And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should never store important things like your email/passwords/passkeys on google
The post is about a "disposable" Google account created two hours prior and all it did was break Google TOS. This is totally predictable protection from account abuse. Pretty much any major consumer company will ban brand-new accounts that immediately proceed to break TOS.
I don't know what Google does with a longstanding account that breaks TOS in this way, but this is not that. Also you should be using Google Takeout to backup your account data regularly anyways -- that's what it's there for.
That's literally all I did with the account over a span of two or three days. Then I took a long weekend hiking trip. Came back, the account is permanently locked. No way to contact support. Just a tiny comment box where I could plead my case, which I never got a response to.
I was able to get back control of the FB, IG, Twitter accounts quite easily. It took me weeks of wrangling with Google support to get back control of the Google Maps location, and I was never able to unlock the original account. I had to do this whole messy process (as directed by them) of registering the business on Maps a second time then declaring the old one as a duplicate, then waiting two weeks for Google to process (ignore) that so I could escalate it to real human, then they fixed it but mangled the name which took another week or two to fix.
So yeah, don't use Gmail for anything you care about is my advice.
I can see why my actions on that account could falsely trigger the account to lock, that's not the issue. The issue is that there was literally no way to ever unlock the account once the false trigger happened. All they had to do was require a phone call with a real human in this case. But no, it's Google.
They will call you from an overseas number between 8-11pm your local time, or 4am.
If you answer, they can magically fix it in moments.
If you don’t — you may get a call another time… or never… in which case, good luck.
(In short, it’s insanely hard to get anything going wrong with Google fixed. And I am so sorry you had to go through that. I’m terrified of having something like my drive deleted(shared files). But I do pay for space… so perhaps paying makes it less likely?)
I cannot imagine this being allowed in their TOS. The app is a reverse engineer of their APIs.
Pretty much nothing. I've had my main account for... 15 years or so? I moved away from Google several years ago [0], and use the account almost exclusively for the Aurora store now. It's been fine, and has been for somewhere between months and years.
[0] If I'm wrong, or Google becomes more aggressive, then nothing major is lost. I've gone through Takeout, stopped adding photos/email/passwords/etc years ago, and completely migrated away. No need to tell me "But what if the account gets banned?", because nothing of value will be lost.
Sure if you want to download your Maps location history or YouTube comment history as JSON it's there too, but I don't think too many people care about importing that stuff elsewhere. Competing services are obviously free to build their own importer if they want.
But all the normally "important" content we think about like e-mails and documents and photos, it's all there just zipped up. Nothing trapped inside proprietary JSON or anything like that. And it's just peace of mind knowing that I've always got a local backup of everything.
Offering Takeout doesn't actually make it very easy to migrate to a competitor, is my point. Sure, you can get the data out, but very little will actually ingest Takeout in any useful way. And heck, I think last time I used Takeout, it preferred to issue things in .tar.gz archives, and good lunch to any non-HN user on figuring out what to do with those.
And it's not Googles responsibility to make it easy for you to import to other services.
They use open formats and standards in their export. It's up to you and the other providers to mess with it. A lot of them can import directly from Gmail over API.
Mbox can easily be converted to maildir. Which can be used by thunderbird, not much, sup, etc.
I know people hate on Google but in this case it's not on them to make it easy. The fact that you can export it into open standards is all they have to do.
Finally, this is probably their way of creating a dark pattern. Especially for email. Export into an old, less used nowadays format.
What is the intersection of people who decided to use Google takeout but are incapable of figuring out how to extract a tarball?
The built-in Archive Utility on macOS handles .tar.gz just fine, as does 7-Zip on Windows.
Limit your interactions with Google to only the services you most need, and you will probably be safe. It’s too dangerous to go all-in on Google, because you could lose your entire digital footprint from an AI bot with no recourse other than HN and Twitter.
That said, I do pay for YouTube Premium.
Has this actually happened - does Youtube Premium still charge for accounts that have been terminated? Or is this just FUD?
In the past I have contacted YouTube Red support in the past when I didn't cancel my subscription after I moved counties and they easily refunded a few months of charges. Unsure how that would play out if your account was cancelled. I would probably just contact my bank to get the charges blocked + reversed.
Otherwise there's always recourses for a company to recover the fees that were due and couldn't charge through your credit card. You'd then have to dispute a court order to recover it from your employer for instance. You can of course battle it then, but it's a lot more hassle than to have the charge disputed in the first place (the dispute goes back to the company, who has to prove their point)
That's not how any of this works. A company doesn't just send someone over to the courthouse to speak to the manager and get a court order to garnish some random person's wages over $20 in declined subscription charges. Lol.
As a company you file an official claim that goes through a court, usually the other party won't show up, and you're awarded a judgement in your favor. That judgment allows you to request recovery of the funds in many ways, including asking the person employer to pay you first before paying them, repossessing their godds, houses whatever the court allows you to do of there's no other option.
E.g. in NZ: https://communitylaw.org.nz/community-law-manual/chapter-26-...
> lol
For people baffled by all of this, many countries will have stronger laws to protect lenders and service providers than just telling them "tough luck" when you refuse to pay for received goods/services.
We're at least two people this has happened to :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35836221
FTFY