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Comment by notheguyouthink | Hacker News Reader

Even more than that; I left Google (as a user, never employee) because I was scared of being banned. Seeing stories of users on Amazon / Google getting their account banned due to something related to a business concern, made me realize that if someone flagged a google app I had my whole life could come to a grinding halt. Phone, phone number, email, storage, internet access! All that because maybe I got reports on a phone app I wrote (hypothetical).

I'm doing nothing illegal or unethical, nothing wrong. Nevertheless, I ran from Google asap due to that reason alone. Google represented a massive single point of failure to my digital life.

I now use separate products for just about everything I own. While it's not as convenient as Google, I feel far more secure.

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Similar concerns, I recently used Google Express for a purchase, it worked fine, and then I deleted it. My Google account is my main email, and every new Google service is another opportunity for my whole account to get irreversibly banned.

Using Google with their famous lack of customer service to make purchases that I could conceivably need to put a chargeback on felt uncomfortably risky.

Tie my home internet connection to that? How do I know I won't get locked out of the cloud-integrated admin app? Why would I want it connected to anything Google?

The "one account everywhere" thing is convenient and great for their branding, but it's not great for my peace of mind.

Agree on lack of support. I have an account that is blocked. I forgot the password since it was always logged in. When I try to recover the password, it asks me a bunch of questions that I am pretty sure I am answering correctly. At the end it just tells me that the account cannot be recovered... even if I had the second factor authenticator still working and I punched in the right code. I searched high and low online but since they do not have any kind of support I have no way out. It is depressing.

To be honest, if someone doesn’t know my password, doesn’t have my 2-factor code, and can’t answer the security questions, I don’t want them to be able to call up customer service and social engineer an account takeover. I don’t think there’s any amount of proof that I could provide but an adversary targeting me couldnt’t fake to convince a call center employee.

What I’m more worried about is their “You violated the TOS. We can’t tell you how you violated the TOS. We can’t unban your account.” If you don’t know someone at Google, you’re out of luck.

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