Google is good. Good at what they are doing. So good, that their services slowly but surely started to dominate my online life, and just until now I didn't really see anything bad in it.

Google Maps helps me navigating my city, the world. Google Mail helps me to connect with my friends, my colleagues and everybody else online. Google Drive holds pretty much every piece of information around my taxes, payslips, apartment, loans, mortgages, invoices and what not for now over 10 years. Google, more precisely YouTube, is hosting almost 2,000 short videos of my son growing up. So far, so convenient.

And then there was this Christmas cookie video that brought the love story to a standstill: a one minute video of a bland cooking session that included a short adaptation of Belmondo's famous monologue in the French 1960 classic movie À bout de souffle, which made my son laugh out wholeheartedly by the way, made things tip over and get me banned from everything I have on Google. Uploaded on December 23, I woke up the next morning with a short text message from YouTube stating that my account has been disabled for violation of their terms and conditions. The first and last piece of information I would ever get!

Well, they didn't like that cake video I uploaded last night!

I have been indeed disconnected from all the different Google services and wasn't able to log back in. No more emails, no more docs, no more maps, and no more kid videos for friends and family: Christmas 2019 announced itself to be offline.

Shit happens, YouTube has 30 million users a day and adds every single minute new videos of 500 hours! I know that only automation through algorithms can deal with this and that things sometimes go wrong. I appealed on Christmas day and acknowledged the confirmation message, expecting things to be fixed very soon:

Request Received

The Google Accounts team will review your request and be in touch with an update as soon as possible. Most requests take 2 business days to review, but some might take longer.

Thanks for your patience.

The two days went by, so did the week and the year. I wasn't too worried yet, it's been Christmas holidays and Googlers deserve their vacations too. I only started to seriously worry two weeks in the wait, when I tried and failed to make my case heard. You need to know that Google cannot be reached by email, nor by phone, nor is there anybody responsible for answering user requests. Further more I realized that I was not the only one to be trapped in this machine between YouTube and Google. Thanks to the Google Accounts Community board I finally got some answers, although they didn't bring me any closer to my lost data. Even worse, I haven't heard back at all since my question has been transferred to the YouTube Community board.

Deprived from so many well-oiled services since the incident happened, I have started to move away from Google service by service. I found the checklist on No More Google fun and helpful, and instead of one very powerful friend I now have many: Firefox, ProtonMail, Ecosia, Vimeo, Notion, ...

The fact that Google doesn't have a valid process to correct things that went awry is unacceptable. Good for them that they don't have to, as they state on the according help page: Sometimes we need to cancel and remove an account. We'll use our best judgment in these situations. In some urgent or extreme cases, we might not provide notice.