I Guess I'm a Pinterest Criminal

One day last week I went into the Pinterest App on my phone and was searching for a recipe that I have used numerous times. All of a sudden, I got an error message and the App closed. So, I opened it back up and the same thing occurred. Now, I've had a Pinterest account since way back in the days when one had to be invited or recommended or whatever in order to join and create an account. I've been saving recipe ideas, decoration inspiration, and such as that for all of these years. So, I had LOADS of Pins and quite the collection of Boards. 

Note that I am not one who creates many pins. I generally just click on the Pin icon that is included into different websites and click the Save button. So, I'm not uploading anything questionable. On the rare occasion that I did create a Pin, I was meticulous about siting the resource. (The English teacher in me comes out.) So, I was pretty confused about what might have been going on.

I noticed that I had an email from The Pinterest Team. So, I read what they had sent me.

That made me wonder if I my account had somehow been hacked and somebody was posting things without my knowledge. How would I know? How does one research such a thing? Again, being the English teacher, I read the Community Guidelines and Could not figure out any way in which I had not been following those. So, I believed that was an error and clicked on the link and filled out the form provided. I immediately got a response.

In about four hours, I got another email:

So, I don't know what sort of criminal activity I committed or what was going on. However, I could not access the account nor salvage any of the ideas and recipes I had saved there throughout all those years. I was pretty bummed. I was pretty mad about being banned when I could think of no reason why I might have been done that way. I accessed the Help Center but that wasn't all that helpful. Basically, the suggestion there was to create a new account. So, I went a few days thinking about the situation. Did I really want to participate in a platform where I had been treated as if I am a criminal when I clearly was not? Would I want to give this company business after I had the door slammed in my face, basically? 

Finally, I decided that I liked the premise of the platform as a way to store digital ideas much like I used to do as a young girl/woman when I cut out magazine photos and taped them to a piece of notebook paper and put them in a binder. It was handy for me. I couldn't think of another platform that did just that in an easy and straightforward way with just a click or two. So, I created a new account with a new email and I started searching and saving some of the same recipes and ideas that I knew I had collected before. 

This new account works and looks a bit differently than the old one. Plus, there is no established data for their logarithms to post for me. So, I'm basically seeing some stuff that I never saw before and some stuff that I care nothing about. It is interesting to me and I am still exploring - almost like I did back when I created my first account. Some things are not as easy - Following has been a bit of a problem for me because that seems more buried within the App. But, I'm working through it and finding some new ideas and saving some of the ones I had collected before.  

Early last week I opened Pinterest while using my laptop and using my Chrome browser. Since I was logged into the browser, it immediately tried to open my old account. There were lots of flashes and different screens showing for a moment or two and then my old account popped up! I have been working a few days to try to salvage and copy some of the recipes that I had collected into my new account. So, I haven't logged out or shut down my laptop for a few days. I can only stand so much surfing at one sitting. So, it is a bit slow going. I have salvaged a bit, though and that is nice. 

I'm still just wondering what was going on with my old account that it was not considered as a 'legal' usage and why I was marked as a Pinterest Criminal? Has anybody ever had that happen to them?