also let me be clear that i don't think this is going viral because i wrote a poetic letter that tugged at the heartstrings of twitter. if you think that my story is going viral for any other reason besides google's completely crap user support you need to re-examine your approach to dealing with people.
and if you need anymore proof of that please be aware that i signed up for twitter on wens night. and i do not know a single person, not one single person either physically or virtually, that has republished my letter. this should speak volumes as to how frustrated people are with google and any company that has policies like this. go to twitter, search for @thomasmonopoly and change "top tweets" to "all" tweets and see how your users are responding. because this has absolutely nothing to do with me.
Actually, I'd argue that this is going viral because you spammed the entire internet with your twitter post. Surely someone would bite eventually. Just a hunch, though.
It went viral because all you do is talk and talk and talk and talk, and people love hearing about other people with problems. A "look at that poor sap, I'm better than him," kind of thing.
But anyway, we would appreciate it if you didn't start spamming HN with this story. We know the details. We know you're upset. We don't really care.
If you must comment, one comment per threading level, please. Don't reply to the same comment more than once. And, keep it short. There must be something better to do with your life than tell everyone that Google disabled your account due to ToS violations.
Speak for yourself. I fully appreciate this guy being the one carrying the torch for all of us, who have or will be in the future, wronged by Google or any other big corporation where we have no recourse. Hopefully something positive will come of this.
What came of it was that he's violated Google's ToS, as confirmed by a number of employees. It would be nice if he was innocent, but he's not, so the story is meaningless.
No, the point is that its irrelevant that he violated ToS. Google should not unilaterally wipe a user's data without providing a chance to retrieve it. I'm sure the ToS lets Google delete an account for no reason whatsoever. That doesn't mean it isn't evil to delete a user's data.
