You've got a chance of being struck by a meteor whenever you leave your house (and also while being in it). Do you solve that problem by staying inside? No. You go outside and take those odds. The chance that you'll be mistakenly shut down by a mistake is minuscule. Google has proven in the past to be a reliable way to do things like whistleblowing and hosting questionable content. The fact that one or even a dozen users get banned doesn't invalidate Google's history of keeping a _vast_, _overwhelming_ majority of even their free users safe.

Unless you work at Google and are privy to internal information, how could you possibly know that? The only reason you're hearing about this case is because the account holder is a university professor who lost a long standing Blogger site—used at his school and linked to by the NYT—and then the story made it to the front page of HN.

It's overwhelmingly likely that the vast, vast majority of people who lose access to their Google accounts never make it onto your radar.

It's an estimate, not an exact figure.

I certainly am. That rat might be rare, but the system that allowed it to go out isn't one I can trust implicitly.