We had something similar happen with our corporate twitter account that we’ve had for eight years. Our news site, agfundernews.com is the sites of record for foodtech and agtech innovation/investment and Twitter inexplicably locked us out with no recourse.
Google users locked out after 15 years' use
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Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying he was smart enough to grow this revenue to 2000/month, but, in the meantime forgetting something that basic - and the system caught up with him? If so where was the system before?
There have been big swings in advertiser behaviour in the last few years. One big advertiser changes their policy to "no longer include sites about LGBT issues", and suddenly a blog about that could see revenue drop 90%.
In the past, the advertiser would likely to tell that to the people selling ad space.
Then, they’d suffer political blowback for being anti-LGBT.
It sounds like Google is laundering third party behavior that is further dividing our society.
Perhaps advertisers should be forced (by the government, on all algorithmic platforms) to publish their targeting criteria.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#473Everyone saying "I would lose all my e-mail" apparently doesn't know about fetchmail, getmail or even Thunderbird. Just download your mail using IMAP or POP3 and archive it locally. I recently deleted my last Gmail account (that I had since 2001). Before doing it, I tried Google's Checkout to get the data, but it was adking me for "verification" (i.e. more info about me) to finish the download. I just fired up Thunde…
You can also schedule Google Takeout, which gives you a nice .zip or .tgz with mbox files, in addition to all of your other Google information. I have it set to deliver one of these backups every two months automatically.
Those multipart backups are a pain to download in my experience.
I decided to setup a key and backup via the api for gmail and gphoto. i should probably do drive as well...
This works for email and says it will let you upload to another account. https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#474I've saw quite a few similar stories over the past years and this left me very scared. I've been a heavy user of google services for more than 15 years. For some months now (maybe a year?) I've been trying to reduce dependency on google services and apps. It is a slow process, but I hope to get it done in the next year or so. Meanwhile I try to use google takeout as much as possible to keep up to date backups of my d…
Fastmail.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#475This makes me scared to report security bugs to Google.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#476I've bounced around Google, Microsoft, and Fastmail for the last 4-5 years trying to find a sort of "holy grail" solution but I've learned there really isn't one. Google comes closest (for me personally), but the privacy implications and vendor lock-in always end up scaring me away.
Fastmail has really outstanding mail support, but their calendar service definitely leaves a lot to be desired (i.e. if you want to share a calendar with a spouse with any sort of authentication, spouse needs an account too), and their file support is minimal.
I think the answer is diversification and make sure you're a paying customer for whatever service you use. Use your own domain, spread your data around, use standard formats (text, etc.), and keep backups. Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#477Are there any tools that could use to back everything up on another Google account? (May cost twice the price)
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#478It should be illegal. Companies that provide public utility type services should be obliged to follow certain laws, one of them being that they are not allowed to shut people out from their own data. They could provide the service as read-only on alleged breach of terms (allowing the user to migrate) for example. Shutting them out completely: just no.
> Companies that provide public utility type services The only "public utility type services" Google provides is phone service through Fi. Nothing else counts as a utility. Even then I'm not sure if being an MVNO counts.
> The only "public utility type services" Google provides is phone service
I guess my implicit suggestion that email services be regarded as a type of public utility was a bit convoluted. But gmail is surely a close enough parallel to postal services of old (traditionally a public utility) to be regarded as such. Legislation has simply not caught up with technological developments.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We do not pay for a home address What? You don't pay paxes in your country? No rent to the owner of your house or paid for owning the house yourself? What country is that?
I mean we do not pay the USPS or FedEx or UPS, etc. to agree to send mail to our address. I was making a comparison between mail and email services. Hopefully this clarifies what I meant.
No, but the person on the over end does.
Someone always pays.
Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once created a location-based file sharing web app [0] to simplify sharing non-sensitive content with people nearby, e.g. sharing slides for a public presentation with a room full of people. Anyone nearby just had to go to http://quack.space -- no funny long URLs. I never monetized it, but it got quite a few users and I definitely could have started a path to monetization. I had ideas, such as incorporating locatio…
I suspect it was basically legit--somebody used it to try to spread malware, their spider found it.
Exactly. The service was used to distribute malware and it got blocked by google and co.
There was a similar story last month about someone running a URL shortener. It started being used to obfuscate links to porn and scams. Then it got blocked by twitter/facebook and that's the end of the road for the service.