Same as every other “cloud provider”, yet somehow Google is the one subjected to these overwritten accounts and the almost mandatory pseudo law/policy musings that follow.
You might want to take a look at some policies from others in the industry to get a more accurate picture of this landscape.
These policies are constructed as such to mitigate litigation, which the author concedes. Regardless I'm glad this instance had a happy ending.
Gmail and Yahoo Mail and Facebook Mail and my personal mail server all stand in contradiction to your claim.
Stop making things up just because you want to complain about the Google. Nobody will fault you for a simple "Fuck Google, they're demonstrably evil and have access to way too much data now," which is what it seems to me you're driving toward.
Email is decentralized because Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and whatever server you can setup can talk together. You don't have to use Gmail to send an email to a Gmail user.
The only thing that's threatening email decentralization is the war on spam. It's becoming more and more difficult to send messages that don't go directly to spam boxes if you're not one of the big player.
Or simply people who didn't have the skills to be a peer?!
And what about closed gardens like social networks and services that wall our data behind proprietary walls? Google data liberation front is a step forward but its still not enough.
People with such great skills and knowledge of the stakes of IT like the HN audience shouldn't put the blame on common people right?!
I genuinely believe that technology and the open source community have reached a maturity that makes the development of simple and solid alternatives are possible, even for the least knowledgeable of us.
Take a look at what this startup is trying to achieve: https://www.cozycloud.cc/
It gives everyone an easy to administrate server, you can assign your own domain name, self host it or have it hosted elsewhere. The server is a plat-form on which you have total control and ownership of your data and can install and develop apps that serves YOUR needs. It still young but with the support of talented people that could become BIG!
One of the problems that's recentralized mail is spam.
Because of spam senders, especially spam originating from residential and dial-up IPs (well, mostly residential now), many large email providers use blacklists (literally: DUL -- dial-up lists) to block SMTP access from IPs within a known residential range. Many also work to whitelist specific lists of known legitimate email providers.
May enterprise IT organizations require explicit whitelisting of domains from which email is sent. I kid you not. And many of these organizations apparently have never heard of SPF/DKIM.
A third level of resource are reputation-based services. Cisco's Ironport / Senderbase is among one of the better of these (it indicates both good and bad reputations, as opposed to simple blacklisting or whitelisting, as well as volume variations from a given IP and "neighborhood" reputations of nearby IP addresses.
The result is that it can be painful to try getting your mail delivered through to large email service providers. I've had the most significant issues with Yahoo and Aol, though others are at times problematic. This affects both individuals trying to configure small residential servers and businesses / enterprises.
Ideally tools such as SPF and DKIM help, but at best these indicate that a given IP address is included in a policy framework or that header integrity is assured -- there's still no basis for assuming that a given email message is or isn't spam. Getting SPF and DKIM properly configured can also involve hoop-jumping, especially for non-technical users.
I don't think his comment was focused on John or Jane Q Public, but rather the general use of cloud services and the dangers of these types of events happening.
For instance, I host most of my business on AWS. We recently had a compromised server that delivered malware to some of our Web visitors resulting in Google completely blacklisting our site, and ultimately resulting in AWS sending us a threatening notification that we were violating their terms of service by serving malware and we could be terminated at any time.
Within an hour of finding out the root cause we cleaned up the malware issue, but we spent the next 24 hours trying to get Google to remove the blacklist and kept our fingers crossed that AWS wouldn't just terminate all our 17+ instances and ask questions later - effectively putting us out of business.
This has always been the way it works with hosting providers and even colocation facilities. You have an obligation to keep your infrastructure healthy, or the provider has an obligation to shut you down before they get a reputation for being malware/spam/badness-friendly and have to worry about their peering relationships and the like.
Well, the Amazon approach is much better than the Google approach. At least they sent a notice, while Google's policy is "shoot first, discuss later". Well actually the first part, I'm not sure if there is a second part.
Apple iCloud, MS Live, Amazon Kindle Libraries, Dropbox.
All of these widely used and are subject to loss of service, arbitrary account shutdown, data loss, and data theft. None of them are really trustworthy, particularly not as a primary data store, so I find it odd that the commenter rants about Google - the problem is trusting any corporation with control over your data.
The interests of a corporation and an individual are not likely to coincide in the long term. Google is not evil, they're just a corporation like any other.
Microsoft gets a lot of beating for changes to Windows, simply because of widespread use; an OS with 0.5% market share will not be messing with so many people. By being banned by Google you lose your email, youtube, adsense, adwords, docs...your financial life could be destroyed, even if the 'violation' is for an unrelated offense (example: posting copyrighted material on Youtube and getting adsense disabled)
Another difference, as an example, when the company I work for had some issues with the hosted mail from MS, my boss was able to get to a real, live person .. not left fluttering in the breeze as so often happens with google.
The handful of times I've had issues, I usually take to twitter, and it magically gets resolved within a day... I'm overly tethered to google at this point. via Andriod and Google Voice alone, it's been a difficult weekend with the issues GV seems to have had since Friday. I've recently cloned my dropbox to both google drive, and skydrive... which gives me a little security.
For the past two years, I've been using my gmail address more, and my own domain email less, because the gmail ui has been more convenient... without igoogle/reader I don't think that's as much the case, but if I lost my email (logins for other sites) I'd be boned... I recently had to re-enable a domain on my mail server just to change an old account on a site I needed to recover. Not cool/fun.
You might want to take a look at some policies from others in the industry to get a more accurate picture of this landscape.
These policies are constructed as such to mitigate litigation, which the author concedes. Regardless I'm glad this instance had a happy ending.
It’s also worth mentioning the the paid tier of Google Apps operates under completely different TOS: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html