Imagine, if you will, that all of your life's work - all of your photos, memories, documents, and videos which document years and years of your life experiences - suddenly disappeared without reason or explanation. Imagine, if you will, that entire portions of your life were suddenly deleted at the blink of an eye, and you were given no avenue to retrieve them.
That was the nightmarish scenario I found myself in at the beginning of April, 2022. And it is a haunting message about the dangers of entrusting your data and your property to a giant, faceless, trillion-dollar corporation where your livelihood and nearly all of your life's work exists at the whim of a faulty computer.
Since I was 12 years old, I have been using Google Drive to host tens of thousands of documents that chronicle my life, my experiences, and my work. Not only does Google host thousands of pictures and videos that I've taken over the past nine years - chronicling vacations, family events, and even just everyday life - it also hosts thousands of my early writings, article drafts, research links, and old projects that I treasured very much.
In essence, you could say, Google has had control over a great part of my entire life - something that I trusted them to take good care of.
That, as it turns out, was a horrible, horrible mistake.
On March 31, 2022, I received a message from Google stating that one of my Google Drive accounts had been suddenly suspended, leaving me no way to access any of the documents on it. The reason for the suspension given was that my account had "harmful content" on it.
Of course, Google never explained what this "harmful content" was. Not once did they ever direct me to a specific video, picture, document, or file that they found objectionable, nor did they give me any opportunity to review or delete the "harmful content" in question. To this day, I still don't know what they found objectionable, and despite my repeated appeals and requests for clarification they still have not told me what it was.
That account was one of multiple I have on Google, and when I lost it I lost a year of documents, pictures, and videos I had stored on there.
But that was only the beginning of my nightmare.
Later that night, I discovered that another one of my Google Drive accounts - a larger one this time - had also been suspended without warning. The reason given for the suspension was the same: "harmful content". Yet again, Google gave me absolutely zero context as to what "harmful content" was found on this account, and though I was given the opportunity to appeal the suspension I had very little to appeal on without knowing what exactly they had flagged. On that account were years of work I had done on articles, drafts, and research documents - even stories I had written when I was younger - and all were suddenly lost at the drop of a hat, for reasons Google has yet to explain to me.
At this point, I began to panic. I didn't even go to sleep that night. Instead, I stayed awake to both fight the suspensions with appeals and to back up the remaining Drive accounts I still had access to. I worked throughout the night downloading every file from every remaining drive account - including this one - in the event Google decided to go after those ones too.
But even now, the nightmare still was not over. The following day, on April 1, 2022, my personal Google account - one that I'd had for my entire life - was suspended by Google, yet again for perceived "harmful content". As with the two previous suspensions, Google never, ever specified what file they deemed to be "harmful content", and though I appealed all three suspensions multiple times, all were rejected without Google ever elaborating on what "harmful content" they found.
Even today, I still have not the faintest idea what "harmful content" Google found on my accounts, and I am still not sure if my remaining accounts - including the one I use to host this website - are even safe anymore, and because Google still stubbornly refuses to tell me what "harmful content" was on my three accounts, I have absolutely no way to prevent them from going down either, short of deleting the accounts myself.
Countless suspension appeals and requests to Google for clarification have been met with either automated rejection - where Google simply reasserted the presence of "harmful content" without identifying it - or just dead silence.
In the end, the only salvaging I was able to do with these accounts came in the form of a glitch I discovered, where an archived version of the suspended accounts can be accessed by switching off the internet and mobile data on a smartphone.
While I was able to salvage a great number of my documents by utilizing this glitch, to my great dismay the glitch does not work on pictures, meaning thousands of images and videos I stored on these accounts are lost forever. Images of vacations, birthdays, family members, pets, places I've visited, friends, and countless others are gone - wiped away with no opportunity for me to get them back or even know why they were deleted.
As of right now, I still have a few of my Google accounts up and running, but I have lost all trust in Google. I am in the process of removing the data from my accounts and switching to storing everything on external hard drives - an expensive and arduous process but one that I feel is the only way to keep my life's work and memories safe from harm.
And this brings me to my biggest gripe: Google itself. By being a tech monopoly that has virtually bought out its entire competition, they have effectively separated themselves from any and all accountability - and have thus been given free reign over my entire life. I guess one could argue that I set myself up in this situation by deciding to utilize Google's services, but is that really surprising given the utter monopoly they have over technology?
Basically everything I use to store, write, communicate, and share on the internet is owned or controlled by Google, and the consequence of this is that my entire livelihood exists at their whim. And, as I've seen firsthand, once they decide to target you, they don't even need to give you a coherent explanation for doing so. Your entire livelihood can be thrown away in an instant with little explanation and even littler hope for recovering it. And that is just not fair - especially since my pictures and writings on those accounts are MY intellectual property, not Google's. Google's own terms of service state that I retain ALL intellectual property rights over my work, and yet they have stubbornly refused to even return my content over to me for safekeeping.
Unfortunately, this nightmare might not even be over for me yet. My last account - the one I use to run this website - is still up for now, but, with no way to know why my other three accounts were shut down, I have no way to know if this one is next on Google's chopping block. It could go down any day, any minute, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.
I have, of course, backed up as much from this account as I can, but if this Google account goes down, everything I have - this website, my YouTube account, my Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Steam, Snapchat, Disqus, Origin, GOG, Battlenet, Amazon, Patreon, Netflix, Ebay, and probably dozens of other accounts will all be lost, along with thousands of pictures stored on Google Cloud which I still cannot back up.
I've had problems with big tech before; three years ago my first Twitter account was banned for reasons I thought were unfair, but even then Twitter still had the decency to show me exactly what tweet it was that they found objectionable, even if I think they misinterpreted it. Google won't even tell me what file or files they found on my account that they determined to be "harmful content", leaving me little recourse to properly appeal my suspensions or explain myself.
I'm sure I am not the only person to find himself in such a nightmarish situation as this. This is what happens when you entrust your life to a gigantic, faceless corporation that incentivizes money and power over honesty and accountability.
I am almost positive that an actual human being never once looked at my account or my appeals, and that for the entire time I was fighting these suspensions I was helplessly fighting with a computer - a computer with faulty A.I. and an inability to correct its own mistakes.
There is very little I can do at this point to repair the damage. I have considered taking legal action against Google for seizing my intellectual property - or even to force them to disclose what specific content they found objectionable - but I have little hope of that being effective given the immense size and power of my adversary.
I have also considered removing all of my data and pictures from Google and finding a different service to use, but this is more easily said than done, as Google has a virtual monopoly over online services pertaining to file sharing and storage.
This entire horrid debacle - this dreadful, Kafkaesque nightmare that I've found myself in - has been extremely exhausting, depressing, tiresome, and draining. It has taken time away from doing things I love, like writing. I've had to completely adapt my life around this disaster, and while that might sound dramatic I assure you it absolutely is not. I really don't think the average person realizes just how much they depend on Google for their everyday life. I know I did. I entrusted them with a great deal of power and control over my life, in the good faith that they would protect my data and my livelihood.
That was a mistake - probably the biggest mistake I've made thus far in my life. And this mistake was a costly one - one that, unfortunately, seems to be all too common and one that Google seems to be totally unwilling to rectify. And that needs to change.
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