[avazhi]

Google deciding to willy nilly unilaterally ban my 20+ year old primary Google account is probably my greatest internet fear, given how famously awful their support is. Seems like it's the singular best example of a tech company so big that through some combination of internal silos and TOS bureaucracy you have no shot of getting your account back, no matter how unreasonable the ban actually is.

A while back I made completely separate Google accounts for YouTube and Maps just so my longstanding Gmail account wouldn't get banned if the system somehow detected that my Youtube account for example breached Google's TOS.

[blibble]

> A while back I made completely separate Google accounts for YouTube and Maps just so my longstanding Gmail account wouldn't get banned if the system somehow detected that my Youtube account for example breached Google's TOS.

I bet you that if they ban one they ban the other too

the only safe way is to get your important data out of Google entirely

after manifest v3's announcement, I de-googled: gmail, chrome, search, google cloud, photos, family on android phones

2 years later, it's all gone, except youtube

and if they ban that I don't care

[neilv]

> I bet you that if they ban one they ban the other too

Related: I've had a suspicion that, if you have an Apple or Google app developer account through a company (in your name and recovery phone number, but company email address)... and you leave the company... you'd better hope that someone at the company doesn't then use the account to do something sketchy or rule-breaking.

Someone inheriting the account is a very real possibility, given motive (people can be lazy about figuring out how to set up the account for another developer, or not want to pay another fee), and opportunity (professionalism norm is to preserve all passwords/secrets in a way that is accessible to the company).

[londons_explore]

Linked bans pretty much only happen if you use the same recovery phone number or email address.

Other ways of linking an account, such as having both logged in on the same phone, don't put you at risk.

[DANmode]

Who did you move to from Gmail? How’d you make out?

[g947o]

Which is exactly why I de-Googled much of my digital life (email, notes, password management, photos, chatbot, browser etc) except where there is no reasonable/practical alternative. The "main" account is only for those things and for old contacts in case someone reaches me via the old email. I use a secondary Google account for anything that is remotely risky.

[randallsquared]

This is a major reason I haven't worked with Gemini much. Too many eggs in that basket to mess with it. Anthropic and OpenAI at least have no other baggage for me.

[chongli]

Friendly reminder that Google Takeout [1] exists. When I read a story a few years ago about a guy who had his primary Google account banned with no recourse (for reselling Pixel phones) and permanently lost 20 years worth of emails and family photos, I researched and found Takeout and used it to back up all my data, then subsequently stopped using Google services altogether (apart from YouTube).

[1] https://takeout.google.com/

[teshigahara]

Unfortunately the service is very buggy in my experience. When I tried to download all of my photos data multiple times it gave me corrupted .zip files and half of the files were just zero bytes. Maybe I can blame Firefox for that though, I dunno. I should probably try again with Chrome before completely blaming Google

[stevage]

That doesn't solve all issues, such as services you have signed up to using your Gmail account.

[PacificSpecific]

Thank you for this. I had no idea this existed.

[mihaelm]

I moved off Gmail exactly because I didn’t want to be fresh out of luck if I ever need support.

It’s free so I’m not going to complain, but for something as vital as an e-mail, I’m willing to pay for a service to have some peace of mind.

[lysace]

To clarify: None of the comments in that thread talk about experiencing that. They have been locked out of the Gemini service, not their Google account with mail etc.

Source: I actually read them. Yes, personally. I didn't even have an LLM summarize them. I know, I'm practically a luddite.

[sowbug]

But when they paste support replies using terms like "suspension," "violation of the Google Terms of Service," and "zero-tolerance," it sounds like someone's close to losing access to their family photos.

[ocdtrekkie]

If you are this afraid of your Gmail getting banned, I don't understand why that wouldn't translate to... moving off of Gmail. It's not even a very good service, it's slow and bad at spam detection. Leave an autoforwarder and go.

[mdavidn]

Welcome to the club. I registered my own domain and moved my digital life off Google services 18 years ago for this exact reason. If you need another reason: They scan all of your e-mail to target ads at you and your associates. Do it. It's not that difficult!

My "new" mail provider fetches messages from Gmail to create a unified inbox, which helped with the transition. Today, I'm thinking of shutting this off given the volume of misaddressed e-mail and spam that arrives via Gmail.