The whole family. Including his 2 sisters… what a nightmare.
> absent parent more concerned with his business than his son
I don't know how you came to this conclusion from the post.
The process through which you parked the domains with Google entailed loading a file with the list of domains, after which each one would, in turn, be approved or denied. All 400+ domains were approved.
A few days later I received a cryptic message about unusual click activity on the domains and the Google account I had at the time was shut down immediately without recourse. I visited a few of the pages (not all 400, maybe a dozen) as they were approved to see what they put on them. Of course I did not click on anything. I might be accused of being stupid, but I am not an idiot. Besides, I pretty much knew the income would be a rounding error, maybe a few cups of coffee per year, maybe.
Well, nobody to call, text, email or send smoke signals to. Nothing.
That's when I decided I would never do business with Google. All I use from them is search. That's it. Nothing else. I can't trust them with anything that is business related and anything personally important.
Gmail? No way. I pay for Zoho mail for all the email accounts for my businesses and I am very happy about the product, the service and the isolation from a despotic company that can shut down your life in a microsecond.
Given that's their main business and they are likely to graveyard whatever domain penny business you've got burnt by anyway, you're still doing a lot of business with them
I try and not depend on a single vendor for everything and I don’t use the same email for all services - with auto email forwarding and password managers there’s just no reason to
My services are spread across Apple, Google, and other third party services for other email, storage, music, etc
I’m trying to think of what it would be like if this happened to me and it’d be annoying for sure, but not catastrophic
I do recommend having your own domain for email for certain accounts - I don’t do it for all services because sometimes it’s just easier to say email@gmail.com vs risking typos etc with a custom domain
I still use main stream services of course, I’m not that hardcore and like convenience like I said, but so what I can to avoid these types of headaches
GitHub is great, I know it in the heart of my hearts.
Steam is owned by literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ, they'll never turn on me.
Loyalty is of course a quality of a decent human being. But not loyalty to corporations that you trade fair with, or worse, use YOU as a product
There is a reason that we once eliminated this idea. It’s a stain on a free society and a constant drag on the economy. Corporations embracing this tactic are laying the groundwork for a terrible future.
> I did an SAR with Google last year and it took over a month for a single account. It also ended up containing very little because of the way they decide what is and isn’t ‘personal data’, e.g. for the one I used for work, they outright refused to release most of it apart from specific emails and docs where I was mentioned by name because the email address was a standard contact@mywebsite.com (which to be fair is correct grounds for refusal). They were very helpful in padding out the SAR release by re-sending the emails of me requesting the SAR, and also redacted the data protection employee name whom I was conversing with though lol.
> For SARs themselves there’s also grounds to refuse if they think it might interfere with potential future legal investigations, which given the ban reason I suppose isn’t an impossibility but unlikely.
That would account for the time it took for the bans to spread, and for why the son came clean a few days later instead of right away or never.
Brutal situation; hope the can restore access.
Hosts feel like they have everything to lose by not banning problematic accounts, everything to gain by performatively burning anything “sketchy”, and nothing to lose by the inevitable automated over banning.
I almost lost everything because I used a state ID that was not a drivers license (which i did not have at the time), in combination with another complication that was “caused” by a recent move between states.
It made zero sense if you are not an automated system, and would have been devastating if I hadn’t figured out a path through it. I spent three weeks under enormous stress, as my savings, among other things, were needed to pay off the majority of my house right then.
But despite the insanity, it was easy to see the pedantic digital “reasoning” that was happening.
The mass centralization and automation of commerce is pushing us into dystopia. Brazil.
We are not safe. I mean that. Until laws make corporations responsible for these kinds of harms, with fines on the order of historic fortunes, if they don’t, it is going to get worse.
The “mind boggling fine” part makes for a hard sell. But it is the only way to create balance against the mind boggling levels of centralization and profits that insulate these companies of any personal individual level ethics.
>Visual Context: On mobile, you can choose to share your camera feed or screen. This allows you to ask questions about what you are looking at in the real world or get help with tasks on your device.
>Common Use Cases • Brainstorming: Talking through ideas for a project or event. • Role-playing: Practicing for a job interview or a difficult conversation. • Learning: Asking deep-dive questions about a complex topic while you're on the go. • Daily Tasks: Getting help with things like gift ideas, travel itineraries, or summarizing information from your screen.
I currently use Google Voice for almost all SMS 2FA after a nightmare scenario where I realized that the mobile carriers are entirely susceptible to social engineering and will happily port your number to an attacker’s phone. I planned to switch to Fi as they are probably the only one that this is not susceptible to… but if I were to lose both email and phone access I’d really be fucked.
I don't know what the OP does for work, but almost certainly it's going to be easier to just start over with a new website. Maybe get the daughter's laptop taken to a data recovery specialist and try and pull browser history for the thesis.
The average person cannot realistically exist in a digital vacuum, self-hosting their entire online world. Google should not be able to do this to them.
No one should have to rely on trying to whip up public mobs on Reddit or HN to get Google to give them access to their own freaking tax spreadsheets.
> All my emails, all my documents saved in Google Drive.
testbjjl•1h ago
falcor84•1h ago
My understanding is that Google banned all users that had been logged into that family device.
tartoran•23m ago