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from the how-do-you-trust-a-company-that-can-delete-your-life's-work? dept

Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ever engage constructively with users the company fucks over. At the time, I dubbed it Googles big, faceless, white monolith problem, because thats how it appears to many customers. Going all the way back to 2009, I had suggested that the company needed not just better customer support, but something like a user advocate.

This issue shows up time and time again. The company screws people over and generally theres no one to talk to. Too bad. Talk to the white monolith. Weve faced it ourselves here at Techdirt.

And, of course, in situations where someones full Google account is taken down, and where theres little to no recourse, it can really fuck people over. Last year, we wrote about a NY Times story by Kashmir Hill concerning a parent who not only lost his entire Google account, but also was flagged for passing around child sexual abuse material (CSAM), after a medical professional had asked the father to take photos of his son regarding swelling. Despite flagging him as a potential criminal, he couldnt even talk to anyone at Google to explain what happened.

Hill just recently published another such story, regarding a woman losing her entire Google account after one of her 7 year old sons, messing around with a camera and uploading the videos to YouTube, published a video of himself naked. For obvious reasons, thats a problem, and the video was taken down quickly, but Google shut down the womans entire Google account and said it would be deleted.

But its not just issues regarding CSAM that are creating these kinds of issues.

Weve written a few times about independent journalist Tim Burke. Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News. As we noted, this seemed like a pretty big 1st Amendment issue. Burke is also facing bogus CFAA charges because he was able to access the footage by using publicly accessible URLs to obtain the content.

But, with all of his devices seized, Burke at least still had Google Cloud to keep all of the massive troves of (mostly video) data hes collected over the last few years of reporting. Burke said he paid Google a lot of money for a long time for an unlimited cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google Enterprise Workspace customers for a while. However, in the last year or so, they simply phased out that plan, which really sucked for those who had a ton of data.

As you can see from the above email, they told those who had formerly used a ton of storage on their unlimited plan, that their account would go into read-only mode and they wouldnt be allowed to upload any more data. Tim Burke and his 237.22 TB of video files were among those put into read only mode, which he assumed meant that, at least, that content would be kept safe (hopefully until he could get the feds to return all of his computer equipment).

Instead, over the weekend, Google reached out to say that since hes using too much storage, theyre going to delete his entire account in seven days (later this week).

That email sure isnt subtle:

Your Google Workspace Enterprise Standard for your account burke-communications.com has been scheduled for suspension and will soon be canceled, and your data will be lost.

As Tim notes, this is his lifes work. And even if he had access to ~250 TBs of free storage, its not even clear hed be able to transfer that much data in just seven days.

But, of course, Google has its big monolith problem. Theres no one to speak to. Youre just dealing with the machine.

That seems bad?

And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesnt have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit. And finding (and paying for) multiple backup services that can handle 250 TBs of data is likely pretty cost prohibitive.

One hopes that some human at Google might finally realize how bad this is and give Tim the time he needs to find another home for the data (or just give him back the plan he originally paid for, or at least let him store the existing data there as suggested in the earlier email).

Filed Under: cloud backup, customer service, data backup, tim burke, unlimited, white monolithCompanies: google

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Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life's Work Will Be Deleted ... - Techdirt