How Google Could Murder Your Digital Identity
TechNewsWorld
Until Google puts in place a clear customer service organization, make sure you keep a copy of your stuff on your own hardware. This is likely good advice for any online service. Google really needs to start focusing on customer satisfaction, though. Its current perceived position of "hey, it's free -- take what we give you" isn't likely going to work in the long term.
I'm in the midst of doing the biggest tablet review I've ever attempted, and I have to admit I'm rather impressed with a number of the Android offerings. The funny thing is, the ones closest to the phone work the best, suggesting there is a bit of a Windows XP/Vista event going on in this space.
While I was doing this, I was sent a link to a Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) customer who got royally screwed when Google effectively gave the death penalty to everything he had stored across Google's online applications. There is a huge warning here.I'm going to make the product of the week the best of the Android tablets I was sent, and that's the Asus Transformer -- largely due to the keyboard integration and extra battery (the thing has days unplugged).Let's start out with the Google warning. Evidently, Dylan M., who goes by the name "Thomas Monopoly" on Twitter, had a bit of a problem with Google. A long-time supporter, he recently woke up to find Google had pulled the plug on his digital identity.
Google Warning
Now he had pretty much converted everything to Google services. He used its storage (and paid for extra capacity), used its social network, used its email and used its applications. He is a grad student and had more than 500 articles cached for research in his Google reader (gone); he had migrated all of his bookmarks to Google bookmarks (gone); he had consolidated on Google his 200 contacts (gone), his backup files (gone) and his docs (gone).The guy even put all of his calendar items (doctors' appointments, meetings, dates) onto Google, and they are now gone. He had used Google Maps extensively, and all of those records are gone. Oh -- and it isn't just access to new items either. His entire mail account and documented history have been deleted.
In effect, and you can read it in his words here, Google wiped his digital life from existence. Google pretty much gave him the digital death penalty, and there was no due process, no warning, and no real explanation.
Now he doesn't have access to his files, can't get his email, can't contact his friends, and is pretty much screwed. Google doesn't provide someone you can call, and so getting reinstated has been problematic. Actually, a better way of saying this is there is no real appeal process. In effect, he was tried and told about the guilty verdict after his digital identity had been executed -- and, apparently, he has no recourse.
Posted by Blog'sMania
on 8:45 PM.
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