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by bagels 1304 days ago
Does getting your google account blocked prevent you from using GCP? There are so many stories of people losing access to google accounts that it seems way too risky to use GCP when this sort of thing can happen.
4 comments

Potentially yes, if you use a personal account for GCP. Don’t do it.

If you have to use GCP, use a burner account… because Google is absolutely asinine right now.

I would not trust Google if they were a hired employee to turn on my sprinklers in the morning.

Edit: For this reason, I am actually all in favor of having GCP, AWS, Azure, etc declared utilities. Unless there is a crime, we have a right to an account. Your electricity company can’t cut you off whenever they feel like.

Anecdotal, but I know somebody who got their personal Google account blocked and then the company they work for GCP account blocked just because their names "looked" the same as somebody else's on the sanction list, even though it was a different person. I'm not sure they ever got the personal one back.
You’d have to be insane to put important infrastructure on a google platform.
Google aggressively links accounts together. If you ever hire someone who was banned by big G, kiss everything goodbye.
Microsoft does it too: forces everyone to sign up to Microsoft account and defaults to syncing/saving to OneDrive. If you hit OneDrive content filters, you lose everything, including Excel spreadsheets and Xbox games.
He means something more aggressive than a whole platform lockout for the account. What Google does is you have entirely different accounts, one gets indicted for something, they try to find other accounts you have/are linked to and nuke those too. eg. your company has a Google dev account, hires someone, and that someone misbehaves on a personal account. Your company account is at a very real risk of getting nuked with Google's famous customer nonservice afterwards.
Doesn't Google famously link accounts that have ever had anything to do with each other, and ban them as a group? I recall some businesses getting their play store accounts banned because some dev did sketchy stuff separately, or the other way around.
If so, treat everything that Google offers as ephemeral. They deserve no additional respect.
> If you have to use GCP, use a burner account

Does that actually help? Don't they collect enough of your data to be able to correlate accounts?

You're going to have to start using your GCP like it's a freedom fighting session. Never used from the same public wifi. Don't use a public wifi within xDistance from your house. Only interact with GCP from a freshly spun up VM/Tails boot/etc. If no available wifi access, only use a mobile hotspot that is prepaid in cash where the burner was bought by someone else (so their shiny mugs are on the security camera), buy that burner in a different town, and all the other paranoid things to safe in a hostile world. Just to use Google
I just use Whonix in a QubesOS VM routed via Tor.
That works? I would expect Google to ban accounts just for using Tor.
You will get lots of captchas during login but otherwise it works fine. I begrudgingly use some Google services every day, but at least via Tor.
Perhaps, but better safe than sorry. If you had a small business and relied on Google Workspace, the damage for one mistake like this could be incalculable.

Imagine losing your contacts, your photos, your emails with clients, your cloud setup… because you had the humanity to take care of your child.

It is impossible to underestimate Google now.

This is starting to sound daunting. I’ve recently got few strikes for posting few pics of my kids at the beach on Instagram (Close Friends audience). Even if when my accounts were originally seperate from Facebook, they are connected. Loosing access to FB messenger would be PITA.

Much worse - losing access to iCloud/iPhone would be disastrous

GCP is so awful to deal with directly their sales people ghost you after you submit your LLC info to raise limits. Then the sales person you were working with initially gets sacked, and weeks later a new one comes on board and tries to pick up where you left off again.
I don't know why people use gcp, I would like to hear some opinions.

The way I see it, if you don't mind price, you go with AWS (most polished). If you mind price gcp isn't really much cheaper, so you go with something actually cheap like OCI.

Usually, it’s because someone bought into GAE, and needed some flexibility for extensions to that app.

Cynically, fairly typical vendor lock-in.

afaik there is no alternative to BigQuery on AWS? All alternatives are less managed and require more administration. But I never looked too closely.
Snowflake. It does not work internally the same way as BigQuery but is substantially equivalent in user-visible functionality.
kubernetes is nicely integrated in GCP
OCI as in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?
Yep, it's the deep-pocketed enterprise's Hetzner or DO.

The sales slogan is something like, "All the costs of AWS, all the automation of a bare metal box!"

Ironically, more suitable to manually point-and-click or phone-call managed "lift and shift" than the infra-as-code clouds.

Oci is much, much cheaper than aws. Data transfer for example is 10x cheaper.
Azure doesn't exist, apparently.
Azure I'm not too knowledgeable in terms of polish, but pricing wise it's similar to aws and gcp.
not if you're trying to use compute in Germany:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33743567

How does this work with Android mobile devices that are linked to that account?

From a non-technologist perspective, is a linked Android device becomes neutered?

You can use android phones without a Google account right
But you'd lose all content you paid for.

Apps, games, movies, books, youtube paid things, etc.

Hmm true, apart from apps those are all available outside of android so I didn't really consider it.

But that's why I back up my media in the first place, Google can't steal my epub of the book I bought, nor can audible steal the m4a of the audiobook I bought.

Not yet.
Not easily, especially if you aren't tech-minded.
imagine what happens if you use google's domain registrar services.

even if you were to run a domain name zonefile that pointed its MX at something non-google and had zero A records or CNAMEs pointing at things hosted on GCP, you'd still risk being unable to login or admin your domain.

This is why I pay extra for domains on gandi and avoid google owned TLDs. I also won't touch namecheap anymore for the same concerns just too much downside risk even if the chance is small.

It wouldn't take much for Google to turn this around, that's the really screwed up part. All the would have to do to regain trust is come out and admit their system did something wrong and provide recourse for resolution in these cases. Instead they just double down and hope people forget.