This is why I have de-Googled my family - at least for the most part. The hardest part was Gmail. Hundreds of services and accounts relied on that email address for 2FA. If I were to be blocked from it, I would be screwed. So I bought a domain and spent the next couple of years migrating everything to it. Pain in the ass, but now no one can ever ban me from my own email address. Worst case scenario my provider blocks me and I switch to another one in minutes. Plus I can do cool things like catch-all, so when I sign up for services I use "verizon@[mydomain.com]". I have caught many cheeky fuckers selling my email address to spammers.
Outside of this there is very little harm in my Google account being banned now. I'd lose some YouTube watch history and a few locations on Google Maps.
Just a suggestion but make the canary/alias less obvious. Companies caught onto this and are treating aliases with their name in it as "fraud" which is of course a load of crap. That is how tractor supply stole a gift card from me so I have turned many of their customers away from them and they have lost exponentially more than they stole from me. So now I use realistic looking aliases and just have my own lookup table that describes which one is for which company.
>> Just a suggestion but make the canary/alias less obvious. Companies caught onto this and are treating aliases with their name in it as "fraud" which is of course a load of crap.
> It hasn't caused me any issues yet [...]
Ugh, I ran into this earlier this year when creating an Airbnb account. I tried registering with "airbnb_[randomcode]@[mydomain.com]" and was confused when account creation would error out with an unhelpful error message (don't remember what exactly). After checking with multiple browsers to make sure it's not some browser or uBlock Origin problem, I suspected it might have something to do with the "airbnb" in the alias. Sure enough, I created some temporary alias without "airbnb" in it and ... it worked. I wasn't willing to tolerate their sh— "load of crap" though, so once the account was created I tried to change the email back to "airbnb_[randomcode]@[mydomain.com]" and ... it worked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The problem is not saving my data, it's losing access to the email account. I have hundreds of accounts like trading, social media, forums, GitHub, media, etc, which require access to my email account for 2FA. If I lose access to my email accounts, I lose access to those accounts. Some might be recoverable with a lot of effort, but many would be gone forever.
I understand, it is a horrible risk, the only answer is to get your own domain and then use an email service routed through that domain. Your ability to control your domain records should be modifiable even if your email provider is down.
Would not be an easy one to swallow but I don't have a false expectation that these accounts are mine in any sense. They are Google's, and I'm just renting it paying with my personal data to feed the AdSense machine. Any day they might decide to do what they want with it, there might be a bug or a technical issue which will lock me out, and I doubt I would have a single way to influence it, the customer care or user support is clearly not a priority for this company and is virtually non-existent.
I can control my own digital life, but I don’t have the resources to do the same for every family member. An old age family member owning Android devices for a decade is virtually impossible to untangle from Google.
I don't have any illusion that this is not how things are but I don't think that should mean that we accept this. We can very well demand that if google wants to take over that much of people's lives that they should not get to do whatever they want. This becomes even more important when you have less and less options for realistic alternatives.
It really would be nice if they weren’t allowed to create the equivalent of the digitally unbanked by unilaterally wielding this power without any kind of due process.
I've stopped logging into YouTube for this reason. Next step is to install a "YouTube browser" and configure my VPN to make sure all connections from that browser go over the VPN rather than my ISP's direct connection.
Friendly reminder to enable periodic personal data extraction from google (Google Takeout) and back it up so you don't lose your digital life in the rare case of being blocked.
Haven’t you seen people getting their Google accounts banned out of the blue? Haven’t you seen the great lengths that YouTube goes (in terms of content control) to please its advertisers? Haven’t you seen the cat-and-mouse fight between YouTube and yt-dlp (and similars)?
There is no “if”, but only a “when” for all of those things will be connected.
It’s naïve to think you can make YouTube not get paid without them trying to stop you. And it’s quite likely this is already against their ToS.
Of course I have seen it. This is exactly what I meant. If you are doing something because you are afraid of 'retaliation' you should not use those services at all. For anything.
You can be afraid of heights or earthquake or driving fast on mountain roads. Not google. For all that is holy: corporation should not make you afraid of doing something.
I should have used different words. I wouldn’t care much about using yt-dlp, as I barely use Google and would survive an account ban. Other family members _in the same household_ could be immensely more affected by my actions.
