Comment by cletus

The biggest failure here is Google's continued refusal to segment their services and this has been a problem since at least the Google+ days, which is more than a decade ago at this point.

During Google+, Google controversially instituted a "real name" policy. This was controversial and completely driven by Vic Gundotra who would get up at company meetings when asked about this (back when he still answered questions because believe me that ended) and said "we don't want people named 'dog fart'".

Legitimate concerns that people might have for their safety were completely brushed aside.

Anyway, the enforcement for this of course was automatic and resulted in I'm sure many false positives. But what happened when your account was flagged/ You lose access to everything.

This too was criticized at the time and people asked "well if it's a policy violation for Google+, why do people lose their Gmail?". These questions too were completely brushed off.

At this time I decided I simply couldn't and wouldn't use any other Google service because my Gmail is too important to risk by an automatic ban from a false positive on a completely unrelated product.

And here we are, a decade later, with the exact same nonsense happening.

Now of course the CSAM ban itself is ridiculous. Refusing to reverse it is ridiculous. All of that is true. But don't tie your email or your phone to a company's other services when they do blanket bans like this.

Disclaimer: Xoogler.