Comment by amiraliakbari | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amiraliakbari | Hacker News Reader

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Just today, I received a text message from Google that my account has been disabled. The stated reason is "Spamming". I've been actively using this account as my main email for more than 14 years - back when you Gmail was intive-only. I rarely send any emails, and I'm sure my accounts has sent less than 50 emails in the past year. I don't know how an account with so few sent emails can be marked as spammer by any AI. But it was just the last day that I read the tweet saying files containing a "1" are marked as copyright infringement, so I shouldn't be so surprised.

Like the author I've also seen many such horror stories before, but always thought that wouldn't happen to me. I'm setting up my new email address on my own domain now, and encourage everyone to do the same. I'm still waiting for my appeal, so have not yet exactly checked how many sites I've lost access to because of Google login. Anyways, I will not make the mistake of using Google login or an email with domain not under my control for registering on any site again, even the least important ones.

I worked for an identity company for years and preached the dangers of social auth.. especially when there is little chance/process for appeal.

If Google kills your account, gmail and youtube are gone. Every social auth account is frozen. No clue what happens to your Android devices but your Play purchases are gone. Your Google Voice number disappears. It's a bad place to be. The story isn't any different for Facebook (Whatsapp, Instagram, Occulus), Apple (icloud, app store), and many many others.

And even then, I'm starting to see the same dangers for any centralized auth provider.

Social auth isn't that much better than email auth which is what social auth replaces. If you lose your primary @gmail there goes your accounts to everything. Some services let you change your email but most don't and your email is your account. Having all your accounts exist in a dead-man walking state isn't that much better.

If you own your own mail domain, you can at least move providers. There will be a downtime of days but better than "forever".

Just a reminder for anyone not ready to ditch gmail...everyone should at a bare minimum be using https://takeout.google.com/ to export and backup their data if you use any google service.

Are there any services that can automate the Takeout process on a cadence? For example, every month or quarter initiate the takeout process and upload the results to Backblaze, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc?

Yes Google themselves allow that every 2 months

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