> Even his business domain registrations

If true this is likely an ICANN violation, or a registry violation in case of ccTLDs. This needs to be reported and could cost them a lot.

If you are on Google do a regular takeout [α] in preparation for a future ban. It exports everything. Easiest way to back it all up and gives you time to wean off Google.

α: https://takeout.google.com/

The problem is that Google behaves like an asshole. It doesn't help that you have the option to make a backup beforehand.

Yes, I agree. But this does help people both mitigate AND move away from Google services. The main sticking point for me with Google is having all your history searchable and now it’s possible to set that up over your takeout data as you move to someone else for email, calendar etc.

I don't understand why they don't at least allow Google Takeout for banned accounts. They've already done all the hard work of implementing it!

Two reasons:

* Some account bans are for illegal content - Child porn, bans so an account state can be investigated, copyright claims etc. In that case, letting a user download their data could violate the law/ethics.

* Technically implementing this in Googles infrastructure is hard. The login session used by takeout has to have access to all data (so that takeout itself can get your data from each service and build an archive). Stopping you taking that same cookie and using it to access services directly isn't part of their auth model.

Despite all this, I think they should try harder, both for the users, but also to save a potentially very expensive EU fine when someone with power in the EU gets impacted by this...

If it is "hard" to let user download their data, then they shouldn't be in this business in the first place. It's like they want their cake and eat it too.

> very expensive EU fine when someone with power in the EU gets impacted by this...

Given how EU works, more likely scenario is money under the table after a period of sabre waving.

Neither of those sound like remotely difficult problems. And honestly the first point sounds like an imaginary problem.

1. When banning people, include a field saying whether or not they should be allowed to access Takeout.

2. Include a one-time authentication token for Takeout in the ban email.

I'm sure it would require some work to implement but so what?

Also takeout is kind of underwhelming: It was probably one of the last things Google announced that I was enthusiastic about:

The rest here is my personal feeling. It might be wrong. I might have missed something.

... only when trying to use it it is dark patterns in layers to prevent you from actually using it:

- getting links to download stuff takes more than enough time to get you to forget it.

- and they only last for a very limited time

- archives are unwieldy

> getting links to download stuff takes more than enough time to get you to forget it.

Building takeout archives is incredibly expensive for Google. Do that just a few times and you might have wiped out years of profit Google made off you. Thats because most data in your Google account (eg. a random email or a photo you took in 2013) is only accessed once and then never again. Storage systems are designed for that. Yet when you go and try and access every single piece of data ever, you're putting more load on their storage systems than years of regular use.

Thats part of why it takes so long to build the archive - they do it at low priority and slowly so as not to overload the service for other users.

Aha, that explains a lot of course.

Still: why make it so hard to get the archives once they are generated?

Once the archive is generated it isn't hard to download it I don't think... Click the link in the email and it starts downloading... They even have an option to split into multiple files for ease of download if you have slow or unreliable internet, and their download links do support "download managers" which can resume failed downloads.

Giving you 7 days to download it seems fine... Remember they are effectively giving you double storage capacity for those 7 days, and hundreds of gigabytes of network egress (which would cost $8 or so if I paid GCP network costs each time I takeout my account).

You defend Google better than any of their official spokespersons IMO :-)

I still dislike Google intensely for a number of things but not for this anymore.

(In case you are interested:

- serving me insulting ads and not giving me good ones whenever I didn't have adblock activated for over a decade. (edit: I've lost count of how many times I've clicked "not interested" on semi nude pictures advertising for scammy dating sites)

- causing me hours and hours and hours of frustration by breaking doublequotes

- killing Google+

- keeping me worried that they will shut me down until I can migrate my last account off Google and a few weeks

- almost killing Firefox

- and the open web

- scheming to make adblockers impossible

- probably more)

What did they do with double quotes?

(I googled it but couldn’t find it, haha)

Try to search for "goolge" on Google.

See if any of the top three or ten results contains the word "goolge" or if they have silently rewritten it in the background.

Adding doublequotes used to mean it should search for that exact phrase. Super simple example of one place were it was useful: when you were troubleshooting a weird crash and you saw a mis-spelling in an error message: you copy or type in that exact message in quotes, bam, if there was a match you got it.

Google is always doing lots of experiments on all of us, vut for the last decade this has been broken for me. It just ignores the doublequotes. Same with the verbatim setting, it has been just placebo.

> See if any of the top three or ten results contains the word "goolge"

The top three did contain "goolge"...

The greatest of sins was killing off Orkut.

I just found out about Google Takeout through this thread.

I was able to schedule it to do backups every 2 months for 1 year, and upload the backups directly to my Dropbox account.

If it works as advertised, I'm pretty happy with that!

They send an email when the link is ready though...

Also, you know have the option to have downloads prepared for you automatically at periodic intervals.

Seriously!

It’s easier for them to just lock you out than give you any kind of limited access.

But if you can’t login, you can’t request your data either.

If he is in Europe he can probably force Google to allow him to download his data under GDPR

Have you tried to use your GDPR rights and complain if they were not delivered? You are most likely get a template response, completely irrelevant to your complaint. Then few more templates when you try to "escalate" and finally you get no replies. That's how those big companies are serious about GDPR. Then if you try to complain to one of the body responsible for GDPR they'll likely say if you don't like the service, delete your account and no further action will be done. GDPR is one of those all sizzle but no stake.

Article 79 gives the data subject legal standing to bring a civil lawsuit against the data processor.

It's been the case before GDPR that you had to at least threaten legal action to make corporations behave. Freedom of association does typically mean that a human can just ban you from ever being their customer again, but that's IMO an important freedom. The monopoly ISP in your municipality doing the same to you does not seem ok, however. And it might not be reasonable to ban ownership of a Google account that's used exclusively for "Sign in with Google".

But these articles are largely toothless when it comes to big corporations. I am aware of only one case running against Facebook in the EU.

Then it is unrealistic to expect that an average individual will have money to sue the data processor, as the cost is out of reach for most of people.

Good to know. But he’s in California.

I believe Google deletes your data fairly quickly after they decide to ban you, so best get that GDPR request in fast.