Commentary

Google Temporarily Wrecks Man's Life (Sort Of)

You should pity poor Nick Saber. The president of CrossTech Media returned to his desk on Monday after taking lunch to find himself completely locked out of all of his Google services -- even though he pays Google to use Google Apps. It brought his business to a halt.

You should pity poor Nick Saber. The president of CrossTech Media returned to his desk on Monday after taking lunch to find himself completely locked out of all of his Google services -- even though he pays Google to use Google Apps. It brought his business to a halt.The mere thought of losing access to all of my Google services makes me quiver with fear. I rely on Google for practically everything. My Gmail account is my main e-mail address. I do all of my writing in Google Docs. I store my photos in Google's Picasa. I use Google's Reader for my RSS feeds. I use Google Maps to get directions from Point A to Point B. I use Google's Blogger to riff about the music industry in my spare time. In short, my very life depends on having access to Google's services.

So did Nick Saber's. Until Monday, that is.


More Internet Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

When he attempted to log into his Gmail account, he received a message from Google that I hope to never see. It read, "Sorry, your account has been disabled." Um, eek!

Using another e-mail system, he tried contacting Google support (he is, after all, a paying customer). He then received this e-mail, "Thank you for your report. We've completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we're unable to reveal any further information about this account."

Wow, that's rather disconcerting.

It turns out that Nick was able to restore access to his account after several hours of dealing with Google customer support. Until his account was restored, his business was at a loss. Without access to his Google account, he couldn't get anything done.

I would have been in a similar quandary. Granted, I have some back-ups in place, but not all of the Google services I use can be duplicated elsewhere, such as Blogger or Gmail. I have other e-mail accounts, but my Gmail account is my main address. It's where I funnel everything. I'd be up the creek without a paddle were I ever to lose access to Gmail.

I suppose the moral of the story is, no matter how trustworthy some applications and services are, always have a back-up plan.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links