Comment by SXX
5 years ago
What Eric Schmidt would do to help with Google Account bans? Bans without any appeal process were a problem since foundation of Google and it's exactly how Schmidt built that company.
The only people who ever got their accounts recovered at all were celebrities or people who go HN / reddit frontpage.
> were a problem since foundation of Google
You might be right, but Google changed as a company.
They started selling phones (ok, even if your account gets locked... you can still use your phone and/or create a new account to install free apps from what was the android market)
They started to sell storage (ok, even if your account gets locked, as long as you can retrieve your contents with Takeout, you just lost access to Google Drive, and not something of lasting value)
And they've been selling music (not anymore), movies, books, games (both on Play store and Stadia)... and more hardware that ties into their services (e.g. Nest Hub is useful precisely because you can have it automatically show your pictures from Google Photos, and you can have calls with other people on Duo)
The more new commercial products they offer, the more they should be careful about account bans. At the very least you want to segment access to them (as an extreme* example: even if you uploaded child pornography on Google Drive, after you'll have paid your debt to society, you ought still be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 that you purchased on Stadia)
(* extreme both because of the heinousness of the crime, and also how trivial/unimportant a videogame is on the grand scheme of things... but I think there's an easier case to be made for someone to retain access to the game that they purchased, vs retaining access to their Google contacts, which might not even be backed by any payment for the service)