Slashdot Mirror
Google+ Account Suspended? You Won't Find Out Why
jfruh writes "Dan Tynan is a tech writer and blogger who discovered, while trying to post links to his writing on his Google+ profile, that his account had been suspended. This despite the fact that he used his real name and didn't violate the terms of service in any other way. Upon appeal his account was reinstated, just as mysteriously as it was shut down, but along the way he discovered a rash of people with suspended Google+ accounts who can't figure out what they did to anger the Google gods."
Is Google acting like the TSA?
Art thou not aware of thine own future? Art thou so evil, one cannot trust thy anymore? Woe is me. Woe is me...
Honest question. How many of those banned users are fabricated by the facebook anti google pr machine?
Even Google has bugs!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
the short, fun version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ymyWS82NsY
The long, serious version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hATC_2I1wZE
The original, analog version
http://www.amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934
I would publish all this golden info on your Google+ account, rather than SlashDot.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
RTM usually means Release to Manufacturing, in that it's essentially ready.
"Mysterious and known moderations (mostly by editors) can't get you comment banned here and for some unknown length of time. As well as mod points given and taken away."
Have you read the TOS for moderators? ( http://tech.slashdot.org/moderation.shtml ) I'm not going into rant mode but go look at /. a little harder and you might see it for what it's for.
It sounds to me you are ungrateful.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
By shifting our online communication to a few proprietary services like Facebook, Twitter, and G+, this is exactly what we're begging for: censored tweets, data-mining of everything we say for advertisement purposes, EULAs that grant ownership of our pictures and videos to those services, and more.
Collectively, internet users are *begging* for this kind of world, where we can only communicate at someone else's whim.
That bastard has invented time travel, and or imortality! Which everyone knows, is explicitly banned in the TOS of Google Plus. That's why he got banned.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Perhaps they used Google to search for the Bing website?
sudo make me a sandwich
or- ;-)
Rush To Market (a play on 'Release To Manufacturing' and what the poster likely meant)
or-
Read The Manual (usually RTFM
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
This has been building for a while and I've been thinking of not using their services for anything important anymore. I think, overall, that using any "ecosystem" is a terrible mistake. I got locked out of my Google account a few months ago and found it very difficult to get access to my docs. Maybe this ecosystem stuff has just run its course, we're living on other people's networks too much and need to start installing and maintaining our our postfix servers agains. I might start on it this weekend. And, yes, requiring real names is a mistake. Sometimes people need to ask "dumb" questions and not look bad in a Google search.
No, still they require real names, unless you are already widely known by an established alias.
Yahoo did this to me. The only Yahoo service I was actively doing anything with at the time was Yahoo Answers, so I assume it came from there. But no explanation, and in my case they didn't respond to a few attempts to ask why or reconsider. I couldn't login to my Yahoo mail or anything else controlled by Yahoo. But it was only Yahoo (nothing important), so I just gave up.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Yet another example of how centralized systems are bad.
Social networks, torrent indexes, search engines, you name it. All of them censored and/or unreliable.
We need decentralization.
Same happens at MS.. upload a file that violates their code of conduct policy to MS sky drive, and your windows 7 phone account will be permanently blocked without telling what file caused it or getting any good response.
Note that that includes files that are not yet shared of, and includes partial nudity
A few years back, I set up a Google banner on a forum I run. After my income reached the $100 minimum for payout, it was mysteriously closed down for "illegal clicks". I offered to provide all of my log files as proof there was no illegal activity or repeat clicks but they wouldn't hear it. There is no way to contact them other than email. No phone number. They did not respond to any of my emails. The account is still suspended, to this day. If they decide you are cut off, whether right or wrong, you are gone...permanently. Google sucks.
I just don't post anything on my google+ account ever. If my google account was suspended i'd lose email, docs, drive, calendar etc.
Its too dangerous to use. Why risk it. F**k google+
This is the problem with freely offered services. You can be subject to an incredibly arbitrary policy. It might make sense to pay a small monthly fee, therefore you have some true legal recourse.
Ahh, that would probably explain it. I've been Zorin since 1995 at least.
More likely it's just that no one has reported your account. There are probably some automated filters that look for really obvious fake names, but Zorin is a real name, though typically a surname. "Zorin Lynx" is obviously a pseudonym, but one that isn't likely to be flagged by an automated check. I suspect that if someone reported your account you'd have to send Google some documentation proving it's a well-established and well-known alias (and you might be unsuccessful).
Personally, I can see both sides of this debate. It appears that real name policies actually do improve the S/N ratio significantly, which makes for a better user experience. On the other hand, pseudonymity is important to some people. It will be interesting to see if the real names push on YouTube is successful at cleaning up a large portion of the crapflood which is the typical YouTube comment stream.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
naw, he just isn't patched for the Y2K bug yet.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Personally, I think anybody who uses Google+ as part of their way of doing business has a screw loose.
You are putting your business at the mercy of an organization that has proven itself to be capricious, if not malicious. Not to mention their downtime. This is just more proof.
Get a clue.
Once again Slashdot links to a woefully inadequate article that only details one side of the story as a blatant attack on whatever service the author decides to pull out of his ass.
If you could anyone could actually be bothered to take a few minutes to find more informative articles, you'll come across Google's Official response:
"Google tries to provide a World-Class Social Networking Service. In order to meet the high standards of our users, we must be diligent in monitoring the behavior of our users to identify and block parties that may be a threat to the enjoyment of our site and safety to other users. In this case we saw that this particular user was using Google+ far too much, essentially using it for more than 5 minutes a day, which is a big red flag, since everyone knows that no one uses Google+ for anything. As such, he was blocked for being a spam bot. However, since receiving his butt-hurt email, we have reinstated his account, since spam-bots are incapable of getting their jimmies rustled."
Consider how many people are served by Google's services. Gmail alone has approximately 425 million users, the vast majority of whom pay no money for the service. Despite what they may think, they are not "customers," they are a "resource." Google's customers are the advertisers who want access to Google's resource. Therefore it is reasonable to expect that Google has staff devoted to answer the questions of its customers, but not the people who make up its resource. It could not afford to pay a support staff to be available to speak/write to each of those people on-demand, so it doesn't. Similar large, non-paid services are the same.
In fact, years ago when I was paying Yahoo for Web hosting and mysteriously lost access to my account, a Yahoo CSR told me I wasn't paying enough money for the privilege of talking to someone and hung up on me after I listened to hold music for three hours. I got an email form letter three days later telling me there was nothing they could do. And that was for a paid service. I was a little fish in a big pond. With non-paid services, you're not even a little fish. You're a speck of bacteria living on the algae in the pond. That's not to say that these services are bad, but you have to understand what they are, who you are to them and gauge the risks before you invest too much in them.
other than "I will as soon as you F4ing write it!!" would be
"and what part of the Kama Sutra covers %product_or_service%"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
If you, like me, disapprove of the way how Google deals with that matter, tell them! Send them your opinion as feedback. Rate down this page - http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1228271 - and click "the solution is not ideal". Comment on posts of Google employees.
As long this is just a matter that affects a couple dozen people amont millions, Google won't give a shit, but if a large group of people complains, they will have start to start moving their asses.
So, it is the same effort but the effect will be bigger if you post/address Google instead of the Slashdot forums.
I change ISPs fairly often and wanted a stable email address. Of the available free email providers, gmail offered the best service/features.
-
Nobody ever thinks of themselves as evil, except in the movies.
"advocates, or expresses pornography, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity, hatred, bigotry, racism, or gratuitous violence."
That can describe 50% of the movies available on google play, and 100% of their rap music.
So does that mean google itself is violating its own policies.
Yep.
Douchbag Hypocrites.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.