I 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 - 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.
Another thing to think about is OAuth. If you if you lose an account at Google or Facebook that you've used to sign into another site, you lose them too.
Will not using G OAuth and probably delete all photos from my Picasa, now that they were automatically moved over to G+.
You never know what the automatic image scanner may think it has found in those photos that violates some G+ rules. I don't want to lose all my data in my G account, only because an automated scanner thinks my friend's face was a bare female breast.
The problem with having your own domain for email is the communication factor. When I tell someone my email is charles.lastname@gmail.com, there's no miscommunication. Worst case I have to spell out my last name, but generally if someone's asking for email they already have my last name.
If you buy a domain, nowadays, you have few options with respect to getting an email that sounds legit, mature, and isn't long and/or uses easily misspelled words.
I have a bunch of domains, but none of them are particularly appropriate for an email address I would verbally communicate to someone. bluh.org is my main domain, but when you say 'bluh' out loud to someone, you inevitably have to spell it. I once owned thereisnocharles.com, which was a goofy thing and I used that as my main email address before gmail came along. But it's long, and it doesn't sound professional at all.
I guess we could all just use something like gmail as a simple forwarder service to our owned email addresses, but even then, it's not a foolproof solution.
As someone who has my own domain, I find it very rare that I actually have to tell someone my email address out loud using my voice. 99% of the time they get it from an online profile, or my website, or by receiving an email from me, or by me filling in a form, online or physical, or a business card, or by me writing it down.
I don't see this as a valid issue to deter anyone from getting their own domain.
There is also the .me TLD - not sure if it has the same intentions as .name, but it is less used so more widely available. I own my lastname.me domain, and so I can (if I ever set it up properly) send mail to firstname@lastname.me, which is slightly shorter but works just as well.
Actually the domain you own is almost certainly firstname.lastname.name, but the email is setup so firstname@lastname.name works. It's particular to the .name TLD.
I have a short domain (xk7.net), doesn't cause any problems over the phone (occasionally people comment on the fact that I have my own domain/mail) and doesn't sound immature.
Although I was once told 'sorry, you must use a Hotmail, Yahoo! or Gmail address'...
For a good portion of my people (in my experience, at least 50%) any domain but .com might as well not exist. With them, ".com" is four characters that must ritually be applied to all domains to appease the computer gods.
This is only true depending on how seasoned a netizen someone is. True story: I have a friend of mine whom I once verbally communicated a (now long-gone) gmail address to, with Swedish pronounciation. The result was him smirking a bit, and some time later asking me if I got the pictures he sent to my "gaymail.com address". This could just as well have ended up being "geemail.com" or "yeemail.com" had I gone with English pronounciation. He just didn't know what google or gmail was. He doesn't use the net in the same ways we do.
But let's be realistic... it's not like the world of internet users suffered from a supposed problem with miscommunicated email addresses before "geemail.com" came around. We managed just fine.
Picking another TLD is tempting, but I find it confuses people, even tech-savvy people. Maybe not if you have something kinda common like a .tv, but take what I did:
My username, across the Internet, is spiffytech. I registered http://spiffyte.ch. It's fun and a little clever, but since most people haven't heard of .ch domains I'm constantly saying "w-w-w dot spiffy t-e dot c-h. No, not .com. No, put the dot between the 'e' and the 'c'. Spiffytech. Like my username.". Even to tech-savvy friends.
Sure, maybe that's an artifact of my particular domain, but I'd much prefer if I could get the .com and just tell people spiffytech.com and avoid the confusion.
I have Google Apps Free for my personal domain and I am considering moving to the paid one, just to be able to phone them if anything ever goes wrong. (The Android remote-wipe feature that comes with it might be worthwhile too, just-in-case.)
I also primarily use an IMAP client which saves a local copy of all my email, so although the "identity" issues (and non-email data) bother me a bit, I do have at all times essentially a backup of all my mail.
This, and the impossibility of resolving the issue, is why I don't trust google. I had my own experience with google unfairly preventing me from using its service-- one where I was trying to give them money-- and I realized they really don't have any customer support.
This is why I trust Apple. They might be slow, or silent, but they've never left me hanging (and I've been a customer of theres for decades before google existed.)
That said, my iCloud account is where media and non-essential information will get stored. If Apple disappears it one day, at most I'll have lost music and movies. But everything real lives somewhere I can control and backup.
I use GMAIL, but with POP access, and I store my email locally.
However, it is time to get off of gmail and move anyway. It is just such a PITA to manage your own email servers....but I expect a company that does it for a living will provide better support than a company where I'm the product rather than the customer.
This made me concerned. I have my own domain which indeed uses Google Apps, but I just forward all my mails from there to my @gmail.com account. This needs to switch.
But you own your domain. In your case, if Google disabled your Gmail or Apps accounts, it'd be just a minor annoyance, because your e-mail address would still work after a DNS change.
Google owning your data is not the problem here, while you can backup it. The real problem is them owning your identity.
Do you really <i>own</i> your domain? You're likely dependent on a registrar where you're probably a $10/year (i.e. nearly nothing) paying customer.
What if your domain registrar simply fails and loses your records?
The US government has been seizing domains associated with sites accused of violating laws; are you with a registrar who will fight that?
I'm not saying that you shouldn't own the domain for your email address--it's simply that you should realize that it solves one problem but creates others.
Once you look at things at detail, almost everything in your life is dependent on trust. Knowing how much to trust different aspects and how to evaluate risks is key.
This is probably a little hyperbolic. I have a gmail address and I don't expect it to disappear. If it does, however, I will still survive (after going through some temporary pain). I feel like you're telling me I shouldn't use a credit card because someone could steal my identity. Or that I shouldn't use closed-source software because my "freedom" is in jeopardy.
I hope I'm wrong, cause I really love email, but I don't think many people will care about it in 10 years. Most don't care much about it anymore today.
He 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.
Data 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...).
If you download all your mail for backup purposes using, say, POP3 then if Google does nuke your account you can switch to hosting yourself and maintain your email address.
This is what I do, but if Google ever fails me I'd probably switch to fastmail.fm or similar service instead of setting up a server. Unless you're interested in the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining an email server, it's something I'd outsource on a cost/benefit basis.
Actually that works quite well. If your photo accounts, your whatever accounts etc are all tied to a non-google login, then it won't matter that your google account is gone.
THE PROBLEM is that many places only accept google/facebook if not facebook alone. Although I have no freaken' idea why, it took a minute after adding google login to my site to add facebook, openid, etc..
Google 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.
But, 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.
The world would be a better place if if companies focused on "people", and not on "money".
Of course that's unrealistic. But I don't care. I grew up believing in Star-Trek-style society. You know... "Social problems are gone; people are free to devote themselves to improving themselves; etc". I honestly believed that humanity would someday achieve this.
I used to believe most people were inherently good, and that they are naturally adverse to doing unethical things, and that if they did something unethical by accident, then they would go out of their way to fix it, even if they weren't obligated to. Because it's the right thing to do.
Needless to say, Real Life came as a nasty surprise.
You're a bad person for not caring about That One Guy Who You Deleted 7 Years Of His Life. But hey, our capitalistic society encourages not caring, so it must be okay, right?
There's less conflict between people and profits than you might think.
First, I share your idealism. Being good to people, and humanity as a whole, is the most important thing we can do in our brief existence.
What's happened, though, is that perverse incentives that reward short-term thinking at the expense of long-term results have become the norm in large businesses.
Ship product X before it's ready because the Street wants to see some action before the end of the quarter – even though in an unfinished state, you'll destroy the product's reputation. (most people in Tablet land)
Fire an experienced sales force because they are expensive. The money saved will look great in our financial reporting – even though the resulting drop in customer service will gut our profitability for years to come. (Home Depot, Circuit City)
Adopt rigid policies around customer service. Don't empower front-line people to make things right. That might cost money – even though the lost goodwill will mean that customers will abandon the business and flock to better alternatives. (most retail chains, airlines)
But the good news is that there are companies who make a lot of money just by kind of being nice to people, creating a fair balance of profit for the company and value for the customer.
Zappos spends a shitload of money on phone support. It's a marketing expense. So everyone loves shopping at Zappos after awhile.
Amazon will disable their Prime $3.99 one-click shipping button if they've noticed that the free option has the same delivery estimate. So you can always feel safe shopping there.
Apple Stores are pretty flexible with return/exchange/warranty rules. Be polite, explain what you need, they'll often bend policy or waive repair fees. From a product perspective, Apple sits on products for years and kills them if they can't deliver a minimum level of user experience quality. So when they launch something new, they have lines out the door with people desperate to buy.
Whole Foods empowers their store managers to do the right thing – whatever that looks like for a given situation or market. So if the power goes out in the middle of a busy day, everyone goes home with free food so they can get on with life.
So as long as you're capable of seeing past the next three weeks, you can make money and be good to people. Which is what you need if you want to pay your employees' rent. Corporations are capable of doing a lot of good. But they've been hijacked by unimaginative, unproductive Wall Street morons who would kill a school bus full of children if it meant a higher return on the next five minutes of trading.
I sympathize with your idealistic sort of thinking but it is unreasonable. Corporations (which is what Google is) are responsible to shareholders. The purpose of a corporation by definition is to maximize the bottom line for the shareholder. It has nothing to do with being good to people. The only way that this guy's problem will get solved is if enough people catch wind of his situation that it affects the fairly popular status of the Google brand. I use a lot of their services myself and would be just as infuriated if this happened to me, but you have to keep in mind what the purpose of Google is essentially. Now, if you want to talk about the down/upside of our capitalistic society and corporate greed that is another conversation to be had.
"The purpose of a corporation by definition is to maximize the bottom line for the shareholder."
No, the purpose of a corporation is to efficiently organize work.
Fundamentally, corporations, and the entire economic system, exist for only one purpose: to create a better human society. Profit is the incentive to get them to work for the greater good, but it's not the end-goal. We've temporarily lost sight of that, but sooner or later we're going to have to redefine corporations so we can keep the good (competitive drive), and discard the bad (profit at the expense of humanity).
Personally, I would be very interested to see minimum holding times for shares (incentivizing long-term behavior), and maximum lifetimes for corporate personhood (corporations should all die at some point, just like other people).
This is simply the definition I was given in business school. If you type in "purpose of a corporation" on Google, this is what you will get (which is comedically ironic in this situation).
"Efficiently organizing work" is what must be done as a by product or failure is ensured in this survival of the fittest capitalistic system.
I agree that the ethics are not what they should be in the corporate culture today, but that doesn't change the nature nor the purpose and definition of corporation.
> The purpose of a corporation by definition is to
> maximize the bottom line for the shareholder
That is a definition without qualification. What is the bottom line for the shareholder? The stock price tomorrow? The stock price in 10 years? The dividends paid out this year? The dividends paid over the next decade?
If I push up the stock price $100 over 2 years, but in the process destroy the brand in a way that causes the business to drop in value and eventually close over the next 3 years, have I increased shareholder value?
What if I cut the customer-service budget, saving money and causing customers to hate the company? What happens when an incumbent shows up in the market, and steals away most of my customer base? Did that create shareholder value?
Reciting "money++ is the only thing that matters" as the definition of a corporation is brain-dead.
"Reciting "money++ is the only thing that matters" as the definition of a corporation is brain-dead"
That wasn't my intention, and my definition was ambiguous, you are right. I wrote that off the top of my head. To be more accurate, it is "to maximize shareholder value."
This includes building a solid brand name and maintaining a good reputation via ethical practices.
I believe the idea of "publicly-held companies" is a net negative for humanity. It encourages immoral behavior.
Obviously my thoughts are unreasonable. I wish the world were unreasonable. Because then people might empathize with each other to an unreasonable degree, resulting in far less grief and hate within our microscopic timeline of our universe.
I have to disagree with you. "Publicly-held companies" don't encourage immoral behavior. People encourage immoral behavior. I know that some folks like to think of people as "basically good", but I don't think history has held that out. Humanity has proven time after time that regardless of the social structure or organization, their tendency for immoral behavior pervades each one.
"We did it for the shareholders" may be a unique excuse in the realm of organizations, but governments, churches, companies, school boards, communes, etc all suffer from problems like these. The difference with public companies is that folks can vote with their dollars, or in an adequately free economy, can band together and compete.
What is the answer to 99 out of 100 questions? Money.
It is not the pubicly-held companies. It is the power of money to control, persuade, influence, or even empower.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is true that money doesn't buy happiness but even truer that not having money can cause unhappiness via stress among other things.
The problem is what people who have money decide to do with it and how they choose to influence the larger whole. Many of the people who have put their entire intellect towards making money, have desired to do so for the wrong reasons and therefore use it in a net negative way as you have put it.
I guess what I am saying, is that it falls on the individual to make the right decision, and not corporations, governments or societies as a whole.
> The purpose of a corporation by definition is to maximize
> the bottom line for the shareholder.
No, the purpose is whatever the corporate charter says. It's just that most of those are pretty vague, and for a publicly held corporation it's been held that within the bounds of the charter there is a duty to maximize shareholder value (whatever that means). For privately held corporations, of course, the private holders just call the shots.
But back to charters... you may be interested in the fact that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation exist and distinctly do NOT maximize shareholder value. Also, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#Mutual_benefit_corp.... And in recent years there has been a movement to create charters that look just like your typical public corporation charter but impose certain restrictions on what the corporation is or is not allowed to do in the process of making money. Several states issue such charters at this point. Again, the corporation is responsible to shareholders but within the bounds of the charter. Which shareholders should read before investing, of course; that's basic due diligence.
"The purpose of a corporation by definition is to maximize the bottom line for the shareholder. It has nothing to do with being good to people."
So in your opinion being good to people have NOTHING to do with maximizing the bottom line from the shareholder.
I beg to differ, IMHO the most profitable business are those that provide a very good product or service to their customers(people).
I remember the pre-google days, Altavista that forced you to click 5 buttons to do the same thing you could do with google on "Advanced search", That push pop ups that will flick on the screen with vivid colors and force you to visit their stupid "portals", that sold the three first web results page to the best bidders(so they were crap).
I recall that days every single day I have to visit my old hotmail account because they are not dead. If there were not some company that gave a better service that they do(google) they will come back.
The purpose of a corporation by definition is to maximize the bottom line for the shareholder.
No, the purpose of a corporation is to faithfully carry out the corporate bylaws. There are many corporations that do little for the shareholder's bottom line: private schools, charities, self-styled socially responsible businesses, co-ops, government-run public service companies, profit-neutral public utility companies, and many others.
I sympathize with your idealistic sort of thinking but it is unreasonable.
Google could easily start a service department and run it as a profit center: simply require a massive credit card charge or wire transfer before they will help fix your account. That they do not is an intentional choice.
Only as a storytelling device. And in Deep Space 9, the Ferengi Nog was willing to spend his entire life savings of Latinum at the request of his friend Jake, just to buy Jake's dad a baseball card, simply to make him happy.
I hope one day I do something like that for someone. Maybe on my deathbed or something.
I don't know; I just wish people were... better people. To each other. I know they never will be, but I'd rather hope for this fantasy than accept grim reality.
And as long as we're geeking out, money existed but not in the Federation. So, not for humanity. Outside cultures had it, which made them an interesting foil for a humanity whose abundance taught them to value other things.
There's a little bit of ambiguity. Starfleet didn't use money, at least not explicitly, but there were humans who amassed personal fortunes, and other Federation worlds that had market economies. Money was also referenced several times in various Treks [0], sometimes with a character talking about how humans don't have money, and other times with a character talking about selling something, charging for something, or being willing to spend money for something ("I'd give real money if he'd shut up" - McCoy, referencing Chang's Shakespeare quotes, ST VI)
I keep hearing this argument over and over again but the fact is that when I was using Google AdWords and had problems, I received zero (0) support and response from Google. Nothing. And I was a customer in the "I'm paying money for this" sense of the word.
Obviously this is just anecdotical evidence as the only "data point" I have is my own experience and it's possible that everyone else in the world receives five star support from Google right away. None the less, it made me lose a lot of respect for them and in the end I ended up cancelling my account and asked for a refund (which is automated).
"But, see, the trouble here is that these users aren't customers. They're product sold to advertisers."
The whole product/customer thing is a boring bit of sophistry usually used to slander Google.
Google's profitability secret is a very high revenue to employee ratio. When I bought a $600 Nexus One from Google and discovered a problem with fulfilment, the grand total of support Google supplied to me was an automated email response (that itself was a dead end -- no recourse or escalation), and a link to an FAQ.
That's just how Google operates. If they can make a cron job that eliminates the need to supply support for most customers, that's what they do. It is this way whether they benefit from you via your eyeballs, or from your wallet.
> That's just how Google operates. If they can make a cron job that eliminates the need to supply support for most customers, that's what they do.
You begin with what seems like disagreement, then prove my point.
A $600 device to be exposed to Google's mobile ads? Here's an email.
A few million dollars a year in ad spend? Here's a whole department of new friends.
Solving problems with AdWords can be done algorithmically. And is – there are lots of little automated touches there, from ad approval to keyword suggestion. But smart humans can give more – resulting in better financial performance for Google.
Code can rarely resolve support issues. But that's all they bothered to do because end users are not a priority. For all the reasons I mentioned.
When it benefits them financially, Google offers support. Otherwise, they don't. You can chalk this up to whatever cultural or business case you'd like.
But the end result is that unless you're pouring money into their pockets, you, as an individual, don't matter to Google. That's not sophistry – that's established fact.
You forgot "And that's an immoral way to operate. As individuals, we should try very hard to discourage that mentality. But that's the way the world operates at this time."
Personally, I've given up hope that the world will ever be different. But if there is any hope, it will take the form of: "We will no longer tolerate your impersonal policies and rationalizations". So we should try to speak out against it.
But yeah. People are irrational cows that throw money at anything shiny. So that won't happen, and the world won't change.
The problem is, if Google had to provide real support, would they be able to offer stuff for free¹? Because if not, the alternative is shutting down these services, which is bad for those of us who bother to backup their emails and have their own domains.
Personally, I feel this is a simple matter of personal responsibility. It's free, so you can't expect support. If you're not okay with that, pay someone and ask them for guarantees.
¹ Yes, I know there are other costs, but I don't think their value to Google covers anything similar to real support.
So if we discard the polarizing language about customers and products, we get to your point being that the more profitable you are as a customer, the more attention you get?
I don't think that is terribly challenging viewpoint.
Perhaps. But the vast disparity between the class of user that an advertiser is versus, well, everyone else, makes the original language both apt and more economical.
There are infinite degrees of nuance everywhere you look. We use language to reduce that complexity. You can call it sophistry as much as you like — the reason it's polarizing is because the reality sucks for 99% of people who need Google's help — they're not treated as customers as most people understand that term. Inconvenient but true.
Sophistry : "a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning."
Google makes money because they have users, in the same way that a television network makes money because they have viewers. Both are entirely reliant upon their user base, and will desperately trying to optimize and maximize that user base.
If the GP's point was "there is a very low profit / user, and a limited impact by irate customers (at least those who don't shout from the rooftops)" then they are making an accurate statement, and it's actually what I supported -- Google doesn't care whether you're on a "free" or pay program, they'll still try to avoid talking to you.
The bit about products and customers is just completely unnecessary, again, sophistry. Google's product is a mail system and a search engine and a social product, and sometimes users pay for it (I use Apps for Domains), and sometimes advertisers pay for it. Cutifying that into comforting slogans isn't helpful.
But they sell it to advertisers and the advertisee. They both are the customers of google.
Frankly, I think the problem is that google has no real competition. Google, really is becoming a fine example of why monopoly, regardless of whether it is merit based or otherwise, is bad, for in the end, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I have to admit, this whole story gives me pause. I live and breath by my gmail account, and it they decide to deactivate it for no good reason (or refuse to help me after the fact), how can I be expected to use their services with any confidence? Perhaps my planned migration to google+ is on hold...
I 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.
Google made a decision not to provide human support because it isn't scalable. Google is doing quite well with the support system they have in place now, in terms of financial success and still with general consumer sentiment.
I was thinking yesterday that the real secret of Apple's success is their obsessive focus on the end-user experience. Google's gone far on technical prowess alone but I think it's clear which philosophy the market rewards best.
I 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."
I 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."
So 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)"?
Why 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.
His 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."
I 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.
Cutts, Google still doesn't understand the problem here.
Let's say I decide I have to break up with my live-in girlfriend, for good and sufficient reason. Perhaps she banged my three best friends, perhaps she literally killed my dog with an axe. Doesn't matter - I have my reasons. I break up with her. I still have to give her back her stuff from my apartment. If I don't do so, I'm committing a separate offense of my own. I lose the moral high ground.
Maybe something has to be worked out - maybe a friend of hers has to come over and get it, maybe I put her shit in boxes out on the porch. Whatever. I still have to give her back her stuff. The courts agree, public opinion agrees, the police agree. Whatever she did, no matter how egregious the violation, my swiping her stuff is FUCKING FROWNED UPON and is not justified by whatever harm she did to me.
Google demonstrates no knowledge of this legal and social norm. That's what is pissing people off. Implement a system to let people download their data from closed accounts and you can delete accounts with no explanation all day long.
Stealing people's data - regardless of what they did to you - is something that most people consider to be evil. Nobody cares about whether the guy did anything wrong or not. He's seizing the moral high ground from you because you, also, have committed a wrong.
Physical objects can only be in one place at a time. Data on the other hand can be backed up while it is still being used by the service. And Google collects information about how to do this for their services in one place: the Data Liberation Front http://www.dataliberation.org/
It is not realistic to expect all users to continually make backups of all their Google services.
It is however realistic for Google to solve this by putting a violating account in a "read-only" mode, where you are able to export all you data and not do anything else.
Yes it is realistic to expect all users to continually make backups of their Google services. Maybe google just hasnt made it easy enough yet... but that is what the goal should be.
Allowed access to banned accounts in "Read-only" mode is ripe for abuse by spammers and phishers who could benefit from still being able to access information in the violating accounts. Its the wrong kind of solution to a problem that really comes down to personal responsibility.
I think most people know deep down the responsible thing to do is have backups of all their important data... the cloud is just making people lazy. And providing a "read-only" access to a banned account will only make people lazier and more apathetic about it. "oh.. no worries.. Googles got my back" But what happens when Google is hacked, or suffers a natural disaster, or other catastrophic failure? It only serves to make the problem worse. Losing your data, to even a wrongfully banned account, is nobody's fault but your own.
There so many more reasons to backup your data before something bad happens, not after.... thats what we should be promoting
Any improvements in exporting data from a Google Account that will make a daily backup actually doable are welcome. But Google should not place all responsibility in the hands of the users, since this inevitable will result in bad user experiences and therefore bad publicity.
Regarding spammers and phishers, these are users violating the law and they of course have no legitimate claims to their account data.
"Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products. Our team's goal is to make it easier to move data in and out."
This philosophy, or at least the "out" part, should apply doubly after someone's account is terminated in this manner. Google has determined that sinning against one service warrants terminating access to other services. That may be justifiable. But sinning against one service should not warrant loss of one's data in other services.
4.3 As part of this continuing innovation, you acknowledge and agree that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users generally at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you. You may stop using the Services at any time. You do not need to specifically inform Google when you stop using the Services.
4.4 You acknowledge and agree that if Google disables access to your account, you may be prevented from accessing the Services, your account details or any files or other content which is contained in your account.
I have no knowledge of what services he can or can't access, just that it is within Google's purview to remove access to all Google's services.
P.S. This is not Twitter and we don't use hashtags in our posts. Please act as though you have a semblance of decorum.
Doesn't matter what the TOS says. They are destroying their brand. Last week I had some trust, now I have less. Next week I may have none. I can say that I am already looking for alternatives.
Since Cutts isn't at liberty to say I think I'll take this one for him. This guy did really dumb stuff with Adwords or Adsense and got caught. Everyone wants a piece of the Google pie and Google wants no one to have it too easily, or their integrity goes to the shitter.
Think about what you could do with a tiny bit of programming knowledge and keyword knowledge to make money using these service. Then try it and get banned. Cutts works all day to ban guys like this. He's less webspam hall monitor than he is the "Ad Sheriff". The internet, and Google, is the Wild Wild West. The only thing stopping people from scraping cash from Google and other ad networks are people like him. And their algos of course.
Sorry your account got banned bro. You just got tased by the cops. Next time don't ask questions about Skull and Bones and deliver good content instead, as Cutts always says.
Even assuming the OP pulled some stunt with AdWords (and this is just an assumption that you're putting forth, without any evidence whatsoever), does it justify wiping out that guy's entire online existence? His photos? His emails? His documents?
This is like sentencing someone to death for shoplifting. GMail, Picasa, etc. are not about AdWords; they're a means for people to connect with each other. Unless, of course, Google is agreeing that you are indeed a product and not a user.
Wow. A bunch of Google fanboys voting me down for stating something rational, but that just happens to be anti-Google.
I just started using G+ (mainly because I'd like there to be a strong competitor to FB), but Google's antics give me cause for concern. I'd hate to get "hacked" some day and have Google completely wipe out every bit I have with them.
When you sign-up for a Google account, there's a little something called a Terms of Service you agree to. You violate them? You sacrifice all rights to any data you may or may not have on their services. That's something every Google user agrees to from day one. If you don't like that punishment, you shouldn't have signed up.
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...Gmail will only let you down a few hundred emails at a time. You can repeat the command (let getmail finish each time before you run it again) until all of your email is downloaded.
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You honestly expect users to fetch of their mail a few hundred messages at a time ?
You also leave out the fact that if you re-run that script a number of times in a row, Google's server's will block you until you fill out a captcha and wait 24 hours.
GMail is a free service, so having limited features and options is expected. But it's troublesome that Google doesn't feel it has an obligation to respect its user's data. An admin you're not allowed to contact thinks you violated the terms and all of your mail is deleted. Business contracts, random chats with cute girls/boys from school, messages from family and friends who might not be here anymore, ... all of it is gone.
As we can discuss now, it wasn't regarding AdWords or anything like that, it was about potential child pornography: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bvqdos The person whose account was suspended said "I too found the image bordering on the limits of what is legally permissible and hoped to highlight the fact that it is allowed to exist within a grey area of legality."
When someone violates adwords and adsense TOS they don't get everything banned, just access to those services. In fact I think that is the case with many Google services. I once had an unused youtube account banned for an unknown reason but everything else worked. It is curious that they would shut down all of his accounts.
> This guy did really dumb stuff with Adwords or Adsense and got caught.
If that were the case then why can't Google disclose this to him when they close his account? (And perhaps, though this is a separate issue, then even give him a chance to defend his position -- you know, like they do in The Real World?)
hey pal, i'm not going to go around righting every one of you people who thinks they know what they are talking about. but since i'm here anyway, even though i already said this, i don't know a goddam thing about google adsense or adwords. period. i wouldn't know how to make money from scamming google even i wanted to.
Regardless of the circumstances surrounding the termination of this individuals account, he still brings to light some very valid concerns.
I'll quote terryb088 from reddit in saying, 'The whole "cloud computing" model that companies like Google are pushing requires that we place good faith in the companies that provide these services. In my opinion good faith runs both ways, and any suspension of services needs to have a channel for dispute and resolution.'
The bottom line is, with so much of our personal information and other material invested in Google and its services, the opportunity to appeal (much less be given a reason for) account termination should always be available. It speaks volumes of Google's attitude towards its users that there is not such an avenue already provided.
Deleting the whole account is really unjustifiable! If OP was abusing some service of Google, then ban him from this specific service, but why take his whole data?
If there is something to learn, it's to keep a local copy of anything you have, and never be 100% depending on an online service. But then this obliterates the benefits of investing entirely in so called cloud services with any company, including Google. Ownership of your data, doesn't seem to be one of those benefits.
The backup methods are very different for each Google service. If you want daily backups of all your Google services, you need to pay for multiple external backup services and/or spend a lot of time doing it manually.
And how do you download all your Google Analytics data? This page on the Data Liberation page suggests that you export to XML, Excel or TSV. http://www.dataliberation.org/google/analytics
But to do daily backups of all the dimensions, metrics, advanced segments etc. would be very time consuming.
You could do it easier with the API, but that requires programming knowledge.
Was his entire account really wiped? That is pretty horrifying. Can you give us a hint as to what sort of offence would justify destroying an online identity? I use my google identity for almost everything I do. If the crime this guy committed was really so great, why isn't he in jail right now?
48 hours? When someone gets fired from a job do they let that person just hang around the office for a couple of days?
If the guy broke the rules and had that action taken against him...and Cutts agrees...he did something wrong for real. Automated mistakes happen. Obviously this was not one of those.
The only sad part about this, is that we'll never know what he did wrong. Shame.
Whether or not there has been a TOS violation, basically locking away the guy's past emails and any other documents he may have saved previously using Google services seems like the dick move of the century.
It certainly makes me question the wisdom of keeping my email in Gmail and my photos in Picasa. And anything else in other parts of my google account.
This is essentially the response I got from Valve about 4 years ago when I was banned. I spent about a month struggling to get in contact with them just to ask 'why' and 'are you sure.' It wasn't until I began leaving daily voicemail messages at their offices asking for help that they finally talked to me at all. The only thing they told me in that conversation was that the ban offence was at my home IP, so I knew my account wasn't compromised. They even ignored a BBB complaint I filed.
They insisted that their automated ban system could not make a mistake. While I realize that most people banned from any online service probably deserve it, you can tell the quality of a company by the way they handle the mistakes. And there are always mistakes.
Furthermore, I'm trying to understand why everyone is saying that he should have backed up all of his data. They must be gigantic Google fanboys.
If Google is going to act like they can hold all of your data easily and effectively, why would a normal user back up their data? Would a normal user even know how? I doubt any of my friends would know where to start, or why they even should. After all, Google operates under the pretense of being a reliable service.
And let's get one thing clear: they ARE a reliable service. Up until they deactivate your account.
While I am sure that there are people that try to game the system- there should at least be a warning or some way for appeal. I am extremely upset that Google took MY domain schema.org without even any attribution at all to my project OpenDomain. I have been too afraid to say anything because I also might get 'removed'. PLEASE show me that Gooogle still supports open source and at least acknowledge my contribution
For the people who land on this thread, here's how the issue was resolved: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bvqdos The person whose account was suspended remarked about the image in question: "I too found the image bordering on the limits of what is legally permissible and hoped to highlight the fact that it is allowed to exist within a grey area of legality."
This is the first time in my life I have been disappointed by Google. If you are about to disable anyone's account, you need to give atleast a few days notice with an option for downloading all the emails, pictures, calendars, docs, etc.
Right action or not, why isn't Google giving out warnings? And allowing people to download their information from Google services once they get banned?
"A defendant has the right to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation against him. Therefore, an indictment must allege all the ingredients of the crime to such a degree of precision that it would allow the accused to assert double jeopardy if the same charges are brought up in subsequent prosecution.[8] The Supreme Court held in United States v. Carll, 105 U.S. 611 (1881) that “in an indictment ... it is not sufficient to set forth the offense in the words of the statute, unless those words of themselves fully, directly, and expressly, without any uncertainty or ambiguity, set forth all the elements necessary to constitute the offense intended to be punished.” Vague wording, even if taken directly from a statute, does not suffice."
So the charges have to be specific enough. In this case, they are super general.
Pretty much all the other parts of justice are denied by google too (except the right to a speedy trial). These include the right to a public trial, an impartial jury, legal representation, the right to call witnesses in one's own favor, and the right to confront one's accusers.
Obviously Google is not required to give anyone these rights. But not even giving a semblance of them puts google on the evil side.
These rights aren't just made up for no reason - in the past people realized that just trusting leaders to do the right thing doesn't work, and gets corrupted. To stop this corruption they came up with ideas for how to make things more fair, and built systems around this. In some cases they even died to get these rights. Just trusting google to do the right thing is a scary, primitive way to deal with their power - and google seems to be wilfully ignoring that progress.
I wish I knew what terms I have supposedly violated. Google are being really mysterious, very Kafkaesque, because they refuse to tell me what I have violated and they refuse to allow me the option of appeal. I am guessing I was suspended because I posted a Google-critical thread regarding the user-names issue but the ToS don't mention anything about not being able to criticize Google. Free speech is theoretically permissible.
The most detail I can get from Google is that my suspension is due to "text and images" which alleged violates community standards. No precise details whatsoever and no option for appeal.
I am sorry to hear that. I am just wondering why this is on HackerNews. But so be it. Did something happen to @thomasmonopoly account that he is not aware of?
I got banned from Adsense just over a Year ago and I thought about making Noise. BUT I wanted to work WITH Adsense and Google. Why Burn Bridges? So I tried to use the proper channels. But very disappointing that I was Ignored the whole time.
All I do/did was make Family Friendly YouTube Videos and occasionally post on my website. MY writings, My Original Videos. No Gaming the system no extra promotion, just let the views and the subscribers build naturally. I STILL have NO idea why Adsense Disabled me.
BUT there is an Issue that Many Partners have become Victims of. Clickbombing. There is no way to View or Track where impressions or clicks are coming from on YouTube. AND even if you report the activity, you still get banned. I was having slow steady Success. Was the Invalid Activity hidden in the Success data? I have no idea.
Looks like it is time to start a revolution. This might make National News.
I just got permanently banned from Adwords a month ago too.
It took me 5 years to finally reach the minimum payout, and they banned my account right before the 2nd payout. I did not do any click fraud.
The only other explanation I can think of is "click bombing" but I did not have logs longer than a week and did not see anything unusual.
It is infuriating that not only did they steal $100 from me (it was stolen from me because I could've used the other advertisers I am using now during those months), but that I am banned without an explanation. And they have the gall to ask me to try out Adwords with a $100 coupon.
I've been victim of sane. Although, I hadn't earned much, but the fact that Google banned me without my mistake, still bother me. I was just getting few clicks a day and some retard user used some script which made automated clicks on my ads 10,000 times. I noticed this and immediately reported the activity to Adsense, and what do I know... they ban me.. for being freaking honest. And just like this guy, none of my screamings and rantings were heard.
I think it is bad for public image, whatever it is.
We don't need details, but we need to hear at least whether this violation happened over a month or longer or just in a recent day(s), and thus could have been due to compromised account.
As an example - I heard from many Blizzard fans that their WoW password got compromised and first thing offenders do are acts that violate ToS and get real account owner banned for life. Very painful, and unfair. Just sayin...
You are destroying your brand. I know literally dozens of people that have enthusiastically come over from FB who are deeply freaked out about what you are doing here.
Yes, you can remove someone from your service if you like. But you must let them retrieve their materials. Otherwise, please trust us: We will go somewhere else. Behavior like this from FB is why we came here in the first place.
also let me be clear that i don't think this is going viral because i wrote a poetic letter that tugged at the heartstrings of twitter. if you think that my story is going viral for any other reason besides google's completely crap user support you need to re-examine your approach to dealing with people.
and if you need anymore proof of that please be aware that i signed up for twitter on wens night. and i do not know a single person, not one single person either physically or virtually, that has republished my letter. this should speak volumes as to how frustrated people are with google and any company that has policies like this. go to twitter, search for @thomasmonopoly and change "top tweets" to "all" tweets and see how your users are responding. because this has absolutely nothing to do with me.
Actually, I'd argue that this is going viral because you spammed the entire internet with your twitter post. Surely someone would bite eventually. Just a hunch, though.
It went viral because all you do is talk and talk and talk and talk, and people love hearing about other people with problems. A "look at that poor sap, I'm better than him," kind of thing.
But anyway, we would appreciate it if you didn't start spamming HN with this story. We know the details. We know you're upset. We don't really care.
If you must comment, one comment per threading level, please. Don't reply to the same comment more than once. And, keep it short. There must be something better to do with your life than tell everyone that Google disabled your account due to ToS violations.
Speak for yourself. I fully appreciate this guy being the one carrying the torch for all of us, who have or will be in the future, wronged by Google or any other big corporation where we have no recourse. Hopefully something positive will come of this.
What came of it was that he's violated Google's ToS, as confirmed by a number of employees. It would be nice if he was innocent, but he's not, so the story is meaningless.
No, the point is that its irrelevant that he violated ToS. Google should not unilaterally wipe a user's data without providing a chance to retrieve it. I'm sure the ToS lets Google delete an account for no reason whatsoever. That doesn't mean it isn't evil to delete a user's data.
and based on what other people have said about you i do belive you are an honest person. and if i really have violated the terms of service in some way, what in gods name could i have done that was so small for me to have not noticed it yet so large as to warrant shutting down my entire account and blacklisting me???
hi. someone on twitter sent me a link to this. is this about my situation? because if it is let me say to "boneslf" if he is the correct person, i don't know a goddam thing about computers let alone the "tiny bit of programming knowledge and keyword knowledge to make money" scamming google products. let me be clear about that.
and also "jellicle" makes my point exactly and so do a few others on here.
also, i've sent an update to the few contacts i have made at google, but they haven't responded. i found out two days ago that this week the fbi raided an apt in my building connected with anonymous and hauled away computers. like i said, and like i told google yesterday, i don't know enough about computers to know whether or not it's plausible that this could have something to do with my issue, or if they would hack into my google account for some reason, but i do know that my router had "dns poisoning" last week and that's when the internet started acting up. it might be crazy for me to suspect that the fbi case has anything to do with this, but i would know if google would talk to me.
also, in my opinion, nothing would warrant what they have done. unless i was knowingly violating some term of service. which i don't think anyone at this point could possibly think that i was. i never even sent out group email or had any of my picasa folders public.
It definitely seems from the way that google is handling this (playing everything close to the vest, not letting you know anything) that it DOES have something to do with the FBI raid. In the US, this kind of cockiness and disregard for standard procedures of law and decency is often paired with Homeland Security shit. It doesn't seem very far fetched to say that google might have been told by the gov't that you are without a doubt some sort of terrorist or pro-wikileaks hacker so that the gov't can look at your information (without any kind of warrant, of course).
first of all i am absolutely pro-wikileaks. that shouldn't even be a statement i have to make. that's like saying "why yes, i am pro-truth." those people are the definition of patriots and they're not even from my country.
secondly, i can't imagine google would be dumb enough to actually think that even if someone did use my account for something like that. i would hope that the most powerful corporation would notice the change in behavior if someone was one day uploading pictures of hiking to my picasa account and emailing my sister and the next day hacking into the cia. i should hope that they would suspect they weren't the same person.
also, why is the text on this website so small? rhetorical question.
I have a small amount of experience with this kind of stuff (gov't assualts on Internet activists through property seizure, collusion with the private sector, etc) from reading Glenn Greenwald and some others and here's my take: the gov't has been cracking down on people suspected of DDoSing the credit card companies a few months back in the name of anonymous and wikileaks; I read a thread somewhere about the FBI raiding a house with guns drawn to go after the OP's 13 year-old son, who the mother said was absolutely innocent of using LOIC to do this at all.
I think you, and possibly your neighbor, might have become victims of this kind of shoddy, falsified intelligence work. Back when the "war on terror" was really hotted up after 9/11, there were tons of stories of Muslims being erroneously charged with terrorism, like the time with the "Detroit Sleeper Cell" that turned out to be just some impoverished Detroit Muslims; the FBI took wild liberties interpreting a disturbed man's doodles to be some sort of terrorist plot. Well, now the intel agencies are a little more restricted in their ability to harass and intimidate innocent Muslims (well, as long as they're within our borders). But as we've seen with the story about the 13 year-old, these agencies are still quite willing to harass and intimidate online activists, accusing them of being "hacktivists" and seizing their property. And we've also seen that companies such as google are quite "in bed" with the gov't whenever they ask them for the data in the name of "the war on terror."
TL;DR I suspect that google disabled your account at the behest of the gov't who are in turn serving credit card companies mad about being DDoSed by Anon who was mad at them for stealing money from wikileaks, who the credit card companies say violated THEIR terms of service.
The question remains, despite the link to Betsy Perry's G+ post which has been repeatedly posted in this thread in order to discredit you, is which term of service you violated in the use of your gmail account? Google refuses to answer this, which is what makes me most confident that some homeland security BS is involved here.
It's interesting that I am being accused of "samefagging" just because I seem to be on another person's side and am making somewhat wild assertions about what might have happened. I'm not an HN user typically because I'm ignorant of most of the stuff you guys find interesting, I found this thread linked from reddit and when I saw that ThomasAlexander's building had allegedly been raided by the FBI going after Anon, I knew I had to comment. I assure you, the last thing I want is for his story about the FBI raid to be untrue, it would mean the hour or so I've spent thinking and commenting on it was totally wasted.
LOL, another accusation. I looked at RangerSix's reddit profile, and I can confirm that he's definitely not me. Have you considered that my reddit name is the same as this one?
ahahaha. ok. yeah. there are tons of us all pretending that we don't have the same profile. even saying that is confusing.
and the thing about anonymous in my building is very true, look it up. bushwick bk. ny post. i don't know the specifics. but i did have breakfast two days ago with someone who knew the tenants and let's just say i don't want to know and he didn't want to tell me what was going on.
i just noticed matt's comments at the top. and i'm going to respond without getting angry and without using profanity. but matt, if you know what it is that google thinks i did, and after all of this, you are still not telling me, i am dumbfounded. if that is true then you really need to consider your terms of service and your public relations department. i'm getting about 5 messages a minute about this on twitter.
I'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.
Google+ makes getting backup of all your data really easy (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.
Sounds 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?
I should say Thunderbird. Its IMAP implementation has always had issues downloading large volumes of mail for me.
I also live in an area where latency is normally measured in seconds, so I think you and everyone downvoting me are living in a slightly different Internet from me.
Heliotrope sounds like it might offer a good alternative without a six hour journey back to civilization.
Why would you use TB for backups? Use something designed for the job, like offlineimap. Well, or Heliotrope, which is brilliant (Sup, the other project by the same author is brilliant too, but it doesn't download, just reads a maildir).
i'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.
I'd say it's a bigger order of problem than not having the mail at all. I have mounds of inadequately organized information. I don't want to add to the amount of noise I have to sort through.
I checked out google takeout - but it only lets me backup the services I don't care about. Google for imapgrab. It's a tiny python program and it's as simple as can get.
Reading this link gave me the push I needed to finally backup my gmail. I've been worried about the [probably very low] risk of Google deciding to close my account, but I'm going to take it into my own hands now, and start using Gmail as my reader only.
Not at all, it's utterly trivial with something like OfflineIMAP. Of course, depending on the size of your mailbox it'll take a little while for the first synchronisation but after that it's incremental.
I 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".
It'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.
I'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.
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"
I 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.
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.
We kinda started something... 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.
This 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.
Btw 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.
I lost very important data to stikipad.
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.
If 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.
I 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.
Its 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.
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 - 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.