Stories like this are why I do it. I don’t know when something is going to get flagged - NSFW or otherwise. I really should de-google and I mean to. Buts its a daunting project for the email address I’ve had since 2004 (my email is now old enough to drink in USA).
1) Got my own domain
2) Subscribed to an email service that lets you use your own domain (for example fastmail)
3) Forwarded all of my email from my gmail account to my new email/domain, and use my new email/domain in all correspondence.
4) Made a separate google account for every google service I used. For example, I made a separate account from my gmail for google play, google cloud and youtube.
It's a bit of work but this allowed me to slowly ease myself out of gmail, and derisk my account activity. Even if fastmail screws up, I can always point my domain at another email provider like protonmail.
Oh, also:
5) Use syncthing for file storage. It's cheap and I can back up TB worth of stuff from decades ago.
To maintain a Gmail account, you need to:
1. Do nothing
2. Don’t be unlucky
To maintain a domain name, you need to:
1. Keep a functioning credit card forever
2. Make sure the domain name is renewed forever
3. Take action if your registrar goes out of business
The odds of something going wrong with your domain name, while still low, seem higher. Are you banking on the fact that you can talk to a human at your registrar to resolve issues?
I have no solution for this, other than choose a trustworthy registrar. It's the weak link. Perhaps it will be fixed in the future with some petname system
https://old.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ts6jfg/google_h...
Also using multiple accounts can result in suspension: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34961069
I have submitted it 200 times over the past year. I know that it probably just goes into a black void, but it is apparently the official review process, and I am 100% sure there were no rule violations (I was flagged for responding to new threads too quickly and reposting the same educational link a few times because I was answering the same sort of question). It's cruel really. Somehow they made something even worse than the Google approach. Presumably tens of thousands of users are wasting time every single day doing this.
Like others have said, most tech companies are like this and it's unacceptable, even if users are the product.
If HN suddenly banned my account out of nowhere for no discernible reason, I’m not going to E-mail dang 200 times. I’d just find some other site to read. Life is too short to do business with companies that despise you.
I do admit that there is a slight prick of annoyance at the start of every day because of this, but I'm well into sunk cost fallacy into the realm of morbid curiosity and flagellation.
Part of the reason is because I manage an account that has a major position in Reddit equity options, so I have to read the name everyday regardless. Indeed I was banned because my option trading advice was too quick and frequent (man, that sub needs some serious basic theory help)... Of course, you can be assured that their horrible customer goodwill may possibly come up in future conversations when I mention the position.
I thought about just emailing IR, but I've actually talked to someone else in a similar position who has contacted IR and they did nothing either.
I was a major contributor to an open source Reddit alternative after the API lockdown, but unfortunately after 2 years I just didn't think that it was going anywhere big and backed out of that, so been there done that to some degree, and that was a good 500 plus hours of investment (although it was net positive - it was fun to grow an old school internet community even though it is never going to compete with Reddit).
The main issue is that they ban all accounts that they can fingerprint to other banned accounts, and I have an account in hibernation that is 15 years old and truly has a huge portion of my life contained in it. It's much like OP and losing a Google account. I think that is the main reason why I grovel to the uncaring corporate shell that encompasses the community that I once help to build when I came over in the great digg migration. I should probably just export the data and vectorize it into an LLM, and just close the book on the few old friends that I'd like to reconnect with someday.
Speaking of Digg, I hear they're rebooting, and things are going well behind the scenes...
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but at this stage you're messages are insta-filtered and so you're probably not even causing the slight annoyance.
As the other poster mentioned, it's probably best to just move on, or if you're adamant about interacting with people on Reddit of all places, then why not just create another account?
...and believe it or not, it takes months of appeals for some Shadowbanned users to have their appeal lifted. What I'm not sure about is if there is a hidden ban length, and if submitting an appeal automatically lifts the ban if the ban length has passed. I'm guessing that this is the actual case of how it all works.
I remember I was banned from Fark once. Remember Fark? I was actually a paying member, too! It was the last time I visited or even thought about the site (until writing this comment). It didn't even remotely occur to me to try to understand the banning mechanism or what appeal options I have. I'm not going to grovel and beg some stupid website to let me back in if they don't want me around!
Note that Reddit allows you to log into a banned account and have read access. You can also edit your previously-posted comments. So log in, export everything you want, edit all comments to nonsense as a "fuck you" to Reddit (there are scripts and browser extensions to do this, because a lot of people think Reddit deserves a "fuck you") then forget about it ever again.
You are more than your Reddit account.
A few months ago I browsed r/all by new and downvoted every crypto scam post to unrelated subreddits I saw. This raised a red flag somewhere inside Reddit (my guess is that I was interfering with some Reddit admin's crypto scams) and my 18 year old account was suspended until I could respond to an email at the address it was registered from that I no longer had access to almost two decades later. An appeal was ignored.
I was furious about losing the account for about two minutes before I realised that nothing of any importance had been lost, shrugged, and created a new account.
But still, "unzip random NSFW content onto Google Drive" doesn't sound risk free does it
Even if it's $1000 a case, people will often still pay it, and that'd nullify the "scalability of customer service" crap.
Google clearly states CSAM is forbidden on their platform.
The user stored CSAM on Google Drive. Regardless whether it is for academic research or not - which in this case, it wasn't. It was for training a model.
Do you really think Google wants to be on the front page of the newspaper saying it allows users to store CSAM?
The user has been caught off guard and that's on them.
And yes, you're not safe either if you store CSAM on Google. Who in their right mind thinks they are?
Edit: Grammar
In general, when a company does something hostile and unreasonable, let's not invent out of thin air facts to excuse their behavior, shall we? Especially since their stonewalling is deliberate.
Google should at minimum publish the filenames of the content they consider violations. I have Colab notebooks for everything I’ve downloaded from the internet. With a filename, I could trace the origin and have the image independently reviewed.
I suspect it wasn’t CSAM at all. We know nothing about how their detection system or hashing works. I’d also like to point out that I benchmarked my model against Google’s own commercially available NSFW detector—and mine actually performed better: https://medium.com/@russoatlarge/benchmark-study-punge-yolov...
As for datasets: COCO is the most widely used dataset in computer vision, with hundreds of thousands of labeled images. One image in the COCO Train2017 set—000000001790.jpg—shows a child brushing his teeth while looking in the mirror in his “birthday suit.” But if Google's system flagged that as CSAM, then every researcher using COCO is at risk.
If Google genuinely cared about addressing CSAM responsibly, they would share the filenames so they could be independently verified and—if needed—removed from circulation. Instead, they’re silent. That silence creates fear, not safety.
What I do know is that I used publicly available datasets—like NudeNet and COCO—for benchmarking an NSFW detection model. These datasets have been used by researchers for years. If there was anything questionable in them, that should be addressed openly—not used as a reason to erase someone’s digital life without transparency or due process.
I’m not claiming academic immunity. I’m saying it was unintentional, and I had no idea anything I processed could have been flagged. And if there was something problematic in a dataset, I would absolutely want to identify and report it—but I can’t do that if Google refuses to disclose what was flagged.
This isn’t just about me. When a private company has the unchecked power to destroy someone’s livelihood overnight, it stops being a simple platform—it becomes a de facto utility. There needs to be a path for review, correction, and accountability.
More on what happened to me here: https://medium.com/@russoatlarge/when-youre-accused-youre-er...
Didn’t manage it in the end. Ended up going to collections who happily listened and cancelled the debt.
I was a happy paying email customer of many years.
I now am sworn never to enter any kind of relationship with Google, and encourage to do the same.
I’m in the UK btw.
For every hour I wasted on it I filed a complaint with a regulatory body. It probably cost the millions of dollars. I recommend everyone in a similar situation do the same.
I was never given a reason. I tried to reach out and, of course, we know how it ends (even then). The thing is, I didn't even use it for anything other than sending emails to friends who were starting in other colleges and kind of just using emails for the sake of using emails. It was the new tool for me. Except one - the teenage me was in long and cosy exchanges with a nice someone many states and thousands of kilometres over talking about Jane Austen and Tolstoy and their works that we both read and loved and what not and also sharing with each other things I now definitely would not call poetry. That still feels like a loss - even after some two odd decades. The silliest thing - I didn't remember the email. Those were the good old days of r1d1clulux_paynthr_56789_b0mb@rediffmail.com. We never asked or revealed each other's names. Those were days like that when you didn't have to worry about whether you were talking to a cat or a fish.
I started using other email services (Yahoo, Hotmail - for a long time those were my main emails) and when I started working I got a domain and moved to a paid email host.
This also taught me a lesson about using free services. Hell, even when using a paid service this can happen. Apple is an example. You feel Google does it, oh boy oh boy, Apple knows how to do the true stonewalling! When you are on the phone with a real human being and that human being stonewalls you and their company (Apple) doesn't even allow that human being to help you, or escalate, or move up in the support chain, you feel that is real something - esp. if you are in a country where consumer laws are less than jokes! Anyway, so that taught me to be ready, to have backups (not just as in data, but as in options), and fallbacks.
I think everyone should experience things like this, but kinda early in life :)
PS. Naah, OP's case isn't like mine. But then people like me (and maybe OP and maybe you) allowed and enabled (still do) Googles and Apples of this world to be this big that they can just do it and get away with it and it doesn't even matter even in countries where consumer laws have real functioning teeth. So that's there.
"'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."
My name is Mark Russo. I’m not going to be shamed or erased. I created an app called Punge that’s live on both iOS and Android. The article wasn't written by ChatGPT — it's my story. I used ChatGPT to help tighten the writing, but every word reflects what I lived through.
Here’s the app: iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/punge/id6450322655?platform=ip... Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.markatlarg... TikTok demo: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPHpvJJLHsQyK-Cfk4Y/
Since this happened, I’ve reached out to lawyers, media, lawmakers, and professional contacts — even people I know at Google. I’ve lost access to everything tied to my account: Gmail, Firebase, AdMob, and the infrastructure that powers my apps. Google won’t even tell me which file triggered the CSAM flag.
Even if — by some miracle — I get my account back, I’m committed to making sure this kind of thing doesn’t keep happening. No one should lose their digital life overnight, with no transparency, no due process, and no way to defend themselves.
According to this NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/technology/google-appeals... — people who manage to claw their way out of this nightmare usually do so only after getting media attention. A CBS reporter has shown some interest. If anyone here has been through something similar, message me on LinkedIn — I’ll do whatever I can to help share your story too.
Connect with me: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-russo-60a46912/
Read my medium article
"When You’re Accused, You’re Erased" https://medium.com/@russoatlarge_93541/7a09ebe8bf6a In the article I say:
"A Necessary Fight — But Accountability Matters
Let me be clear: I deeply appreciate Google’s efforts to detect and report CSAM. These systems are vital for protecting children and stopping abuse, and I fully support that mission.
But good intentions are not a substitute for fairness. Right now, individuals who are falsely flagged have no way to defend themselves, no way to clear their name, and no meaningful path to restore their livelihood.
If a system is powerful enough to destroy someone’s life, it should also be strong enough to offer transparency, review, and correction. That’s all I — and others like me — are asking for: a fair process to protect the innocent while continuing the fight against real harm."
“Lost everything”
“I made no backups”
It’s becoming a common lament.
Folks, please note you need backups of data if losing it would be a problem.
That is all.
Oof, buddy. That cock-up is on you. Even if you don’t want to administer your own iron, there are plenty of third-party services that can host your eMail domain.
And with a little work, there is eMail-in-a-box for a turnkey solution, and others like hMailServer if you just want a minimalistic low-effort server running on an old Windows box in your basement.
Unfortunately that it got csam flagged and rubbish support options is classic Google but still a pretty bold move on authors part
Although this is to a large degree a legislative issue as well. The general idiots in politics problem.
The real reason seems to be the opposite - to make it sound less bad by making it an unfamiliar term. Like if instead of saying "the murderer" someone would say "the root cause if the cessation of cellular metabolic activity".
sidkris•2d ago