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What can I do to protect myself in case Google randomly bans my accounts?

14 points by askjdlkasdjsd ↗ HN
I feel like my whole life is somewhat dependant on all things Google.

- Personal email

- Work email

- Side projects

- Admob, Adsense, Play store console, Google analytics, drive, calendar, firebase etc.

- Android phone

- Authorizations to I don't even know how many services via Google sign-in.

- Countless apps and SaaS products

Losing access to all of these would be so devastating, it would be akin to restarting your life, it could take months to recover, except I won't ever be able to get back/rebuild everything just because of how much there is.

I think I can no longer rely on Google services anymore. The risk is too much.

How do I de-google my life? Ideally, without having to rely on anything that could be taken away by the whims of a bot.

10 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 48.9 ms ] thread
ocdtrekkie
Ultimately, your first and foremost need is to move to a different email address: It's the hardest thing to change, it'll take you the longest. Get your own domain name, and set up an email address on that domain name. (I recommend Fastmail, but you can usually just do some rudimentary forwarding of it to your Gmail if you want too.)

Everything else you can mostly download from Google in advance, but it's key to update all of your accounts to not refer to a Gmail address. In the event of losing your Gmail address, you might lose any related account that requires access to it to verify your identity or login.

redvenom
I switched away from Gmail about twelve years ago. It was not hard. I did get my own domain. What I did was I started forwarding my email there. I sat down, made a list of all services that I used Gmail with and changed my address. Every time I wrote an email I made sure that Reply-to: was set to my new address.

It actually was surprisingly quick and painless.

XCSme
How's the email deliverability from your own email server? Or what do you use to send the emails?
knaq
Then you forget about the domain registration, or you are unable to pay due to hospitalization or finances, and you lose it.

Likewise for storage of data at home, there are floods and fires.

Reliably keeping your stuff long-term, both secure and accessible, is really really hard.

toomuchtodo
You can prepay up to 10 years into the future for most TLDs.
ocdtrekkie
As a note on this practice: Still renew it every year! It's easy to think ten years is a long time off to reach, but nine years of not doing anything and you'll have forgotten about it. And if you have lost access to something critical for renewal since then...

Renew every year, even if that date is far off.

fiftyacorn
Separate question but if a Google account is banned can the username be reallocated?
ancymon
Try building solid online identity. If you become recognizable and get some followers then in case of problems you could complain on social media. If your complaint gets enough upvotes you get personalized support :/
RemingtonLak
This actually is a good idea since calling them out can help. However, you then will need to open yourself up completely by making your plight public. I kinda like what little anonymity I've created ;-)
RemingtonLak
No doubt mine too. First the foremost, get G's Take Out option ASAP. At least you'll have backups. I do that actually in two ways:

1. Take out

2. IMAP to local email client. Take Out format not always great and you don't get attachments. So doing the IMAP can litteraly be your identicial backup. I simple created a trucrypt encrypted 30GB container with portable thunderbird on it. The I fire it up once in a while to replicate/sync.

I'm also doing what others have suggested both:

1. I've captured as soon as services became available my name on all of the significant email services and I do keep them alive.

2. got my own domain but I realized having it on GCE cloud isn't the best idea. I may retain the domain but will need to the replicate my server onto diff cloud. Guess will need to think that through.

yeah I feel your paranoia.

Side note: I'm also wondering with their AI/ML. If I could get a psych profile based on my emails, searches etc... that would be an interesting read. I mean they have my searches and emails which they've scanned and profiled since their inception!