The Evil Thing

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So the other night my daughter had the audacity to attempt to create a YouTube channel.

She went to youtube.com, signed in with her Google email & password and then was prompted to enter birth date.  After supplying this and clicking “next”, she received a big red message that said she was too young to have a Google+ account, and that her account was now locked, which means no access to any Google services (gmail, docs, etc.).

The message said, If she had specified her birthdate incorrectly she could use one of the three links provided which could be used to unlock the account by providing a credit card, a federal ID or something involving a fax machine.

The message went on to say that if this was not a mistake, that the account and all data associated with it would be deleted in something like 19 days.

I understand that maybe there are now laws prohibiting children under a certain age from having accounts on social networks or some such thing, however she has been using these services for years and has hundreds of documents stored in Google Docs.  Perhaps her age was requested back when her original gmail account was setup, but then why was it requested again?  Regardless, at this moment years worth of her work was now locked away and queued up for deletion, and the only way to unlock it is essentially to falsify identity information.

After giving this some thought, I came to the conclusion that the only thing to do was to attempt to recover the account, even if that meant lying to Google about her age.  If nothing else, this appeared to be the only way to have a chance to extract her work from their systems before it was destroyed.  So I went ahead and took the credit-card route, specified my birthdate and provided the credit card information (all using my name, obviously not he same name used for the Google account).

Surprisingly this just worked.

We could talk about the questionable nature of a system that would be so concerned about your age as to threaten to delete your data, but is willing to release its grip as soon as you can provide someone else’s credit card, but the more significant thing to me here has to do with Googles ability to legally destroy the documents and information you have trusted them with.

I say legally because I assume that they have arranged their terms of service in such a way that it grants them the legal right to do so, after all if not then they would be breaking the law by deleting the data in your account.

This being the case, it made me think long and hard about who actually owns the stuff you store in Googles systems.  While the legal definition may vary, I would say that from a practical perspective, if someone can legally destroy something you own, then you don’t really own it, and you should put some thought into how many hours you’ve spent creating the content stored in your Google Docs, or on your Google Drive, or in your Gmail archive, or your YouTube videos, etc., etc.

This is why I can no longer in good conscious use Google systems to create, store or distribute anything of value, knowing that at any moment it could simply all go away, that my access could be revoked and that the work itself could be wiped from existence.

I know that most of you reading this will disregard it, or choose to ignore the warning (I probably would have too), but I I felt compelled to share it if only to explain why I’ll no longer be investing time in these services.

Category: Ideas, Philosophy

5 comments on “The Evil Thing”

  1. I've tried to figure this one out. My kids don't have personal Google accounts, however they have Google accounts at school to do their work, use Chromebooks, etc., and the school never requested any kind of authorization from me. Maybe because it's private? Or because it's through the school? I don't know. However, this is why the "cloud" is somewhere I don't want to live. I have tons of data in Google, some in Amazon, crap on Facebook, etc. I back it up locally so I don't have to worry about it magically disappearing. So, I keep using the services, knowing that my data there isn't mine, but the Sysadmin in me makes sure I make a good solid backup of it on a regular basis, in case it disappears.
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    • Like you ever made something worth saving...
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      • I hear from the Legendary Mr. Weber once ever three years and this is what I get...
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  2. That sucks of course. I thought I had heard something very similar recently, and sure enough: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/google-disables-childs-account-without-warning-all-her-data-is-locked-20111212/ FTA:"The reason? It seems to be COPPA compliance, which is the Federal Trade Commission’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. It governs what information can be collected about a child under the age of 13, and Google’s take on compliance is to not allow standard accounts for kids, and to block any it finds immediately." To answer Matt Ungaro above, it appears that the COPPA thing is allowed to be ignored when the children use Google Apps for Education - which it sounds to be in that case. @Jason - I can understand your anger at what appears to be unnecessary restrictions - particularly after the fact the account has been active for so long - but I think it has to be limited to how Google complies with the law, not the fact that they are complying. (Whether the law makes sense or not is another question). It seems to me that Google should give much more support in these cases - allowing the data to be backed-up, etc. Their "automatic" policy is typically non-user friendly of them. I've always tried to adopt a position which accepts that any and all information I store online is not secure and could disappear at any time - however(!) nowadays that is becoming virtually impossible! Finding a happy balance between convenience and security takes a lot of effort in itself. Best of luck finding alternative resources - I think there are plenty of options out there - and will be interested how you fare. (and that's the benefit of "old" tech like rss - I can still keep up to date with your posts even if you're not on G+!)
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    • I wouldn't say I'm angry Gary, or at least not at what it may seem like. I feel that I may have done a poor job of communicating the central point of my post. I have no problem with Google complying with federal law, and while I'm not familiar with the details of the law, the validity of it is not what I'm questioning either. I'm also not upset because I "didn't get what I wanted", and while I find it unacceptable philosophically (as a software developer) that the system is designed intentionally to destroy user data, that's not the core of my complaint either. At the heart of it is the idea that by using these tools, Google has the right to destroy your property without warning or recourse. While options to avoid this are provided, in this scenario, they require falsification of information that is at a minimum ethically wrong and probably illegal as well. A choice between loosing years of work or lying is in effect no choice at all. I see a lot of comments that describe tools that can work-around this situation (which I appreciate btw, I'll be using one of them soon) and other posts that say (perhaps in a nice way) that this is my fault for mis-using the service or having the wrong expectations. I'm willing to accept that, and I'm even happy to say that maybe I'm an idiot and I shouldn't trust anything important to services like this, but I think these comments miss a subtle difference between Google Docs and other storage services like Dropbox, etc. Here I think an example may help: Let's say you use Dropbox, and you create a document and share it with a friend (or perhaps yourself but on your work computer). In this scenario you are essentially "copying" a file into Dropbox. If Dropbox decides to suspend your account and delete its contents, the copy is destroyed but presumably the original is still located on the machine where it was created. With Google Docs, it's not just the file that is stored at Google but the original copy as well. The original document was authored using these tools, and at the moment of its creation it existed solely within the constraints of this system. This raises tricky questions about ownership. In the first scenario it is clear that you own the contents of the document you have created (IANAL but my understanding of copyright is that by default you hold copyright on written works even before you claim it). If someone were to do something with that document without your permission you have legal recourse at your disposal. In the second scenario the same should hold true, however I would argue that if Google has the legal right to destroy this document (again I assume this because they threaten in a formal way to wield this right), that would imply that your ownership of the work is less than it is in the first scenario. This is my central issue with the situation. Since the authoring tools are integrated into the storage system, and as these are the primary value the system provides, the value of this system is reduced (in regard to my use case) below a point where it is worth continuing to use them. If you look at the value proposition for these tools, how many of them remain in light of the fact that anything created with them is the property of Google, and that the "reliability" of the system is such that it's contents must be ritualistically backed-up to other systems? To me the value of "cloud computing" is robust data storage and ubiquitous accessibility, both of which are undermined by a system that behaves in the manner described in my original post.
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