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Be careful when you use the cloud…

Caution

Here’s a cautionary tale of what can happen when your connection to that data is pulled because of accusations that you violated Terms of Service.

Google Apps user Dylan M. was a happy user (and evangelist it seems) of numerous Google services — until the company disabled his Google account.

On July 15 he received an automated message telling him that Google had ‘perceived a violation’ and since then hasn’t been able to access anything linked to that account. Monopoly vehemently denies claims that he did anything wrong and says that he “did not violate any Terms of Service, either Google’s or account specific ToS” and that Google hasn’t offered up any evidence to support its claim of a violation.

So how much data did Monopoly lose when Google pulled the plug on his account? A mindbogglingly scary amount:

I had spent maybe four months slowly consolidating my entire online presence, email accounts, banking info, student records, etc, into that one Google account, having determined it to be reliable. That means in terms of information, approximately 7 years of correspondence, over 4,800 photographs and videos, my Google Voice messages, over 500 articles saved to my Google Reader account for scholarship purposes.

I have lost all of my bookmarks, having used Google bookmarks.

I have also lost access to my Docs account with shared documents and backups of inventory files. I have also lost my Calendar access. With this I have lost not only my own personal calendar of doctors appointments, meetings, and various other dates, but I have also lost collaborative calendars, of which I was the creator and of which several man hours were put into creating, community calendars that are now lost.

I have also lost my saved maps and travel history. I have also lost in my correspondence medical records and a variety of very important notes that were attached to my account. My website, a blogger account for which I purchased the domain through Google and designed myself, has also been disabled and lost.

You can read the rest of Monopoly’s letter to Google here.

Monopoly has made numerous attempts to contact Google, all of which have so far been unsuccessful.

Source: cloudcomputingzone.com | 22 Jul 2011 | 11:27 am