Sat
May
3
Sorry, your account has been disabled.
I got my Google account disabled this afternoon. :(
I don’t remember doing anything nearly close to a TOS violation, so I pretty much believe it was a mistake on their part. I have contacted their support and I have one open ticket with them to recover my access… the page say I should wait 24 hours, so I decided to write a blog post about single sign ons, Google, ourselves and other related things… I will use an unordered list since I don’t really want to connect the items in a way that makes textual sense:
- while disabled, emails sent to my account will bounce. that’s lame, knowing that an account can be errouneosly flagged for disabling, Google could at least keep the emails on your inbox for when you recover access.
- disable first, warn later. It would be nice to have a note about what kind of radar/algorythm was the responsible for the account shut down, and if this was something caused by me, a warning before I trigger the red light somewhere explaining that my account was doing something odd (if that was the case). Or a better message after the turn off, something like “your account was automatically disabled by the such and such bot. That way I could have a hint about if my account was turned off because virus suspicion, spam, crawling, piracy, porn, or whatever their bot believes I am guilt of (DISCLAIMER: I am not involved on any of the above activities just for the record)
- several important and unrelated services under a single authentication umbrella, or break one = break all. Google makes awesome web products, they are known for great reliability and quality even for their “beta” services, and more than that, their good software covers a very hybrid range of applications. Search, webmail, a full featured office suite, calendar, maps, personal webpages, blogs, code hosting, website analytics, ads publishing and managment, photo sharing, video sharing, social network, mailing list groups, web applications hosting, rss reader, shopping, translation, instant messaging, etc… We got used to them and we are naturally confident enough about their quality to rely more and more important pieces of our digital lives to the company, the problem is that if one of the services you use for whatever reason flags your account, you lose them all, it doesn’t matter if a photo from picasa was inappropriate, your appengine will go down, it doesn’t matter if your orkut got a virus, you will no longer be able to chat with your comrades, if your appengine hosted application because of a programmers mistake go crazy and explodes you might lose years of important email archives because of it, your youtube opinion video about a random company may be asked to be taken off and you can loose update access for a 5 years old personal blog and so on… They should be independent services, even if the login is the same. More granularity on this one would definitely improve Google’s success and good netizen image :)
- Why don’t we backup? 1-we take things for granted, 2-we are lazy, 3-it is not always trivial to export your data from web services, 4-we don’t think about catastrophes and exit plans that much…
- on the bright side of the issue, I am happy to not be a google reader user :) Go Bloglines!!
