Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

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> I do have an email address with my own domain but for security reasons any accounts I create are tied to my gmail address. I've known too many people who have had personal domain email addresses intercepted, particularly through compromised domain/DNS settings.

If your Gmail account is lost or compromised, good luck getting any help from Google; while G Suite support is decent, free Gmail account users are basically on their own.

Ask HN: Lost $400k USD in a deleted email, how contact a Gmail engineer? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452969

Ask HN: What to do about a wrongly shut down GMail account? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2033474

Another account lost in the Google void – how many are there? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745761

Professor who refused to use other genders pronouns, was banned by Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14905384

To be fair here, two of these are obvious user error.

In the Etherium case, he deleted the email and wanted to get it back 2 full years later. The only way he would have recovered from this would have been to take meticulous backups (and test them regularly). I would expect any 3rd party provider to honor my wish to delete data, especially 2 years down the line (and, in fact, they are probably legally required to do so).

In the "lost in the Google void" situation, the user set up 2fa but lost all access to their 2nd factors. I don't see any reasonable recourse to this, as any "solution" Google implements would undermine the entire purpose of 2fa.

The remaining two are obvious issues with Google's service. The "gender pronoun" one is a bit odd because gender pronouns don't seem to have anything to do with the account closure (there's speculation that he was mass-reported to exploit their abuse response systems).

Is it more likely that your DNS host or domain registrar could be compromised or that Google might shut you out of your account? There's risks with either decision, personally I put more trust that my Google account will be there than in my registrar's security.

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