social networking and I think it is mostly a silly way for people to waste time at work (I've got better ways to waste time at work, like Slashdot :). However I would be rather angry if my G-mail account was shut down. I have a lot of important things directed to it and it would be rather inconvenient if shut down.

I signed up because friends invited me. I'll have to think if I want to stay signed up as G+ is just something silly to keep my friends happy, G-mail is something I use a lot and I don't want one to risk the other.

Back up your damn Gmail

[David Gerard]

You get up tomorrow and log into GMail. You can't get in. Your account is locked. Your mail, calendar, documents — all gone. What do you do now?

Remember that Google has no customer service, even for paying customers. If your account is locked for any reason, spurious or not, you're utterly fucked.

I keep a regular backup of my GMail. The official interface is IMAP, but GMail's IMAP implementation is really flaky (e.g. Thunderbird or mail.app won't suck everything down). The way to do this that actually works is with OfflineIMAP. It's command-line and geeky, but by crikey it works.

Using it on Ubuntu or Debian is absurdly simple:

• sudo apt-get install offlineimap
• Set up a ~/.offlineimaprc file cut'n'pasted from this one, with your own username and password.
• offlineimap

This will create a folder with all your mail in it, in mbox format (readable plain text). You will have duplicate messages in different folders. I'm just doing this to get an archive, so zipped the result.

GMail's IMAP interface is subtly broken, to the point where it can crash offlineimap. Just start it running again, repeat as often as necessary. (If you like, get a more current version.)

GMail is still the best email interface I've ever used, and I wish Thunderbird would just get the hint and clone it to the last detail. But this way I also have all my stuff myself, just because I can.

I haven't tried this on a Mac or Windows. Could someone do this and write up instructions?

For other Google services, you can get your data from Google Takeout. While your account's not locked.