I bet you that if they ban one they ban the other too

the only safe way is to get your important data out of Google entirely

after manifest v3's announcement, I de-googled: gmail, chrome, search, google cloud, photos, family on android phones

2 years later, it's all gone, except youtube

and if they ban that I don't care

Related: I've had a suspicion that, if you have an Apple or Google app developer account through a company (in your name and recovery phone number, but company email address)... and you leave the company... you'd better hope that someone at the company doesn't then use the account to do something sketchy or rule-breaking.

Someone inheriting the account is a very real possibility, given motive (people can be lazy about figuring out how to set up the account for another developer, or not want to pay another fee), and opportunity (professionalism norm is to preserve all passwords/secrets in a way that is accessible to the company).

Other ways of linking an account, such as having both logged in on the same phone, don't put you at risk.

Yeah they do. There's an entire mesh of metrics that are used to calculate your relation to separate accounts.

It's the confidence tolerance that keeps you and your partner from getting banned together.

> It's the confidence tolerance that keeps you and your partner from getting banned together.

Thanks for that bit of info, the degree of disgusting that google would be tracking who people's partners are is off the scale invasive and should be a reason for an immediate complaint to the various data privacy authorities.

> google would be tracking who people's partners are

is a misunderstanding of that comment. Nothing they said implies that Google is tracking who people's partners are. You're welcome to have whatever opinions you are about companies, but I'd also hope that you're careful not to read conspiracies into places where they aren't stated, especially in about institutions you have preconceptions about.

Whether it is tracked explicitly or implicitly, the idea that there is a matrix that establishes your linkage to other accounts is the bit that I take issue with because the conclusion for me is that Google is able to infer things about the people they hold data on that they never ever should have access to.

If you have a credible alternative explanation of what it does mean then you are welcome to supply that but instead you are making statements that are unverifiable:

> Nothing they said implies that Google is tracking who people's partners are.

That's a very, very thin line because if Google can figure out which account to ban and which account to let live because they are close enough that without that matrix the two would be seen as the same entity then that's already many levels of privacy violation too far. Being able to derive who is partner with whom once you have that data is trivial, whether Google actually does this or not is irrelevant because you can't prove a negative.

You are well into the territory of defending the indefensible here and I'm giving you a lot of leeway because you most likely have a mortgage and a bunch of other responsibilities but effectively you are defending your employer from a claim of gathering data without consent. Which - as I probably don't need to remind you - is a massive violation of privacy.

This all revolves around implied ability, I don't give a rats ass about whether or not there is an actual implementation of that ability - as it seems you do -, Google should not have this capability because I did not consent to its tracking of the relationships of my accounts vis-a-vis other accounts. Legal basis for data processing and informed consent are both staples of privacy law.

I know that both of these, but especially consent are difficult topics for Google, they seem to approach these things from a 'we can therefore we will' angle and that has resulted time and again in them being found on the wrong side of the lines of ethics and legality. This is just one more little nail in that particular coffin.

The entire "ability" here is, as far as I can tell, is that it's possible to connect accounts to IP addresses. This is something that practically every system does. HN does it to stop abuse and ban-dodging. Wikipedia does it. You're reading an incredible amount of bad faith into the concept of IP bans.

> but effectively you are defending your employer from a claim of gathering data without consent.

I'm very specifically not doing that. I've made no comment on what the practices of any particular company are. Ultimately I don't know. What I do know is that the comment you're replying to doesn't say the things you keep implying. If your goal is to silence any disagreement, please feel free to continue speaking like this, but if your actually interested in engaging, I'd implore you to appreciate that I'm speaking for myself and not threaten me with..whatever you're implying here.

> This all revolves around implied ability, I don't give a rats ass about whether or not there is an actual implementation of that ability

I mean this is critical. If all you care about is the "ability" every site on the internet that you can log into has the "ability". All of them, every single one. The stance you're taking here is that a website supporting the ability to log in inherently violates your privacy because, whether or not it does, it has the ability to track information that could correlate your account with other accounts (and many of them do!)

There’s been varying degrees of ease of migrating mail out of mailboxes, though.

Curious anyone recently has had an easy time on both ends, and no regrets.

At least it was when we could afford hard drives.

[1] https://takeout.google.com/

It's supposed to be hard to leave.

I'm just grateful they at least have takeout.

It’s free so I’m not going to complain, but for something as vital as an e-mail, I’m willing to pay for a service to have some peace of mind.

Source: I actually read them. Yes, personally. I didn't even have an LLM summarize them. I know, I'm practically a luddite.

My "new" mail provider fetches messages from Gmail to create a unified inbox, which helped with the transition. Today, I'm thinking of shutting this off given the volume of misaddressed e-mail and spam that arrives via Gmail.