Mike Masnick reports on a depressingly frequent story: Google wiping a customer's account, destroying their data, with no human support to appeal to and only vague and evasive messages to account for the decisionmaking. "Talk to the white monolith," Masnick writes. "We've faced it ourselves here at Techdirt."
We've written a few times about independent journalist Tim Burke. Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News. As we noted, this seemed like a pretty big 1st Amendment issue. Burke is also facing bogus CFAA charges because he was able to access the footage by using publicly accessible URLs to obtain the content.
But, with all of his devices seized, Burke at least still had Google Cloud to keep all of the massive troves of (mostly video) data he's collected over the last few years of reporting. Burke said he paid Google "a lot of money for a long time" for an "unlimited" cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google "Enterprise" Workspace customers for a while. However, in the last year or so, they simply phased out that plan, which really sucked for those who had a ton of data.
Using Google to store your data is like using a pawn shop to store your valuables.
