Deported by Google
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I like to watch porn. However, I am tired of the professionally produced stuff and am more into watching amateur movies made by other people. I am always looking for groups where that kind of stuff is shared and one day I found an anonymous WhatsApp group dedicated to trading videos of that nature. Nothing was going on, so I forgot about it and went to sleep.
When I woke up, there was a notice on my phone saying “account action required” with my email address, so I clicked on it, only to find out that I couldn’t sign back in because my account was disabled. After about half an hour trying to find the reason, I checked my WhatsApp folder and found out a bunch of child porn.
Disgusted, I deleted all the files from my phone, but the damage was already made. I have a bunch of relatives abroad and I use WhatsApp to stay in touch with them and to share photos and videos, and naturally, I have Google photos set up to back up everything from that folder. Of course the offending files made their way into Google’s servers. Never in a million years would I have thought of this, it was the first time I had ever used my phone for porn.
So I tried to reach Google through their contact us page. Not only there is no support number, but they offer a “recover account” link that doesn’t support my account because of the nature of the violation.
Ok, so no phone, no chat and no automatic account recovery. So I tried this “appeal” form to see if I get an answer, only to receive this email about a week later:
Are you kidding me? Of course I know I violated the ToS, I just want to talk to someone to explain that it happened by accident and see what my options are. I tried to appeal one more time, but I got the same response.
So I headed to the Google product forums to see if I could talk to anyone.
Although places like Reddit and Facebook have exponentially less users than Google, they have teams dedicated to answer support questions. They might take a while to respond, but there is always someone from the company willing to help. Not at Google.
The first thing you notice when you go to the Google Product Forums is that there are no Google employees there, all the work is done by volunteers who try to help as much as they can. However, most of the help is just a rehash of what is written at the support pages for any specific issue.
So after about a week messaging back and forth with one of the volunteers, he told me he was going to talk with a “contact” he had at Google. Of course, his answer was the same as the email I got from Google.
Up until this point, I haven’t told you that I’m an immigrant. I am on an asylum case due to life threats made to me over email. You guessed, THAT email address. The email account itself is part of the evidence to support my asylum case, and additional case documentation was on that account. I am potentially facing deportation over an involuntary breach of the ToS.
I had the last pictures of a couple of deceased relatives that I will never be able to see again. I’m also trying to recover access to my bank account from my country and I’m kissing my Google Play paid applications goodbye. I don’t even want to know what will happen to my Steam and Battle.net accounts. One would think that having your data on Google servers is an acceptable form of backup, but clearly, this is not the case.
I guess I could sue Google over my data, but I can barely cover the expenses of my immigration case, -especially considering the case got complicated because of the loss of crucial evidence and now I have to produce fresh copies of most of the documents- and even if I could, I’m sure there’s some fine print that will be used against me. I’m better off taking the loss and moving on.
A few days ago, United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz sent an email addressing the negative perception of the public after an incident that involved the forced removal of a passenger from an overbooked flight. In it, he said “It happened because our corporate policies were placed ahead of our shared values. Our procedures got in the way of our employees doing what they know is right.”
When a company is unable or unwilling to look at the specifics of a case and just limits itself to rigidly enforce the rules, they become obnoxious and out of touch with what should matter the most: the customer. Munoz knows it, and Google could learn a lesson from there.
That’s why I’m ditching google. I am no longer going to feed them my data, history and whatnot. I’m building my own cloud server and will migrate everything Google to self-hosted open source versions of their services. I’m switching to DuckDuckGo (granted, they use Google, but they don’t keep user data) and I’m doing research on alternatives to Google apps that I can sync with my own cloud server.
Of course, the process will be difficult and the solutions are not as polished and elegant as their Google counterparts, but at least I will recover something I didn’t know I lost a long time ago: control over my own data.
