If anyone has gotten their account suspended, what was it for and how can I avoid it?
Fortunately Google is (or more accurately, was) simply a convenience for me.
I have not yet fully deactivated the several Gmail accounts I have still standing, though those are largely inactive, and most are strictly associated with specific nyms I'd created (one notably after a primary nym account was suspended).
The best way to avoid having your Google account be suspended is to not have one.
But moving to self-hosting, or increasingly, entirely offline, has been a goal and project of the past few years.
I touch a few Google services directly:
- Google Scholar: still amongst the best academic search engines I'm aware of.
- Google Ngram Viewer and Google Trends: quite useful for tracking concepts over time.
- Google Maps: There are times OpenStreetMap's search simply falls down even when specifying lat/lon coordinates directly, Because Reasons. Google Maps is my fallback, but I still rely on it far more than I'd care to.
- Gmail: Secondary for several accounts.
- YouTube: still the largest online video hosting service, though alternative interfaces (https://invidio.us/) and alternate hosts (both centralised and federated or self-hosted) are increasingly viable. YouTube's UI tweaks and aggressive pre-roll ads over the past several months have been aggressively user-unfriendly.
- Google Web Search. A very distant second to DuckDuckGo, but still necessary for 1) date-bounded search, 2) getting overall counts of results (occasionally useful), and 3) rare edge-cases where DDG doesn't turn up expected/desired results (GWS is ~50% successful here).
I don't know if it's because I rely so heavily on DDG that I'm influencing its results, but I find that both searches and content that I've posted tends to turn up high-ranked on it. I'm not as aware of this with Google.
Only problem is, you have to be willing to become a moderately good sysadmin and spend your time doing the chores to keep your systems up-to-date. This takes considerable amount of time. Dropping the ball once, and you may find yourself hacked (I had this recently when being slow in updating a nginx reverse proxy).
[0] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Self-hosted services -- Web, Mail, messaging, etc., -- remains more complicated. I really wish it weren't, I've been watching projects for a decade and more now to make it less so. I'm thinking that this won't happen.
Simply based on skills distribution, some sort of federation or clustering at the level of 1 admin per 100 - 100k users is probably necessary. That's a scope at which regional or interest-based community hosting becomes viable. At the same time, it means thousands to millions of individual service providers, a scope at which at least some mechansisms of mass surveillance (state, capitalist, non-state actor, criminal) become less viable.
Concentration is its own risk.
Access via Tor, new devices, and travel, generally.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9060922)
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3mo7l6/that_go...
This is a Hard Problem:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7qya12/informa...
Google doesn't do customer support, which is fine for maps or search where I can just hop and nothing matters, but I'm starting to think it's too big of a risk for my primary email/calendar/contacts.
I still have a google account but I don’t use it. Haven’t logged into google docs and such in years and while I still get the occasional gmail mail forwarded it’s typically spam (usually people who got my gmail address mistaken for mine).
I was 1 full day without Google search. I could not search for anything anywhere, not my phone, my laptop, nothing. That night I switched to DuckDuckGo.
Two days later, I was unblocked from Google search and use it again.
That was the moment where I started migrating all my services from google into independent providers. What if, instead of blocking my use of Google search, they block my GMail ? Calendar ? Google Home ? Android phone?....
I end up out of my house, without the ability to go in, without the ability to search for how to fix it, or to call somebody or message somebody with my home for help, maybe logged out of my car, etc. etc. etc.
For me, avoiding such risks is more valuable than having a better search experience.
- saying you're under 13 on YouTube (probably elsewhere as well)
- TOS violations that malware performed using your account (eg. using your google session to share malware using drive)
- Using drive to share or store copyrighted content
- spam, eg via gmail
For logging in from the wrong location (or network?). Most of the times you just get an email about log in attempts. This was for logging in from JP while usually logging in from DE/EU.
How can you avoid it? Using a private VPN I suppose when using Google (avoid cloud IP address blocks though, else you'll get captcha hell).
Of course it can still happen by random chance thanks to their algorithm going screwy but it’s not likely and if you’re still concerned Id consider at least starting the process.
A less snarky answer is "is the IoT device made by Google or has a Google license?" If yes, then "probably no," otherwise "yes."
I have a theory as to why Google is so tight lipped about how their service works (and what actions will get you kicked off)---it's that Google employees have no idea. Google is so invested in AI and machine learning, that I suspect that their automated systems are as inscrutable to them as they are to us, but admitting such wouldn't look that great.
No but this is why I opted for own domain + paid g-suite. Just so that I can take my toys elsewhere if needed
You are immune in the sense that G can only kill the services and hosting, and your access to G's copy of any content.
But the domain is still yours and your email is not @gmail even if it's hosted on gmail servers. So when G kills your account, it's only the hosting. You can switch your domain to any other hosting povider including self hosting, and all your old urls and email addresses resume working.
It would still be up to you to maintain your own off-G backups of any content. Saved emails, website, gdrive, docs, photos. When the account dies you may lose access to G's copy of everything, so ensure all they ever have is a copy.
Also probably don't use G for domain registrar. Even using them for dns host is ok, just not actual registrar.
Might make for a crappy day if you have to do all that switching, but you can, and that is enough to provide the safety net against the small chance that you will ever need to.
But if your email is actually @gmail, and that is say the "prove you own this account at life-savings-robo-advisor" email, then you are truly boned, and small risk is infinitely too-large risk.
...one big gotcha is gdrive, docs and GCP. Haven't worked out what to do about those yet, but priority is being able to salvage the email addr since everything is linked to it
Since there is no recourse, it’s also hard to get clarification.