“Your Google account has been suspended”

Can you even imagine seeing those words? They send shivers down my spine. danah boyd over at her blog tells the story of a friend of hers who had this happen: mail, calendar, documents, social network (Orkut)… All because the person accidentally gave out some information to someone they shouldn’t have and had their account hijacked.

A couple of lessons to learn. First, if you (personally) use an online email/calendar/document management tool (such as Google), are you prepared if, for some reason, they block access to your account? Second, if you as a ministry use a vendor-supplied web site or an ISP, are you prepared if, for some reason, they block access to your account?

This gives a whole new meaning to backing up your data! I, myself, have always thought that I was rather smart for using an online email system such as gmail (and on online calendar and document tool) because then I can get to my stuff from wherever I want, as long as I can get a net connection. After all, Google is never going to die, right? But I never thought about the idea of Google canceling my account for a reason outside of my control.

Of course, there are several solutions to this problem: you can set up a mail client to keep a copy of all your mail and sync your calendar with a client package. Or you can even have one mail account forward all messages to another. But it is much more difficult to synchronize all of the customizations you have made (labels, categories, saved searches, etc.). Several interesting solutions to this have been suggested over at Lifehacker, so if you are interested, check them out.

Tags: danah boyd, gmail, Google account