Set up a Gmail account as a journal for my two year old and Google closed it | Hacker News Reader

Set up a Gmail account as a journal for my two year old and Google closed it

5 pointsgremlinsinc9 comments

So, I setup a gmail account for my two year old to send journal posts to, images, videos, etc...Also to preserve his name as a username.

Basically a way to communicate with him in case something happens to me.

Google closed it for violating policies, no reason nothing. I responded that this was the purpose of the account and that I was not familiar with any violations and so far no response to that.

Seriously, this really makes me dislike google. I'm a huge PAID google user including: Fi, YoutubeTV, Play Music Premium-family account.

Anyone have any similar horror stories? Any resolution?

View on HN

> Any resolution?

Reduce your google usage to as close to zero as you can achieve.

Really, if you have data you value, and wish to preserve long term, there is no real alternative than to host it yourself and take care of it yourself. Placing it on anyone else's computer leaves you open to the whims of that "anyone else". You can't violate a TOS when there is no TOS because you are storing the data on your own machine that you own and control.

And, if you want an email address for him that is more permanent then buy a domain name for him, at which point he will have (provided the domain payments are made on time) an email address that can't disappear at the whims of a corporate entity. You don't have to actually run the hosting yourself (there are entities that will operate the email hosting for you linked your own domain) but you should make sure to always have a copy of all the email traffic on a machine you own and control to avoid the problems of again being at the whims of others. I've had the exact same email address myself for a bit over twenty years now, it has been operated over five different ISP's, but all of the content I've chosen not to delete is sitting on disks I own, and backed up to other disks I own.

I did a quick search and found out that you can use something called the "Family Link" app. Here is an article regarding it.

https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338?hl=en

I have several email addresses that I reserved for my children and grandchild way-way back when gmail was by invite-only, I guess I just got lucky and none of them got dropped (yet), but I guess the times are changing. I'm going to give this a shot too, just to cover my rear end.

A while back there was a Gmail ad that touted doing exactly this, https://youtu.be/zhPklt9nYas

...so why did they ban it?

Impressively relevant link. OP may be able to include this in his messages to Google.

OP: Is google at least providing you with the ability to "Take Out"[0] your data from that account , or are the messages truly lost for now?

0: https://takeout.google.com/

People open secondary Gmail accounts all the time and they are never closed. I don't think the reason your account was closed was that it was for your son.

Were you uploading a lot of images/videos? That might have triggered some alert that you were using the account as backup/storage. That has been against their policy for a long time.

gmail is for contacting people, what was your job to be done ? sounds like it was smth else aka backup data?

They were contacting their son. Only that the son won't be inclined to check his email until years into the future.

Of course there are other ways to achieve much the same thing.

has to be with children law or similar, irrespective of you being his/her dad?

COPPA

Reply on news.ycombinator.com