Hacker News Reader

Comment by andreynering | Hacker News Reader

I recently took some actions to reduce the damage if Google ever ban my account.

I'm now using a custom email domain (although it's just redirecting to my Gmail for now), and doing regular backups of my emails (through Thurderbird) and Google Drive.

With these news being more and more common, you never know when it'll happen to you.

View on HN

This is a good reminder. Many people don't realise if any one of Google's services ban you it takes down your Google account at the same time (GMail, Drive, Docs etc), it doesn't just block that single service where the alleged violation occurred.

It depends, but generally yes. YouTube DMCA strikes, for example, are known to only nuke your YT channel(s) and the rest of Google still works[0] (although this page does say your entire account is subject to termination[1]). Getting banned from the other services is much harder, of course.

0: https://creatoracademy.youtube.com/page/lesson/respond-to-co...

1: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2814000?hl=en#stri...

> Getting banned from the other services is much harder, of course.

Is it? All it takes is someone at Google not liking what you're saying for Google to conveniently allow a bug to "accidentally" de-activate your account[1]. Google's slogan may as well be "self-censor or be censored".

[1] https://medium.com/@zacharyvorhies/open-letter-dear-attorney...

I'm not sure how true this is. I've had a Google Ads account killed dead, and yet my other accounts kept humming along.

I did this when I was using Google Docs for school and one day I went to open my doc to continue working on it and it just presented me with an error page saying my document was blocked due to "ToS violations" I had to restart in a new document and that was the last time I ever trusted my data with google.

The document got randomly unblocked the next week but the damage was already done.

I do that as well, but I'd still be extremely harmed if Google does ever decide to suspend service - I have an Android phone and a lot of things that are tied to that Google account.

Plus, my mail is sometimes caught by spam filters, and people actually find it very odd that I have my own domain (it is a plus for technical stuff though).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com