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by gjsman-1000 1304 days ago
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.

5 comments

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.