Comment by gman83
10 hours ago
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.
Yes, our masters once again embarrass us unworthy peons with their endless grace, generosity and forebearance. How lucky we are to entrust our data and our lives to them!
Anyone can buy the tokens via the API and do whatever they want with them.
Its not evil of Google to say "Here is an allotment of steeply discounted tokens, but you can only use them with our services."
It is evil to block your email and hold your photos hostage over it though :)
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https://youtu.be/ntICHMV-WMA?t=40
"Google Shuts Down Gmail For Two Hours To Show Its Immense Power"
If a 3rd party product advertises compatibility with a Google service and you use it to login via a first party Google login page, doesn’t the responsibility fall somewhere between the offending product and Google itself? In practice it’s structured pretty much like a phishing attempt.
Notably some model providers explicitly allow that very flow, while others will ban you without notice.
If the "3rd party product" is you selfhosting FOSS, then that's you (OpenClaw users)
Why do you call it self-hosting? It appears to be installable app with a fancy homepage. At what point does the software being covered by an open license changes the responsibility model?
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Okay but they were paying customers paying $$$ for the service. Banning your customers without prior warning is not right, however sketchy their behaviour might appear. Even if it's obvious to Google that there's a difference between a Gemini API key and an Antigravity API key, it's not necessarily obvious to others.
The correct and sane thing to do is to send them an email, with at most a 24 hour suspension. If they keep doing it despite being warned then by all means fire them.
The concern is not losing access to some new IDE for operating outside the terms of service. The concern is when you lose access to the IDE, you also lose access to your 20 year old Gmail account.
A general problem for Google products is that everything is mixed together.
But that's not what happened.
It’s be great if Google just revoked antigravity access if terms were violated. No need to disable the entire account.
> just revoked antigravity access
That's exactly what they did, plus Gemini CLI and Code Assist, which are the same product in different formats.
No Google account has been banned for this. People just keep spreading this lie because no one agrees that they have the right to steal the OAuth token.
"steal" is semantically incorrect here.
It's their OAuth token, it's not being stolen. It's just being copied from one place on their computer to another. This is no different than a competing browser importing your localStorage and cookies from Chrome on first launch.
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Only Antigravity and Gemini access was banned, not email or other google account stuff.
I’ll go further: there should be laws addressing account consolidation. Getting banned from an Apple or Google account is an incredibly wide blast radius. It would be like being banned from buying Unilever or Nestle food from your grocery store.
Email providers should be utilities and also legally require a warrant before disclosing any information whatsoever to the government.
Unfortunately the government is full of corrupt geriatrics who do not understand technology and are paid to continue not understanding technology as they sign bills prepared for them by ALEC.
>It's great that Google is giving these users a second chance.
I hope this is sarcasm. A permaban as the first action is never a good idea.
They were banning people and those people couldn’t even cancel their subscription. That’s a rookie mistake and you expect the same company to have a flawless ban system?
When's the last time you read the ToS of a service you signed up for?
This would be a great job for an AI agent. Even better if a few million such agents collectively refused to agree to unconscionable terms.
Telling your users they can't use certain software to access your HTTP API is exactly the same as telling people they can't use certain browsers to load https://google.com.
"Hey Gemini, write a short blurb casting our capriciousness in a good light."