Why does reddit end up deleting so many of the threads that end up receiving any attention? It's so hard to follow anything now when you go to the site and all there is is [removed]
Because it was obviously a creative writing exercise. I left another comment showing the contradictions in the post. The facts provided were self-contradicting and the story was full of the usual tells for creative writing posts.
You identify two inconsistencies, neither of which appear to actually be inconsistent. (One is just the observation that multiple accounts were banned, which is not actually an inconsistency? Just something you don't find likely?)
It's possible that this is real, it's possible it's made up, but I'm not seeing much more evidence in your armchair scepticism than in the asserted facts. Last week everyone on HN was telling me that social media must immediately be regulated because it's 'directionally correct' to assert that teenagers are suffering, but this week we are to disbelieve that Google would ever arbitrarily close accounts, something it firmly asserts it has every right to do?
> (One is just the observation that multiple accounts were banned, which is not actually an inconsistency? Just something you don't find likely?)
I think you misunderstood. In one post they said all accounts were banned including their recovery accounts.
In another comment they said Google sent them an email saying their accounts were banned for “child protection”. This supposedly occurred after the son admitted what he had done, which was a detail that supposedly occurred much later in the process.
Where did they receive that message if all of their email accounts were banned?
These Reddit stories always get some people invested in the story before the inconsistencies show up. You have to read them with some skepticism. You can do enough mental gymnastics to convince yourself that all of the Reddit posts are true and accurate if you try hard enough.
The story as OP tells it is that they appealed the ban, and the ban was upheld. Logically, they appealed the ban from an email address they had access to. I don't know how you get from 'all of their Google accounts were banned' to 'they had no possible way to send and receive email whatsoever'.
> These Reddit stories always get some people invested in the story before the inconsistencies show up. You have to read them with some skepticism. You can do enough mental gymnastics to convince yourself that all of the Reddit posts are true and accurate if you try hard enough.
I get the feeling you've concluded that the OP's claims is unlikely and are now rationalising that conclusion, but I think the specific rationalisations you've given are fairly weak. That doesn't speak to the veracity of the original story, it merely makes your attempted debunking unconvincing.
God, this is a real nightmare. I'm pretty reticent to rush to regulation, but I really don't know what other solution is even possible here.
The average person cannot realistically exist in a digital vacuum, self-hosting their entire online world. Google should not be able to do this to them. No one should have to rely on trying to whip up public mobs on Reddit or HN to get Google to give them access to their own freaking tax spreadsheets.
I think raising public awareness is a great escalation channel for severe (and complicated) cases that require bureaucratic help from senior people. We do this for other things (like screaming fire, finding lost kids, or finding organ donors)
> We do this for other things (like screaming fire, finding lost kids, or finding organ donors)
Also we have public fire departments, police and amber alerts, and official organ donor registration systems. This isn't really the a case against state intervention you seem to be going for.
> I'm pretty reticent to rush to regulation, but I really don't know what other solution is even possible here.
Before rushing to assume regulation is necessary, we should question if this story is real at all. It has a lot of signs of being a creative writing exercise like the conflicting details about all of their accounts being banned, including recovery emails, but then later they received an email explaining the reason for the ban. How did they receive that email?
> but then later they received an email explaining the reason for the ban
Presumably this was in response to an appeal, which would have required an email, which would obviously have been a non-Google email given the wider context? I'm not seeing the inconsistency.
I think you’re stretching. You can’t just send an email to Google from a new email address claiming you were associated with an unrelated Google account and then receive information about that account.
Then let’s discuss those real stories, not someone’s Reddit fake posts with crucial details that make it a very different story (all linked accounts got banned)
> The average person cannot realistically exist in a digital vacuum
This alone is enough to see that regulation is what is needed. It's completely crooked that the average person is forced to maintain good standing with a single particular NASDAQ corporation to participate in society. Those here who might think "it's very possible to do so without Google" are not the average person, living in an average place in an average bubble.
The solution is breaking up Google.
This remains the case even if this particular story is exaggerated.
Yes, these stories should scare you off of cloud services in general, not one particular vendor. The root problem is that you're storing valuable information on "someone else's computer." And that someone can decide to stop serving you for any or no reason at all, and you are without recourse. This should be totally unacceptable, but somehow the world has normalized it.
Don't keep anything in a cloud service that you couldn't live with losing, unless you keep a local backup. Including and especially your identity (E-mail) which unlocks all your accounts.
No, the root problem is you put all the eggs in one basket ignoring the folk wisdom that predates anything digital
> Don't keep anything in a cloud service that you couldn't live with losing, unless you keep a local backup.
Translated: so do keep everything in a cloud service, just backup it at a fraction of the effort with / insecurity / unreliability / unavailability of your own computer
Yes, and, importantly, have a plan to be able to log in to and reset your passwords through e-mail, on all your other services, if you suddenly lose you@yourcloudemail.com
I consider “cloud” to be a single basket. If you have your online stuff spread across 5 cloud pro briers, than any of them locking you out will disrupt you in some way.
The terrifying part is how much one can be dependent on services from a single company, that may at some point simply decide to not do business with you. Whether they have good reason for that is secondary. I moved away from relying on Google a while ago when I noticed, that I have zero recourse in case something happens. Turned out to be a sensible decision. I still use my google account, but only for things I wouldn't miss if I the account was nuked.
Not everyone is aware how Google operates in cases like these until it happens. . Whether Google don't want to do business with people breaching some rules is one thing but to lock away all their data is something that does not make much sense to me, only highlights how their service should not be depended on. Also to ban all people who may have logged in from a device but who have done nothing wrong is bad policy. From do no evil to this...
My comment focused on Google because that's what OP is about, but I wouldn't single them out here. I think it's largely a matter of scale / compliance. There have been many posts here on HN about individuals and companies "begging" (their words not mine) Apple to reconsider a decision regarding their account. I don't have any experience with Meta, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was also a fully automated, no recourse black box.
I thankfully learned that lesson about twenty years go. Google had a product that allowed you to park domains with them for ad insertion to generate some revenue. Owning over 400 domains at the time I though, why not?
The process through which you parked the domains with Google entailed loading a file with the list of domains, after which each one would, in turn, be approved or denied. All 400+ domains were approved.
A few days later I received a cryptic message about unusual click activity on the domains and the Google account I had at the time was shut down immediately without recourse. I visited a few of the pages (not all 400, maybe a dozen) as they were approved to see what they put on them. Of course I did not click on anything. I might be accused of being stupid, but I am not an idiot. Besides, I pretty much knew the income would be a rounding error, maybe a few cups of coffee per year, maybe.
Well, nobody to call, text, email or send smoke signals to. Nothing.
That's when I decided I would never do business with Google. All I use from them is search. That's it. Nothing else. I can't trust them with anything that is business related and anything personally important.
Gmail? No way. I pay for Zoho mail for all the email accounts for my businesses and I am very happy about the product, the service and the isolation from a despotic company that can shut down your life in a microsecond.
> I would never do business with Google. All I use from them is search. That's it. Nothing else.
Given that's their main business and they are likely to graveyard whatever domain penny business you've got burnt by anyway, you're still doing a lot of business with them
For this reason I’m as diversified as possible while still maintaining some level of convenience
I try and not depend on a single vendor for everything and I don’t use the same email for all services - with auto email forwarding and password managers there’s just no reason to
My services are spread across Apple, Google, and other third party services for other email, storage, music, etc
I’m trying to think of what it would be like if this happened to me and it’d be annoying for sure, but not catastrophic
I do recommend having your own domain for email for certain accounts - I don’t do it for all services because sometimes it’s just easier to say email@gmail.com vs risking typos etc with a custom domain
I still use main stream services of course, I’m not that hardcore and like convenience like I said, but so what I can to avoid these types of headaches
If I ever become a life coach for small business owners, I don't know how I can recommend GSuite. Horror stories of "I've lost everything I had with them" are so plentiful I've stopped saving them. Seems like even Microsoft is not as bad.
The description by OP in comments like https://old.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1s92fql/my_s... seems to strongly imply that all the accounts were unconnected in a GSuite sense, and they are being slowly recursively banned by Google based on indirect connections like recovery emails or co-presence on a device.
I don't see any reasonable way they could have saved themselves besides something crazy like requiring every family member use a different feudal lord - one person gets Google, one person gets Apple, one poor guy gets Microsoft...
That detail is where I first paused and realize this story is more likely a creative writing exercise than a factual account
They had a separate claim that after the bannings and after the son admitted what he did, they received an email confirming that the accounts were banned for “child protection”
Received where? They just claimed all of their accounts were banned first, including linked recovery accounts.
Also where is the text of that email? Communications like that are key to legal matters yet it was only shared as a passing comment
I have no context since the original post is deleted, but in general, it seems the supposed account of the son was not tied in any direct way to the other accounts...
The solution is to use a true business-oriented provider and not an ad agency for one's file and email hosting.
Google is the most untrustworthy company I've dealt with. I have Google One, and pay $250/mo for Ultra, which I barely use, yet I literally have no support. They set a very dangerous precedent: tech companies can have absolutely no support, can close your accounts, and can ban you without any way to even dispute it. Facebook simply copied Google once the precedent was set. Although I hate regulation, Google, Facebook, etc., should be regulated! As consumers, our rights should be protected. These companies have immense profits and should allow basic dispute resolution. Their lack of support is preventing me from switching to Google Fi, because my life is in their hands - email, phone, Google Play, etc. Although these are completely separate legal entities, they treat them as one; if your Google account gets terminated, you won't be able to access Google Fi, Google Photos, Google Drive, etc.
Could you imagine if Microsoft decided to remotely revoke IBM's access to Outlook/all of their mail on their mail server without completely migrating to a new service? Oh, and there's no point of contact.
The ensuing legal battle would be legendary. The only reason this is happening is because Google isn't beholden to the common people, despite running a utility.
Google some time ago deleted all my 13 years of location history while attempting to migrate it to local storage on users phones. I used it to keep track of business expenses for tax and had to collect the data someway else. Plus lost a lot of places i had kept track of in foreign countries visited. Desaster that showed I should not rely on them. Made that mistake there while self hosting and self backuping the whole other stuff. Oh well.
Makes you wonder if Google models how much revenue they lose specifically to this fear, because it's very real. I would simply never use GCP or Gemini because the idea of being banned from Google for absolutely any long-tail reason is a far greater cost than any benefit I could derive from those services.
We're speculating here but between time correlation, browser fingerprinting and telemetry, the average user attempting to pull off a clean compartmentalisation of two accounts has no chance, even when they think they do.
It sounds like the son was desperately using the linked family accounts he had access to as the previously used accounts became banned. But he only admitted to doing it on his own account.
That would account for the time it took for the bans to spread, and for why the son came clean a few days later instead of right away or never.
Hosts feel like they have everything to lose by not banning problematic accounts, everything to gain by performatively burning anything “sketchy”, and nothing to lose by the inevitable automated over banning.
I almost lost everything because I used a state ID that was not a drivers license (which i did not have at the time), in combination with another complication that was “caused” by a recent move between states.
It made zero sense if you are not an automated system, and would have been devastating if I hadn’t figured out a path through it. I spent three weeks under enormous stress, as my savings, among other things, were needed to pay off the majority of my house right then.
But despite the insanity, it was easy to see the pedantic digital “reasoning” that was happening.
The mass centralization and automation of commerce is pushing us into dystopia. Brazil.
We are not safe. I mean that. Until laws make corporations responsible for these kinds of harms, with fines on the order of historic fortunes, if they don’t, it is going to get worse.
The “mind boggling fine” part makes for a hard sell. But it is the only way to create balance against the mind boggling levels of centralization and profits that insulate these companies of any personal individual level ethics.
Poor kid. The irony of scarring this kid for life over completely normal behavior, in order to "protect him from abuse", is hopefully not lost on all of you.
Google really needs to do something about this. It’s one thing for them to stop doing business with you, it’s another to withhold your data from you (in particular after they set up their services such that you’re inclined to store everything with them). Every time I read one of these stories it reminds me that I really need to break away from them.
I currently use Google Voice for almost all SMS 2FA after a nightmare scenario where I realized that the mobile carriers are entirely susceptible to social engineering and will happily port your number to an attacker’s phone. I planned to switch to Fi as they are probably the only one that this is not susceptible to… but if I were to lose both email and phone access I’d really be fucked.
> I currently use Google Voice for almost all SMS 2FA
Same.
I have financial accounts in multiple countries, many using Google Voice for 2FA.
However, whenever I create an account that allows anything other than SMS for 2FA, I immediately switch to that instead. I use an offline TOTP authenticator app, and backup the token secrets in something that's not linked to my Google account.
This greatly limits my blast radius, I think, because I can access my most critical online services without access to my Google account.
My Google Voice number is the only phone number I've used for 15+ years. It'd be a real nightmare if I lost access to my Gmail and/or Voice.
I think it’s human written but there are details of the story that are self-contradicting, like receiving an email explaining why all of the accounts have been banned after all of their email accounts were banned. Including recovery accounts.
>Also, I have plenty of photos of my kids naked when they were little (my son refused to wear anything for 1 year), do I have to be concerned?
This is America, of course you have to be concerned.
Google has family groups where you invite people to your family. I'm assuming they had that set up. I guess if you want to manage your children's accounts you have to do it from a burner Google account.
Oooof. This is going to take a lawyer. A team of lawyers. Everything on that account has no doubt been LOCKED down for CSAM-grade review. I'm just imagining how you'd get a judge to help you here. You'd need to have found an acceptable third party that would do the data access, you'd have to agree on an attorney's eyes only list of data that you'd request.. Any chance anyone might possibly access CSAM = no. Any chance someone might possibly try and delete CSAM = absolutely no.
I don't know what the OP does for work, but almost certainly it's going to be easier to just start over with a new website. Maybe get the daughter's laptop taken to a data recovery specialist and try and pull browser history for the thesis.
This was kind of an interesting comment from that thread. "Just invoke GDPR" is a refrain that's oft-repeated on Reddit (and, dare I say, HN), but it didn't seem to do much in this person's case:
> I did an SAR with Google last year and it took over a month for a single account. It also ended up containing very little because of the way they decide what is and isn’t ‘personal data’, e.g. for the one I used for work, they outright refused to release most of it apart from specific emails and docs where I was mentioned by name because the email address was a standard contact@mywebsite.com (which to be fair is correct grounds for refusal). They were very helpful in padding out the SAR release by re-sending the emails of me requesting the SAR, and also redacted the data protection employee name whom I was conversing with though lol.
> For SARs themselves there’s also grounds to refuse if they think it might interfere with potential future legal investigations, which given the ban reason I suppose isn’t an impossibility but unlikely.
yo I'm not an anxious person but this has set it off. If it truly is anyone who had logged into the same device, I wonder if a system reset keeps you clean from any bad accounts going forward. For example if I system reset and sold a tablet on craigs list
I worked at Google a long time ago now during the whole Google+ fiasco. One thing that was super controversial internally was the so-called Real Names policy. For those who don't know or remember, it was Vic Gundotra's idea that people should use their real identities. He kept using this weird example that he didn't want it filled with people named "Dog Turd". I don't know why.
So there was this mysterious black box that decided if your name was "real" or not. At first this didn't support pseudonyms or any kind of anonymity and that's actually really important for any social network. Think of someone seeking help coming to terms with their sexual orientation, gender identity, addiction, eating disorder or whatever. Or simply going against their family's religious wishes. I later worked at Facebook and one thing I'll give them credit for is Groups. FB Groups had an identity that actually couldn't be tied by anyone else to your profile or identity in any other group. That was a good product decision.
Anyway, if your name somehow failed the magic real names filter, your account got banned. Your entire Google account was banned and basically there was no recourse other than knowing someone who worked at the company or making a big enough fuss on Twitter.
Many people, myself included, criticized and protested this decision. You should at least segment Google products. There's absolutely no reason to ban your Gmail account because an automated system decided your Google+ account name wasn't "real". But that feedback was ignored and this was well before the public launch. And the public backlash proved this position correct (IMHO).
But the net effect was that I decided I can't use any other Google product. Let's say a system is launched to find offensive photos and there's a false positive on one of my images in Google Photos. Maybe it's just a hash collision with a known image. And then what? I lose my entire Gmail? Are you kidding me?
It's wild to me that this is still an issue ~15 years later. I think my stance actually isn't strict enough anymore. You probably shouldn't use Gmail at all. I should really find a paid email provider hosted entirely in Europe, preferably Switzerland or some other country with strong pro-user regulation.
So I have no idea if this Gemini story is true or not. I say that because 95% of the things on Reddit are completely made up. But it is plausible. I wouldn't be surprised if it's true. It means I wouldn't use Gemini at all if I used Gmail.
Why? You're going to reference them from Google Drive. Google has 400 trillion gazillion servers with copies of it. There's no way you can lose it! You wouldn't do anything weird, so there's absolutely no reason to think you'd lose your account. And honestly, we're all humans here - surely you can reach out to a company as large as Google and speak to a human if there's an issue this significant.
Another consideration: kids do not have the ability to think ahead and consider future consequences. It's one of the last functions of the brain to develop, and it doesn't fully complete until, often, you've already finished college. Looking through the comments in the reddit thread, it appears the daughter had her dissertation on her google drive and lost it despite having done nothing wrong herself.
And just the final point I want to drive home: these people lost their google accounts because of what someone else did. Nobody thinks ahead to account for something like that.
At what point are we going to start looking at digital mail the same way we do physical mail? It's equally as important today. It needs protections, regulations, and oversight.
Even if you don't think you're at risk of permanently losing access, you would want to have access during power outages or other internet outages. Or even just when you're on a plane and want to look up an old email.
Even just for offline access when on airplanes, when the internet/power is out. It's not just about rugpulls.
Honestly it's a bit insulting to non-HN people to assume that they'd never want offline access or realize that having a single point of failure is a bad idea.
Most people who use Google services don't know about this or simply do not have bare minimum technical knowledge required to set this up or even know why they would need to do backups
I’m just over here trying to understand why or how you would do that to Gemini Live.
>Visual Context: On mobile, you can choose to share your camera feed or screen. This allows you to ask questions about what you are looking at in the real world or get help with tasks on your device.
>Common Use Cases
• Brainstorming: Talking through ideas for a project or event.
• Role-playing: Practicing for a job interview or a difficult conversation.
• Learning: Asking deep-dive questions about a complex topic while you're on the go.
• Daily Tasks: Getting help with things like gift ideas, travel itineraries, or summarizing information from your screen.
Reminder that Reddit is a hotbed for creative writing stories posted as pleas for advice. It’s a trend across all of the advice subreddits. They usually have rules that you’re not allowed to question the posts, only provide advice, so it’s a safe output for LARPing for attention, weirdly enough.
This story is triggering a lot of my skepticism senses because it fits the mold of a typical creative writing Reddit post:
- The OP claims Google just banned their account for CSAM content, yet nobody is considering the legal consequences of this? Their details would be referred to law enforcement and they could have police knocking on their door any minute. Why is the only thing anyone is talking about the access to their email?
- OP is a helpless victim in a story where the world conspires against them
- This is ostensibly a request for legal advice, but they didn’t post the one communication they claimed to have received in the matter (an e-mail explaining the reason for their bans, which they somehow received despite all accounts being banned)
- A lot of unnecessary extra details about how the tragedy is amplified, like the doctor’s dissertation just happens to be due next week. Apparently she’s been writing this for so long but hasn’t shared a copy with anyone for review, editing, or feedback once? Right.
- Villain is a safe target like an evil megacorp, with a guest villain of a teenage boy who is also safe to dislike
- OP only responds to helpful suggestions with new facts that conveniently obviate those helpful suggestions, like the response explaining they have to use an obscure bank that doesn’t have any physical branches for reasons
- OP completely ignores helpful responses that provide actionable advice. The real accounts are usually all over these comments with requests for additional detail.
- OP has a strange timeline of events where the “AI” banned the first account, then Google manual review started banning accounts that had ever been linked to the tablet, but it did so in a weird way that happened in sequential order with each occurring several hours later. The timeline is oddly specific with these occurrences, too.
The piece that really broke the story for me was this quote:
> Son eventually comes clean and tells us what he was doing. We get the email informing us that accounts have been banned due to child protection reasons
So they can’t access any of their accounts but they also received an email somehow? Details about that conveniently omitted despite the excessive detail in so many other things. They also only receive an explanation for why the accounts were banned after this long process where all accounts were banned one by one, and only after son “comes clean”? This seems like a detail that comes from a story where someone decided the plot point first and then needed some supporting details to try to minimize doubt.
If you’re thinking that maybe the account ban email went to the recovery account, they claimed that their recovery accounts were also part of the lockout:
> Shortly after, accounts which weren't on the tablet, but were used as recovery emails for those accounts also got hit.
This feels like another red flag from someone who lost track of how their story’s facts intersected each other.
These creative writing stories always rely on triggering your sense of “Well it could happen” combined with a set of acceptable villains (Google + “stupid” 14 year old boy) mixed with a set of details designed to amp up the sympathy factor (daughter’s dissertation due next week, no copies exist outside of Google Docs).
yeah this story smells funny. Also, given the popularity of the post, wouldn't their son immediately know it's them? If I truly wanted advice, I would hide the sordid details. I think it's a fantastic piece of creative writing.
This kind of thing is not the only modern example of guilt by association, but it’s probably the most common. (Not this specific event, I mean the banning of “cloud” accounts based on proximity.)
There is a reason that we once eliminated this idea. It’s a stain on a free society and a constant drag on the economy. Corporations embracing this tactic are laying the groundwork for a terrible future.
Google will be a better monopoly than Microsoft i promise.
GitHub is great, I know it in the heart of my hearts.
Steam is owned by literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ, they'll never turn on me.
Loyalty is of course a quality of a decent human being. But not loyalty to corporations that you trade fair with, or worse, use YOU as a product. Only loyalty to people committed to you
Honestly, making the content unavailable for anyone who hasn’t already downloaded it by blocking the entire account is probably not the worst thing. Also, family account?
From Google's point of view, very little downstairs to banning those other accounts. And the upside is that they reduce their legal risk: "We automatically blocked the account that was generating the kiddie porn, as well as the other accounts that had been logged into that device."
Outsources parenting to megacorp, complains when megacorp shows responsible behavior instead of him, the absent parent more concerned with his business than his son.
That feels a bit judgemental. Kids make mistakes despite how much good parenting you give them. It is not like he didn't take precautions with parental controls and at 14 you have to trust them a bit.
Why does reddit end up deleting so many of the threads that end up receiving any attention? It's so hard to follow anything now when you go to the site and all there is is [removed]
Because it was obviously a creative writing exercise. I left another comment showing the contradictions in the post. The facts provided were self-contradicting and the story was full of the usual tells for creative writing posts.
You identify two inconsistencies, neither of which appear to actually be inconsistent. (One is just the observation that multiple accounts were banned, which is not actually an inconsistency? Just something you don't find likely?)
It's possible that this is real, it's possible it's made up, but I'm not seeing much more evidence in your armchair scepticism than in the asserted facts. Last week everyone on HN was telling me that social media must immediately be regulated because it's 'directionally correct' to assert that teenagers are suffering, but this week we are to disbelieve that Google would ever arbitrarily close accounts, something it firmly asserts it has every right to do?
> (One is just the observation that multiple accounts were banned, which is not actually an inconsistency? Just something you don't find likely?)
I think you misunderstood. In one post they said all accounts were banned including their recovery accounts.
In another comment they said Google sent them an email saying their accounts were banned for “child protection”. This supposedly occurred after the son admitted what he had done, which was a detail that supposedly occurred much later in the process.
Where did they receive that message if all of their email accounts were banned?
These Reddit stories always get some people invested in the story before the inconsistencies show up. You have to read them with some skepticism. You can do enough mental gymnastics to convince yourself that all of the Reddit posts are true and accurate if you try hard enough.
The story as OP tells it is that they appealed the ban, and the ban was upheld. Logically, they appealed the ban from an email address they had access to. I don't know how you get from 'all of their Google accounts were banned' to 'they had no possible way to send and receive email whatsoever'.
> These Reddit stories always get some people invested in the story before the inconsistencies show up. You have to read them with some skepticism. You can do enough mental gymnastics to convince yourself that all of the Reddit posts are true and accurate if you try hard enough.
I get the feeling you've concluded that the OP's claims is unlikely and are now rationalising that conclusion, but I think the specific rationalisations you've given are fairly weak. That doesn't speak to the veracity of the original story, it merely makes your attempted debunking unconvincing.
God, this is a real nightmare. I'm pretty reticent to rush to regulation, but I really don't know what other solution is even possible here.
The average person cannot realistically exist in a digital vacuum, self-hosting their entire online world. Google should not be able to do this to them. No one should have to rely on trying to whip up public mobs on Reddit or HN to get Google to give them access to their own freaking tax spreadsheets.
I think raising public awareness is a great escalation channel for severe (and complicated) cases that require bureaucratic help from senior people. We do this for other things (like screaming fire, finding lost kids, or finding organ donors)
> We do this for other things (like screaming fire, finding lost kids, or finding organ donors)
Also we have public fire departments, police and amber alerts, and official organ donor registration systems. This isn't really the a case against state intervention you seem to be going for.
And for the vast majority of people who don't have access to some kind of megaphone?
> I'm pretty reticent to rush to regulation, but I really don't know what other solution is even possible here.
Before rushing to assume regulation is necessary, we should question if this story is real at all. It has a lot of signs of being a creative writing exercise like the conflicting details about all of their accounts being banned, including recovery emails, but then later they received an email explaining the reason for the ban. How did they receive that email?
> but then later they received an email explaining the reason for the ban
Presumably this was in response to an appeal, which would have required an email, which would obviously have been a non-Google email given the wider context? I'm not seeing the inconsistency.
I think you’re stretching. You can’t just send an email to Google from a new email address claiming you were associated with an unrelated Google account and then receive information about that account.
Even if it is fiction it is certainly possible for Google to get people into serious trouble by blocking their accounts.
Then let’s discuss those real stories, not someone’s Reddit fake posts with crucial details that make it a very different story (all linked accounts got banned)
> The average person cannot realistically exist in a digital vacuum
This alone is enough to see that regulation is what is needed. It's completely crooked that the average person is forced to maintain good standing with a single particular NASDAQ corporation to participate in society. Those here who might think "it's very possible to do so without Google" are not the average person, living in an average place in an average bubble.
The solution is breaking up Google.
This remains the case even if this particular story is exaggerated.
Are you not aware of a million of dedicated competitive services for each of this to jump to "self-hosting" as the only alternative?
> All my emails, all my documents saved in Google Drive.
How many of those competitive services would also lock the account if something like this happened?
Yes, these stories should scare you off of cloud services in general, not one particular vendor. The root problem is that you're storing valuable information on "someone else's computer." And that someone can decide to stop serving you for any or no reason at all, and you are without recourse. This should be totally unacceptable, but somehow the world has normalized it.
Don't keep anything in a cloud service that you couldn't live with losing, unless you keep a local backup. Including and especially your identity (E-mail) which unlocks all your accounts.
No, the root problem is you put all the eggs in one basket ignoring the folk wisdom that predates anything digital
> Don't keep anything in a cloud service that you couldn't live with losing, unless you keep a local backup.
Translated: so do keep everything in a cloud service, just backup it at a fraction of the effort with / insecurity / unreliability / unavailability of your own computer
Yes, and, importantly, have a plan to be able to log in to and reset your passwords through e-mail, on all your other services, if you suddenly lose you@yourcloudemail.com
I consider “cloud” to be a single basket. If you have your online stuff spread across 5 cloud pro briers, than any of them locking you out will disrupt you in some way.
None: your me@NonSelf-HostedMail.com simply wouldn't know about your account at AI.com, so you'd only have your AI account banned
The terrifying part is how much one can be dependent on services from a single company, that may at some point simply decide to not do business with you. Whether they have good reason for that is secondary. I moved away from relying on Google a while ago when I noticed, that I have zero recourse in case something happens. Turned out to be a sensible decision. I still use my google account, but only for things I wouldn't miss if I the account was nuked.
Not everyone is aware how Google operates in cases like these until it happens. . Whether Google don't want to do business with people breaching some rules is one thing but to lock away all their data is something that does not make much sense to me, only highlights how their service should not be depended on. Also to ban all people who may have logged in from a device but who have done nothing wrong is bad policy. From do no evil to this...
My comment focused on Google because that's what OP is about, but I wouldn't single them out here. I think it's largely a matter of scale / compliance. There have been many posts here on HN about individuals and companies "begging" (their words not mine) Apple to reconsider a decision regarding their account. I don't have any experience with Meta, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was also a fully automated, no recourse black box.
I thankfully learned that lesson about twenty years go. Google had a product that allowed you to park domains with them for ad insertion to generate some revenue. Owning over 400 domains at the time I though, why not?
The process through which you parked the domains with Google entailed loading a file with the list of domains, after which each one would, in turn, be approved or denied. All 400+ domains were approved.
A few days later I received a cryptic message about unusual click activity on the domains and the Google account I had at the time was shut down immediately without recourse. I visited a few of the pages (not all 400, maybe a dozen) as they were approved to see what they put on them. Of course I did not click on anything. I might be accused of being stupid, but I am not an idiot. Besides, I pretty much knew the income would be a rounding error, maybe a few cups of coffee per year, maybe.
Well, nobody to call, text, email or send smoke signals to. Nothing.
That's when I decided I would never do business with Google. All I use from them is search. That's it. Nothing else. I can't trust them with anything that is business related and anything personally important.
Gmail? No way. I pay for Zoho mail for all the email accounts for my businesses and I am very happy about the product, the service and the isolation from a despotic company that can shut down your life in a microsecond.
> I would never do business with Google. All I use from them is search. That's it. Nothing else.
Given that's their main business and they are likely to graveyard whatever domain penny business you've got burnt by anyway, you're still doing a lot of business with them
But it's the kind of business, where recourse is not needed
For this reason I’m as diversified as possible while still maintaining some level of convenience
I try and not depend on a single vendor for everything and I don’t use the same email for all services - with auto email forwarding and password managers there’s just no reason to
My services are spread across Apple, Google, and other third party services for other email, storage, music, etc
I’m trying to think of what it would be like if this happened to me and it’d be annoying for sure, but not catastrophic
I do recommend having your own domain for email for certain accounts - I don’t do it for all services because sometimes it’s just easier to say email@gmail.com vs risking typos etc with a custom domain
I still use main stream services of course, I’m not that hardcore and like convenience like I said, but so what I can to avoid these types of headaches
There's a story of an OnlyFans star who slept with Meta employees "in hopes" of getting her IG account unbanned, which worked.
If I ever become a life coach for small business owners, I don't know how I can recommend GSuite. Horror stories of "I've lost everything I had with them" are so plentiful I've stopped saving them. Seems like even Microsoft is not as bad.
The description by OP in comments like https://old.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1s92fql/my_s... seems to strongly imply that all the accounts were unconnected in a GSuite sense, and they are being slowly recursively banned by Google based on indirect connections like recovery emails or co-presence on a device.
I don't see any reasonable way they could have saved themselves besides something crazy like requiring every family member use a different feudal lord - one person gets Google, one person gets Apple, one poor guy gets Microsoft...
That detail is where I first paused and realize this story is more likely a creative writing exercise than a factual account
They had a separate claim that after the bannings and after the son admitted what he did, they received an email confirming that the accounts were banned for “child protection”
Received where? They just claimed all of their accounts were banned first, including linked recovery accounts.
Also where is the text of that email? Communications like that are key to legal matters yet it was only shared as a passing comment
What would Microsoft do in such a case? Unlikely to be any different.
No idea, but at least Microsoft has some semblance of support where you can talk to a person.
I have no context since the original post is deleted, but in general, it seems the supposed account of the son was not tied in any direct way to the other accounts...
The solution is to use a true business-oriented provider and not an ad agency for one's file and email hosting.
Google is the most untrustworthy company I've dealt with. I have Google One, and pay $250/mo for Ultra, which I barely use, yet I literally have no support. They set a very dangerous precedent: tech companies can have absolutely no support, can close your accounts, and can ban you without any way to even dispute it. Facebook simply copied Google once the precedent was set. Although I hate regulation, Google, Facebook, etc., should be regulated! As consumers, our rights should be protected. These companies have immense profits and should allow basic dispute resolution. Their lack of support is preventing me from switching to Google Fi, because my life is in their hands - email, phone, Google Play, etc. Although these are completely separate legal entities, they treat them as one; if your Google account gets terminated, you won't be able to access Google Fi, Google Photos, Google Drive, etc.
Could you imagine if Microsoft decided to remotely revoke IBM's access to Outlook/all of their mail on their mail server without completely migrating to a new service? Oh, and there's no point of contact.
The ensuing legal battle would be legendary. The only reason this is happening is because Google isn't beholden to the common people, despite running a utility.
Google some time ago deleted all my 13 years of location history while attempting to migrate it to local storage on users phones. I used it to keep track of business expenses for tax and had to collect the data someway else. Plus lost a lot of places i had kept track of in foreign countries visited. Desaster that showed I should not rely on them. Made that mistake there while self hosting and self backuping the whole other stuff. Oh well.
This is the exact scenario I described one month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195943
Makes you wonder if Google models how much revenue they lose specifically to this fear, because it's very real. I would simply never use GCP or Gemini because the idea of being banned from Google for absolutely any long-tail reason is a far greater cost than any benefit I could derive from those services.
>Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account.
Google has no problem correlating your accounts unless you know what you're doing and are ready to switch to the cypherpunk mode.
There is realistically no way to evade the account correlation systems that Google (likely) has.
It's not that hard actually, but separation has a maintenance/convenience cost and requires you to think before doing anything.
We're speculating here but between time correlation, browser fingerprinting and telemetry, the average user attempting to pull off a clean compartmentalisation of two accounts has no chance, even when they think they do.
I'm not speculating, but yes, ordinary users won't be able do that, that's what my warning is about.
Jeez, really gives you incentive not to use Gemini.
https://theywillbanyou.com
It sounds like the son was desperately using the linked family accounts he had access to as the previously used accounts became banned. But he only admitted to doing it on his own account.
That would account for the time it took for the bans to spread, and for why the son came clean a few days later instead of right away or never.
Brutal situation; hope the can restore access.
The common device would have been enough.
Hosts feel like they have everything to lose by not banning problematic accounts, everything to gain by performatively burning anything “sketchy”, and nothing to lose by the inevitable automated over banning.
I almost lost everything because I used a state ID that was not a drivers license (which i did not have at the time), in combination with another complication that was “caused” by a recent move between states.
It made zero sense if you are not an automated system, and would have been devastating if I hadn’t figured out a path through it. I spent three weeks under enormous stress, as my savings, among other things, were needed to pay off the majority of my house right then.
But despite the insanity, it was easy to see the pedantic digital “reasoning” that was happening.
The mass centralization and automation of commerce is pushing us into dystopia. Brazil.
We are not safe. I mean that. Until laws make corporations responsible for these kinds of harms, with fines on the order of historic fortunes, if they don’t, it is going to get worse.
The “mind boggling fine” part makes for a hard sell. But it is the only way to create balance against the mind boggling levels of centralization and profits that insulate these companies of any personal individual level ethics.
Poor kid. The irony of scarring this kid for life over completely normal behavior, in order to "protect him from abuse", is hopefully not lost on all of you.
Google really needs to do something about this. It’s one thing for them to stop doing business with you, it’s another to withhold your data from you (in particular after they set up their services such that you’re inclined to store everything with them). Every time I read one of these stories it reminds me that I really need to break away from them.
I currently use Google Voice for almost all SMS 2FA after a nightmare scenario where I realized that the mobile carriers are entirely susceptible to social engineering and will happily port your number to an attacker’s phone. I planned to switch to Fi as they are probably the only one that this is not susceptible to… but if I were to lose both email and phone access I’d really be fucked.
> I currently use Google Voice for almost all SMS 2FA
Same.
I have financial accounts in multiple countries, many using Google Voice for 2FA.
However, whenever I create an account that allows anything other than SMS for 2FA, I immediately switch to that instead. I use an offline TOTP authenticator app, and backup the token secrets in something that's not linked to my Google account.
This greatly limits my blast radius, I think, because I can access my most critical online services without access to my Google account.
My Google Voice number is the only phone number I've used for 15+ years. It'd be a real nightmare if I lost access to my Gmail and/or Voice.
Is this an AI post? The last few times something mind-blowing was shared from Reddit, it was later found to be fake.
I think it’s human written but there are details of the story that are self-contradicting, like receiving an email explaining why all of the accounts have been banned after all of their email accounts were banned. Including recovery accounts.
This is terrifying (I have 2 young kids, but they'll get there).
How do I avoid that? When is a Google account considered linked?
If I log into 2 google accounts and swap between them, are the accounts considered linked?
Also, I have plenty of photos of my kids naked when they were little (my son refused to wear anything for 1 year), do I have to be concerned?
>Also, I have plenty of photos of my kids naked when they were little (my son refused to wear anything for 1 year), do I have to be concerned?
This is America, of course you have to be concerned.
Google has family groups where you invite people to your family. I'm assuming they had that set up. I guess if you want to manage your children's accounts you have to do it from a burner Google account.
Which is insane. I already purchase my Pixel through a burner account due to this whole insanity...
I do have backup of my photos and drive, but I appreciate Google Sheets and would like to keep using that.
Oooof. This is going to take a lawyer. A team of lawyers. Everything on that account has no doubt been LOCKED down for CSAM-grade review. I'm just imagining how you'd get a judge to help you here. You'd need to have found an acceptable third party that would do the data access, you'd have to agree on an attorney's eyes only list of data that you'd request.. Any chance anyone might possibly access CSAM = no. Any chance someone might possibly try and delete CSAM = absolutely no.
I don't know what the OP does for work, but almost certainly it's going to be easier to just start over with a new website. Maybe get the daughter's laptop taken to a data recovery specialist and try and pull browser history for the thesis.
This was kind of an interesting comment from that thread. "Just invoke GDPR" is a refrain that's oft-repeated on Reddit (and, dare I say, HN), but it didn't seem to do much in this person's case:
> I did an SAR with Google last year and it took over a month for a single account. It also ended up containing very little because of the way they decide what is and isn’t ‘personal data’, e.g. for the one I used for work, they outright refused to release most of it apart from specific emails and docs where I was mentioned by name because the email address was a standard contact@mywebsite.com (which to be fair is correct grounds for refusal). They were very helpful in padding out the SAR release by re-sending the emails of me requesting the SAR, and also redacted the data protection employee name whom I was conversing with though lol.
> For SARs themselves there’s also grounds to refuse if they think it might interfere with potential future legal investigations, which given the ban reason I suppose isn’t an impossibility but unlikely.
yo I'm not an anxious person but this has set it off. If it truly is anyone who had logged into the same device, I wonder if a system reset keeps you clean from any bad accounts going forward. For example if I system reset and sold a tablet on craigs list
I worked at Google a long time ago now during the whole Google+ fiasco. One thing that was super controversial internally was the so-called Real Names policy. For those who don't know or remember, it was Vic Gundotra's idea that people should use their real identities. He kept using this weird example that he didn't want it filled with people named "Dog Turd". I don't know why.
So there was this mysterious black box that decided if your name was "real" or not. At first this didn't support pseudonyms or any kind of anonymity and that's actually really important for any social network. Think of someone seeking help coming to terms with their sexual orientation, gender identity, addiction, eating disorder or whatever. Or simply going against their family's religious wishes. I later worked at Facebook and one thing I'll give them credit for is Groups. FB Groups had an identity that actually couldn't be tied by anyone else to your profile or identity in any other group. That was a good product decision.
Anyway, if your name somehow failed the magic real names filter, your account got banned. Your entire Google account was banned and basically there was no recourse other than knowing someone who worked at the company or making a big enough fuss on Twitter.
Many people, myself included, criticized and protested this decision. You should at least segment Google products. There's absolutely no reason to ban your Gmail account because an automated system decided your Google+ account name wasn't "real". But that feedback was ignored and this was well before the public launch. And the public backlash proved this position correct (IMHO).
But the net effect was that I decided I can't use any other Google product. Let's say a system is launched to find offensive photos and there's a false positive on one of my images in Google Photos. Maybe it's just a hash collision with a known image. And then what? I lose my entire Gmail? Are you kidding me?
It's wild to me that this is still an issue ~15 years later. I think my stance actually isn't strict enough anymore. You probably shouldn't use Gmail at all. I should really find a paid email provider hosted entirely in Europe, preferably Switzerland or some other country with strong pro-user regulation.
So I have no idea if this Gemini story is true or not. I say that because 95% of the things on Reddit are completely made up. But it is plausible. I wouldn't be surprised if it's true. It means I wouldn't use Gemini at all if I used Gmail.
> All my emails, all my documents saved in Google Drive.
I would think someone whose business depends on gmail would use an email client, at least periodically, to download their emails.
Why? You're going to reference them from Google Drive. Google has 400 trillion gazillion servers with copies of it. There's no way you can lose it! You wouldn't do anything weird, so there's absolutely no reason to think you'd lose your account. And honestly, we're all humans here - surely you can reach out to a company as large as Google and speak to a human if there's an issue this significant.
Another consideration: kids do not have the ability to think ahead and consider future consequences. It's one of the last functions of the brain to develop, and it doesn't fully complete until, often, you've already finished college. Looking through the comments in the reddit thread, it appears the daughter had her dissertation on her google drive and lost it despite having done nothing wrong herself.
And just the final point I want to drive home: these people lost their google accounts because of what someone else did. Nobody thinks ahead to account for something like that.
At what point are we going to start looking at digital mail the same way we do physical mail? It's equally as important today. It needs protections, regulations, and oversight.
Even if you don't think you're at risk of permanently losing access, you would want to have access during power outages or other internet outages. Or even just when you're on a plane and want to look up an old email.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
What an arrogant response. Do you think the average user understands where emails are stored or that google could rugpull at any moment?
Even just for offline access when on airplanes, when the internet/power is out. It's not just about rugpulls.
Honestly it's a bit insulting to non-HN people to assume that they'd never want offline access or realize that having a single point of failure is a bad idea.
Where the hell is the open source app that downloads all your google stuff? There is a huge opportunity to be a hero.
Why do you need an app?
https://takeout.google.com/
I have been trying to do takeout periodically for 6 months. All manner of combinations and different sets of data.
I'm probably at 20 attempts and everyone single one has failed...
Takeout always fails for me, with ~11TB of data in Google Drive.
Google Drive files you can sync to local disk via the Windows or Mac app.
Fails!
Why would you use takeout to download Google Drive contents when syncing to your local computer is its entire purpose?
Because the Google drive desktop app crashes as well :)
Google Takeout[0] seems to have basically everything selected by default, so I don't see a need for another tool.
[0] https://takeout.google.com/
Most people who use Google services don't know about this or simply do not have bare minimum technical knowledge required to set this up or even know why they would need to do backups
Timelinize[0] has been at this for awhile on several platforms.
[0] https://timelinize.com/
I’m just over here trying to understand why or how you would do that to Gemini Live.
>Visual Context: On mobile, you can choose to share your camera feed or screen. This allows you to ask questions about what you are looking at in the real world or get help with tasks on your device.
>Common Use Cases • Brainstorming: Talking through ideas for a project or event. • Role-playing: Practicing for a job interview or a difficult conversation. • Learning: Asking deep-dive questions about a complex topic while you're on the go. • Daily Tasks: Getting help with things like gift ideas, travel itineraries, or summarizing information from your screen.
You underestimate people.
> • Role-playing
Yeah, uh... that one.
Mark my words: they’ll make a movie about this but change his age to 18.
The whole family. Including his 2 sisters… what a nightmare.
This Summer: Bad Wank, from the people who brought you Bad Blood.
So we're just linking to random Reddit posts now?
Reminder that Reddit is a hotbed for creative writing stories posted as pleas for advice. It’s a trend across all of the advice subreddits. They usually have rules that you’re not allowed to question the posts, only provide advice, so it’s a safe output for LARPing for attention, weirdly enough.
This story is triggering a lot of my skepticism senses because it fits the mold of a typical creative writing Reddit post:
- The OP claims Google just banned their account for CSAM content, yet nobody is considering the legal consequences of this? Their details would be referred to law enforcement and they could have police knocking on their door any minute. Why is the only thing anyone is talking about the access to their email?
- OP is a helpless victim in a story where the world conspires against them
- This is ostensibly a request for legal advice, but they didn’t post the one communication they claimed to have received in the matter (an e-mail explaining the reason for their bans, which they somehow received despite all accounts being banned)
- A lot of unnecessary extra details about how the tragedy is amplified, like the doctor’s dissertation just happens to be due next week. Apparently she’s been writing this for so long but hasn’t shared a copy with anyone for review, editing, or feedback once? Right.
- Villain is a safe target like an evil megacorp, with a guest villain of a teenage boy who is also safe to dislike
- OP only responds to helpful suggestions with new facts that conveniently obviate those helpful suggestions, like the response explaining they have to use an obscure bank that doesn’t have any physical branches for reasons
- OP completely ignores helpful responses that provide actionable advice. The real accounts are usually all over these comments with requests for additional detail.
- OP has a strange timeline of events where the “AI” banned the first account, then Google manual review started banning accounts that had ever been linked to the tablet, but it did so in a weird way that happened in sequential order with each occurring several hours later. The timeline is oddly specific with these occurrences, too.
The piece that really broke the story for me was this quote:
> Son eventually comes clean and tells us what he was doing. We get the email informing us that accounts have been banned due to child protection reasons
So they can’t access any of their accounts but they also received an email somehow? Details about that conveniently omitted despite the excessive detail in so many other things. They also only receive an explanation for why the accounts were banned after this long process where all accounts were banned one by one, and only after son “comes clean”? This seems like a detail that comes from a story where someone decided the plot point first and then needed some supporting details to try to minimize doubt.
If you’re thinking that maybe the account ban email went to the recovery account, they claimed that their recovery accounts were also part of the lockout:
> Shortly after, accounts which weren't on the tablet, but were used as recovery emails for those accounts also got hit.
This feels like another red flag from someone who lost track of how their story’s facts intersected each other.
These creative writing stories always rely on triggering your sense of “Well it could happen” combined with a set of acceptable villains (Google + “stupid” 14 year old boy) mixed with a set of details designed to amp up the sympathy factor (daughter’s dissertation due next week, no copies exist outside of Google Docs).
You forgot ‘a human at google actually responding to anything’ which is the most unbelievable of all
yeah this story smells funny. Also, given the popularity of the post, wouldn't their son immediately know it's them? If I truly wanted advice, I would hide the sordid details. I think it's a fantastic piece of creative writing.
This kind of thing is not the only modern example of guilt by association, but it’s probably the most common. (Not this specific event, I mean the banning of “cloud” accounts based on proximity.)
There is a reason that we once eliminated this idea. It’s a stain on a free society and a constant drag on the economy. Corporations embracing this tactic are laying the groundwork for a terrible future.
Google will be a better monopoly than Microsoft i promise.
GitHub is great, I know it in the heart of my hearts.
Steam is owned by literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ, they'll never turn on me.
Loyalty is of course a quality of a decent human being. But not loyalty to corporations that you trade fair with, or worse, use YOU as a product. Only loyalty to people committed to you
Honestly, making the content unavailable for anyone who hasn’t already downloaded it by blocking the entire account is probably not the worst thing. Also, family account?
>Also, family account?
My understanding is that Google banned all users that had been logged into that family device.
Why not ban the offending account only? Is there a logic i'm missing?
From Google's point of view, very little downstairs to banning those other accounts. And the upside is that they reduce their legal risk: "We automatically blocked the account that was generating the kiddie porn, as well as the other accounts that had been logged into that device."
It's probably as simple as that…
Yes, the logic you're missing is "protect the children"
Outsources parenting to megacorp, complains when megacorp shows responsible behavior instead of him, the absent parent more concerned with his business than his son.
That feels a bit judgemental. Kids make mistakes despite how much good parenting you give them. It is not like he didn't take precautions with parental controls and at 14 you have to trust them a bit.
If a 14 year old engaged in erotic roleplay with a sexual predator over Google Meet, would you be saying the same thing?
I would say that Google should not ban the victim’s family members’ account in that scenario.
Parent of the year over here.
Really uncharitable take. I did stupid things at 14, and had more unrestricted internet access too.
> absent parent more concerned with his business than his son
I don't know how you came to this conclusion from the post.