[koolba]

Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account. There’s too much risk of cross damage. Imagine losing access to your Gmail because some Gemini request flags you as an undesirable. The digital death sentence of losing access to your email with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk.

[tjoff]

Use a custom domain and don't use google for email.

And if you do use your gmail address just forward it and start to transition to something else. With time everything of importance has been transferred.

[aliljet]

How do you even pull away from a Gmail address? I'm nearly twenty years into that service. Getting banned would be absolutely devastating...

[bilalq]

This has its own risk factors. If your domain renewal lapses due to credit card expiry or something and you fail to notice, it's catastrophic. This is just not realistic advice for the average person.

[rzerowan]

There was a time back when we could get generic LoginWIth OAUTH butons along with the social media roster , allowing one to use whichever provider they wanted.

Current state of OIDC should be pretty much standard across most providers - it put it that devs need too make the push to support alt login providers for preventing vendor lockin in identity like were currently barreling towards in hardware/software.

[gman83]

This wasn't due to some random Gemini request. Users were using sketchy antigravity auth plugins to use their antigravity tokens on things like OpenClaw, clearly against ToS. It's great that Google is giving these users a second chance.

[amiga386]

Yes, our masters once again embarrass us unworthy peons with their endless grace, generosity and forebearance. How lucky we are to entrust our data and our lives to them!

[exitb]

If a 3rd party product advertises compatibility with a Google service and you use it to login via a first party Google login page, doesn’t the responsibility fall somewhere between the offending product and Google itself? In practice it’s structured pretty much like a phishing attempt.

Notably some model providers explicitly allow that very flow, while others will ban you without notice.

[crawshaw]

The concern is not losing access to some new IDE for operating outside the terms of service. The concern is when you lose access to the IDE, you also lose access to your 20 year old Gmail account.

A general problem for Google products is that everything is mixed together.

[zarzavat]

Okay but they were paying customers paying $$$ for the service. Banning your customers without prior warning is not right, however sketchy their behaviour might appear. Even if it's obvious to Google that there's a difference between a Gemini API key and an Antigravity API key, it's not necessarily obvious to others.

The correct and sane thing to do is to send them an email, with at most a 24 hour suspension. If they keep doing it despite being warned then by all means fire them.

[johnebgd]

It’s be great if Google just revoked antigravity access if terms were violated. No need to disable the entire account.

[jamesnorden]

>It's great that Google is giving these users a second chance.

I hope this is sarcasm. A permaban as the first action is never a good idea.

[sneak]

Telling your users they can't use certain software to access your HTTP API is exactly the same as telling people they can't use certain browsers to load https://google.com.

[NicuCalcea]

When's the last time you read the ToS of a service you signed up for?

[theturtletalks]

They were banning people and those people couldn’t even cancel their subscription. That’s a rookie mistake and you expect the same company to have a flawless ban system?

[wnevets]

> Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account.

I would also avoid using the same credit card between accounts. I used a Venmo card for my chrome extension account as an extra layer of separation.

[jauntywundrkind]

It's not 100% clear to me, but supposedly it was just access to Antigravity that was shut off.

If people lost access to their whole accounts that would be a major crisis for Google users. But it doesn't seem that that was actually the case.

This doesn't make it super clear, but, the submission from a week ago when bans got handed out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115805

[jijji]

yeah exactly have you ever tried to call Google support? it doesn't exist. the only way to contact Google is by posting something on news.ycombinator.com and then hoping that some person who works at that company actually responds to you and logs in somewhere and then changes your access.

[baby_souffle]

> Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account

As a hedge, you can google.com/takeout on a monthly cadence.

At least a few years ago when raspberry pi nodes were cheap, you could set up rClone to sync the `TAKEOUT` folder of your gdrive account locally and then encrypt it and shove it into backblaze. Then set up a monthly reminder to quickly request a takeout and make sure that you choose the "deliver to google drive" option.

[HardCodedBias]

AFAIK it has clearly been a ban of Gemini and not of all people's Google accounts.

However many stories appeared where people tried to claim that their whole Google account was banned to gain traction.

Unless it is clear that a full Google account has been banned we should push back on any story that claims this.

[nottorp]

Why? Google has been doing automated bans for ages, even before "AI".

By now they lost any trace of goodwill they ever had and are guilty until proven innocent.

[joe_the_user]

Using Gmail as your primary email has become a serious risk. Email was once a distinct thing but Google tying it to your everything-account makes gmail terrible.

[TacticalCoder]

> The digital death sentence of losing access to your email

I agree that the digital death sentence is really bad and doubly so seen that many are using single-sign on tied to their Google identity but...

> with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk

There's definitely phone support for paying Google Workspace users: don't tell me there's not, my wife got Google support on the phone more than once and they've been helpful.

And it's not a crazy expensive subscription either.

[ithkuil]

This remains a problem for the personal account though (arguably what "primary account" meant in GP)

[aprentic]

That's a big part of why I switched to paid email.

I'm the customer, not the product.

[rootnod3]

Here’s an idea: run your digital life away from a corporate shitbucket like Google. Don’t run your email there. Plenty of good other options.