[throwaway82931]

It's terrifying that the punishments are so draconian (because one false move and you lose access to the entire Google account, and possibly become persona non-grata and lose the ability to create another one even in a company context), it's hard to understand what the rules are, the appeals process generally won't help, and even being a paying customer won't save you.

It seems like best practice for any professional who needs to use Google anything would be to avoid Google to the greatest extent possible except in professional contexts, lest some inadvertent mistake (or something malicious like a hack) cripple your career.

[dsign]

>> It seems like best practice for any professional who needs to use Google anything would be to avoid Google to the greatest extent possible except in professional contexts, lest some inadvertent mistake (or something malicious like a hack) cripple your career.

Talking from my company's perspective, this is very real. It gets worse when out of the blue a customer rep from them want to schedule an interrogation about why to do you use their cloud services, which is because the absolutely vital part ML bit of your business is there. We are currently decentralizing and moving to a local cloud provider with real people subject to local laws, better for the environment.

[ThalesX]

I once got a new phone number and I tried to register to Twitter; apparently it's already used, by an account that is banned.

I managed to login to the account but there is no way to ask what's up. I followed the procedures, even wrote them an e-mail that as a EU citizen, I'd want them to forget anything related to me and my phone number. No reply.

Still probably doesn't work, don't care all that much though. Wasn't a Twitter user before, wasn't one after.

[pixl97]

Twitter is great isn't it...

"We need your phone number to post"

short time later

"We have leaked your phone number linked to your account to the entire planet"

[mastazi]

This is what works for me: I open a new personal account (using a fake name) every few months, when I open the new one I delete the old one. Obviously I don't use Google for anything important e.g. email.

Basically, at any given time I'm using a throwaway account. It's like Docker for Google accounts.

It's good because I could not care less about losing the account; another welcome side effect is that every few months I get a blank slate, that way I avoid becoming a prisoner of your own bubble e.g. in relation to Youtube suggestions.

PS when opening a new account Google will ask for SMS verification and recovery email address, I use those services that give you a throwaway email address and phone number - that way Google can't "follow me" across accounts.

[dorfsmay]

This strategy does not work for somebody trying to publish and monetize content.

[throwaway82931]

OpSec is hard. I'm not going to risk that Google won't be able to connect the shadow accounts.

[mastazi]

Sure but even if they connect the dots, basically nothing is at stake, at least in my case. The only reason I have an account is for small things like Youtube's "watch later" list.

[formerly_proven]

YT subscriptions and watch later could be entirely done in a JS userscript so that no account is needed at all any more - food for thought.

[cube00]

I wouldn't mind if the appeals process was legitimate but it's clearly not. 15 minutes to say "nope, appeal denied" how much background research could that person (assuming there was a person) have done?

[Ygg2]

Appeals process is somewhere between Kafka's Process and 1984.

[josteink]

> It seems like best practice for any professional who needs to use Google

Use single-purpose Google accounts for each professional need, so only one thing gets "banned" or logged out at a time.

Preferably for those accounts you should have email-forwarding to a different "human" account you can check even when logging in to the account is suspended.

Basically an unusual variation of defence in depth?

[petters]

As far as I understood, the entire Google account was not suspended. Was that the case?

[throwaway82931]

The user cannot log into their Google account. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29458794

[thijser]

Sorry if I was unclear, only Youtube is blocked for me now, gmail & rest of the account is fortunately still working.

[questiondev]

good point, these systems got worse when they decided to create an iphone app. apple loves censorship calling it “moderation”, sounds like a fair word until you realize it’s typically done on the wrong videos leaving the actual scam videos up. (there’s plenty of those still up)

[jacob019]

And use a different account for each google service, firefox containers helps with this.