And if you do use your gmail address just forward it and start to transition to something else. With time everything of importance has been transferred.
After a year or two losing Gmail becomes an inconvenience; after a few more years it is nothing. As everything is now on your own domain name you can switch providers without affecting anything.
That's what I did about 5 years ago and my only regret is not doing it earlier.
Set up forwarding in Gmail to your new address.
Then, whenever you log in to a website or app with your Gmail, take a moment to change it to your new address. In a few weeks, most of your important accounts will be covered. In a few months, almost everything you still actively use will be done.
I did this ~5 years ago and the only thing that still arrives at my Gmail is spam.
You can mitigate/speed the process using your password manager too.
I still use a filter in my email so that if something comes in under my Gmail, it gets a special tag that I can filter on and treat those as a todo list. Rarely happens beyond the occasional Google Meet connection.
Making a new local account on your machine is a good first step.
Pretty sure just moving emails would have take a lot less effort. I had the advantage of keeping the domain until I was ready to move, now imagine Google just turned it off one day and what your workload would be. I shudder to think about having to deal with that.
After a few years you'll notice you stop bothering to check your Gmail and you can delete it to close the address.
If you need motivation, skim the /r/GMail subreddit and see how many people are getting locked out daily.
I vaguely recall encountering a service that only accepted addresses from a whitelist of big providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.), even @icloud did not qualify.
I've never once run into a service with such a restriction, but I can imagine someone being that short-sighted. I have seen services that only support "log in with Google or Facebook", which is comparably terrible.
What's the playbook for migrating away in this situation?
I switched to fastmail with my own domain.
Although I am increasingly concerned with its longevity since there's a non-zero risk that Proton might shut down SimpleLogin since Proton Pass has its own alias feature.
Current state of OIDC should be pretty much standard across most providers - it put it that devs need too make the push to support alt login providers for preventing vendor lockin in identity like were currently barreling towards in hardware/software.
Its not evil of Google to say "Here is an allotment of steeply discounted tokens, but you can only use them with our services."
"Google Shuts Down Gmail For Two Hours To Show Its Immense Power"
Notably some model providers explicitly allow that very flow, while others will ban you without notice.
A general problem for Google products is that everything is mixed together.
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.
That's exactly what they did, plus Gemini CLI and Code Assist, which are the same product in different formats.
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.
I hope this is sarcasm. A permaban as the first action is never a good idea.
I agree that the digital death sentence is really bad and doubly so seen that many are using single-sign on tied to their Google identity but...
> with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk
There's definitely phone support for paying Google Workspace users: don't tell me there's not, my wife got Google support on the phone more than once and they've been helpful.
And it's not a crazy expensive subscription either.
If people lost access to their whole accounts that would be a major crisis for Google users. But it doesn't seem that that was actually the case.
This doesn't make it super clear, but, the submission from a week ago when bans got handed out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115805
However many stories appeared where people tried to claim that their whole Google account was banned to gain traction.
Unless it is clear that a full Google account has been banned we should push back on any story that claims this.
By now they lost any trace of goodwill they ever had and are guilty until proven innocent.
A week? Try at least 16 days
https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/account-restricted-without-w...
The danger here is they'll ban you with no specific reason, fill out the form and you get an automatic unban and then something else automatically flags and you're banned the second time permanently.
Support bot will then say "you were warned, read the TOS" and you get to guess what you did wrong.
You'll notice there are no appeals or reviews in this workflow.
Google has no creditability when it comes to handling account bans.
What they are actually trying to force you to do is to pay for the tokens that you don't use in their applications to increase their revenue and/or give their in-house tools an "unfair" advantage. But this is bad for the consumer because it means that there is less competition between coding agents and unless I'm willing to pay per token I have to take one of the model labs agents.
Anticompetitive behaviour imo they could just ban reselling tokens or something like that instead of locking your subscription in like this.
This is almost as realistic as "I wish netflix or youtube allowed me to use VLC to watch their content".
The easiest way to watch a movie in the player of my choice - even if i have legal access to it because it's in my netflix subscription - is to download it off piratebay.
Add to that Netflix's shitty discovery system, I'm pretty sure I watched some downloaded movies in spite of actually having legal access to them.
Oh, remember when PC games used to come on disks? For the Netflix example I can only guess, but I'm 100% sure I downloaded isos for games I had actually bought and had the physical disc... somewhere.
especially considering most modern movie/tv piracy is free streaming websites - shitty quality and awkward player controls, definitely no choice of player here
They have no problem with users using their quota on their own software. Because they get the signals. They do have a problem with users using the API in 3rd party software, because they don't get the signals.
This is not at all true. What is prompting this behavior from Google and Anthropic is that people are using their oauth creds/API keys to run OpenClaw bots that use orders of magnitude more tokens than the IDEs. The official clients also can use a lot more prompt caching because they have expected workflows.
And like, if you want to run OpenClaw, they’re not saying you can’t do that: use the API pricing, that’s what it’s for. But people are getting mad that they’re not allowed to roll their pickup truck up to the all-you-can-eat buffet table and fill it.
It's been 2 months since these bans have started, first Anthropic, then Google. And their wording is still so confusing that I can't get a simple answer to a simple question:
Is piggybacking on headless 'gemini-cli -p' or 'claude -p' a TOS violation? Because there's really no reason why you can't do exactly what these tools did that caused these two companies to start giving out bans.
Unless you're in for a very specific configuration of models for some niche concern, CLIs give you nearly exact same access to the backend that snatching an OAuth token from them does. They give you JSONL for stdin, JSONL for stdout, and if you spin up a local proxy, you even get the same exact API contract in responses that you get from public APIs.
In fact, I already built a small tool for myself that does exactly that, to allow usage of alternative harnesses I prefer. Once I release it to the public, will -p be banned too?
>Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead.
Seems clear-cut to me.
But that's the sole reason why all of the tools have headless modes. Headless mode is textbook definition of supporting automation.
From gemini docs: [1]
> Headless mode allows you to run Gemini CLI programmatically from command line scripts and automation tools without any interactive UI.
And claude code:
> Use the Agent SDK to run Claude Code programmatically from the CLI, Python, or TypeScript
Why does headless mode exist if using it is a bannable offense?
[1] https://google-gemini.github.io/gemini-cli/docs/cli/headless...
ToS change frequently and it’s not really fair to assume the user knows what is and is not correct use of tokens.
To be charitable, maybe they’re expecting AI agents to eventually start reading the ToS docs
problem is google's security concerns. when people connect gmail to openclaw, google flags the activity as weird and suspend the account because of unusual activity. Many whose accounts got locked because of this and they thought it was because they connected it to antigravity use against the policy (which happened in some cases). We will still see google account suspensions, and that would keep making news. and it wont be because of antigravity usage.
> bans for Antigravity usage also blocked access to Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
Google consistently fails to provide a process to deal with user issues. You donot see many reports of these at Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and many more providers. Though Meta learns from google I think.
Yes but as we're talking about Microsoft, these cases are probably explained by incompetence.
Which means that anyone serious about AI and not going local route should be using a provider with better reputation. I don't know if Alibaba, Z.ai or moonshots AI are also known for hair trigger responses, could be decent options for coding AI otherwise? If not, time to look for smaller providers with good reputation?
Today I could have uploaded them fine, and let whoever owns the cartoon make money I was just a fan of the show.
If I squint at the conversation, it doesn't seem that different from a behemoth company taking an employee of a private company and forcing them to still stop working for arbitrary reasons.
I'm giving agents and coding tools wide berth here, but if AI is going to replace all employees, what guarantees do you have as the employer that your employees will do your bidding, and not the bidding of enterprises with a shifting moral landscape?
Once we have tooling wrapped around specific agents, it'll be hard to rehire. What will we do then when our "employees" are furloughed?
This will be especially relevant when the big AI labs decide they need to enter a market to justify an obscene valuation. Or, when the sovereign wealth fund decides they don't like the direction of a business.
This is a good and honorable decision by Google. But it also brings up scary times ahead.