Comment by debazel
14 hours ago
You wouldn't even have to be a high profile target like a sanctioned judge. Simply getting your account banned by some automated process that marked you as "suspicious" will basically render you excluded from society.
It is absolutely insane to put this amount of power in 2 foreign companies that will be able to destroy your life with zero reason, oversight, or due process.
This is not a hypothetical problem and you don't need to be deliberately targeted. It actually happens to normal people. And if it does you have absolutely zero recourse.
Source: I have a banned Google account (it's over 20 years old at this point). I know the password, but Google doesn't let me log into it. Every few years I try to unsuccessfully recover it.
If you have a Google account and having it banned would be a problem for you here's my advice: migrate. Right now. You never know when one of their bots will deem you a persona non grata.
Can't you just create a new account?
You can, but you lose access to anything that was associated with your old account.
Another fun thing Google did is to automatically (without my consent) add a required second-factor authentication to my current Google account. I have this old, e-waste tier phone that I use mostly only as a glorified alarm clock, and at one point I used it to log into my current Google account.
Imagine my surprise when I tried to log in to my Google account from somewhere else, and it asked me for an authentication code from this phone. Again, I have never explicitly set it up as such - Google did this automatically! So if I were to lose this phone I'd be screwed yet again, with yet another inaccessible Google account that I will have no way of recovering.
At this point I don't depend on any Big Tech services; my Google account has nothing of value associated with it (only my YouTube subscription list, which is easy enough to backup and restore), and I pay for my own email on my own domain, etc. So if I get screwed over yet again by a big, soulless corporation that just sees me as a number on their bottom-line, well, I just won't care.
You better hope that whatever is-this-the-same-user heuristics they have on their side never find out for the duration of your entire life.
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