What if: Google suspends your account?

But, Why is this happening?

Google has a huge user base. If you’re not in China, you must have been a Google user in one way or another. The Google as a company is like a monopoly in this space. According to review24,

• YouTube has 2B monthly users

• Gmail has 1.5B users

It is practically impossible to monitor and regulate the platforms with people alone. And rightly so, the most of the monitoring is carried out by AI programs which captures anomaly, and raises a flag. The problem, however, is there is not a straight forward way to deal with false-alarms. For example, the story published today in NYT - A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal. The Domino effect of losing Google account is,

“Not only did he lose emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son’s first years of life, his Google Fi account shut down, meaning he had to get a new phone number with another carrier”.

The article further adds,

“Without access to his old phone number and email address, he couldn’t get the security codes he needed to sign in to other internet accounts, locking him out of much of his digital life.”

This, nevertheless, is a nightmare. The worse is yet to come.

The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.

As the law enforcement cleared there is no crime, ideally the service must have been restored. After appealing to Google with police report, but to no avail.

After getting a notice two months ago that his account was being permanently deleted.

Yep. Once the account is flagged its almost impossible to get it restored.

Is there a way out?

Every oragnisation has a disaster recovery plan. It’s the firms readiness to regain the functionalities affected due to natural disaster or any other such calamities.

Like DR plan of firms, we, individuals might need to have a back-up plan to preserve our online identity. And, I’m not the first one to suggest this.

Did I moved out of Google? No. Living without the dependence on Google is, practically, impossible. And, it takes effort and dedication. To understand the pain and frustration, check with anyone who worked on migration/modernisation in their workplace.

As as individual, the major impedence is the price to pay for our day-to-day usage and convenience and availability. For example, if we consider MS Excel as a replacement of Google Sheet (although it costs quite a sum), the Excel doesn’t has an in-built integration with Mutual Funds, which is a must for me to shift away from Sheet. Even after buying the Spreadsheet, this will be available in only one computer. On the other hand, Google Sheet resides in cloud for free and available in browser.

For some service there is no alternative, Youtube is one among them. The Network effect it unleashed in last few years has been unmatchable. The number of channels I subscribed to is handful enough to keep using YouTube.

But, its not entirely hopeless. There are two popular subreddits which focusses on de-googling - r/degoogle and r/privacytoolsIO. The intention for the subs are primarily the privacy concerns. The communities are very active in exploring uncharted territoty and spoting alternatives to Google Services.

They have already collected and listed down the ways to move away. The tools are available for some fee and also as free. Having a reliable alternative to some of the Google service would derisk us from the potential account lock down and subsequent loss of our digital existence.