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Comment by oreoftw | Hacker News Reader

The author should consider himself lucky. Just one google service has been suspended. I got my account banned for no reason and lost access to more than 10 years worth of emails, documents, single sign ons to different apps, etc.

Only invoking GDPR and the ownership of a domain name allowed me to regain access and restore email service. Without GDPR I would've got nothing at all.

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Every one of these threads serves as my bi-annual[1] reminder to invoke the Takeout <https://takeout.google.com/> for fear that some AI process goes rogue and nukes my account

1: I just noticed that Takeout now offers a scheduled export option, including cloud-to-cloud transfers, so I am definitely going to turn that on

Could you provide a little bit of detail about how you did that? Just in case…

Find google data protection officer email. State your request to get the data with a mention of escalation to the Irish Data Protection Officer if no action is taken within a reasonable timeframe.

This has magically unbanned me in less than two days. In contrast to two months of tweeting, emailing support, nagging my google eng friends and even support folks via linkedin.

Are you an Irish citizen? Or can anyone contact the Irish DPO because Google is “based” there for taxes or whatever? I’m wondering if I can use this as a US citizen.

Not an Irish citizen or a resident. Everyone residing in the EU(including EEA) enjoys GDPR protection.

I don't know how stringent the geo check for claims is, but as soon as you become an EEA resident you can invoke GDPR.

I would recommend to ask Google’s DPO anyway.

Could you please share how did GDPR help in this case?

Invoking the right to retrieve and correct information helped me to get Google’s attention to my case and unban me.

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