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Showing posts with label Privacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Privacy. Show all posts

Thursday, 17 January 2013

Everybody Won't Get Proper Notification When Their Blog Is Deleted Or Locked

One problem that we're seeing in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken involves blog owners, who recently discovered their blogs deleted or locked, by Blogger - and without any notice received.

The account actions may be required with the blog deleted for a suspected TOS Violation, such as hosting malware, porn, or spam - or locked because of "suspicious activity" on the Blogger account.
Why was my blog deleted? I never got proper notice!
Too many people depend upon email notification - and may not receive proper notification, in all cases.

Blogger provides a dashboard based malware / porn / spam classification notification / recovery process, which may not be available for everybody. Similar to malware / porn / spam classification, there will be issues with DMCA violation notification.

This is also a problem when accounts are locked for "suspicious activity", and when blogs are locked for hosting malicious third party gadgets.

There are several reasons why some blog owners won't get notification of their blogs being deleted or locked, by the various Blogger / Google security processes. Besides notification limitations, nobody should expect to get advance warning of action being taken - as this would simply encourage the intentional spammers to never request review.

Intentional spammers, if permitted, would play 3 Card Monte, endlessly, with their spammy blogs. Both the notification, and advance warning, limitations contribute to confusion about the various Blogger / Google security recovery options.

All email based notifications may not be properly delivered. The owner of any email account, which may not deliver email properly, is still responsible for reading any important email messages.

Too many Blogger blogs are owned by Blogger accounts which are based on inactive or nonexistent email addresses. Owners of these blogs will never see email notification, when they - intentionally or not - make themselves anonymous.

In other cases, some people may get the email notifying them of problems - but their email program may misfile the email, in a folder which they may not check, regularly. In some odd cases, somebody other than the owner may get the email.

In team blog ownerships, any blog owned by the team is subject to action against any team member accounts. Blogs affected will simply disappear from the dashboards of all team members - with no opportunity provided for appeal or review.

Finally, too many blog owners maintain multiple Blogger / Google accounts, and are not completely sure which Blogger account may own a given blog. These owners may not even see the dashboard based "Deleted Blogs" button / link, because they will be logged in to the wrong Blogger account.

Not all of the above scenarios are entirely the fault of the blog owners - but the blog owners are the ones who will have to make the effort to resolve the resulting problems.

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Monday, 7 January 2013

Anonymity, Your BirthDate, And Your New Blogger / Google Account

Not all new Blogger blog owners understand why they are asked for their birthdate, when they setup a Blogger or Google account. Some folks see this as a violation of their right to privacy, and enter a fake birthdate. Some real serious privacy enthusiasts might enter "01/01/01", just to get through the setup process - maybe intending to correct it, later.

Nobody entering "01/01/01", for one's birthdate, suspects that claiming such a birthdate makes them - in 2013 - appear to be 12 years of age. Unfortunately, 12 years is below the minimum age for owning a Blogger blog. Since Blogger / Google tries to protect the young people on the Internet from inadvertently exposing themselves - or their families or friends - to unknown dangers, people who may appear to be of insufficient age are subject to having their Blogger / Google accounts, and Blogger blogs, deleted or locked.

If you entered a fake birthdate some time ago, and now find your account or blog locked or deleted, you need to prove your age to Google - and you should do this promptly. The Google Accounts document Frequently Asked Questions about Google Account and Age Requirements explains how you do this. The process of verifying your age / birthdate is not convenient - and some privacy enthusiasts may claim that it too violates their privacy rights - but it is necessary, to let you correct your birthdate - when you are legitimately of legal age.

Now, you have to hope that you did not, intentionally or mistakenly, also provide a bogus email account as your Blogger / Google account name / recovery email address. The process of identifying yourself as the owner (former, nominally underage) of a given Blogger / Google account is easier to do, when you have access to the email account stated as the account recovery email address.

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