And there is almost no way to talk to a human and get access back. I like Google's services, but I think their ability to deny service with no recourse is shameful. If I lost my gmail account with my last fifteen years of emails, linked to ask my other online accounts, plus all my documents and all my photos in drive, I'd be totally lost.

Perhaps it is time to export all your emails and start forwarding any new emails to a backup email service. As well as backup any documents regularly to another service or personal drive.

As far as opening a google checking account goes I think I will be avoiding that one. Diversifying my critical online services might in some sense be a higher security risk, but safer from it all being wiped out in one go.

I'm working on this right now. Google's level of control over my ability to communicate online is really scary. If I lost my gmail account because of a perceived TOS violation I would lose access to many of my accounts, and have to go through a huge inconvenience of going to physical stores, calling during business hours and submitting ID, etc. to reset passwords.

If I had known back in 2002 what I know now about what Google would become I never would have joined the Gmail beta.

> If I had known back in 2002 what I know now about what Google would become I never would have joined the Gmail beta.

100% agreed. It was cool at the time. Now Google has so fundamentally changed and I don’t trust them with my data anymore, but it is a Herculean task to move everything off Gmail. Literally hundreds of accounts are bound to my Gmail.

Agreed... been giving more and more time for thought on how I want to handle this myself.

I've already setup a domain in front of Protonmail so I have email under my control. My next step is to use an email client to fetch all my emails under IMAP so I have them outside of any cloud service.

Fastmail's import tool worked well for me and I have a big archive.

I am so glad I transitioned from Google services in 2012 (mostly spurred on by the domestic spying stuff). I did a dump of all my Gmail account and could not be happier (Gmail's IMAP implementation is hopelessly broken rubbish).

I used Dropbox and now MEGA to sync photos off my phone, but I copy all that stuff to my NAS and backups. I use Drive for some things, but I wouldn't be screwed if it went away. I disable almost all the major Google apps on my Android phone and hope to switch out to Lineage + miniG soon.

I use a self hosted TTRss currently (Google Reader was garbage and it dying was really good as I realized what good RSS readers were actually like).

I need to set a reminder to do more regular Facebook exports/backups. No one should be in the situation where a single provider killing your access means you loose a huge chunk of your content. Self hosting has its own problems and yes, a lot of people don't have the knowledge/means/time to do it, but man I'm glad I made it a priority.

My phone number is still on Goolge Hangouts. I need to find a better solution for that as well.

What RSS reader are you using?

They said TTRSS, that’s this one: https://tt-rss.org/

I use it myself :)

Not Google Voice?

Nope, still Hangouts. I'm so confused on the difference and their offerings now that I will probably avoid changing it until I can port my number off of it entirely.

I keep no email on Google. I have a Linux box that pulls down all email, for all my families email accounts, and stores it locally. Then we use Thunderbird and access it via IMAP. It is then easy to back it up with everything else onto external drives and my Backblaze account.

With what is going on with big internet players censoring and deplatforming people, why would one trust these people with your money.

At the very least, you should be running isync[1] to keep a local copy of your emails. Losing access to future emails would still be devastating though.

[1] http://isync.sourceforge.net/

Syncthing and DecSync have helped me a lot in this regard.

I’d sue them next day in State court for interference with my business contracts. Having a billion dollar data center in Iowa the judge has a lot of leverage.

I don't think it would fly. Google would just argue you agreed to that in the terms of service. Plus it would be slower and more expensive than just getting Google to reinstate your access, even if you had to fly there in person to beg them.

Any idea where I should go to do that?

I've been unable to access my google account for over two years. Their automated processes are never able to confirm my identity, and any humans I do manage to communicate with tell me to use the automated systems.

I don't even care about my dignity any more, I'll beg for it back in person.

> Google would just argue you agreed to that in the terms of service.

and any judge can tear that to shreds if they are sympathetic to the implementation

But wouldn't they just delay the process, appealing forever?

Wouldn't they just take a look at your account before deciding on their court battle strategy?

And years later in court you might get access maybe not.

Or just go with an email provider that isn't auditing your behaviour

It is a bad idea to use vanilla gmail account for critical purposes. I highly recommend coughing up some money and getting a gsuite account. Once you do that all these problems disappear. You also get support and the fact that you are spending money tells Google that you are a serious user.

> You also get support

No, outsourced call center with no escalation path doesn't qualify as support for anything but the most basic issues. Google 'support' means bitching on HN, getting upvoted, and having an engineer take notice and actually poke at it.

> the fact that you are spending money tells Google that you are a serious user.

No, it signals that you are reliant on them. This means they can treat you as a second-class citizen from the free users! This recent issue happened to one of my clients (not anyone in this thread), https://support.google.com/voice/thread/3818693?hl=en . Note, paid users can't request a free Google Voice account, have to pay for the same thing on Cloud Voice now.

We had similar issues in the past where we couldn't delegate users from a Google Business panel inside our G Suite domain, we had to maintain personal GMail accounts to add business managers.

I've been a reseller of this shit, deeply regret it. When it works for our clients, it works fine. When it doesn't, we're just as screwed with getting support as anyone else. I switched my primary accounts to Fastmail and O365, and haven't looked back.

As a Gsuite user for 4-5 years, it's funny when I run up against Google services that work for free personal accounts but not my paid account.

I've been meaning to migrate to Exchange/o365, it's in my backlog of projects that I'm procrastinating.

G Suite is now clearly oriented to companies, and the differences in tools compared to free accounts make sense in that context. Google cannot deploy to corporate customers tools that are not properly tested yet, and that they cannot guarantee will be supported for a long time.

They use free users as beta testers and to see if ideas stick. They can't deploy those to actual customers.

Anecdotally, I've called g suite support as a "business" with one user about issues I've had with non-covered Google products like Android and gotten either good support or a referral to another support agent who solved my problem. No idea if I'd have gotten referred to someone as helpful without paying.

> You also get support

I manage my company's G Suite account, and their support hasn't impressed me. We were initially unable to set up DKIM. The page to generate the DNS record kept returning a strange error code. I talked to support they were friendly and apologetic, but the issue took months to fix. Every time I followed up I was told they hadn't even heard back from the engineers, which gave me the impression that the support department doesn't have much pull in the organization.

You're better off just dropping Google altogether.

Paying for GSuite doesn't eliminate any of the problems (they'll still ban you, spy on you, have relatively poor support, etc.) and many of the alternative services are simply better anyway.

Btw, Youtube replied here: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_susp...

And Markiplier posted an UPDATE video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhb4CvOtEeo

(I'm a googler, opinions are my own).

YouTube is full of shit. They're in a hurry abandoning the unprofitable "you" in YouTube and replacing it with will smith driven garbage.

YouTube's denials about why it happened are again dumb, and a chat ban in YouTube should in no way affect the rest of your Google account. Just acknowledging that it happened isn't a good explanation.

"Ya our rules are dumb and on manual review we were still stupid assholes"

It's also impossible to get ahold of anyone at YouTube and YouTube's "ya we manually reviewed it and fucked up" is just another admission that their pile of a system just doesn't work.

I'm moving away from Google and any other provider like them. These incidents only impress the need to do it faster. I can't risk having my business and life ruined because of a youtube algorithm with no one behind the wheel.

I recommend everyone else do the same. Just the idea that YouTube chat bans would connect to other portions of the account means google is not interested in you. Every interaction with them is a threat to your digital well being where your whole account can be banned. It's totally unacceptable given the position they're in.

And it can all be manually reviewer and you'll be told to go fuck yourself and if you aren't markeplier or whoever you have no recourse.

Fuck that shit.

> The whole-account "ban" was a common anti-spam measure we use.

It's strange to me when someone restates the misbehavior as though it's a justification. If someone is abusing commenting, block them from commenting, sure. Don't disable all their other products. If someone is abusing two products, disable their whole account, then? Sure, if you want. That reduces the false-positives by about a square factor (0.1% -> 0.0001%)

Would this have turned out well if Markiplier wasn't a well known streamer that had worked closely with google on an interactive youtube special? It's worth noting that the appeals were initially denied and the people banned got a "case closed, nothing we can do" response.

I'm cancelling my Google One sub and Fi shortly, sadly after being incredibly impressed with roaming coverage.

Google needs to do more than a Reddit comment. This is the second time you have done this, and you supposedly seriously damaged a few of the people involved (I'm guessing they are SOL in terms of that, and I don't want to be SOL). "Oops" only cuts it the first time.

Man I can't wait until they cancel this product too, and I have to migrate my money back to my current bank. I'll save myself the leg-work ;)

The article says "with accounts run by Citigroup Inc. and a credit union at Stanford University". If the accounts are run by these partner banks, maybe that means you will be able to contact the partner bank's customer service when stuff like this happens.

Then what's the point? Just get a normal bank or credit union account and be done with it. Why leave your financial future in the hands of a company with zero customer support or care?

Presumably they'll add some kind of innovative feature so it isn't just a traditional checking account.

If you don't think those features will be worth it because you don't think Google is good at customer service, then I guess that's for you to decide for yourself. I don't really see how it's relevant to my comment, though.

This already exists to an extent on the other end of the transaction. Payment processors like Stripe are too ubiquitous to not have some level of oversight.

Some bot had flagged me as suspicious, and as a result

- I couldn't take any Lyft rides, and my company only subsidizes lyft.

- I couldn't rent a car on Getaround

- I couldn't rent a scooter on Skip, one of two providers in SF at the time

My mobility was severely hampered. I almost couldn't close on my house in time because my insurer of choice at the time also used Stripe.

To add insult to injury, Stripe's customer service absolutely refused to address the issue, flat out ignoring it. They claimed the issue was on the vendor side and to follow up with the vendor directly. It was only when I left a poor review on Google did they follow up with me within 2 hours, lifting the ban. For someone unfamiliar with the idea of a "payment processor", this may have never been resolved since the company "Stripe" is never visible during the transaction.

> Now imaging your checking account also got disabled because some bot decided that you looked suspicious.

That's already how fraud protection works in the majority of banks.

Far from the same.

A bank might suspend your checking account if it detects suspicious financial transactions on the account. The goal here is (ostensibly) to protect the account owner.

Google, as per the precedents it has repeatedly set, could suspend your checking account for participating in a stream on YouTube and following the streamer's instructions to spam chat with emotes in order to vote on his path through the game, as happened to Markiplier and his followers. That's far beyond what anyone should consider reasonable risk for being able to access their bank account.

The bank might suspend your card until you clear it up (and my bank is much lighter touch, granted after having blocked my card a dozen times), it doesn't close your account and lock you out of all your financial services.

> That's already how fraud protection works in the majority of banks.

Yes, but what bank has the surface area of google? If I do something in a an area that has _literally nothing_ to do with banking ( say google stadia ) that a bot thinks is fishy - will I have all of my funds locked up over that mistake?

But your bank will have humans making sure it's not a false positive. With google, you can appeal so a bot can tell you that your appeal was rejected.

The bank won't close your account if your child put an emojy on a youtube comment while using a tablet. The proper response is to block your YT account but Google forced merged your accounts.

Really? We know banks use machine learning models too but can you really get suspended for a comment on a video site?

The surface area for misclassification is much larger in Google’s case as they close down the entire account without any mechanism for appeal.

> That's already how fraud protection works in the majority of banks.

That's not the entire story. Not only do banks have tons of regulations that they have to follow, a concept of "algorithm determined that we shutdown the account and we can't explain to you why" does not exist there.

It's pretty easy to resolve that with the bank. Google has notoriously bad customer service for people whose accounts it disables.

But you can actually call your bank. It's not run by bots, like Google is.

Not only that, I can physically walk into my bank and speak with an actual human being face to face.

If a bank terminates you, you can sue at a court. With Google? Good luck trying to sue them, even if you are an EU citizen.

Because of a nationality I hold, I often get some vague replies from financial institutes or online payment gateways when processing my transactions or credit that due to some "internal" or "unknown" reason their service is unavailable. That's mostly a workaround for EU anti-descrimination laws.

With Google, there is no human recourse.

This is China Social Credit System level of control. I would NEVER EVER use such a service. Its just too much of control in one place for a private company.

So I worked at Google when Google Plus rolled out. What was contentious at the time internally was the Real Names policy. This was all Vic Gundotra's doing. He routinely gave the example of not wanting to interact with someone called "Dog Turd".

I think we have ample evidence that people want pseudonymity. People like to segment parts of their lives without their prospective employer being able to look up what you said and possibly take things out of context. So as much as people outside complained, trust me there was a ton of internal dissent about this too. This was back before leaking for a political agenda became widespread in the Trump era.

Anyway, agree or disagree with the Real Names policy it presented a far larger problem. If some automated system decided your name was "fake" your entire account including Youtube, Gmail and so on got locked.

Whoever signed off on this was utterly insane and should've been fired. While we're at it, fire anybody who suggested it as being a good idea.

I remember looking for a photo storage solution for my sister at the time. Google Plus had unlimited storage but you had to "upgrade" your account to a Google Plus account. I, as a Google engineer, could not in good conscience recommend this approach because I had no idea what might trigger a global lock on her account.

Google Photos came from the wreckage of this shit show and is actually a good product. This happens when you start addressing user needs and concerns rather than trying to push your own agenda. What agenda? Google wanted a single account for everything where everyone was logged into search as this would allow search to be personalized (better). Or at least that was the theory. Larry talked a lot about the desire to get people signed in to Google search.

I'm utterly dependent on my Gmail address to the point where I probably won't use any future Google service just to diminish my risk of some new product triggering a global lockout, which as an ex-employee I now have limited ability to rectify.

Google should NEVER have taken the route of a global lock out. Trust is broken. So my chances of using this banking service is literally zero.

Yesterday I signed up for Proton mail to start splitting off my data from Google. The announcement that they are now vacuuming up health data without patient consent is unacceptable. Had Google made this announcement at the time of the Wells Fargo scandals they probably would've had my business but my trust in them is near zero at this point.

> What was contentious at the time internally was the Real Names policy. This was all Vic Gundotra's doing. He routinely gave the example of not wanting to interact with someone called "Dog Turd".

To me, this is stunning. IMO, Facebook beat MySpace because of their real name policy. However IMO this was because it enabled discoverability which got the network past a critical point. If I'm on a social network, I want to instantly know who friends and acquaintances are.

Saying "real names are good because I don't want to talk to someone with a silly screen name" is a complete misunderstanding of the product. It's not about the personal preferences of power users, it's about casual users being able to use the network reasonably efficiently.

Sure you can ask users to link accounts or whatever, that's part of the puzzle, but getting the network going is literally the problem you're trying to solve. Understanding how real names fit into the puzzle is pretty important.

I'm not stunned that you disagree with real names. I'm stunned that (apparently) no-one tried to convince you why it was a good idea beyond the preference of some hypothetical power-user.

As for global lock-outs ... yeah. Google isn't the only game in town, when it comes to email and data hosting. They're the only game in town when it comes to drunken comments on silly political videos (or my cat sitting on my keyboard as a livestream runs, or some accidental cut and paste error or whatever else will upset them). If I have to pick one, I'll keep watching Youtube and I'll take my serious business elsewhere, I hope Youtube is making a ton of money for them.

Very interesting. It is pretty much how many people imagined it to have taken place.

> Larry talked a lot about the desire to get people signed in to Google search.

I don't do that and still use the search engine from time to time. It is really annoying, since you have no control about settings, that could very well be controlled by a cookie.

Google just plainly started putting business interest above user interest. I even doubt the intention of wanting to provide a better service. Or at least not for the "customers" that visit the page to search.

The intention was pretty transparent from the start. And there is a reason this intent is probably only communicated internally.

I think the problem with Google is mainly the leadership, which changed profoundly with the success of Google in my opinion. Almost as if they don't even know why they were successful in the first place.

> I'm utterly dependent on my Gmail address to the point where I probably won't use any future Google service just to diminish my risk of some new product triggering a global lockout, which as an ex-employee I now have limited ability to rectify.

I've never thought of it that way. That's hilarious.

Reading this whole thread has made me realise I really need to at least back up my ~15 years of gmail emails somewhere else. I don't care much about the rest but that would be a killer.

This actually terrifies me and I have recently be pondering if I should switch from my gmail to something else to secure my accounts. I worry one day they will say something like, sorry you used an adblocker on Youtube that is against our terms now you are cut out from your gmail. I do hope one day legislation is made giving consumers some protections. Until then I would like to find an alternative email provider, even a paid one, and get off of gmail.

I would highly recommend ProtonMail, Tutanota, Fastmail, or CripText. You can use Google Takeout to create an mbox file of your inbox, fwiw.

I have my entire photo in my iPhone synced to Gphotos. I also ran the "Free space" in my iOS GPhotos app to free up space. Now I am afraid of locking out of Google and my photos are gone.

It is completely ridiculous if you think about the fact that they created a system where people can spam emojis, then banned them for doing it. If you don't want people to do something so easily filtered, just don't let them do it in the first place.

I have had my current bank (Chase) steal all the money in my checking account for a lot less than an emoji comment, to be fair.

So really it was Indiana that stole your money, with Chase charging (Indiana) $150 for legal fees. The situation still sucks, but Chase doesn't come out looking so bad.

Can you explain what happened?

Zero-burden-of-proof state government edict (an Indiana tax warrant) based entirely in fiction caused them to throw up their hands and say “there’s nothing we can do!” as they took $150 for Chase’s lawyers’ time and handed the remainder over to Indiana in full.

So a State government, using lawful authority, for taxes owed ordered Chase to hand over your money, and you frame this as Chase "stealing" your money? I'll acknowledge the $150 fee that you ultimately pay is high, maybe even unreasonable, but I feel like your original post was a little disingenuous nonetheless.

Your own explanation of events reads like you tried to ignore a tax liability until you gave them no choice but to seize it. If you believed it was erroneous you should have worked with the State of Indiana to resolve the error (or create a payment plan saving $150 in fees).

It sounds like you aren't considering the possibility that Indiana did not have a legitimate reason to confiscate the money, such as a numerical error on a tax form, which has happened to me.

I did acknowledge that. That's why I said they should have worked with the State to resolve the error, rather than ignore it until a seizure was required.

Seizures are expensive for the state too. If you're working with them on the tax liability (inc. disputing it) they likely aren't going to go the seizure route as a first port of call.

There are situations where the mail that the State sends does not properly reach the taxpayer. I suppose if they confiscate the funds and then are open to swift resolution of the error, that's not so bad, but I'm surprised they don't choose wage garnishment or some other way of contacting the taxpayer before just "surprise, the money is ours!"

So... Chase is, in your imaginary world, supposed to refuse a lawful court order because this person claims that they don't actually owe the money? Hey, maybe Chase could even pony up for a legal defense fund! I mean, why wouldn't they?

When a private company tried to lay a claim to my account, BoA told them to go stuff themselves.

I understand that a court of law is different, but that does not mean that the court has acted ethically or logically-- they have only acted officially.

If your money was stored non-digitally, it would be a bit more difficult to confiscate, such as if it were in a safe that I privately maintained offsite somewhere.

All irrelevant. The GP is bashing Chase for complying with a court order. It's not their place to decide which lawful orders they will follow.

Out of curiosity, are you also one of those Westerners who also criticizes China for being authoritarian?

It's because I'm trying to understand the logic of those who feel like just because an action has been performed by a certain government, it therefore must be logical and ethical 100000% of the time.

I could point to examples of times where private organizations defied specific government orders because they felt the order was unjust, but I have a feeling this wouldn't be a sufficient argument for you.

>Out of curiosity, are you also one of those Westerners who also criticizes China for being authoritarian?

Wow.

>It's because I'm trying to understand the logic of those who feel like just because an action has been performed by a certain government, it therefore must be logical and ethical 100000% of the time.

I literally never said that. Not once in any of these comments. Are you even replying to the right person?

>I could point to examples of times where private organizations defied specific government orders because they felt the order was unjust, but I have a feeling this wouldn't be a sufficient argument for you.

So, in your mind, Chase should perform their own investigation of this man's taxes before complying with the court order? This is really what you think?

Should we also have private companies arrest people who the police say have committed a crime?

Hey! That guy is in your restaurant. Hold him down before we get there. If you don't comply then you are in contempt.

Ummm... no, we have police for that. Of course, the police do not have access to anything and everything in any place at any time, which is why they sometimes need to go through the court in order to compel private entities to assist.

honestly, have you thought through anything that you're saying? How do you imagine any of this could possibly work in the way you imagine? You literally expect every subject of a warrant to conduct their own internal investigation as to the validity of said warrant, even though they have absolutely no right to not comply.

it's so unreasonable that it's comical; I don't even know why I continue to respond. You live in a fantasy land.

In this argument, that point does not matter. OP said that Chase stole money from them. That is not true; banks lawfully complying with government orders is not theft. Banks, or really any private business, do not protect you from the government.

There was no tax liability, no taxes owed. That’s where the “based entirely in fiction” part comes from. States do not have lawful authority to invent nonexistent tax liabilities and seize property in any amount they make up, which is what Indiana attempted here.

Chase charged me $150 to rubber-stamp an illegal seizure of my account. They were entrusted with the funds and they seized them on behalf of a third party which had no legitimate claim to them.

Sounds like Chase stole my money—and charged me to do it.

So you're claiming you never lived in Indiana, received no correspondence from the State of Indiana on a potential tax liability, and absolutely no warning that they were planning on seizing your account?

Correct. It was not a lawful order.

I am unable to see why your comments are being downvoted. Even if you owed money I do not see how state can compel your bank to hand over your personal wealth to recover that. They should employ the exact same methods as some other business might use to collect their debt, going to court should be the last step.

Thanks for the warning and I will never do any business in state of Indiana.

> They should employ the exact same methods as some other business might use to collect their debt, going to court should be the last step.

They said above the state had a warrant. So they did what you wanted them to do, went to court, got a warrant and forced the bank via legal edict to hand over the money.

Tax warrants in indiana can be filed by clerks:

https://www.in.gov/judiciary/admin/2651.htm

It has problems:

https://cbs4indy.com/2019/08/15/state-automatically-issues-t...

https://www.theindychannel.com/news/call-6-investigators/cal...

You can also find tons of evidence of major tax warrant scams hitting Indiana. I wouldn't be surprised if Chase got a letter from the scammer, with a deposit account number, and a link to an official public tax warrant URL.

Private businesses can (and do) also compel your bank to hand over your personal wealth if they have a court order.

> Zero-burden-of-proof state government edict (an Indiana tax warrant)

"Zero-burden-of-proof state government edict" describes the property tax bills every single homeowner gets in the mail and is expected to pay. Pay your taxes.

No; property taxes require a burden of proof: you must own property. That property must be assessed in some way.

In this instance I had no tax liability whatsoever. Zero. No business operations whatsoever in or touching or with their state. Indiana invented numbers out of thin air. Most of a year later I got the money back from Indiana as they agreed on this point (after they skimmed about $1k for “collections fees” incurred as a result of their illegal seizure).

Chase was happy to oblige them with a rubber stamp.

Unfortunately, even Google would concede and hand over the money because it's backed by Citi-Group. Financial institutions listen to court and state orders blindly.

Court orders, sure. But the state should have to go through the courts the same way everybody else would.

And you think they did not in this case?

Having your checking account disabled because some bot decides you look suspicious already happens with traditional financial institutions.

Anytime I have issues with a bank account I walk into a brick and mortar and talk to someone in person. My Amex has a number on the back and I speak to a person.

Not even sure how to call google. Google Maps has issues with father in laws address. They also have some made up city name near where Ive lived on and off for 30 years, not a single person calls it that. Amazon hides their number or changes the location on their website frequently.

If you typically have a help line, possibly also a physical bank to go to, and if not, you'd reach out to the OCC (https://www.occ.treas.gov/about/index-about.html) and your problem will get solved real fast

I think it was more than just an emoji in a comment but happy to be shown otherwise.

Someone was violating youtubes rules about posting repetitive comments. You can't post the same thing over and over on youtube without running into problems.

They ban entire accounts that are not paying. We've had reasonable (not great by any means) service with some of their paying products.

And paypal locked an account of mine for something like 10 years (based on nothing). Wasn't worth the fight, but was randomly contacted to claim my money oddly.

"They ban entire accounts that are not paying" isn't a hard-and-fast rule either; I wouldn't risk anything you can't afford to be cut off from stored monoculture-style in Google's ecosystem, whether or not you're paying, if it's absolutely critical to you. Regardless of whether they apply a different account risk model, the checking thing is experimental and I definitely would recommend against handing it money you can't afford to lose.

Your point on Paypal is valid, and people dealing with Google checking are making a risk calculation like people dealing with Paypal do (but of course, one would hope that over time, the offerings improve; Google entering this market new should be offering something better than Paypal).

People are building entire mission critical business on google (GCP etc) that they can't afford to be cut off from. You can pay $250/month for one hour support. If it truly is mission satirical you can pay $60k/month and get 24/7 support.

Agreed though - if you are not paying and are the product in their system - then you are definitely at risk.

What point is being advanced here? That it is ok, or at least inconsequential that Google can lock you out of services that you rely on? Or that we should be happy because Google is "reasonable" here?

I have purchased a domain and used it to underpin a fastmail account; personally, I don't share in your line of reasoning and don't want to continue to trust Google.

There are two points.

1) The statement that google deleted someones accounts because they used emoji's in a comment or comments is 100% a lie. Let's be crystal clear about this.

2) If you aren't paying you are not the customer - you are the product. Is this not obvious to folks?

If you pee in google's pool they are going to kick you out. You don't make them much money (they make money on volume) and if you annoy lots of their other users and violate their written policies they have an economic incentive to eject you from their ecosystem. Every MINUTE they spend dealing with you is profit lost - so they are probably NOT going spend a lot of time dealing with you.

If you want control - buy your own domain and point it to where you want to. Or pay someone for email. Or do both, I think those are all great ideas.

But the lies about an emoji in a comment being the reason someone's account is banned are very annoying.