TROM Google Account back!? WTF!

As you may know Google deleted my entire TROM Google account in May this year without a warning. Everything I had: gmail, picasa photos, google drive, API, everything … except for my Youtube account, that was there but I could not access anymore. So it was weird as fuck. Contacted them and they said they cannot help me out. Checked several times on a special Google page to get the confirmation that my account was deleted and it was indeed deleted (confirmed by Google). I even created another Google account to post our TROM Series there since I could not access the old channel. For the past months I checked the account several times and it was the same – inaccessible. I did that because it felt weird that they deleted everything yet my Youtube was still up and running, so I hoped to at least see a message from Google with an explanation – I thought that it may take them a bit of time to let you know the exact reason of why they deleted my account.

Last night I tried to sign in with the old credentials and it fucking worked. Just like that. WHAT!? Every Google service was back again – all of my files on Google Drive intact, gmail, picasa photos, everything. What is even weirder is that I had that gmail address set up to forward emails to my personal email address and it never did that, UNTIL I logged in last night and started to forward emails out of a sudden. In a way it looked like my login activated my account again or something like that. I have 1.3k unread emails (imagine that), and even though most could be spam, I still lost some important stuff because of this circus. I also realized that I was paying for my “deleted” Google drive for the past months when I could not access it … I deleted that account now.

This is beyond weird. I searched through all of the unread emails to see if Google sent me a cookie or a bottle of wine in apology for the stupid mistake they made, but none what so ever. All I can tell is this: Google deleted my entire account without telling me a thing about it. Then I checked and it was confirmed by Google that it was deleted and only if I made an appeal to court (or some legal shit like that) I “may” get it restored. I, of course, did none of that and forgot about it. They continued to charge me for the Google Drive however. Yesterday I tried to log in and it worked – my account was back again. No notice from Google about that. So they kinda deleted my account for 3+ months without telling me, and then brought it back from the dead (again without telling me).

But I lost my “faith” in Google entirely regardless if they restored it – although who knows, maybe in a week I can’t access it anymore. I am glad that this entire thing with Google happened so that I can learn a lesson: never trust any company with your data (digital stuff). This experience made me back up everything locally and use more and more the offline Linux apps available. I will post TROM Series on the Youtube channel again, here https://www.youtube.com/user/TROMdocumentary/ but I won’t make a big fuss about that. Whoever watches there, good for them, but I will only promote tromsite.com for everything we do. I can control tromsite.com entirely and you can bet that you’ll find all of the TROM stuff there. But I can’t guarantee you’ll find TROM stuff on Youtube or anywhere else.

So, Google re-enabled TROM account, and I give little fucks about that. Fuck off Google :P. Don’t need you bro.

It is unfortunate that we can’t share TROM videos properly with people – if Google doesn’t close our account, then it for sure will eat us alive because of copyright, so it will make our TROM Videos on Youtube unavailable in certain parts of the world. Either way, it is a reason not to care to use Google anymore. This goes to show that these companies own you. They can do whatever they want and whenever they want to.

Thank you Linux community for allowing me to give the middle finger to all of these idiot companies. Most of what I use is open source and free.

You, the one reading this, maybe should learn something from this and avoid giving your digital stuff to companies, no matter how sweat their offer seems. But more than likely you won’t properly get this (like I did), and only after going through what I went through (rebuilding VideoNeat and all of the hassle that followed the disabling of the account) you’ll learn.