Clouds cast shadows
alex August 19th, 2008
Like many people, I’ve been gradually moving towards using web based apps and keeping my data ‘in the cloud’ (e.g. GMail, Remember The Milk, Google Docs etc). This is despite the occasional report of problems, such as having your GMail account deleted - I’ve basically been thinking that this would never happen to me.
Well, you may have seen my posting the other day about being banned from Google Groups. This is still unresolved - despite sending a number of emails to Google support - and has made me much more wary about my ongoing usage of these types of services.
I do realise that these are ‘free’ services (though Google does generate huge profits) , so maybe shouldn’t expect too much, but I would at least expect to have received notification that I was being banned and the reasoning behind it - as far as I know I’ve not knowingly done anything wrong. I appear to be blocked from accessing all Google Groups using my GMail account - including groups I’ve never visited before - which is contrary to the message I receive which says that the group administrator has blocked me.
My main problem with all this is that fact that I am now the administrator of 3 Google Groups which I am unable to access (and I’m the only administrator for each) - so now I’m unable to prevent other users signing up and posting inappropriate messages.
I wonder how many more times my experience will be repeated for other users before Google does anything about it… but with 08 Q2 profits at $1.25bn they probably won’t care too much.
