alt Hacker NewsWay too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account. There’s too much risk of cross damage. Imagine losing access to your Gmail because some Gemini request flags you as an undesirable. The digital death sentence of losing access to your email with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk.
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Use a custom domain and don't use google for email.
And if you do use your gmail address just forward it and start to transition to something else. With time everything of importance has been transferred.
This wasn't due to some random Gemini request. Users were using sketchy antigravity auth plugins to use their antigravity tokens on things like OpenClaw, clearly against ToS. It's great that Google is giving these users a second chance.
That's a big part of why I switched to paid email.
I'm the customer, not the product.
Here’s an idea: run your digital life away from a corporate shitbucket like Google. Don’t run your email there. Plenty of good other options.
It's not 100% clear to me, but supposedly it was just access to Antigravity that was shut off.
If people lost access to their whole accounts that would be a major crisis for Google users. But it doesn't seem that that was actually the case.
This doesn't make it super clear, but, the submission from a week ago when bans got handed out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115805
yeah exactly have you ever tried to call Google support? it doesn't exist. the only way to contact Google is by posting something on news.ycombinator.com and then hoping that some person who works at that company actually responds to you and logs in somewhere and then changes your access.
AFAIK it has clearly been a ban of Gemini and not of all people's Google accounts.
However many stories appeared where people tried to claim that their whole Google account was banned to gain traction.
Unless it is clear that a full Google account has been banned we should push back on any story that claims this.
> The digital death sentence of losing access to your email
I agree that the digital death sentence is really bad and doubly so seen that many are using single-sign on tied to their Google identity but...
> with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk
There's definitely phone support for paying Google Workspace users: don't tell me there's not, my wife got Google support on the phone more than once and they've been helpful.
And it's not a crazy expensive subscription either.
> Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account
As a hedge, you can google.com/takeout on a monthly cadence.
At least a few years ago when raspberry pi nodes were cheap, you could set up rClone to sync the `TAKEOUT` folder of your gdrive account locally and then encrypt it and shove it into backblaze. Then set up a monthly reminder to quickly request a takeout and make sure that you choose the "deliver to google drive" option.