[aha] Killed by Google - Ucciso da Google

[domenico quaranta]

Con la presente intendo informarti che Google ha disabilitato, con iniziativa unilaterale, il mio Account Google. Il che significa:

- che l'email quaranta.domenico at gmail.com non è più attiva. Se desideri contattarmi, ti prego di scrivere a qrndnc at yahoo.it o dom at domenicoquaranta.net. Se mi hai scritto nelle ultime ore all'indirizzo Gmail, per favore girami la mail su questi indirizzi;
- che i blog http://domenico-quaranta.blogspot.com/ e http://spawnofthesurreal.blogspot.com/, seppure ancora accessibili, non saranno più aggiornati e non sono più di mia proprietà;
- che le dispense e i documenti che ho caricato su Google Documents, seppure ancora accessibili, non saranno più aggiornati e non sono più di mia proprietà;
- che i miei canali Picasa (http://picasaweb.google.it/quaranta.domenico/) e Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/user/domenicoquaranta) non saranno più aggiornati e non sono più di mia proprietà.

Questa notte sono stato ucciso da Google. Se vuoi sapere perché e capire se potrebbe succedere a te, continua a leggere.

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With this email I'd like to inform you that Google disabled my Google Account. This means:

- that the email address quaranta.domenico at gmail.com is no longer active. If you want to contact me, please use qrndnc at yahoo.it or dom at domenicoquaranta.net. If you wrote me in the last few hours, please send your message to these last addresses.
- that the blogs http://domenico-quaranta.blogspot.com/ and http://spawnofthesurreal.blogspot.com/, while still available, won't be updated and no longer belong to me;
- that my documents, presentations and teaching material on Google Documents, while still available, won't be updated and no longer belong to me;
- that my Picasa (http://picasaweb.google.it/quaranta.domenico/) and Youtube channels (http://www.youtube.com/user/domenicoquaranta) won't be updated and no longer belong to me.

This night I've been killed by Google. If you want to know more and understand if you'll be the next, go on reading.

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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.»


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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