However the one service I do rely on still is Google Photos. I don’t really use YouTube or have much data tied-up in the other Google offerings. Personally, I’ve used my own domain to send and receive email (using Fastmail) for several years now, and self-host my files and documents using Nextcloud. There are many websites that list good alternatives to Google services, and I won’t bang on about these ideas here - it’s up to you what you prefer to use, of course, and this type of thing has been covered many times before. For example, DuckDuckGo is excellent for web search - though several times a day I do need to revert to Google search for more complex queries (which I can do by prepending DuckDuckGo search queries with g!). These days there are so many services that compete with Google’s own offerings. Whilst I haven’t (at least, I don’t think?) done anything to violate any terms, I just don’t want to take the risk and wake up one morning to find I have lost 15 years’ worth of emails, photos, and documents. Of course, I am sure there are legitimate reasons for many accounts to be removed and that the original intentions behind these automated systems were good. There are many similar stories available, and probably thousands more we never hear about. The creator of Stardew Valley recently found himself locked out of his 15-year-old Google account - even whilst involved in a key ongoing deal with Stadia, which he has since pulled out from due to feeling mal-treated. However, for most people this is not possible.
Some affected people are fortunate to have a large social media following to ensure that their posts describing this treatment can traverse the networks enough to get through to someone close to Google who can try and elevate it in order to get accounts reinstated. This could be years’ worth of documents, family photos, emails, Google Play purchases, and much more (ever used “Sign in with Google” on another service, for example?). Often the account closures are reported to have been accompanied with vague automated notifications from Google complaining that the account-holder violated their terms in some way, but without any specific details or an offer of appeal or process to resolve the “issues” and reinstate the accounts.Īs such, these events usually mark the end of the road for the victims’ presence and data on Google platforms - including Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube - without having any option to extract the data out first. Disclaimer: The challenge focuses on writing frequency rather than quality, and so posts may not always be fully planned out!īy now I’m sure everyone has heard the horror stories about people (seemingly-) randomly losing access to their Google accounts. This article is one of a series of posts I have written for the 100 Days to Offload challenge.
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