I woke up this morning looking forward to reading my virtual paper and sipping on my really good cup of Joe, only to find this message while trying to log onto my Google portal at www.google.com/ig: “Account has been disabled.”
Huh?
Now, I’ve had this account for the past six or seven years, ever since Google handed out invites to Gmail Beta, so you can imagine my shock – and later outrage.
In most cases, accounts are disabled because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service.
I can’t possibly imagine what I could have done wrong. Even though I have not read the hundreds of pages that make up the terms of service, but I suspect it might have something to do with my new blog created over the weekend. Could Google have perceived some kind of copyright infringement – of my own work – as that was all I had blogged?
Perhaps the account was hacked, or perhaps I’m a schizophrenic bi-polar sleep walker whose other side consists in being a pornographer or a mafia kingpin, and perhaps I did violate the terms while sleep typing, I don’t know, but the result is no more email address, no more Google documents, no more Google blog, no more Picasa photos, no more membership in Google groups, no more Google friend connects, and no more access to Google analytics for the websites that I maintain.
So a big shout out to all: Google really can “terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice,” and will apparently do so without showing any mercy
whatsoever.
But being the big backup blowhard that I pretend to be here, I do have backups of just about everything mentioned above, all except the Google blog that was intended to be written about today. I’ve other Gmail accounts and the same photos (pretty much) on Flickr, and many other group memberships on other services that losing a few on Google will be of no harm to anyone. All my emails are safely stored on my home computers, and synchronized with another service – Mobile Me from Apple – that I highly recommend (until they too cut me off for something done while sleep walking).
But a big lesson learned today: Never put all your virtual eggs in one Google basket, i.e. don’t tie all your own cloud activities to a single Google account. In a flash, it could all be
a toast.
So is Google really evil then? That question ran through my mind for the rest of the day. Many techies tend to say “heck yes” or something expletively stronger. Google is the devil incarnate, and has been for some time they cry! But up until this morning, I had no real reason to agree.
However, let’s think about Google for a moment: It is a multi-billion dollar empire with hundreds of millions of user’s per day, all supplying intimate details about their lives and loves via a simple search box. Like Facebook, Google determines who you are by what you do while using Google services, in addition, to photographing our houses and businesses in 360 degrees and also geo-mapping the heck out of our collective movements, and in many cases, our individual movements as well.
And why are they doing this? So our data can be sold to other billion dollar empires that intend to market us to death with 3D TVs, SUVs, and enough consumer soap to drown anyone in a single lifetime. And that’s the benign explanation. The nefarious explanation requires you to put on your tin hat.
And in exchange, we get all the wonderful free services that Google provides, uncoupling us forever from the arduous ownership of encyclopedias, phonebooks, and a sharp letter opener.
But taking these services for granted and considering them as part of our human rights is a fallacy in the making, as revolutionaries around the world have recently found out. One of the first services to go in Libya was Google’s You Tube, followed by Twitter and Facebook of course. What is given out so freely can be taken away swiftly; another lesson learned on the march towards global democracy.
Putting revolutions aside, all I really wanted to write about was how wonderfully easy blogs are to create in Google’s improved Blogger tool, but all I can actually report is how easy they are to lose – forever. Even with the “export blog” and “export template” feature that allows you to hypothetically back up your blog, if Google pulls your plug, you’re looking down towards a very long road in recovering what you once published.
Personally, I’m switching to WordPress, in hopes, that little guys in the blogging world will treat us little boys and girls with a heck of a lot more respect.
Jiggy Gaton is quirky kinda techo-expat who is now blog-less, but hopes to be back online soon – using WordPress!
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