howdyhowdy
6 hours ago
I recently had an account banned for 'bot' activity that I use for work. The Open Compute Project uses google docs and drive EXCLUSIVELY for all of their work, and this email address is tied to it. I don't have a gmail account, this account was created using my work office365 account.
This weekend my account was suspended for 'suspected bot activity' and that I was welcome to file an appeal that would be reviewed over the course of 2 days to determine if I should be turned back on or not, and that I could get my account data via takeout.
So I did the take out thing, which broke 98kb into THREE zip files due to 'size concerns' lmao
All activity was null save one YouTube channel subscription that I made accidentally because I needed to use the YouTube app to TFA my account at some point and hadn't logged out. That was the only piece of data for this account, was this seriously the thing that triggered the autoban?
about five minutes after submitting my paragraph and a half of appeal I get a generic 'fuck you goodbye' with no further recourse, no human, no longer appeal process where a human eventually gets around to things, just...get your data and get out.
At this point I'm wondering if a human every even clicked a confirm button much less looked at anything in this workflow. Now I'm stuck, there are a ton of files and docs I don't have access to that I was actively working on that I now have to what, link to a personal account?
This is fucking insane. If this surfaces at all on HN and someone at google sees it please help. Shit like this is why people are fleeing your products.
Sincerely, ScreamingIntoTheVoid
gonight
6 hours ago
I've been warning my boss that we need to stop using google for our work email accounts because of exactly shit like this. Not looking forwards to the inevitable "I told you so".