It mentions that most people made up brand-new accounts to run the deal from. If Google's initial investigation showed only brand-new accounts, it might explain their move to delete the accounts entirely. They reversed the decision when they realized real accounts were getting caught up as well.
Yeah, let's be honest, if you're running a scheme like this, you probably have a hunch that it may not be the most legal thing ever... why the hell would you use your real account with all your information instead of making a new dummy account?
They probably assumed it was a bunch of fake account and deleted them all in one big swoop, but once they realized a few of them were real, they restored them...
Just the media blowing things out of proportion, and for some reason everyone's defending these people who were doing something clearly very shady and wrong.
I do agree though that the thought of losing access to all your data is scary, and people should definitely do takeout and be more conscious about it, but in this case specifically, it was hardly Google's fault.
Google is at the end of the day a service, and if you go on their lawn and start shitting all over it, what do you expect will happen?
They reversed because they got a ton of bad press for it. They've been banning accounts with no recourse for years now, and will continue to do so until people speak out loudly enough against it. Maybe then at least they could allow those banned to export their data.
