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Google has a long-standing reputation for insufficient developer support, especially if you’re a small studio or an independent team. But the company’s general customer support is also lacking, and today’s horror story is one that encourages a Google Takeout backup, just in case. Last night at midnight, a customer’s Google Account was completely deactivated. They claim that without warning or explanation, the entire contents of their Google account – email, photos, Google Pay balance, even the ability to pay their internet bill through Google Fiber and cell phone bill through Google Fi – has been removed. without ceremony.
What happened?
Take all of this with a grain of salt, as we can never be sure we have the full story, but the details we have are terrifying.
Last night the above email was sent to a Google customer named Chris explaining that his Google account has been disabled because “it appears to have been used in a way that seriously violates Google policies “. The email arrived while they were asleep and no additional information regarding the reason for the account suspension was provided. Believing it must have happened in error, Chris filed an appeal, but it was denied, leaving him with no apparent options and no access to the ten-year-old Google Account.
For some of us this might be a slight inconvenience, but Google’s services are both plentiful and ubiquitous. If you’re stuck on your Google Account and the only business service you use is Gmail, you might lose access to your emails, but Chris has been a lot more invested, using Google Fi for phone service. , Google Fiber for Internet access, Google Pay to pay off debt, Google Drive for school and work, and Google Photos for photo backups. This left him with no way to pay his phone or internet bills, unable to access his Google Pay balance, and with nearly a decade of photos and documents gone. And even this basic loss of access to email is a major issue right now – Chris, like many of us during the pandemic, is unemployed and unable to respond to any response to job applications when ‘it is blocked on the account.
In addition to this, email is often used for two-factor authentication, including some financial and healthcare services. This loss of access to the email account can also mean that third-party services that are completely independent of Google may be affected, and Chris may temporarily lose access to the doctor and bank thanks to Google’s actions.
Forget about identity theft or hacking, you have a new digital horror
Most of us probably think that the biggest internet service nightmare we could experience is identity theft or hackers (and we’ve heard some real digital horror stories there as well), but this Google’s simple, one-sided action can be massively destructive to our lives, equivalent to the term of service-sanctioned destruction of all of our digital assets if we are not wise enough to perform regular backups. And, unfortunately, this is also becoming commonplace.
@Google my account has now been deactivated for more than 3 weeks. I still don’t know why, and after using all the resources I have to fix this problem, you did nothing but give me the solution.
– Andrew Spinks (@Demilogic) February 8, 2021
Last month, Terraria developer Andrew Spinks was also banned from his Google Account for what was considered a violation of YouTube’s terms of service. The action led to the temporary cancellation of its highly popular game for Google’s game streaming platform Stadia. While Spinks has had enough influence to draw attention to the matter and seek both clarity regarding the issue and Google’s resolution, others are not so fortunate.
A few years ago in 2019, Google distributed mass account suspensions to hundreds of users for interacting in a YouTube Original live series of Choose Your Own Adventure. While viewers were warned that Google’s detection of spambots was likely to be a problem if they were overly enthusiastic about their participation, some did not take the warning enough to heart, and the YouTuber behind the show even had to intervene to help his viewers find a solution.
All of this still ignores the many smaller account suspensions that happen silently all the time, leaving customers to howl into Google’s automated and indifferent void. In many cases, customers may not even know why their accounts were suspended – Google never tells them.
The same goes for Chris, who tells us the reason for the suspension remains a mystery. In some cases, Google suspends an account to help the account holder himself – if, for example, it has been hacked, this can protect their data. But what Chris has the closest of an explanation is a late night backup set up through Google’s backup and sync tool, set for that time of day to save bandwidth, and which recorded video editing projects, potentially containing copyrighted music, although not shared.
I saw this tweet and then spent the next hour setting up sync clients for Google Drive and Google Photos.
– Gabriel Samfira (@gabriel_samfira) March 8, 2021
It remains to be seen if Chris will ever hear more on the subject. He claims he’s unable to get hold of a “real person” to explain what happened, and the customer service reps they’ve spoken to simply point to Google’s support site. We reached out to Google for more information regarding both this particular instance and the company’s account suspension practices in general, but a response was not immediate. Right now, Chris claims to have “resigned himself that the account is probably gone forever.”
Fortunately, Chris raised a pretty big stench on Reddit and Twitter to attract attention, so that Google can still approach its individual case with greater transparency, but not everyone is so lucky. In the meantime, I know that I will be backing up my own Google account data tonight, and I recommend that you do the same.
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