Google - GA/workspace

TLDR; Don't trust Google for ANYTHING. They are flat out extortionists and actively design extortion rackets.

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Back in the day, Google offered business, organizations, enthusiasts, etc, free 'Google Apps' accounts and promised lifetime grandfathering. Probably a fair trade for gaining market-share, access to business intelligence data by scanning content, etc. Of course the ended up welshing on the deal. Probably the legal loophole they used was to re-name their service to 'workspace' and then automatically 'convert' the GA accounts to a new name.

As with any such business oriented service there is an 'admin' account to adds and modifies users. I doubt that anyone logs on to the admin account just to kill time, and no sane security person would give users (even themselves) admin privs.

I used my GA account for my domain mail, and made extensive use of the cloud drive and business aspects. Esp spreadsheets. This because I do a lot of collaboration and it is convenient.

So, a few days ago, every window for every user logged out with a "Google Workspace account has been suspended." message.

Having planned for some time to stop using Google for anything, the first thing I did was change my DNS records so I could receive mail again. I certainly don't rely on Google for domain registration and never did!

No sane person is going to set up a backup mail to be dependent on the service. I know my shit was working because I would get security warnings to my unrelated mail if I logged in with a new device and that sort of thing. They never sent any mail saying the whole service would be suspended and I looked. If they didn't wish to have as many problems as possible they would have sent mail to, or put up banners for USERS saying that the service would be suspended so 'talk to your administrator' or 'make backups' or whatever. This would be super obvious for anyone who designs systems. It's clear to me that they wanted as much leverage as possible and doing a surprise data freeze was the way to do this.

For a while, any login attempts whatsoever were met with the above error. After a day, a normal login thing did appear wishing one to log in with the admin account. Logins to the normal user would seem to sort of work but get one into a loop. I got sort of conned into adding admin perms to my main user account. This necessitate more DNS work (A TXT addition) and a 3 day wait.

I had trouble remembering exactly the name I used for the admin (which I didn't use normal '~admin' since I set a few GA's up for family back in the day...to my regret). Eventually I found a message in my backup non-google mail and was able to get the real admin user name. I stupidly had notes about usernames and account structure in cloud drive since it's supposed to be reliable. Anyway, they wanted me to change the password on the admin account. Another TXT in DNS and a 7 day wait.

All I want is just a backup then I'm totally done with these slimy motherfuckers. They are sort of promising that even when one does get admin access the only option is to give them your credit card details so you can sign up for their 'new' service and then maybe get access to your data again. I'll bet money that this will come with a new TOS which gives them even more latitude to scan all your stuff, keep it forever, and sell it to the highest bidder. Not to mention that they now have your credit card details for whatever nefarious purposes they might choose.

Google is notoriously bad about having anything close to tech support, although I will say that a year or two ago when they froze my logins because I made the mistake of logging in from another country, a real live human talked to me and helped me get access again. Only because it was supposedly business class GA or 'g-suite' was the name at that time...I never did get my regular gmail back. Not this time for anything resembling 'support'. If you find a method that might get through to any sort of support via a ticket, you'll find 'our fault' system failures and 'to many requests' web server errors from the initial forms and won't get to first base.

A good solution if Google actually cared about being a tiny bit honorable would be to re-activate accounts for a small grace period so people who never got the obscure or non-existent message that they were about to be separated from their e-mails, documents, files, etc, would have a chance to take the appropriate actions. It's pretty much beyond doubt that this mess was carefully planned and executed to squeeze as much out of the 'customers' as they could get with no scruples whatsoever. It really is one of the most egregious scams I've ever seen in the industry. It's much worse than bitlocker for people who do keep their stuff on-line in redundant storage for supposed reliability reasons. e.g., business people who tend to have more high-level needs than your average NPC jerk-off who entrusts everything to a 5 year old lap-top hard drive.

If I even do get to look at my data again (via paying Google's extortion racket fee or by legal means or whatever) it is unknown if they even will have backup methods any more. I did some backups a year or two ago so some of my old docs and stuff should be recoverable that way, but I've been working on a lot of projects since that time and all of that work is gone.