[2s.mk-friends] killed by Google

Sat Jun 6 07:11:23 UTC 2009

forward од една друга листа. ми се виде интересно за овде.

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*This night I've been killed by Google*
Domenico Quaranta

This night I've been killed by Google. When I woke up, I tried to
enter my Google Account as usual, but what I got was only a short
message:

?Sorry, your account has been disabled.?

?This fucking password!?, I thought, and I retyped it. Same message.
At the end of it there was a question mark with a link. I clicked on
it, and this is what I read:

?If you've been redirected to this page from the sign in page, it
means that access to your Google Account has been disabled.

In most cases, accounts are disabled because of a perceived violation
of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of
Service.

Google reserves the right to:

* Suspend a Google Account from using a particular product or the
entire Google Accounts system if the Terms of Service or product-
specific policies are violated.
* Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without
notice.

If your Google Account has been disabled, please review the relevant
Terms of Service before attempting to create another account. For
guidelines on a specific Google product, please visit the product
homepage for a link to its Terms of Service.

If you believe your account has been disabled in error, please contact
us so that we can assist you.?

?Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without
notice?? Wow! If God exists, probably he is more democratic than
Google. But, well, of course it's a mistake. So, let's fill the form.

I did it, and this is what I got:

?Thanks for contacting our Google Accounts team. Please note that
we'll only reply if we have additional information to share about your
disabled account.?

I take a cigarette. ?Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper?, I
think. Tons of emails, two blogs, about one hundred images, videos,
documents, web pages, presentations, two years of work lost for...
what? Because I believed in a fallible God.

I don't believe in God, actually. That's why I always have to
understand what happens to my life. So, I start making some research.
Google invites you to put your whole hard disk online. If you have a
Google account, you can check your email, but you can also run one or
more blogs. Picasa lets you share your pictures, and since Google
bought Youtube, you can create and access a Youtube channel with the
same username and password. Google Documents is a kind of Microsoft
Office. You can create and share word documents, spreadsheets, Power
Point presentations, databases. It's far but easy to fascinate me, but
if I find something useful, I use it. So, I run two blogs, I have a
Picasa account, a Youtube channel, and several documents online ? most
of them being material I use for teaching, and that I share with my
students. All under the same Google Account.

So, let's check if everything is working. My email doesn't work
anymore. R.I.P. My blogs are still online, but I don't have the right
to edit, delete or update them anymore. Actually, I'm not the owner of
these sites anymore. They are still there, but they aren't mine ? they
belong to Google. I realize right now that they always did. As for my
Youtube videos and my documents, the same as above: only Google can
decide if my students can go on studying what I teach. Finally, I look
for my Picasa channel: it's gone.

?You asshole!?, you may say. ?You are boring us with your fucking
story, and it ends up that you uploaded some sex images or copyrighted
material.? I didn't. What I put on my Picasa account are just my
photos: some holiday pictures (as private albums, accessible only to
me ? and Google of course) and some pics related to the exhibitions I
organized up to now (as public albums). I go through the terms of
agreement about one hundred times, and what I understand is that I
didn't violate any rule. Maybe the following one?

?4.5 You acknowledge and agree that while Google may not currently
have set a fixed upper limit on the number of transmissions you may
send or receive through the Services or on the amount of storage space
used for the provision of any Service, such fixed upper limits may be
set by Google at any time, at Google?s discretion.?

I don't know how many megabytes I used ? unlike for Flickr, there were
no upper limits for Picasa till yesterday. Maybe I used too much disk
space and they decided to kick me out?

I don't know. Probably, I'll never know. Since this morning, I wrote
about 10 emails to Google, but I got no answer. I can just look back
to my dead account and wonder: is it dead because God decided to kill
it or because it violated some stupid rule?

Of course, I will migrate on other platforms. I'll do even if my
Google Account comes back from hell. Nothing is really lost, besides
my time. But don't forget: if it happened to me, it can happen to
anybody, at any time, everywhere. Everything is there, in the contract
you signed with God ? or it was the Devil?:

?4.3 As part of this continuing innovation, you acknowledge and agree
that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the
Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users
generally at Google?s sole discretion, without prior notice to you.

4.4 You acknowledge and agree that if Google disables access to your
account, you may be prevented from accessing the Services, your
account details or any files or other content which is contained in
your account.?

---

Domenico Quaranta

mob. +39 340 2392478
email. dom at domenicoquaranta.net
home. vicolo San Giorgio 18 - 25122 brescia (BS)
web. http://www.domenicoquaranta.net/

"The world we actually have does not meet my standards". Philip K. Dick

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