Is it safe to have an Android phone? What if they decide to deplatform your Google account associated with it. What about trusting your number to Google Fi? I have both and I am nervous.
This case was in the news last week. Some dude named Dave took a medical photo of his young son that got flagged as CSAM. His android account was locked with no way of recourse.
At this point doing anything but search and ads with google is like going to a steak house and ordering a lasagne. It’s just not what they’re good at.
It was a video and he didn't send it. He just happened to have it on the same phone.
"the subsequent review of his account turned up a video from six months earlier that Google also considered problematic, of a young child lying in bed with an unclothed woman."
source and context? I think that happened in the U.K., and I'm not sure what their laws are, but in the U.S.A., as long as there is nothing sexual about it, such a picture is not illegal.
Your android phone will continue to work as-if-offline if your account is banned. You can still do calls/sms and browse the web, but all google apps won't work until you create a new gmail account (and obviously you'll lose all your data).
Question: Assuming you have a modern android phone like samsung galaxy S20. When you factory reset your phone you need to log in with your google account to use it. This prevents people from stealing your phone.
How does this work when your account has been banned? Is my phone a brick afterwards? Someone should try this out.
Some might see Occham's razor in this, but I could imagine this being a real edge case:
When I had an Android (OnePlus) device I often factory reset when tinkering with it, go to bed and continue whatever I wanted to do on the next day. Of course my phone had it's bootloader unlocked and TWRP recovery, since I was trying to get lineageOS + spoofed signatures + microG to work.
So basically the scenario is: factory reset your phone, go to bed, wake up with banned google account, have a new brick decor for your garden.
Would be funny if they didn't think of this possibility.
In the US, carriers are legally required to port your number to your new service, but they can delay the process by up to a week. Generally, it's much much faster (I've ported numbers in literal minutes), but I don't know how it would go with a banned account.
At this point doing anything but search and ads with google is like going to a steak house and ordering a lasagne. It’s just not what they’re good at.