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Get a new Instagram account. It is a free service.
The worse advise. If anything, he should just keep away from Instagram and never go back.
I disagree. If one finds a service valuable, it continues to be valuable if you have a new username. I am not excusing Instagram's behaviour. But I am pointing out the fallacy in believing that you own your username.
For the service to be valuable, users are led to believe that when they create a username and a password for themselves, their username will not simply disappear and access revoked at any point in time. That would be quite a useless service wouldn't it?
Indeed, especially for a service like Instagram, your identity is your entire reason for using the service. By taking away the article author's username, they also took the entire account away, including any content he posted. For most users this represents months or years of interactions and activity they can never get back. Depending on how much they use the service, their entire online identity could potentially be lost.
Outsourcing your identity to a company that treats you as the product - good luck with that.
The hyperbole of the talk of violated rights took my sympathy about down to zero. It's a shitty move on Instagram's part to be sure, but I don't think even the most European of Europe's governments defends the right to the Instagram account name of your choice.
But probably have the right to not get your IP destroyed. And just transfer the account once it is created.
This is assuming that instagram held the only copy of those pictures (so loss leads to IP being destroyed). I doubt anyone would keep the only copy of any serious IP on a third-party free service. (just to make things clear - I'm not defending instagram, but deleting photos on a service users don't pay for can hardly be called 'destroying IP')
Instagram's TOS probably gives it an explicit, perpetual license to your IP.
You rescind sympathy because someone has a erroneous thought about the legal nature of the way they were wronged?
It seems like he should be at least notified before they seized his account, though.
What could be the grounds of taking account away from him? This guys is not a spammer, everyone who sees photos there can figure it's not a football player, but different Andreas Iniesta. Football guy could get verified account with nickname Iniesta official or smth. Very sad story, I feel for the poor guy :(
The modern policy of no customer support by these services is a little worrying.
I'm in a similar situation with google suspending my gmail account because I tried to make play store purchases while traveling (apparently this is a "suspicious access pattern").
Now I'm out 5 years worth of emails and have no way of contacting google (Despite being a paying google apps customer and registered on their payroll system). Frankly, I'd rather like to be able to pay to receive some support from these companies.
Oh well, at least they made my emails bounce.
tl;dr why don't web companies offer paid support to their users?
I've got a mixed feeling about this.
On one hand, because a friend and I operate a mostly-free opensource online service, I can appreciate the cost associated with even reading customer e-mails and triaging which one is important to reply to. For a free service, especially one that has millions of users, it's just not economically justified to run effective customer support. And it's not a good move to take someone's account away, but then again, it's a free service so pretty much the account belongs to the company, not the person.
On the other hand, not being able to get any support from Google when their APIs change and break our stuff is annoying (keeping it polite :).
Perhaps there is a model there for services such as Instagram to offer paid support. I'd gladly pay for Google developer support if that was an option, but it doesn't seem that they care enough to offer it.
Are you really Instagram's customer? As in, they accept money from you?
I don't use Instagram. But in Googles case, very much yes. And I'd like to give them more money for some customer support.
May I recommend Fastmail? Only sent them one support request of sorts, which was more of an alert that they were letting too much spam through. Got a detailed reply and the customer support rep even tweaked my spam score threashold settings. All in all a class act.
I'll definitely check them out. Picking a new email provider is really hard, reliability is key. And to me gmail used to represent the ultimate reliability, but no more.
In my experience over the last 7 years they've been rock solid, no lost emails that I can discern, only 2 or so short incidents when they were down for a little while for whatever reason. Storage reliability might not be quite as high as for Google, given that one meteorite in the right/wrong part of the North Atlantic would take out their NYC and Amsterdam colos, and no doubt the Iceland one they're setting up now per recent email, see https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/architecture.html for lots of details.
On the other hand, they're a lot more transparent than Google, their special sauce does not include their infrastructure, most of which is open source or they've open sourced, and no doubt due to their singular focus and relatively smaller size you can get contact real people rather easily, sign up for updates on their software and infrastructure, etc. Google is so big that, as you've discovered, they don't have to care.
I'll second the FastMail recommendation. I closed several Google accounts and migrated them to FastMail a few years ago and it has been a good experience. The UI is very much faster and spam filtering is every bit as good as GMail's was. No complaints about uptime, either.
I wish more people knew about rollernet.us . They're incredibly excellent as an email service provider for technical users.
I'd definitely recommend Fastmail. Fast, clean interface, easy to use, very customisable (including wildcard mailboxes), and great support. They've got a really interesting blog [1] with some technical content on there as well.
[1] http://blog.fastmail.com
Fastmail is great. They're also doing a lot of interesting work to bring mail access protocols out of the dark ages with JMAP.
https://github.com/jmapio/jmap
They accept money from us by selling our data. There is a transaction, it just isnt conventional.
You send them actual money?
I think that anyone reading the post you're replying to understands what the poster is saying. Feigning ignorance just makes you come off very poorly.
And what exactly is the poster saying? That they have a contract with Facebook whereby the poster gets to use Instagram in consideration of the quantifiable amount that Facebook earns from selling any and all data that the poster gives them?
What the poster said is pretty straight-forward, if you can't understand it then the concept is either beyond you, or you don't want to understand it. You don't have to agree with what the poster is saying, but so far you haven't voiced disagreement, you've only projected ignorance (real or fake) over what the poster actually said by continually asking for clarifications. If you want to form an argument, then by all means go ahead, but none of your posts thus far are good examples of how to do that.
And to be frank, I'm not sure if I can read stuff like:
in any way that gives you the benefit of any doubt. I mean c'mon. The poster said that there was an "unconventional transaction" happening. Since when does a "transaction" imply such a contract? It comes across as you purposely being obtuse either because you enjoy trolling or due to some OCD-like need to be "right" on the Internet. If neither of those are true, then I apologize, but would suggest that you reflect on how you are coming across to others.
There is no transaction , it is called crowd sourcing. You're working for Instagram, Facebook and Co for free,in exchange of a "useful" service. You are wilingly giving up personal informations for free. The customers are the advertisers, you are the "user".
You do know that Google offers 24/7 phone support for paying customers, right?
https://www.google.com/work/apps/business/support/
Yes, but that support can only help you with business accounts. Not with personal accounts, even paid ones.
That's interesting, didn't know that. Hmm, that is definitely a weird dichotomy.
See, you're confused - you actually think you're a customer of these companies.
I'd venture to guess that they do have customer service, but you do t fall in to the customer category. Now if you started a $100,000 'branding campaign' with them- the you'd be a customer.
I pay for gmail, I pay for drive, I pay for adwords, I pay for google apps, I pay for GCE and play store. (and undoubtedly a plethora of other services I couldn't remember)
I think I fit at least some definition of "customer".
And I'm still not asking for free support, I'd gladly pay Google 2k an hour to get someone to assist me.
You're paying to be a power user, and you're still not a customer in Google's eyes. As the parent said, the only true customers are the advertisers who buy your information and eyeballs from Google.
But I am an advertiser! And surely GCE customers are customers too.
(My GCE spending has been far bigger than a hobby project)
I’m beginning to think that Google is too large to have actual customers, per se, since any group of paying users is still too small for Google to need to pay attention to.
I know how you feel. I'm locked out from Google Play Developer console. I've been locked out since beginning of June and have not been able to get in touch with anyone. I've used the contact us form several times and no one has emailed me back.
------------
Unable to access a Google product
If you've been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has been suspended. Read on for more information. Your access to this Google product has been suspended because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service. For specific product guidelines, please visit the homepage of each Google product you're interested in for a link to its Terms of Service.
Google reserves the right to:
Disable an account for investigation. Suspend a Google Account user from accessing a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system, if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated. Terminate an account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice. Next steps for suspended accounts: If you believe your access to this product was suspended in error, contact us.
I have my own domain with a developer account (I can install my own software) for a couple hundred dollars per year with unlimited email accounts. You can get hosted domains with some limitations for only a few dollars per month. And I get immediate phone customer service 24/7. Years ago I decided not to use gmail or any of the free crap to avoid the kinds of problems you are having.
Assuming Instagram is behind this, it is bad business to do that. Instagram by itself is nothing, it's users are what made the service, and showing a lack of respect for them it is their worse publicity.
And this while thousands or more spam bot accounts are added daily, and while Instagram could easily ask or force the user to change is handle. Anyway, good to know.
I am not the author of the post but I thought it was interesting because it's related to something I've been thinking for a while: the "namespace" for humans is quite limited.
World's population grow fast and practically no new first or last names have been introduced in the last years, therefore the chances of having another person with your exact same first and last names and more exposure than you is growing exponentially. Plus, thanks to the Internet, if someone with name X does something "remarkable" that name X will be associated to that individual forever, creating a "digital shadow" over those future individuals with the same name.
I remember someone who had my exact same first and last name, and he had bought the domain [fist_name][last_name].com ... The annoying problem was that person was also a developer and his website was awful. I was always worried that someone could google me, find his site and, as he was a developer too, think that poor site was mine.
I have the same problem! http://nathanbroadbent.com/
I plan to give my child a new last name for this reason so he/she could have unique google hit. But I am not sure what the legal implications of this are.
Depends where you live. In the UK, the person registering the birth can give any surname:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1987/2088/regulation/9/ma...
In the UK, there is no legal formality around changing one's name (you can change it by deed poll if you want a piece of paper, but you change your name by simply using the new name), so they could change it themselves anyway whenever they feel like it.
What about the social implications
Are you sure you (or your kid, for that matter) would want them to be that accessible on a Google search? Seems that could come back to bite them.
I say that because my name is pretty unique -- most hits on my name are relevant to me -- and I have to be very careful about anything I make public. Even more so than most probably have to be.
Fortunately, I'm a pretty boring person and it's not been much a problem.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about having a unique [1] first/last name pair.
The bad case IMO is sharing an unusual but not unique pairing with someone who you really don't want to be confused with. Back pre-web, a friend of mine in NYC shared a name with someone who was involved in a fairly serious local baseball scandal. My friend received everything up to and including death threats on his voicemail.
[1] According to "deep web" searches, not entirely but the one or two other cases have no web presence and may well be deceased.
The uniqueness of my name has yet to bite me in the ass. I'm sure there are other Pavel Lishins (Pavels Lishin?) in Russia and Eastern Europe, but I appear to be the only one on this half of the globe.
So far so good for me. I had a little last minute concern about airport security but they didn't bat an eye. I think that blended families are common enough so that different last names aren't a big deal.
Every year, I wait for my name(first, last).com. Every year, the guy who doesn't use the site much, waits until the last day to renew. Maybe one day he will forget? Why do I care? I really don't, but just want it out of greed? I have my nickname, plus last name .com up on the Internet, and no one remembers me? Or, since I still can't bear to put up any personal information--they probally have no idea who I am? I put up a cryptic poem, and expect people to resize it's me? I'm narcisstic, dumb, or crazy--probably all three?
Try being called Tom Anderson. Both the Myspace era and the height of popularity of The Matrix films were trying times for me.
Heh. I know four unrelated guys named Steve Miller. They might be willing to trade your "Misssssster Anderson"s for their "Some people call me a space cowboy... yeah"s.
It could be much worse.
A friend of mine has a common name. Unfortunately this moron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Peterson in California has his own Wikipedia entry.
I just searched Google for that name, no quotes, and the entire first page of hits is about the moron in California. I guess the bright side is that my friend can fly under the radar.
Terrible stuff by Instagram. Iniesta the footballer already has a very successful (5.4 million followers) account on Twitter using the handle andresiniesta8. It looks like versions 1-7 have been deleted. However the guy who wrote the article already has a Twitter account using ainiesta, which clearly isn't one of these imitation or mock accounts. The footballer hasn't moved Instagram handles, but it does look like Instagram are directing the author's alias to the footballer's existing account. Awful.
fyi, it's "8" cause that's the number on his jersey.
And using a combination of their name and jersey number as a username is very common among athletes, it doesn't mean they couldn't get just the name.
FTFY
Oops! I meant to say Instagram account. He already has 5.4 millions on Instagram using the *8 handle.
GitHub did the same thing to me. Changed my SSH keys and renamed my account. I used to have "rbishop", now some other developer has it.
No notice, no communication, nothing.
When I contacted the person at GitHub who did it he refused to answer any questions or explain anything.
So watch out... If you have the same name as an employee's drinking buddy, prepare to have your account removed without notice or explanation.
github sucks. Use gitlab man :)
I still like bitbucket
What was your old account name? Just bishop?
Was your account inactive by chance?
They have rules that after an account is inactive for a significant amount of time it is subject to removal.
I know this because I reclaimed a VERY inactive account. It had one repo that was forked years previously and never had any updates. And the user never contributed to any repos or anything. No activity of any type in years. So, I contacted GH support asking about the account and they removed the account and told me I could register it if I was fast.
How much time elapsed between you speaking to GH support and them removing the account?
I would very much hope that GH would attempt to contact the account holder before they deleted the account!
A very short period honestly.
I was surprised how easy it was.
That being said, I would have gladly contacted the account holder but GH removed that capability a long time back. Instead I had to resort to the TOS rules that allowed inactive accounts to be removed.
IIRC, activity on private repos isn't exposed on the user's page. Is it possible for a non-employee to tell the difference between a truly inactive account and one that has activity on only private repos?
And this is why I asked if the account was inactive and deletable. A staff member checked the account and confirmed that the account was inactive and deleted it so it could be reclaimed.
That sounds like quite a story; you should consider writing it up somewhere other than an HN comment. That's a very serious issue, not least of which because GitHub uses usernames all over the place to identify people.
Holy shit! Can you give us some more background? Was the account inactive? Free or paid? Did you try contacting anyone else at github?
Hey there. I'm the person that was awarded your account. GitHub has/had a form and all I did was submit a request and it was given to me. They said they deemed you as inactive for a substantial period of time. I'm not saying this is right or wrong but I thought you would take solace in knowing your old username is in good hands.
Sincerely,
the other rbishop
The Instagram FAQs on their site say that account names are first come, first serve.
They say that if the name you want is on an account that seems inactive you should consider periods, numbers, underscores, or abbreviations to come up with an available name.
They say he violated their terms of service. I took a quick look at the TOS, and don't see anything that having the same name as a celebrity and using your name for your Instagram account would violate. I suppose it is possible that he violated some other term completely unrelated to this whole name thing, and that's why he got kicked off, and then they gave it to the football player even though the football player already had an established, verified, active Instagram account using the same name he uses for his verified Twitter account.
There is one TOS term that his name could be construed as violating, if one were take a ridiculous reading of the term. That's Basic Term 12: "You must not use domain names or web URLs in your username without prior written consent from Instagram". The football player has the andresiniesta.es domain. If we take "domain name" in the rule to include the domain name with the TLD portion removed, then any username with the string "andresiniesta" in it would be covered.
I had a similar thing happening to me. Friends were traveling and shared their photos on Instagram, so I decided to log in to my old account which I hadn't accessed in a few years.
On the web page, it says "Your username or password was incorrect." Upon trying to recover my password with my email address I get " That e-mail address or username doesn't have an associated user account. Are you sure you've registered?" When trying with my username instead I get "Sorry, this user is not active."
I decided to try to login with the app, and there I got a message basically stating that my account was disabled because of not following the Terms and Conditions (same as OPs, don't remember the exact wording in English). They don't tell you what you did to break those conditions. They do tell you however, that there is no possible way to contact them or to get your account back. All your images are gone, your friends can't follow or contact you again and there is no way you can reactivate the account or get access to the user name. No email was ever sent notifying me of this happening, ever.
Worst "customer" experience ever.
If you hadn't logged in for a few years why would you expect it to still be open? It's a perfectly reasonable policy to recapture unused accounts.
So, who defines "unused account"? I mean, I see your point in this instance, but who wants the chore of logging in to all their accounts every 6 months (or more often?) just to avoid losing them? What if merely logging in becomes "not using it enough" for some services?
From the Instagram TOS[1]: "5. We reserve the right to force forfeiture of any username for any reason."
Not saying that this isn't terrible customer service by Instagram, and they definitely should have given better notice, but when you agree to these terms of service you accept that THEY OWN your username... You signed up for this; it shouldn't be a surprise that they actually have these terms for a reason.
[1] https://help.instagram.com/478745558852511
TIL Github can terminate your account, for any reason, at any time ..
https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#d-...
All companies have a termination clause to protect themselves.
If you find a TOS of a major website without a clause like this, let us know. That would be a true unicorn.
It's not "Customer Service" it's "User Experience".
We are not Instagrams customers. We are the product that Instagram and Facebook sell to their actual customers, the advertisers.
I would imagine that the policy was put in place to eliminate trademark name squatting, and has probably been abused by someone internally at the company for whatever reason.
Sometimes forfeiture makes sense, so they use overbroad language that allows completely unfair processes because that's easier for them.
The term exists for a good reason, but the reason it's done in such a biased way because the user has no negotiation power.
Besides completely agreeing with that, I wonder how much can you complain about a service not tied to fees or contracts. The same goes for github, gmail, etc... everybody assumes them for granted.
I went to Instagram address he mentions and looks like all photos are still there. I'm not sure how designer guy looks like, but it's definitely not football players' headshot: https://instagram.com/ainiesta/
Maybe Instagram restored it (once they were outed)?
We'll never know the whole story. I'm sure it's too damn embarrassing.
Yes, it also looks like the footballer is at the same name that he uses on Twitter:
https://instagram.com/andresiniesta8
Appears to be fixed now. It would be interesting to hear a follow up.
I can confirm that about an hour ago from this point that page displayed a 404 error.
This happened to my friend's wife a few years ago - an Instagram employee hijacked her username: https://medium.com/@behoff/they-say-nothing-will-change-5c54...
After being picked up by some of the bigger tech sites, they returned the username to her.
The thing I find oddest here is that the his friends are now set as following the new account of the football player. Seems like at the very least there is a bug that needs to be fixed there.
I restrict access to my instagram account to approved followers. Now I wonder if someone could take over an handle of one of my friends and then have access to my posts.
I doubt it's a bug. Someone probably complained saying something like "Hey, this guy isn't Andres Iniesta. Someone's squatting on his name to get extra hits." If that's the case anyone following that account must have meant to follow the athlete.
They should have contacted the author first, of course, but companies offering free services don't have the money for customer support.
What really weirds me out is why didn't they go for his full name instead of a shortened version? If it was the PR team, they could have a better time telling people to follow him on Twitter (edit: I mean Instagram) based on his full name wouldn't they? Weird.
Same thing happened to me. The trend of larger online services having non-existent customer support worries me.
If we operate under the assumption that with free services like facebook, twitter, instagram, gmail, etc -- can and will delete our content and revoke access to the service without warning at any point in time -- doesn't that make the service somewhat useless?
Most users operate under the assumption that there is some sort of guarantee that their account will continue to exist and they will have a consistent day-to-day experience. That is a BIG part that makes the service actually "useful".
What bugs me is when a service changes, and you lose your own name... Not talking my given/family name, but the online handle I've used since before the web is "tracker1" ... that was my alias on my google profile (before the switch to google+), and it still hasn't been offered back... half the first to pages of results on google's own search refer to my profile on other sites... it's irksome.
One part of Internet's success is that it's decentralized.
startup idea: Make it easy for "normal" people to have their own "Instagram" or blog.
It wouldn't be Hacker News if the one genuinely good comment wasn't downvoted :/.
A friend made the same true, idealistic, and completely impossible proposal on his blog:
http://frabjousdei.net/post/108191939171/rfcs-not-ipos
Well, I'm not going to sign up for Instagram. Wankers. Smells like desperation when companies are willing to alienate their core like this.
It is shameful that it was done, but at the root, it seems to come down to: what is the product, and who are the users being swapped to who is the product, and what are the users.
Free services seem easier to hit critical mass with a low barrier to entry, yet unless it is a paid-by-end-users service, end users seem to get trampled like this.
Well my twitter handle is @pdp and there is a political party in Nigeria also named PDP. There is also this thing called "personal development plan". In other words, I need twitter spam filter because people don't know the difference between @ and #. Anyway, if you don't want to get in trouble just come up with a super unique username. Do the same for your personal site and your business site.
Looks like he's back in business:
5 hours after writing this article, my account has been restored, but still no news from Instagram about what happened or an apology.
He got his account back. Instagram is sorry[0].
[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33592599