The average person cannot realistically exist in a digital vacuum, self-hosting their entire online world. Google should not be able to do this to them. No one should have to rely on trying to whip up public mobs on Reddit or HN to get Google to give them access to their own freaking tax spreadsheets.
Ideally it'd go like this:
Offer services for free (eg cross-subsidized by another business arm) in order to carve out a gigantic kingdom with millions of users, smothering any competition (only few use an indie email provider when there's "free" email, only few try to make a stand not using Whatsapp in whatsapp-saturated locales), and... Congratulations, now you've become too big too fail! And now you'll be treated as such. You're a critical part of society's functioning, and are to be regulated as such. Whether by accident, whether intentionally, whether it's because you're simply awesomely innovative or maybe you just massively cross-subsidized from another business branch, is irrelevant.
Once market capture has reached a certain point, yes, you need a physical grievance office, with state-backed arbitration/escalation. For instance.
Maybe you also can't just change the TOS anymore just like that, making people choose between coordinating a hasty move of the families' 4 TB of photos to... ? and being slowly boiled while $BIGBOY AI-trains on the family photos.
As a big boy, don't like this kind of regulation? Just shrink by selling off some business arms. Or stop hooking people by giving out "free" stuff. Or maybe don't base your growth strategy on gatekeepership and moats.
I surmise that big rules for big boys (while not burdening small players, thus, differential legislation) will actually massively help competition and innovation. But even if it doesn't — government, by the people, for the people, should get the final say in how we let citizens be treated. People with beating hearts over emotionless corps, always.
If it was on the free plan then all bets are off. If he was paying for a service, I believe there is enough case for a lawsuit where Google pays through their teeth for basically taking the client's data hostage.
At some point I'll move my hosted services to one or more companies, which for a cost - essential point if you want legal protection - offer me their services. And if shit happens, I get my data back. And there is someone, a physical person that I can call when shit happens and they can't hide behind AI and automated replies. Otherwise I have real leverage to sue their ass and settle for mucho dinero so they learn to behave.
Seems to me Google is not such a "service provider" company, so it's naive to let them hold your data, with zero legal protection if they decide to take it hostage.
Also we have public fire departments, police and amber alerts, and official organ donor registration systems. This isn't really the a case against state intervention you seem to be going for.
This alone is enough to see that regulation is what is needed. It's completely crooked that the average person is forced to maintain good standing with a single particular NASDAQ corporation to participate in society. Those here who might think "it's very possible to do so without Google" are not the average person, living in an average place in an average bubble.
The solution is breaking up Google.
This remains the case even if this particular story is exaggerated.
We cannot continue to allow the worst among us -- those who by definition want more than everyone else and can seemingly never be satified -- to run the entire world. A lack of morality is what gets you to the top. We must end this for the good of us all.
Before rushing to assume regulation is necessary, we should question if this story is real at all. It has a lot of signs of being a creative writing exercise like the conflicting details about all of their accounts being banned, including recovery emails, but then later they received an email explaining the reason for the ban. How did they receive that email?
Presumably this was in response to an appeal, which would have required an email, which would obviously have been a non-Google email given the wider context? I'm not seeing the inconsistency.
> All my emails, all my documents saved in Google Drive.
I'm probably at 20 attempts and everyone single one has failed...
I would think someone whose business depends on gmail would use an email client, at least periodically, to download their emails.
Another consideration: kids do not have the ability to think ahead and consider future consequences. It's one of the last functions of the brain to develop, and it doesn't fully complete until, often, you've already finished college. Looking through the comments in the reddit thread, it appears the daughter had her dissertation on her google drive and lost it despite having done nothing wrong herself.
And just the final point I want to drive home: these people lost their google accounts because of what someone else did. Nobody thinks ahead to account for something like that.
At what point are we going to start looking at digital mail the same way we do physical mail? It's equally as important today. It needs protections, regulations, and oversight.
Nonetheless, at the moment, it's a real risk, and plenty of people do in fact think ahead and not make themselves dependent on those services.
> kids do not have the ability to think ahead and consider future consequences. It's one of the last functions of the brain to develop, and it doesn't fully complete until, often, you've already finished college.
Please stop posting kindergarten-level distortions of neuroscience. It burns.
Honestly it's a bit insulting to non-HN people to assume that they'd never want offline access or realize that having a single point of failure is a bad idea.
It was also oddly focused on email access instead of the obvious legal problems that would come from having your account flagged for CSAM. It’s like what someone would write if they were trying to imagine a story about getting locked out of their email but didn’t realize that their CSAM and child endangerment plot point would trigger much bigger legal concerns and consequences
It's possible that this is real, it's possible it's made up, but I'm not seeing much more evidence in your armchair scepticism than in the asserted facts. Last week everyone on HN was telling me that social media must immediately be regulated because it's 'directionally correct' to assert that teenagers are suffering, but this week we are to disbelieve that Google would ever arbitrarily close accounts, something it firmly asserts it has every right to do?
- https://www.androidauthority.com/google-account-bans-3654171...
- https://x.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/2039536001186414760?s=20
It’s interesting to see how many HN comments it spawned believing the story, even after others pointed out all of the problems with it and signs that it was fiction.
The process through which you parked the domains with Google entailed loading a file with the list of domains, after which each one would, in turn, be approved or denied. All 400+ domains were approved.
A few days later I received a cryptic message about unusual click activity on the domains and the Google account I had at the time was shut down immediately without recourse. I visited a few of the pages (not all 400, maybe a dozen) as they were approved to see what they put on them. Of course I did not click on anything. I might be accused of being stupid, but I am not an idiot. Besides, I pretty much knew the income would be a rounding error, maybe a few cups of coffee per year, maybe.
Well, nobody to call, text, email or send smoke signals to. Nothing.
That's when I decided I would never do business with Google. All I use from them is search. That's it. Nothing else. I can't trust them with anything that is business related and anything personally important.
Gmail? No way. I pay for Zoho mail for all the email accounts for my businesses and I am very happy about the product, the service and the isolation from a despotic company that can shut down your life in a microsecond.
Given that's their main business and they are likely to graveyard whatever domain penny business you've got burnt by anyway, you're still doing a lot of business with them
I try and not depend on a single vendor for everything and I don’t use the same email for all services - with auto email forwarding and password managers there’s just no reason to
My services are spread across Apple, Google, and other third party services for other email, storage, music, etc
I’m trying to think of what it would be like if this happened to me and it’d be annoying for sure, but not catastrophic
I do recommend having your own domain for email for certain accounts - I don’t do it for all services because sometimes it’s just easier to say email@gmail.com vs risking typos etc with a custom domain
I still use main stream services of course, I’m not that hardcore and like convenience like I said, but so what I can to avoid these types of headaches
I don't see any reasonable way they could have saved themselves besides something crazy like requiring every family member use a different feudal lord - one person gets Google, one person gets Apple, one poor guy gets Microsoft...
They had a separate claim that after the bannings and after the son admitted what he did, they received an email confirming that the accounts were banned for “child protection”
Received where? They just claimed all of their accounts were banned first, including linked recovery accounts.
Also where is the text of that email? Communications like that are key to legal matters yet it was only shared as a passing comment
The solution is to use a true business-oriented provider and not an ad agency for one's file and email hosting.
Google has no problem correlating your accounts unless you know what you're doing and are ready to switch to the cypherpunk mode.
- https://www.androidauthority.com/google-account-bans-3654171...
- https://x.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/2039536001186414760?s=20
How do I avoid that? When is a Google account considered linked?
If I log into 2 google accounts and swap between them, are the accounts considered linked?
Also, I have plenty of photos of my kids naked when they were little (my son refused to wear anything for 1 year), do I have to be concerned?
That said, I bet there's millions of parents with at least one pic of a naked kid.
My bet is it's quasi-random, but if you get "lucky", nothing short of a extremely senior exec can reverse that decision. So probably we need to behave as if these accounts can just get yanked on a moment's notice at random.
Fastmail is great, btw.
I recently had to choose between google workspace for my email and fastmail, I was really going all in on fastmail and then I hit something that really blocked me. I can't remember what it is though
This is America, of course you have to be concerned.
Google has family groups where you invite people to your family. I'm assuming they had that set up. I guess if you want to manage your children's accounts you have to do it from a burner Google account.
I do have backup of my photos and drive, but I appreciate Google Sheets and would like to keep using that.
That doesn't sound like what happened lol. I'm sure there were many other avenues she could have tried, she probably chose the one she preferred.
It was definitely fake though and it looks like the mods finally realized that (after deleting comments for calling out that it was fake)
I currently use Google Voice for almost all SMS 2FA after a nightmare scenario where I realized that the mobile carriers are entirely susceptible to social engineering and will happily port your number to an attacker’s phone. I planned to switch to Fi as they are probably the only one that this is not susceptible to… but if I were to lose both email and phone access I’d really be fucked.
Same.
I have financial accounts in multiple countries, many using Google Voice for 2FA.
However, whenever I create an account that allows anything other than SMS for 2FA, I immediately switch to that instead. I use an offline TOTP authenticator app, and backup the token secrets in something that's not linked to my Google account.
This greatly limits my blast radius, I think, because I can access my most critical online services without access to my Google account.
My Google Voice number is the only phone number I've used for 15+ years. It'd be a real nightmare if I lost access to my Gmail and/or Voice.
Best of luck. Its not a great situation to be in.
I had my youtube premium (back when it was red) banned for violating community guidelines - impossible since account was only used for viewing videos. Appeals got auto rejected... can only repeal every few weeks... oh at time account ban = cannot access accounts page so they kept charging for months while I appealed. Had to cancel credit card.
For reference I also had wechat account blocked in PRC... and show how got to talk to a human being and sort it out within a few business days.
Eventually youtube account restored... 2 YEARS LATER, OUT OF NOWHERE. I think maybe I posted on youtube google groups and someone eventually got to it, but who the hell knows.
If anyone works for FB/Meta, my email is in my profile. Thanks in advance.
The whole family. Including his 2 sisters… what a nightmare.
This story is triggering a lot of my skepticism senses because it fits the mold of a typical creative writing Reddit post:
- The OP claims Google just banned their account for CSAM content, yet nobody is considering the legal consequences of this? Their details would be referred to law enforcement and they could have police knocking on their door any minute. Why is the only thing anyone is talking about the access to their email?
- OP is a helpless victim in a story where the world conspires against them
- This is ostensibly a request for legal advice, but they didn’t post the one communication they claimed to have received in the matter (an e-mail explaining the reason for their bans, which they somehow received despite all accounts being banned)
- A lot of unnecessary extra details about how the tragedy is amplified, like the doctor’s dissertation just happens to be due next week. Apparently she’s been writing this for so long but hasn’t shared a copy with anyone for review, editing, or feedback once? Right.
- Villain is a safe target like an evil megacorp, with a guest villain of a teenage boy who is also safe to dislike
- OP only responds to helpful suggestions with new facts that conveniently obviate those helpful suggestions, like the response explaining they have to use an obscure bank that doesn’t have any physical branches for reasons
- OP completely ignores helpful responses that provide actionable advice. The real accounts are usually all over these comments with requests for additional detail.
- OP has a strange timeline of events where the “AI” banned the first account, then Google manual review started banning accounts that had ever been linked to the tablet, but it did so in a weird way that happened in sequential order with each occurring several hours later. The timeline is oddly specific with these occurrences, too.
The piece that really broke the story for me was this quote:
> Son eventually comes clean and tells us what he was doing. We get the email informing us that accounts have been banned due to child protection reasons
So they can’t access any of their accounts but they also received an email somehow? Details about that conveniently omitted despite the excessive detail in so many other things. They also only receive an explanation for why the accounts were banned after this long process where all accounts were banned one by one, and only after son “comes clean”? This seems like a detail that comes from a story where someone decided the plot point first and then needed some supporting details to try to minimize doubt.
If you’re thinking that maybe the account ban email went to the recovery account, they claimed that their recovery accounts were also part of the lockout:
> Shortly after, accounts which weren't on the tablet, but were used as recovery emails for those accounts also got hit.
This feels like another red flag from someone who lost track of how their story’s facts intersected each other.
These creative writing stories always rely on triggering your sense of “Well it could happen” combined with a set of acceptable villains (Google + “stupid” 14 year old boy) mixed with a set of details designed to amp up the sympathy factor (daughter’s dissertation due next week, no copies exist outside of Google Docs).
My understanding is that Google banned all users that had been logged into that family device.
>Visual Context: On mobile, you can choose to share your camera feed or screen. This allows you to ask questions about what you are looking at in the real world or get help with tasks on your device.
>Common Use Cases • Brainstorming: Talking through ideas for a project or event. • Role-playing: Practicing for a job interview or a difficult conversation. • Learning: Asking deep-dive questions about a complex topic while you're on the go. • Daily Tasks: Getting help with things like gift ideas, travel itineraries, or summarizing information from your screen.
That would account for the time it took for the bans to spread, and for why the son came clean a few days later instead of right away or never.
Brutal situation; hope the can restore access.
Hosts feel like they have everything to lose by not banning problematic accounts, everything to gain by performatively burning anything “sketchy”, and nothing to lose by the inevitable automated over banning.
I almost lost everything because I used a state ID that was not a drivers license (which i did not have at the time), in combination with another complication that was “caused” by a recent move between states.
It made zero sense if you are not an automated system, and would have been devastating if I hadn’t figured out a path through it. I spent three weeks under enormous stress, as my savings, among other things, were needed to pay off the majority of my house right then.
But despite the insanity, it was easy to see the pedantic digital “reasoning” that was happening.
The mass centralization and automation of commerce is pushing us into dystopia. Brazil.
We are not safe. I mean that. Until laws make corporations responsible for these kinds of harms, with fines on the order of historic fortunes, if they don’t, it is going to get worse.
The “mind boggling fine” part makes for a hard sell. But it is the only way to create balance against the mind boggling levels of centralization and profits that insulate these companies of any personal individual level ethics.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. [1]
Which is cute and all, but handwaves away a real problem. IMO we should always point out and ridicule when a post or comment is too Reddit because it is a real problem.
So I try not to say anything when this happens, but I'm glad when someone still points it out.
I'm not a programmer, not in tech, and not an Anglo... I come here because it's the last place on the internet aside from 4chan that is free from Reddit-like posting (I just ignore all the posts about Rust or whatever).
Please, don't take this away from us.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
PS. This place is also becoming Bluesky, which is its own problem, but I guess that's another topic.
The ensuing legal battle would be legendary. The only reason this is happening is because Google isn't beholden to the common people, despite running a utility.
> I did an SAR with Google last year and it took over a month for a single account. It also ended up containing very little because of the way they decide what is and isn’t ‘personal data’, e.g. for the one I used for work, they outright refused to release most of it apart from specific emails and docs where I was mentioned by name because the email address was a standard contact@mywebsite.com (which to be fair is correct grounds for refusal). They were very helpful in padding out the SAR release by re-sending the emails of me requesting the SAR, and also redacted the data protection employee name whom I was conversing with though lol.
> For SARs themselves there’s also grounds to refuse if they think it might interfere with potential future legal investigations, which given the ban reason I suppose isn’t an impossibility but unlikely.
I don't know what the OP does for work, but almost certainly it's going to be easier to just start over with a new website. Maybe get the daughter's laptop taken to a data recovery specialist and try and pull browser history for the thesis.
So there was this mysterious black box that decided if your name was "real" or not. At first this didn't support pseudonyms or any kind of anonymity and that's actually really important for any social network. Think of someone seeking help coming to terms with their sexual orientation, gender identity, addiction, eating disorder or whatever. Or simply going against their family's religious wishes. I later worked at Facebook and one thing I'll give them credit for is Groups. FB Groups had an identity that actually couldn't be tied by anyone else to your profile or identity in any other group. That was a good product decision.
Anyway, if your name somehow failed the magic real names filter, your account got banned. Your entire Google account was banned and basically there was no recourse other than knowing someone who worked at the company or making a big enough fuss on Twitter.
Many people, myself included, criticized and protested this decision. You should at least segment Google products. There's absolutely no reason to ban your Gmail account because an automated system decided your Google+ account name wasn't "real". But that feedback was ignored and this was well before the public launch. And the public backlash proved this position correct (IMHO).
But the net effect was that I decided I can't use any other Google product. Let's say a system is launched to find offensive photos and there's a false positive on one of my images in Google Photos. Maybe it's just a hash collision with a known image. And then what? I lose my entire Gmail? Are you kidding me?
It's wild to me that this is still an issue ~15 years later. I think my stance actually isn't strict enough anymore. You probably shouldn't use Gmail at all. I should really find a paid email provider hosted entirely in Europe, preferably Switzerland or some other country with strong pro-user regulation.
So I have no idea if this Gemini story is true or not. I say that because 95% of the things on Reddit are completely made up. But it is plausible. I wouldn't be surprised if it's true. It means I wouldn't use Gemini at all if I used Gmail.
True story, look it up.
There is a reason that we once eliminated this idea. It’s a stain on a free society and a constant drag on the economy. Corporations embracing this tactic are laying the groundwork for a terrible future.
GitHub is great, I know it in the heart of my hearts.
Steam is owned by literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ, they'll never turn on me.
Loyalty is of course a quality of a decent human being. But not loyalty to corporations that you trade fair with, or worse, use YOU as a product. Only loyalty to people committed to you
