What is troubling is:

1: This guy had to go to the fucking MOON to get his account back, ranting and raving on twitter like a mad man- and it took nearly a week!!

2: Google's support sucks- God help any of us who is in a similar position.

3: Even getting Google's attention is not enough. Since there is no formal appeals process, you have to harass Google employees in a informal method. Matt Cutts even said on a HN thread that "Google took the appropriate action" - So what is it? Did he break the TOS or not? This is the whole issue. Without a formal process, you just get knee jerk reactions. Any person other than this guy would have stopped trying after Matt essentially said he wasn't getting it back.

4: Even after all that, he did not even know why his account was deleted for a week.

5: For all Google's talk about data liberation, they suck with this. Takeout only gives you access to useless social crap and if you want to download your email its a long process that involves reading guides, using POP, IMAP, etc.. How about just giving me a link to download my mail?

6: No warnings, no contact- This could have all been solved if Google asked first and shot later.

* Link to where matt_cutts looked into this and still decided he cant have his account back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465

Do you seriously think there is any other US provider (i.e. subject to US child pornography laws) that would have behaved any better? Given the allegation, it probably was legally risky for Google to keep his data at all. There are laws that criminalize even the "innocent possession" of child pornography. Had things gone another way, I presume Google would have argued they were preserving evidence, but they have to be very, very careful regardless. I'm absolutely certain there are many providers who would have behaved worse (account closed, no comment, no investigation, no appeal, data given to the police then deleted).

In the alternative scenario, many of the things you want Google to do could easily be illegal. After an allegation, any warning, contact or access to data could easily have been construed as aiding and abetting a crime in progress and/or obstruction of justice (particularly by an ambitious, headline-seeking prosecutor). What you don't seem to understand is that, once the allegation was made Google couldn't do squat for @thomasmonopoly without risking criminal charges until they determined the allegation was false. And that determination was going to take time no matter how you slice it.

Personally, I find it hard to think of what Google could do better in this sort of situation. My two suggestions (and I'm not sure they're practical):

1. Commit to manually reviewing every automatic suspension for these kinds of potential criminal allegations.

2. Be clear about when an account is being suspended and investigated versus suspended with a final determination made.

Also, complaining about having to use POP or IMAP to pull out your email? Seriously? It's a standard, it lets you import them into any email program you want, and just giving you a compressed archive of everything would be a nightmare of compatibility if you wanted to do anything with it but read the messages in a text editor.

But he very specifically didn't say that he had "decided [Thomas Monopoly] can't have his account back".

This is presumably because that decision isn't even Matt's to make. (He is the head of the webspam team at Google.)

But regarding "freeing" your data from Google, it's hilarious trying to see people argue that it's somehow difficult or hidden. It's not. Takeout lets you grab all of your social information. Any popular desktop mail client can connect to Gmail over IMAP and automatically download every last e-mail in your account. I click one checkbox on Google Docs and then hit download to have a backup, or I can connect through WebDAV using a popular FTP client. There are similar easy solutions for Picasa, Calendar, and the rest. Just because they don't provide you with one shiny big button to do all the work for you doesn't mean they don't provide you with very accessible ways to backup your data offline.

At the end of the day, an automated system did what it was designed to do. Google should definitely work on it's customer service channels, but until then I'll happily continue to use their free services and backup on a scheduled basis.

[0]I'd be shocked if Google doesn't use data mining and heuristics to discriminate between legitimate accounts and spammers, pornographers, etc....

As the post indicates, Thomasmonopoly's account wasn't disabled for something like misusing AdWords; it was an investigation of potential child pornography. Thomasmonopoly himself says in his write-up that "I too found the image bordering on the limits of what is legally permissible and hoped to highlight the fact that it is allowed to exist within a grey area of legality."

Google has a zero tolerance policy for child pornography. I am glad that Thomasmonopoly got his account reinstated after a full investigation, but it's also incredibly important that Google takes appropriate action on potential child pornography, and United States law compels companies to react to child pornography in certain very specific ways.

For what it's worth, I got a chance to do a question and answer session with some congressional staffers earlier this year, and one of the things I said was that (in my personal opinion), current laws on child pornography were suboptimal.

Here's a quick example from a few months ago: http://www.winknews.com/Local-Florida/2011-04-29/Fla-Senate-... "The Florida Senate voted to extend the state's anti-child pornography law to include not just possessing but also intentionally looking at such images." Looks like the text of the bill is here: http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2011/0846/BillText/File... and I don't see any exemption for people who fight or take down child pornography. And that was literally the first link I found after doing a search on Google.

So in theory, looking at images in the process of trying to fight child pornography could be illegal. You don't need to dig far to find similar brittle examples. That's why I'm glad that I work on webspam and not on trying to stop child pornography.

So if I take pictures of my children in the bathtub with my Android phone, I am risking having my entire Google account deleted with no recourse except to try to 'make a stink on the internet'?

Because frankly, I would never take photographs to be developed at Walmart because they're well-known for calling the cops on parents who took pictures of their children.

Is Google the new Walmart?

I'm a parent of four young kids, so I can appreciate that those tub pictures are adorable. If I really wanted that picture, I'll take the hassle of finding a smaller print shop willing to do it over enabling child pornography any day.

-- the police came and charged my tenant with selling drugs, so I kicked him out.

and

-- every day I obsessively searched through my tenant's belongings when he was at work to make sure he wasn't violating any laws, in my sole opinion, and then when I thought I found something illegal, I kicked him out.

Google can't judge what is or isn't child pornography. Lawyers and judges can't even do it. Nothing is child pornography, no matter how explicit, unless it appeals to the "prurient interest".

And in fact I'm not even located in the United States. The child pornography laws in my jurisdiction are less vague and more narrow than those of the United States. Is Google's crawler programmed with laws of every jurisdiction worldwide? I rather doubt it.

It would be perfectly legal for Walmart to take a non-proactive approach to photo developing. Machines do it all anyway - the only human step is picking up the stack of photos and putting them in an envelope. But Walmart has directed its employees to search through all photos, searching for kiddie porn, and to call the cops. That's a personal stance of Walmart's CEO.

Google is similarly protected - it has no legal liability in the United States for serving as a passive conduit for anything its users care to distribute. It's unfortunate that Google's CEO is adopting a similar stance.

Maybe they don't have a choice.

Good question. Just like a good programmer finding a bug should ask "How could I prevent this bug from happening next time?" it's pretty common that when a situation like this occurs, the relevant people at Google ask "How could we prevent this situation from happening next time?"

In this case, I believe the solutions that have been proposed elsewhere on this thread (letting the outside person know about the suspected violation, letting the outside person have access to their data) can be fraught with potential legal difficulties.

I'm sure that people at Google will be discussing what different steps could prevent a situation like this from happening in the future.

To just highlight the difficulty of "what is child porn?" problem, it wasn't just Walmart's officials, but local police who took the complaint, prosecutor that initiated the case and probably a number of other officials in the pipeline who made incorrect determination

I would have assumed AdWords a hundred times over.

edit: Just realized I said "images" and not "image" in my original post. I was thinking about the image even he thought was a legal grey area.

If you can describe it, design it, deploy it, and operate it - you might have the beginnings of a multi-billion dollar social network on your hands. Rather than rant at google/facebook for their inadequacies, go out and ship something that will truly demonstrate how wrong Google/Facebook are.

To take an extreme example, if you told me a debugger sucked because it couldn't predict in advance whether or not running your program would end with an exception, I'd tell you that you didn't have a reasonable or useful scale for debugger suckiness.

So what you are saying is that if something sucks and cannot be made better than I should not say it sucks. Maybe you should not even be making the food in the first place. Start from scratch and make something totally different. Saying that something sucks is a valid criticism. Saying why it sucks would be even better so that the person taking the criticism understands why but that is besides the point. If something sucks, it sucks. Caveat: suckiness is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure it sucks for the person who's account gets closed and he doesn't even know why.

>>To take an extreme example, if you told me a debugger sucked because it couldn't predict in advance whether or not running your program would end with an exception, I'd tell you that you didn't have a reasonable or useful scale for debugger suckiness.

Yeah, suckiness is in the eye of the beholder. You believe it doesn't suck, I believe it does. To be fair, your example is a really extreme case and that is not what we have here, therefore it is completely irrelevant.

I absolutely agree there is a degree to which suckiness is in the eye of the beholder, but there are still measures of suckiness that are unreasonable and useless. Going back to my debugger example, the standard of suckiness proposed is provably impossible to satisfy (it is equivalent to solving the Halting Problem). That's not just an "eye of the beholder" difference.

The next step is realizing that unless you've thought about how you might fix the suckiness and made a good-faith effort to understand the constraints the cook is operating under you don't know where on the reasonableness scale your definition of suckiness falls.

You can say the dessert sucks because it doesn't have fresh mangoes, but if mango season was months ago should the cook take you seriously?

This exists - it's called paying for something you use every single day, and is a core part of your existence (both online and off).

Why more people aren't self-hosting or purchasing email hosting services (and yes, that includes SLAs and proper customer support) is beyond me.

And paying for an host, why bother? Just get a domain and then you can change your DNS MX records in a hour or so if Google ever bans you.

I've seen this false argument too many times on the internet. When can we be done doing this?

Black and white is rare.

Seriously? Does anybody think this is OK? If there was a crime, shouldn't it be the legal system that dealt with it, rather than some corporate entity, like Google?

This sounds awfully lot like a witch hunt to me. The least they could have done was inform that they had handed the case over to legal authorities.

Yes.

But corporate entities must handle these situations carefully. If your web host botches the DMCA process, they are liable. If Google's support technician accesses child pornography on Google, that technician risks child pornography charges.

It's an absolute case of a corporation covering their ass, but absolutely needed in this legal environment, especially around radioactive allegations like possessing child pornography.

For example, Nicholas Merrill (John Doe, of ACLU v. Ashcroft) was hit with a national security letter that barred him from disclosing anything about the subpoena, even that he had received a subpoena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Ashcroft.

As a response, some providers have started providing warrant canaries: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

They're obviously not infallible and have never been tested in court, but at least companies are trying.

The issue in this case is that with a potential child pornography situation, the legal risks are much different and harsher in all kinds of unexpected ways.

That would make building a training set hard ....

I can only imagine those responsible for developing such systems would require serious therapy as well.

Or, couldn't users get a warning that they're about to be perma-banned? E.g... "The Google Gods have banned you. You have 48 hours to save any data you wish to keep. Afterward you will be unable to log in & access any Google product." They'd still have backups of everything regardless of what the user does in that 48 hours if they'd like to initiate legal proceedings or whatever.

Yeah, that would be fantastic.

They should, however, tell you precisely which part of the TOS you violated - down to highlighting the specific words.

With all due respect, unless you're a lawyer, your comment has zero weight.

If I rent a hotel room and use it to store a barrel of cocaine, and a cleaning lady discovers it, I'm fairly certain they are 1) under no obligation to me to allow me to retrieve my cocaine, and 2) are probably legally prohibited from allowing me to collect my coke barrel.

I didn't downvote, but I disagree. I don't have to justify every decision I make.