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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

No, ladies and gentlement, that has nothing to do with that.

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.

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Let's not make excuses for Google here. A few months ago I created a Gmail account for a new business - since I hadn't registered the domain yet, I planned on using the Gmail account for a while then switching over to the real email. Over the next few days I signed up for a bunch of other stuff with the account: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. I also registered the real, verifiable business address on Google Maps and requested a postcard verification to that address (which never arrived).

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.

I will say from experience with google maps, that if you say the right combination of lawyer, legal, etc etc…not directed at them, but about another entity accidentally in control of your maps location.

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?)

Fortunately it was resolved before we actually opened to the public (barely). But at one point I was like, fuck. Google Maps is the main driver of customers to our type of business here, from my research. What if this couldn't be resolved at all and we were stuck unable to control our business on Maps? It would be a huge problem.

Breaks TOS how? (I don't know what aurora is more than it appears to be an app store)

Specifically, I don't know. But Aurora is an open source client that uses google play APIs to download and install apks. It's used by users who want to install apps from google play without having any google play services (and their unreasonably terrible privacy implications). The account is required I assume to authenticate to whatever network requests they're using.

I cannot imagine this being allowed in their TOS. The app is a reverse engineer of their APIs.

> I don't know what Google does with a longstanding account that breaks TOS in this way

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.

Is there a service that will import google takeout backups and produce a working account with minimal data loss?

No. It's one of the reasons Takeout is more performative than useful. A giant pile of JSON files for proprietary Google services you can't import anywhere isn't useful unless you're a developer who can write automation to import them to somewhere else.

It's certainly 100% useful for me, not "performative" at all, but that's because I use it all for standard stuff -- e-mail/contacts/calendar, files/Docs/Sheets/Slides/photos. None of that is proprietary to Google (e-mails are mbox, Docs files are converted to Word, etc.).

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.

Well, for example, what mail services will allow you to upload an MBOX file? (I'll give you one... Fastmail added support for it about six years after I left Gmail, but that wasn't until like last year.) You can't carry that export method over to most mail services, which if they support importing, require IMAP (and hence access to your current account in good standing).

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.

Well I do regular backups and they do ZIP nowadays.

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.

> t preferred to issue things in .tar.gz archives, and good lunch to any non-HN user on figuring out what to do with those.

The built-in Archive Utility on macOS handles .tar.gz just fine, as does 7-Zip on Windows.

> I think last time I used Takeout, it preferred to issue things in .tar.gz archives

What is the intersection of people who decided to use Google takeout but are incapable of figuring out how to extract a tarball?

You can import your mbox emails into lots of email serves via a desktop client. Depending on the client you might have to import into a second location, select all and then drag over to your live account. IMAP will sync up your imported email.

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