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Comment by dvfjsdhgfv | Hacker News Reader

Things like these can happen with any service provider. The key difference is that no other company has so many popular services linked together. Using Google this way basically means putting all one's eggs in one basket. We all know it's an unwise thing to do. An yet, people do it every day, for convenience.

Personally, I set up separate Gmail accounts for their different services. First, I don't want them to profile me automatically (they do it through correlation anyway, but let's not make it too easy), and second, in situations like these, only some of the eggs are broken.

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That's unlikely to work. You are still putting all your eggs in one basket. This seems to be a variation of the setup this company has/had.

Unless you are using different browser profiles or installations, and IP addresses for each account every single time you use them, it's very easy for Google to see that requests are coming from the same computer. If you were shut down, they would be able to do it as in the example, all accounts closed at once.

> different browser profiles or installations, and IP addresses for each account

People underestimate power of IP tracking. Use VPN. Plus, a must, have uBlock Origin in medium blocking mode (3p-scripts and 3p-frames blocked). Today EVERY website makes several google*.com API calls.

Well, it works somewhat. I keep my main email account separate from adwords, adsense, GA (although I now replaced it by Matomo, there is no reason whatsoever to use GA now), and Google Play. Ditto for their other services. I had a problem with one of the accounts a while ago - Google didn't "recognize the device" (this often happens as I have strict browser cleanup policies) and I lost access to the account because it was linked to a phone number I lost 10 years ago and forgot to change the number in the account settings. In this case, I lost access to just one account and I didn't care that much. If I used one account for everything I'd have gone mad.

The key difference is that Google's customer support sucks. I can't think of any other service where a client with 150 accounts can't get on the phone with a human being and get things sorted out pronto.

If they're a client (with a G-suite account) then they can definitely get on the phone to tech support (I've done that numerous times). If they have 150 personal gmail accounts for free then that's something different. You get what you pay for.

The moment your GSuite account is banned your access to premium GSuite support is also cut off.

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