It's been [0] days since the last "Cloud provider banned me and I lost everything" article.
Everyone who depends on the good graces of a cloud provider for something (not just Google, but Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whatever) needs to at the very least, take a moment, and figure out what their plan is when they are suddenly banned and locked out permanently, without any way to contact the company.
Does life just go on, since you don't have anything important hosted there? (Best Case)
Do you lose some precious family photos and use it as a tough learning opportunity to stop doing what you're doing? (Next best)
Do you lose access to your E-mail and are suddenly not able to do 2FA, reset passwords, communicate with the company or the Internet in any way, and so on, and now have to panic?
Do you complain online, hoping that someone in the company sees your post and has the ability to restore your account, which you then continue to use because you learned nothing?
Having an online account suddenly suspended is a real, non-zero, but unlikely risk. You should at least have a disaster plan if you rely on these things for anything important. Or better yet, stop relying on them for important things like your identity or precious files!
"A guy on HN told me one time, 'Don't let yourself get attached to any cloud services you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.'" -- Robert de Niro
To me, the action is the juice.
> Everyone who depends on the good graces of a cloud provider for something (not just Google, but Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, whatever) needs to at the very least, take a moment, and figure out what their plan is when they are suddenly banned and locked out permanently, without any way to contact the company.
This is one of the most common sentiments I hear expressed on HN, next only to "if you're not building your software business around Claude Code, you're gonna left behind".
google is worst because normal people with no tech experience can accidentally get banned from the only email account they ever had since 2005 which has all their insurance tax resumes family photo etc , never even understand how it happened , or fix it
I'm one such person among the billions worldwide, that is a minority on this forum.
Had my workspace account blocked, too. It was an early google account (long before they offered email with it) on a free tier they stopped offering in 2012 - in 2022 they made all free tiers pay. I thought I would get downgraded to the free tier, but nope, all was gone and blocked. Not even google keep (note taking).
In the case of Google Workspace for our company, I'm using Cubebackup[1]. I've been going through the disaster recovery exercises lately, and thinking about what I've been calling "external backups", which are backups of a service that are stored and restorable outside that service.
It can be surprisingly difficult with a lot of SaaS products (including Google).
[1] https://www.cubebackup.com/
> It's been [0] days since the "business I contract with to provide services locked me out of the building we rent, ghosted me, and threw all my shit out" article.
We really need to just fix the laws.
> We really need to just fix the laws.
This. There are something like 150 million Americans with a Google account, and these days it is more important than a phone number to have a working email.
Email is a utility. Email companies should be heavily regulated and controlled like phone or other utility companies.
Americans need a government issued digital signing token to prove their identity digitally. There are a lot of services demanding ID verification these days and use a 3rd party to process driver's licenses and faces. It's super inefficient, full of friction, and probably unregulated (dodgy).
Someone claiming to work for the US Digital Services replied to me here years ago that this was being worked on in relation to the easily compromised SSN but I'd say all bets are off on a consumer friendly government service like that now.
I don't know if I agree it should be regulated like a utility, however I believe contracts and suspensions should require more work than a click of a button.
The ease of suspend isn’t the problem here. It’s that there is functionally no recourse once the suspension happens, justified or not.
The only people who seem to get un-suspended are the ones who can generate news media outrage or who can call their friend who is a director/exec at the company. (Obviously this intuition is flawed, but it’s hurting the reputations of these SaaS providers.)
> it’s hurting the reputations of these SaaS providers
It's not hurting them enough. Hence the regulation is needed.
Yeah. And every time I see a new "cloud provider banned me and I lost everything" article (i.e: every few days), I always just want to ask the same question(s):
"I'm sure it's very sad that you've lost all your [email|calendar|photos|whatever]... but, were you, a person who has chosen to rely on a service provided by a cloud provider with a track record which goes back well over 15 years of locking people out of their accounts with no recourse for the user, not aware that said provider has a track record of doing so, in some cases without even giving an explanation why?
Were you not aware that the service you were relying on them for was critically important to you? Or were you unaware that the provider of this service has the capability to completely disable the service you're relying on with the simple flip of a switch?
I'm fascinated by this decision you've made - could you please explain the thought process by which you chose to use this service which you have no control over for critical things?"
Come now, are those really the rhetorical questions you'd fling at your Aunt Tillie panicking on the phone, because she can't email anybody or renew her important drug prescriptions or whatever?
Most people expect better because in most other walks of life it is better with some kind of plausible appeal route, and the deficiencies we're discussing don't really get publicized. These service-outcomes are the outliers in need of repair, not the consumers.
But I'm not actually really talking about regular people losing their personal email where they happen to keep a few sort-of important things that are relatively-easily replaced/transferred into a safer system. Those people I can sort-of understand, and don't really need to ask my questions - the answer is simple: "I never thought about it until now".
But aunt Tillie doesn't call herself an "entrepreneur" and doesn't rely on the existence of her gmail account for the survival of a business, and she especially doesn't have a blog where she whinges about the fact she did that.
I'm talking about people who should know better, who should be smart and considering things like "what are the existential threats to this business I'm trying to run?", who use gmail for vital business functions like payroll, and who tie their auth for everything else to their google (or whatever other shitty cloud service) accounts.
Yeah I'm afraid I'm going to have to challenge this assertion - I've seen variations on this article about ten thousand times. The post I was replying to was pointing out that they've also seen this article about ten thousand times. The vast majority of people that I have mentioned this problem to (and I do that a lot!) have responded with "oh, yeah, I've heard about that happening to people".And another thing: my questions are not rhetorical. I am genuinely curious about the thought process that leads to these decisions. See, I didn't actually have to see this article even once - what I did was I gave it about 10 seconds thought, and came to the conclusion that relying on unaccountable third parties for mission-critical business infrastructure is an existential risk. This all seems very obvious and straightforward to me. Perhaps I'm some kind of super genius? I'm doubtful about that.
It's both. I agree that there should be some recourse. Show me a thing I can sign to bring in a law requiring all companies to post a phone number where a user can speak to a human and I'll sign it and have everybody I know sign it too.But if you're not giving any thought to who controls your vital data and you lose it as a result of that, that's at least 50% your fault.