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Comment by Justsignedup | Hacker News Reader

I remember someone had a post here a couple years back:

- They bought google wireless. - Their charge was declined, whatever the reason, they wanted to correct that. Or possibly an accidental dispute. - Google disabled their account because of non-payment - Google's customer support couldn't help because they weren't a paying customer. - They literally couldn't do ANYTHING because google was ignoring every step of the way. - Their account was blocked from making any payments and couldn't contact someone until they made a payment. - Eventually their phone was disabled, and they lost the phone number because... no payment!

And once the phone number was released / re-used there was nothing they could do.

Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar.

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> Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar.

Just curious, why would you accept this risk? Even though the probability of losing your account is small, the impact is huge. I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to host the email).

>... your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to host the email).

I have considered this, but converting is not risk free. Say I utilize my own domain backed by Gmail. I have increased my surface area by being reliant upon both Google and the security of my domain registrar. Perl.com was just stolen[0] due to some shenanigans -how I would I keep myself immune?

My fear with using my own domain is that if it is compromised, then an attacker can access all of my email linked accounts (eg banking). If Google shuts me down, at least I know the domain is secure and the email is dead and unable to be intercepted.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25940240

Perl.com is worth stealing via a targeted attack. Yourboringname.com is not.

Banks use 2FA so stealing your email won't steal your account.

Anyway, you can appeal to the registrar and IANA for help if your registration is attacked.

This is kinda what I do. I personally really enjoy Gmail and don't find any competitor can match it, especially since I use a catch-all domain and really value having Gmail's spam filtering in place. However I use my own domain and have all my email forwarded to Gmail. If I ever get locked out of my Gmail account I can just switch where my email is going and be good to go.

I also do regular Google Takeout backups so that I at least have access to the majority of emails and google data.

> I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to host the email).

I've yet to find a good solution for this without paying for Google's business product, which I find way too dangerous to risk. You can't get a custom domain on consumer gmail.

You can forward mail to your personal Gmail account.

Anyway why is Google's paid business product more risky than their free Gmail?

> You can forward mail to your personal Gmail account.

1. You need to pay for a mail server, and then you lose the benefits of gmail's spam filters, and also you start having deliverability problems.

2. You lose the benefits of some of gmail's features as they don't classify forwarded emails the same.

Because as a person I have some rights under GDPR, as a business I don't really. Business accounts are even easier for them to shut, and using a business account for personal things sets off loads of red flags. You can't review products, you can use family features, your google home products get messed up, etc.

While data related to a company doesn't fall under GDPR, the data of the person(s) in that company does.

What I don't understand is why they lock you out of your data when they ban you. For IRL evictions, they'll give you notice to start moving your belongings or, worst-case, dump them on the curb. Sucks, but you still ostensibly have access to them. If Google bans you, they should provide avenues to permanently move data out of their services. Not providing this is tantamount to theft, since I sincerely doubt that the data is straight-up thrown out; it's still used for and tangled up in their ad and machine learning algos.

> Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar.

I have a monthly calendar reminder to do a GDPR export (Google Takeout, Facebook, etc), and I just save it to a big HDD. I keep the instructions to order exports for each service in the "event description" to make it as quick and as little effort for me as possible.

I know it's boring... but I read the article this thread is about and it just re-inforces that I am doing the right thing.

Do you mean google fiber? I've called fiber before I had an account there to ask some questions and I had 0 problems talking to a human immediately and they answered all my questions.

Think that story is about Google Fi. I'm a Fi user, but haven't had to try and reach a human to resolve a problem yet; I dread the day if/when that happens where I actually do need a human to solve something I encountered...

I attempted to be a Fi user. I was a Google Voice number, but apparently some small % of Google Voice numbers could not be ported into Fi at all. After a couple escalations the rep was very sorry but said their system was not able to handle my account unless I was willing to give up my Google Voice number. They suggested I create an alternate google account just for Fi, although Fi and Google Voice cannot front one another, so I end up with a separate phone number that nobody would know.

On the flip side, I reached out to Google Fi for a payment issue (my account was a French account originally which got converted to a US account and that created an issue) and I got through to a human. This was during the beta phase though so might have been different during that time.

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