OK, so now when they suspend your Google account you also get to experience loosing whatever you had in Google Drive.
Just for this I am converting my Dropbox account into one of their paid packages to do my part in ensuring they stick around.
One would hope that at one point Google might start to realize that the way they are handling accounts could work against their own interests. I --and I am sure others-- have exactly zero interest in touching any Google product other than Analytics because it can all go "poof" overnight if an algorithm doesn't like something you did somewhere...and you'll never know why and never have real recourse to attempt to fix it.
Just to be clear: I love just about everything Google has done and what they generally stand for. The one thing I hate viscerally is their approach to customer-no-service and how that relates to accounts. This aspect of what they do and how they behave is nothing less than moronic and possibly evil.
That's the reality of the cloud though, you're really just objecting to having all your eggs in one basket. There were legitimate users of megaupload that didn't break any ToS or host child porn, but they can't get any of their files back.
If it's like dropbox, though, it's probably the most likely google product that people will have backed up locally. I use selective sync with dropbox, but everything is on at least one of my computers.
It actually would be really cool if Google Drive was the ultimate data liberation tool...even if your account is closed, you already have all of your google account data (emails, docs, etc) backed up in your Drive folder locally.
> It actually would be really cool if Google Drive was the ultimate data liberation tool...even if your account is closed, you already have all of your google account data (emails, docs, etc) backed up in your Drive folder locally.
This is a fantastic idea! I would love to see more people clamor for this.
> you're really just objecting to having all your eggs in one basket.
Not really, there are existing projects[1] which allows you to to split your files like RAID0 or RAID5 across different cloud storage providers, losing a single slice will not lose data.
The best part is, since each cloud storage provider has an incomplete partial of data, it totally protects your privacy.
Interesting. I thought about doing something similar to unRAID in the cloud where you essentially designate one provider as a parity drive and can rebuild it or the others easily should one of them somehow be compromised (shut down or whatever). Would make it easy to add additional providers to the mix on the fly.
That's really a BIG issue with all the Google services. In case something wrong happens with your Google account, it's like you lose your email, your mobile device (if Android-based) whatever data you are storing, whatever data you are sharing (youtube account and pictures, photos), etc... the implications are far-reaching. For me, this centralization of services also become a deal-breaker. All accounts should be clearly separated by services, if not the risk of loss in case of failure is just too great.
which free service (or service that pays you money, ala AdSense) has a better approach to customer service? Honestly curious because I hear a lot of complaints about Google, but I have a feeling that Facebook, Bing/Microsoft, etc aren't any better.
Google will assign a real person to talk to if you have more than ~30M views / month or something.
Paypal requires lots of paperwork here in the EU, sometimes their staff will make mistakes or ask you to provide information twice.
Facebook is horrible. In one case, when asked about something simple as their billing address, they gave the wrong answer (causing reporting problems). Their developer support is generally a real pain.
The difference is that if your account gets flagged for anything via any of their services they can lock you out of all their other services. This is the dark side of integration.
I know, I know, horror stories and everything. And the service or the customer service is not always free but at least you can speak to someone, you can have the process explained, you can appeal etc.
If you have multiple google accounts, do they suspend them as well? If you link them in your gmail I'd imagine it's easy to auto-detect. But this could be a way to be sure your files are safe on one account when other service activity inadvertently suspends your account.
That's good to know. But, what about the person who doesn't have 500 RSS subscribers to raise hell for them? Yes, it's "free" (I get email, you get to serve me ads) but that doesn't make it right. Email is very personal and to ban someone without notice, without telling them what they did wrong and no clear process for resolution is outrageous.
"I --and I am sure others-- have exactly zero interest in touching any Google product other than Analytics because it can all go "poof" overnight if an algorithm doesn't like something you did somewhere...and you'll never know why and never have real recourse to attempt to fix it."
We who recognize the problem are in the minuscule minority, and those of us who don't use their services because of that are in the unmeasurable minority. Google won't lose a measurable cent over it.
I'll relate one of my own stories briefly so readers can understand where I am coming from. One of my clients had some 200 domains registered with GoDaddy. Since they were not in use they decided to park them in GoDaddy's "Cash Parking" service. Why not?
All was well for months. They didn't really make any money, but they were not expecting this to be the case anyway. A lot of these domains were slated to be used in perfectly legitimate sites as development progressed. For example, one of them was aimed at legal information and, yes, it was going to use ads served by Google when it finally went online.
One day my client says: "Hey, just learned that this GoDaddy cash parking thing is entirely served by Google. Why don't we cut out the middle man and use Google directly?"
He went on to point out that Google had a service called "AdSense Domain Parking" or thereabouts.
Here's how it worked: You park your domains with Google. They post ads on the domains. They pay you a percentage. Sounds easy enough.
So, using their Google account we transfered all 200 domains from the GoDaddy service to Google's Domain Parking service. You had to enter all the domains into an online form and they went through an approval process. I would imagine that they don't want to deal with objectionable domains. No problem with that. All 200 domains were accepted and went "live" with Google-based ad serving.
Now, let's clarify what this means: Google has FULL control over what ads are served. Furthermore, Google also has full control of the search that might lead to the discovery of these domains.
The domains were up for two days without any issues. On day three they received the dreaded "account disabled due to suspicious activity". Poof! Gone. Done. And that means everything: G-mail, Docs, AdWords, AdSense. All gone in an instant. To say that my client was distraught is an understatement. They just got their Google accounts killed off and didn't know why.
There was no real recourse of any kind and no way to communicate with an intelligent being of any biological species whatsoever. This was brutal, final, totalitarian and as unfair as could be.
Not one person in my shop or my client's shop touched any of these ads. We were far too busy with real business to engage in surfing for pennies-per-click. Then again, to this day, we don't know if the allegation was click fraud or something else. We'll never know. Some of the domains were political in nature so there are also some conspiracy theories floating about.
The point of the story behind this incident is that my client, a reputable and honest enterprise, lost access to all Google tools and services for the simple act of trying a service that they had been using for months through GoDaddy. Nothing changed other than GoDaddy was no-longer in the revenue stream.
This incident really damaged my client. The loss of documents and email was one part of it. The other was that some of the planned (and very legitimate) sites were going to use a business model based around ads served by Google.
That's when I basically pulled the plug on Google as far as recommending it to anyone at all. You can use Analytics because there's really no way that I know of for your account to be closed down based on your use of Analytics. Everything else is, as far as I am concerned, a ticking time bomb.
As far as I am concerned, if you build a business around or rely upon anything Google offers you are very likely out of your mind. It might work for some, but it is a dangerous thing to rely on.
I think you could probably get your analytics account closed if you violate some of the ToS like reporting unique identifiers (IP address counts) for your users into your events.
The danger of getting my account shut down is the sole reason I pay $50/year for a Premium Apps account. The ability to call and talk to someone should something go wrong is worth it considering my entire life is in the account.
unless you use some exclusive special features of Google analytics I do not know, check out piwik as free, self-hosted alternative. it supports privacy protection for your visitors.
Google has a brilliant customer service, it's just that many people do not understand the meaning of the term "customer". If you use their free services, you are not a customer; if you do pay for it, then you get proper support and everything. It seems pretty fair to me.
> if you do pay for it, then you get proper support and everything
I wouldn't call it 'proper' support.
Last company I was at (2 years ago or so) got pretty awful support, and we paid for google apps (50 bucks a person per year, plus whatever the integrated postini cost [$5 a month per user or something?], for 100+ people). It was a minimum of 1 or 2 day turnaround for support, via email only for anything other than 'the entire site is down'. Not sure if that has changed or not since then.
I think that it would be more transparent if they made this perfectly clear to gmail users when they are signing up rather than relying on them inherently knowing this (or reading it buried somewhere in the TOS). I doubt that the majority of Gmail users (or just Google Account holders) realize this.
I'll say this, though. If a majority of your customers do not realize the full implications of what their terms are with you, then you are either:
1) Actively trying to prevent your customers from learning about the terms.
2) Relying on the general naivety of your customers.
3) Incompetent, in that you're not doing your job of letting your customers know what they are signing up for.
If more people were fully aware of the fact that their Gmail account could be randomly closed at any time, without notice, but still used the service because they accepted the risk, then it would be a different story.
Actually, Google makes money off the ads on their 'free' services. I think that qualifies everyone as a customer. The horror stories recounted here is a signal that Google needs to reconsider its reliance on the algorithmic approach.
After pg posted about it, now the new hot trend is to talk about Goggles customer service, whenever the keyword Google appear in one's sight.
Seriously, we got it a week ago. We all agree their support suck and competitors should aim to do better. It's getting old. Can we change the subject and stay on topic?
Google has a brilliant customer service, it's just that many people do not understand the meaning of the term "customer". If you use their free services, you are not a customer; if you do pay for it, then you get proper support and everything. It seems pretty fair to me.
My experience with several of my clients who are paying Google "Customers" proves to me, at least, that Google doesn't consider those who pay for their services "Customers" either. The Customers are Google's advertisers. Granted, my experience only goes up to around 300 seats of "paid for" service, but locating a support resource that didn't shunt me to a FAQ or send me back an automated email telling me that my ticket was closed was difficult.
Just for this I am converting my Dropbox account into one of their paid packages to do my part in ensuring they stick around.
One would hope that at one point Google might start to realize that the way they are handling accounts could work against their own interests. I --and I am sure others-- have exactly zero interest in touching any Google product other than Analytics because it can all go "poof" overnight if an algorithm doesn't like something you did somewhere...and you'll never know why and never have real recourse to attempt to fix it.
Just to be clear: I love just about everything Google has done and what they generally stand for. The one thing I hate viscerally is their approach to customer-no-service and how that relates to accounts. This aspect of what they do and how they behave is nothing less than moronic and possibly evil.