Google disabled my husband's account

It&#x27;s incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you&#x27;re supposed to appeal, but you don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re being accused of doing.<p>This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it&#x27;s an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible.<p>The remaining 1 time it&#x27;s because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose.<p>The only reason these tech companies managed to get so big is because they&#x27;ll cheat at anything that requires human scale. Support, moderation, taking responsibility for the content they host. They somehow managed to skirt on that just as the web was transitioning from a wild west to a somewhat ingrained, regulated place and the world is worse off for it.<p>Because they skirted on all this, they are now somehow the world&#x27;s gatekeepers on modern communications. If you don&#x27;t play ball with them, you&#x27;re cut off from almost everyone. Their recklessness and callousness ironically put them in the position to rule over the rest.

I had a Google Pixel phone. Less than a year old old. Treated with kid gloves. Always kept in a case. Pristine condition.<p>An approved Google software update bricked it. This was, by all accounts, a known issue.<p>The phone was under warranty. I sent it back.<p>They shipped me a scratched up refurbished phone. It ran fine for a week then bricked itself due to the same software update. I sent that back.<p>They sent me another, even worse scratched up refurbished phone. That too bricked after a week due to the software update.<p>I&#x27;ve got $3,000 worth of hold charges on my CC whilst Google are playing footsie with my phones. I sent that phone back.<p>They &quot;lost&quot; it and claimed I sent back a different phone. Then that became that I sent back a phone with a different serial number. Then a different model of phone. I pressed for details but they could never tell me any details about the phone I had allegedly sent back.<p>They wanted me to pay for all the phones, then eventually just the one phone that was missing. Finally Google admitted &quot;we lost the phone but that&#x27;s your problem.&quot;<p>After a month I said &quot;fine, you fix this shit or I am doing a charge back.&quot; They didn&#x27;t fix it. I did a credit card charge back for the thousands of dollars currently on hold on my card.<p>Google decided to disable my Google payments account so I couldn&#x27;t use the Playstore. Or buy groceries using Google Pay. Or process any subscription items attached to the Google payments account. Or access my store rewards cards stored in my Google Pay wallet.<p>Google still owed me for the cost of the original phone that was a brick that I no longer possessed after it was sent to Google.<p>I took Google to small claims, and won.<p>Google decided that wasn&#x27;t to their liking and disabled the Google account attached to the phone.<p>Fuck Google.<p>P.S. Please stop up-voting. This is not a vote-worthy post. It is simply a &quot;this is what happened.&quot; Save your attention for something that is worthy. Save your anger for things that matter.

Sue in small claims court. Costs about $50 to file, plus $100 or so for a process server.<p>Check Google&#x27;s terms of service.[1] They&#x27;re not too bad. There&#x27;s no forced arbitration. You can go to Small Claims Court in Santa Clara County, CA.<p>Google lists the reasons they can terminate an account. It&#x27;s not a &quot;sole discretion&quot; thing; they have specific reasons listed. So Google will have to show in court that you violated those terms.<p>Definitely go. Google will have to send someone, or they lose.<p>In practice, you&#x27;ll probably have your problem fixed shortly after your process server delivers the subpoena to 1600 Amphitheater Parkway.<p>California small claims court instructions: [2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;policies.google.com&#x2F;terms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;policies.google.com&#x2F;terms</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.courts.ca.gov&#x2F;1007.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.courts.ca.gov&#x2F;1007.htm</a>

This story is just absolutely ridiculous: The poster _works at Google_ and even tried to escalate internally for days, to no avail.

Every time a &quot;Google banned my account&quot; thread comes up, I like to point out that my Google Adwords account was banned once. I filed an appeal.<p>It&#x27;s been 20 years this month, I&#x27;m still waiting for a response.

It&#x27;s so incredibly frustrating that no one at Google seems to care about this. They don&#x27;t even acknowledge this as an issue to be addressed. It amazes me that their callousness still hasn&#x27;t backfired further.<p>I was on the receiving end of a similar issue with Google Pay Support for Android and it took <i>weeks</i> for Google to unblock in-app-purchase transactions, even via internal escalations from friends who work there. I guess I should count my blessings that it got cleared up at all.<p>The casual cruelty and opacity is just ridiculous. Surreal and bizarre that this extends even to their own employees. I really do hope this finally serves as a wakeup call for Google, but I&#x27;m not holding my breath.

I remember, long, long ago (2011) there was a similar story about a Google account that was banned, and Matt Cutts himself looked into it and came back with a boring, corporate, legalease answer that was most unlike him.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2795465" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2795465</a><p>The underlying reason in that instance, was the mistaken identification of childporn.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nhwn.wordpress.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;07&#x2F;28&#x2F;the-thomas-monopoly-affair&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nhwn.wordpress.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;07&#x2F;28&#x2F;the-thomas-monopoly-af...</a>

I have been thinking about this for a while. Considering I prefer to keep the important data&#x2F;emails on Gmail or Google drive for security and I really consider it important. Would it help if Google had a paid tier?<p>Say, if you can get into an annual plan, similar to what&#x27;s there for hardware devices like Apple Care+. Just that, in this there is someone to help you through issues.<p>We used to pay 10% of our AWS bill for the AWS support plan because when you needed the help, it really made sense to have someone looking at it with some SLAs.<p>A second option is, Google can just make consumer Gmail as an ad free paid service and then provide support for it as well. Plenty of people are paying $10&#x2F;month for email services, so we have a price point that works for people. Email is very crucial to online identity, and I would trust Google the most with security among the other providers so I would happily pay for it.<p>Edit: As someone pointed out, they have Google One at least for storage. It has proper support. Maybe it makes sense to extend it for other services as well. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;one.google.com&#x2F;about" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;one.google.com&#x2F;about</a>

If anyone has a Google account, you need to Takeout regularly.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;takeout.google.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;takeout.google.com</a>

Do Google employees realize how disgustingly evil their customer service is? Forget their free services for a second: you can even be spending big bucks with them every month and be randomly blocked by algorithm with no human recourse. I understand that Google can’t feasibly provide free tech support for the entire Internet as they’d probably have to have a million employees just answering phones and emails all day long. What they need to do is find some number (whether it’s $5, $25, $50, or more I have no idea) where they can charge for real customer service. Businesses get shut down and people lose their jobs because of some ad issue they can never find a way to get a solvable problem resolved. It’s sick that Google has gotten away with this for so long.

I always figure they just &#x27;rerun the script&#x27; and it produces the same results and there you go.<p>With no new input from the user, how could anything change?<p>Has anyone tried &quot;Try to restore&quot; and had it ... work?

I hate that they don&#x27;t even tell you what you violated, like I&#x27;m sure this just causes more escalation and worse negative feelings for basically getting no additional information.

This is one of the reasons why I&#x27;ve finally began migrating to a custom domain + proton mail. Can&#x27;t imagine the time it would take me to get back all the accounts registered to my email, not to mention those to which access would be lost forever.

I remember that long time ago I thought that using Google account to authenticate in other services is nice because, hey, I don&#x27;t need to remember some many passwords. Luckily after so time I decided that it may not be such a good idea ;).<p>Somehow related - long, long time ago in one of Google services I&#x27;ve used an account bound to my &#x27;external&#x27; email that I&#x27;ve been using actively back then. Just few days ago I had a need to login to this service. I know my login (and I still have access to those e-mail), I know my password, but since I haven&#x27;t used that account for a few years Google wants to send me a verification code on some phone number. Even that the last 2 digits displayed by Google on the verification screen match my phone number apparently I&#x27;ve made a mistake back then and provided a wrong phone number. There is a zero possibility to contact a human person at Google support and their docs in general provide a gentle &#x27;fuck off&#x27;. I understand (somewhat...) the scale they operate at, security concerns and hey, I&#x27;m not a customer really here. Still it is rather infuriating that I cannot do anything. Fortunately the account and that service is not <i>that</i> important... :&#x2F;<p>I&#x27;ve started to untangle myself from Google services some time ago and this incident will only accelerate this. Unfortunately - in general - our dependency on digital services will only increase anyway. With so many services providing some kind of &#x27;free&#x27; tiers and all the effort needed to backup your stuff spread across so many accounts it will only get worse.

I am not fond of suggestions to break up big companies, but I do believe that FAANG should be treated as utility companies and not be allowed to deny service to anyone; any termination decision should be left to an independent 3rd party, ideally a public authority, so the big company will not be liable for any account misconduct.

Right now I have everything tied up to my Google account (primary email, drive, photos). Has anyone moved away and if so, to what?

This is why having email service using your own domain is important. Should Gmail decide to suddenly terminate your account you can point the MX records to a new provider and be up and running in an hour or two. I would argue that any free email service is a liability. It&#x27;s one of the things that&#x27;s very important &amp; worth paying for.

Before laying down judgement on Google, this is standard procedure for any kind of legal matter &#x2F; fraud.<p>I work at a bank and it&#x27;s absolutely critical that we do not let anyone know of our reasons for banning&#x2F;suspending accounts while there&#x27;s fraud investigations on the account.<p>Investigations take a long time since we need to determine if the fraud&#x2F;criminal actions were 100% done by the user of the account, or if the account was compromised and was used as a proxy. 90% of the times we find it&#x27;s a third party takeover and the user is cleared. There&#x27;s a good chance his husband&#x27;s account was taken over and someone was using his Drive to host pirated movies.<p>Think about the other side when thinking about a situation like this. I&#x27;m sure Google is taking this very seriously.

Another example of why we need public internet services that aren&#x27;t run by private companies. Imagine if your mailing address was run by a private company and they could take your mailbox, erase your address, and forever prevent you from receiving mail sent to that address ever again.<p>Every human deserves an email account, linked to if not publicly exposing their real identity, access to which is not revocable except by court order.

Every time this happens I think about reducing my dependence on google, however I&#x27;d love to be able to make this decision by evaluating the actual risk of this happening.<p>Does anyone know an estimate of how likely this is to happen to an individual on a per year basis?<p>Obviously that risk will change as the organization changes, but if it&#x27;s happening to a couple hundred good faith accounts a year I&#x27;d probably put it off for quite some time.

There is a simple three-step process to resolving these recurring problems: (1) Surface the complaint on the front page of Hacker News; (2) Stimulate at least 100 comments on the submission; (3) Wait for someone at Google to sheepishly revert the change, possibly without comment.

Daily reminder that you should not stake your digital identity&#x2F;data on any Google service that you cannot pay support for. And even then, be wary.

This is a fine example of why one should NEVER use a free closed (source or company) service for critical life or business functions.<p>They can and sometimes will shut you off with no reason given, no access to your data, and no recourse (&amp; NO, appealing when no charges are specified, and no info or reasoning for their decision other than &quot;yup we confirmed you violated our TOS&quot;, is not recourse, even in a Kafka world).<p>This guy can get nothing even though he <i>works at Google</i>.<p>It isn&#x27;t like these major companies are short of funds to provide actual customer service, they just refuse to do so, basically saying &quot;what are you going to do about it?&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s a Devil&#x27;s Bargain, and too many buy it.

If someone wants to move away from a Google free account, is there a way to see of list of all sites&#x2F;apps that they have previously granted OAuth access to?<p>I found a way to view this if you have a paid admin account for your organization, but I don&#x27;t see a way to view a list of previous OAuth granted requests for a free Google account.

They&#x27;re begging for the European legislation to require mobility of email addresses as we have for mobile phone numbers.

Every time something like this comes up either with Dropbox, Google, or whatever big corp who owns your data, I suggest everybody to try out Nextcloud!<p>I use it for years, because it&#x27;s a very liberating feeling to OWN YOUR DATA and not be in a risk of something like this. It&#x27;s even more convenient than any cloud drive I tried.

My Dad has all his photos on a PC and HD backup. If something happens to him I know I can recover it all, I&#x27;m glad he doesn&#x27;t rely on Google Photos, dropbox or similar.

I was very happy to get one of the first Gmail accounts in my country, when it was by invitation only.<p>But this is a distant memory, and nowadays I avoid relying on any single big corporation for anything. Particularly I avoid Google.<p>My main email is in my own domain(s) (paid in intervals of ten years) with gandi.net.<p>Using Duck duck go everywhere I can.<p>I have an Android phone by necessity and because there is no real alternative. I download all my pictures and store them with pCloud instead. No G-drive or Dropbox, as I can&#x27;t trust these services at all.<p>My Gmail account is used for things that can get spam. All important accounts are in the email of my domain(s).<p>If Google decides to cancel my Google account, it would be a minor nuisance, mainly related to reinstalling the smartphone apps with another account, and that&#x27;s it.

Issues like this- are why I jump’d through hoops to have a somewhat secure , somewhat reliable, and somewhat consistent- on-Prem back up of my Google (gsuite) data.<p>It’s not as easy and robust as it should be, but it helps me sleep a tad bit better at night.

I&#x27;ve been slowly trying to decouple myself from google in the last few years (&#x2F;decades) ... but I have stuff that goes back at least 2 decades that I have been lazy &#x2F; hesitant, e.g. contacts on the phone (since I doubt I would have the necessary patience to import &#x2F; export &#x2F; sync contacts manually anymore).<p>But ... seeing this kind of thing, I need to reconsider and at least keep a monthly backup or something ... as far as you know, it&#x27;s not even going to be <i>your</i> fault when you get locked out, so you shouldn&#x27;t assume it just won&#x27;t happen to you.

&gt; In the meantime I tried to escalate internally and they&#x27;re being a brick wall even tho I work there<p>&gt; And this is how it ends. No one fucking tells me to assume good intent ever again. Fuck all of this. Our lives are in a bind because of this BULLSHIT<p>Tiniest violin.<p>Too many Googlers like him (and here on HN) mistakenly believe they&#x27;re not evil, just because of that motto (which Google removed) and because the workforce is full of progressive agitators.

The entire thread is full of people jumping on the hate train, did anyone even stop to consider that Google is right on this? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;accounts&#x2F;answer&#x2F;40695?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;accounts&#x2F;answer&#x2F;40695?hl=en</a> There are two points here: first, they claim to provide a reason for closing your account when you log in to your google account (not google service). The OP provided what looks like google service notification on his mobile, but could be on desktop (thanks to reply for noticing this). Second, after escalating the issue internally, decided to email (internally) people saying this is an attack on his family. He is also publicly looking for a job. This seems like a severe overreaction for a google account ban... I think there is reasonable doubt here to suspect something is wrong here more than &quot;Google decided to arbitrarily ban a specific account among billions in order to target one of their employees.&quot;

This is a good reminder to always backup your photos&#x2F;docs elsewhere - if you have one Synology has a good Google integration that will do this automatically (I then send it up to Glacier for off-site). And also - eschew the convenience of OAUTH - just create an account at every site - it&#x27;s annoying but at least you avoid you&#x27;re entire life being locked out.

Reminds me of Amazon. After I listed my own book for sale there, the account can no longer go anywhere near any page related to sales of other products, returning a &quot;Not Authorized&quot;. To even read about the subject, I have to log out first. My account with twenty years of trust history has been reduced to buy only. Should I abandon it? I&#x27;m not sure.

Has he done anything to raise the ire of the American intelligence services? The agencies that gave us <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;COINTELPRO" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;COINTELPRO</a> and the like still exist. Google is not ultimately in control over matters like that.<p>Getting information on this stuff is difficult, given the blank check the NSA has had from 1959 onwards: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehill.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;congress-blog&#x2F;politics&#x2F;516064-state-sanctioned-secrecy-nsas-criminality-shield" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehill.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;congress-blog&#x2F;politics&#x2F;516064-stat...</a><p>Eisenhower&#x27;s 1961 Farewell Address is misinterpreted by many and totally forgotten by others. Please listen: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OyBNmecVtdU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OyBNmecVtdU</a>

What is a good way to move from Google Photos to iCloud? i have a library over 300GB, is there any product that handles this?

Maybe they detected highly illegal content and won&#x27;t disclose it for those reasons (could be an ongoing investigation).

I was planning to move away from Gmail, once I ran through 15GB of free quota. After reading this, I am thinking that I need to move to Fastmail sooner. I did not realized that my logins throughout the Internet depend on Google. I can not have anything critical in my life to depend on Google. I guess it’s just risk management.

Does Google also disable access to Google Takeout when they disable accounts? If so (and I assume they do), IMO that&#x27;s really the worst of it. It&#x27;s bad enough that they arbitrarily and capriciously disable accounts, but then to also deny you the ability to take out your personal data... that&#x27;s reprehensible.

This is absolutely terrible. All these other companies deal with fraud and abuse in a more humane way. Why can&#x27;t Google do the same.<p>If someone&#x27;s actually in charge there, they need to really do a big shake up in whatever team deals with these fraud and account closures as they&#x27;ve been ruining the brand

This year I have completed by goal of being mostly google free. I have yet to replace the Chromecast. Other than that, the transition is complete. I don&#x27;t want to be held hostage by a single monolithic company with more resources than most nation states.

My approach with Google and these other big companies is to use their free services but treat them as disposable. For example: I use Google Photos all the time, but my photos are also synced to OneDrive which, in turn, is synced to my computer giving me offline copies as well as another cloud-based backup. I use Gmail (and old Google Apps accounts) for email, but I have MS Outlook continually running on my desktop PC syncing all email accounts to offline PST files.<p>The key takeaway is to not to get reliant on any service (free or paid) without having a backup plan if it went away.

&gt; And all his data , some very important and irreplaceable (including personal photos) is held hostage with no explanation #googleaccountdisabled<p>The final response from them just says it was a ToS violation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;miguelytob&#x2F;status&#x2F;1315988742545514496" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;miguelytob&#x2F;status&#x2F;1315988742545514496</a><p>So all of his husband&#x27;s data, including &quot;very important and irreplaceable&quot; personal photos, are inaccessible due to a presumed ToS violation. I wonder that violation could be...

No one will read this, but as a public service I have to say: Storing data you need without backup, or maintaining a channel of communication that you can&#x27;t replace, with a company you don&#x27;t pay money on a regular basis, is a recipe for disaster.<p>Tech companies love to be roach motels for your data. They want to lull you into dependence on their platform for mostly innocent reasons. If they have something you need make sure you have your own copy.

Yikes. This prompted me to quickly find a way to backup my years worth of photos on Google Photos. Was looking to move over to a self-hosted Piwigo instance anyway.

This is the part that everyone overlooks when they&#x27;re basking in the glow if their fancy new free email account. You&#x27;re not really a customer in the traditional sense, so you have very little leverage. Don&#x27;t rely on such an account to be the center of your digital life. Don&#x27;t rely that way on a paid account, either, but still, especially not a free one provided by a huge megacorp.

Is anyone surprised though? This has been the Google status quo for over a decade now, and there is no indication of intention to change, ever.

&quot;What am I being punished for? &quot;<p>&quot;Not going to tell you. But if you apologize, I might unpunish you.&quot;<p>Hmmm... Abusive relationship much Google?

We, the users of Google&#x27;s services, are not Google&#x27;s customers, even though we think we are. The advertisers are google&#x27;s customers. So when you reassess the &#x27;relationship&#x27; this way, Google abusing users is totally fine- Google has billions of users they can treat poorly. They can&#x27;t treat advertisers poorly.

My account at ads.google.com is suspended because of suspicious payments. I never did any payments. I am running a full-scale business using admob and other Google services. I don&#x27;t see any impact from the suspension on the other Google services luckily. I send numerous appeals. Not even a single response. Already for 3 months now.

I lost my Google account too.<p>One day they just stopped letting me log in.<p>They show me a text saying that to log in, I have to give them my phone number. Well, I don&#x27;t want to give my phone number to Google. When I signed up, it was not stated anywhere that one day they might hold all my data randsom and blackmail me to give them my phone number.

I honestly moved my main email to Microsoft outlook and I have a ProtonMail for more private communications.<p>Gmail is not that great anyway, it’s too heavy to use their webmail and using IMAP is a major pain due to their stupid labels and not having real folders.

I&#x27;d be willing to pay a small monthly fee for using Gmail, and get proper support.

So, the thing that google has that I value most is broad single sign-on support.<p>Is there a service (other than Facebook) that has this capability?<p>Is there a technology that we should be driving adoption of that would allow me to host my own SSO?

If you are using Google drive will you lose the data on your local as well? I have a huge amount of work, it would be devastating to lose access to it. I do have backups on storage disks, but still...

This is why I pay for Amazon Photos as well and use double the data&#x2F;time to upload to both. I don&#x27;t want google&#x27;s AI or employees nerfing my entire family photos archive.

I use OneDrive, iCloud, a couple HD for backup of my stuff. I also have duplicate of my OneDrive and iCloud stuff on another storage in case both company does something unexpected.

This happened to me. Luckily on a gmail account I don&#x27;t use much - but it&#x27;s a wakeup call for sure. Moving out of Google, finally, after years of being on the fence.

This reminds me, is there going to be a Black Mirror season 6?

reminds me of the old google-opt-out cartoon <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walyou.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2009&#x2F;09&#x2F;google-opt-out-village-parody.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.walyou.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2009&#x2F;09&#x2F;google-opt...</a><p>seriously I just checked the google takeout page and saw a looong list of services. I would be devastated if somebody were to &#x27;disable&#x27; my google account.

Every time I see these, I get reminded to buy some hard drives and get all the data out of Google but keep forgetting it. Time to follow through.

I just can&#x27;t understand why Google, Apple, and such companies can&#x27;t share the specifics around what the violation actually was.

I hope this is fixed by finding and fixing the cause of the erroneous lockout and not just &quot;account restored, problem solved&quot;.

I moved away from Google two years ago after using it for close to 7 years. Still didn&#x27;t manage to move away from Google Photos.

this is exactly why i think oauth for personal use for most people is nightmare fuel.

I fucking HATE thinking about E-Mail. This made me rant about it in my blog: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dusted.dk&#x2F;pages&#x2F;phlog&#x2F;2020-10-15.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dusted.dk&#x2F;pages&#x2F;phlog&#x2F;2020-10-15.txt</a>

That really sucks. Since its from google, im not that surprised.

Everybody not living under a rock knows that some day you might get banned&#x2F;destroyed by some amok running script from Google. Are we supposed to be enraged that this can happen to buddies from Google employees also?

Gmail is great as long as this doesn&#x27;t happen to you.

I remember my buddy using his gmail account as an SMTP server and spammed people with it then got locked out of Google and they cited this as violation of their terms.

Regieconcha@yahoo.com

make gdpr request to download all your data and photos?

Have they completed the official escalation procedure for resolving issues with Google products?<p>It sounds like they&#x27;re at the point where they are supposed to contact a friend who writes for the New York Times, or similarly prominent outlet, to have a story written about their predicament.<p>This usually resolves the issue, but if it does not, they should run for and win a U. S. Senate seat, then forward the details of their issue on official Senate letterhead.

The victim probably did some shady things that the husband didn&#x27;t know about... Something so terrible that Google would disable their account :O

I understand this is frustrating, but reading through this person&#x27;s thread, it reads as an absolute temper tantrum. A few choice quotes:<p>&gt; Our lives are in a bind because of this BULLSHIT<p>&gt; I am out of office reconsidering whether I should work at a company that continuously escalates its attacks towards my family.<p>&gt; [looking for]... A company that provides a steady salary and respects me, my nationality, culture, ethnicity, sexuality and my family<p>It&#x27;s very hard to take this stuff seriously when someone is claiming lack of access to to their emails and photos is an <i>attack</i> on their life, family, sexuality, etc.

&quot;Hey, I&#x27;m going to leave the control of all my personal files to a faceless third party who can arbitrarily lock me out of access without due process.&quot;<p>No. Don&#x27;t use the cloud for that.<p>&quot;But maybe we can fix the cloud by adding more cloud to the cloud, so that we can back up the cloud to the cloud?&quot;<p>No. Stop using the cloud.<p>&quot;But I have (hundreds of gigs of photos|twenty years of emails) there! I was going to pour a glass of nice Chablis and gingerly sift through them all on a Tuesday evening!&quot;<p>No. Stop using the cloud.<p>&quot;But I&#x27;m working on the next Great American Novel and I couldn&#x27;t possibly be tasked with syncing a backup of it to a USB stick!&quot;<p>No. Stop using the cloud, damnit! How hard is it to understand?

I will say that I can only imagine how annoying and frustrating this is, but the way he&#x27;s approaching this on twitter is not going to win him any fans in his reporting chain. In a fight like this you need senior management as allies wanting to help, not as enemies as you stomp your feet and embarrass them.