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Comment by deadbunny | Hacker News Reader

Go on give us just one example of Google killing someone's account due to email content.

You got 'em. Google rarely reveals why they killed someone's account.

So we can't prove it was due to email content. For all we know it could just be a dude named Richard who throws darts at a board full of usernames all day.

It doesn't have to be limited to email. They will kill your whole account for a perceived violation on any service. There was a story recently where a father had his account terminated because he took a photo of his son to send to the doctor which auto uploaded to google photos and was flagged by the AI and reported to the police. The police check it and confirm its a false alarm but Google refuses to unban the account meaning the guy lost access to his email and phone number.

Same exact thing happened to me but thankfully it was a throwaway account (on my domain in fact) since I knew there was risk - thankfully they didn't cancel the whole domain for it...

I've been using gmail for my domain (free gsuite legacy) for 10+ years though I'm careful to not do anything that could be misinterpreted on the service particularly through google photos or youtube

I actually used fastmail for 10 years prior to gmail but abandoned it in 2010 or so because imap/calendaring/etc. wouldn't meaningfully sync with my iphone but gmail had full free activesync (which I still miss a bit...)

I still keep a basic inexpensive legacy fastmail account just for some sieve scripts and cleaner smtp than gmail offers...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...

RSD Academy has been all sorts of messed up after Google flagged the guy's photos. He had the rsdacademy.net domain hosted with Google and lost access to that. He lost access to the YouTube account that handled all of the academy videos. He lost docs for his draft textbook. Granted, he probably should have not tied everything to a personal account. On the other hand, Google shouldn't be able to lock everything.

This comment has to be missing a "/s".

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