7 ms·
Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account. There’s too much risk of cross damage. Imagine losing access to your Gmail because
by koolba 7mo ago
Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account. There’s too much risk of cross damage. Imagine losing access to your Gmail because some Gemini request flags you as an undesirable. The digital death sentence of losing access to your email with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- gman83 7mo agoThis wasn't due to some random Gemini request. Users were using sketchy antigravity auth plugins to use their antigravity tokens on things like OpenClaw, clearly against ToS. It's great that Google is giving these users a second chance.
- johnebgd 7mo agoIt’s be great if Google just revoked antigravity access if terms were violated. No need to disable the entire account.
- dangus 7mo agoI’ll go further: there should be laws addressing account consolidation. Getting banned from an Apple or Google account is an incredibly wide blast radius. It would be like being banned from buying Unilever or Nestle food from your grocery store.
- plagiarist 7mo agoEmail providers should be utilities and also legally require a warrant before disclosing any information whatsoever to the government. 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.
- LiamPowell 7mo ago> just revoked antigravity access That's exactly what they did, plus Gemini CLI and Code Assist, which are the same product in different formats.
- TGower 7mo agoOnly Antigravity and Gemini access was banned, not email or other google account stuff.
- NewsaHackO 7mo agoNo Google account has been banned for this. People just keep spreading this lie because no one agrees that they have the right to steal the OAuth token.
- sneak 7mo agoIt's their OAuth token, it's not being stolen. It's just being copied from one place on their computer to another. This is no different than a competing browser importing your localStorage and cookies from Chrome on first launch.
- NewsaHackO 7mo agoNo, the OAuth token is supposed to be used solely with the context of a first-party app only. Clearly, if you need to extract the key by reverse engineering or set up a proxy to spoof requests to a service, you're doing something shady.
- sneak 7mo ago> No, the OAuth token is supposed to be used solely with the context of a first-party app only. The web doesn't work like that. The operators of google.com saying you must only use Chrome to load it is a ridiculous concept. It's not spoofing to use your own access credentials on your own computer to access your own account on an HTTP API.
- NewsaHackO 7mo ago>The web doesn't work like that. The operators of google.com saying you must only use Chrome to load it is a ridiculous concept. I have no idea what you are talking about. Chrome? Are you sure you are replying to the right thread?
- sneak 7mo agoChrome is an HTTP client that accesses webservers at specified addresses. Antigravity and OpenClaw are HTTP clients that access webservers at specified addresses.
- Aurornis 7mo agoHow do so many people think this happened? All of the articles I’ve read have been clear that it did not happen. Yet it’s all over the comments here. Why?
- DangitBobby 7mo agoIt's very easy to believe, and that's how Google bans usually go. Probably nothing more to it than that.
- crawshaw 7mo agoThe concern is not losing access to some new IDE for operating outside the terms of service. The concern is when you lose access to the IDE, you also lose access to your 20 year old Gmail account. A general problem for Google products is that everything is mixed together.
- BoredPositron 7mo agoBut that's not what happened.
- amiga386 7mo agoYes, our masters once again embarrass us unworthy peons with their endless grace, generosity and forebearance. How lucky we are to entrust our data and our lives to them!
- WarmWash 7mo agoAnyone can buy the tokens via the API and do whatever they want with them. Its not evil of Google to say "Here is an allotment of steeply discounted tokens, but you can only use them with our services."
- fooker 7mo agoIt is evil to block your email and hold your photos hostage over it though :)
- ZekeSulastin 7mo agoDidn’t they only block Antigravity though, leaving other services available?
- WarmWash 7mo agoThey only blocked access to Antigravity and GeminiCLI for the offense.
- joquarky 7mo agoI would question the judgment of anyone who thought they would maintain "don't be evil" beyond IPO.
- fooker 7mo agoYour argument is basically : human being will always choose money over ethics. Could be true, but a somewhat depressing worldview.
- squeaky-clean 7mo agoThat didn't happen though.
- zarzavat 7mo agoOkay but they were paying customers paying $$$ for the service. Banning your customers without prior warning is not right, however sketchy their behaviour might appear. Even if it's obvious to Google that there's a difference between a Gemini API key and an Antigravity API key, it's not necessarily obvious to others. 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.
- exitb 7mo agoIf a 3rd party product advertises compatibility with a Google service and you use it to login via a first party Google login page, doesn’t the responsibility fall somewhere between the offending product and Google itself? In practice it’s structured pretty much like a phishing attempt. Notably some model providers explicitly allow that very flow, while others will ban you without notice.
- n8m8 7mo agoIf the "3rd party product" is you selfhosting FOSS, then that's you (OpenClaw users)
- exitb 7mo agoWhy do you call it self-hosting? It appears to be installable app with a fancy homepage. At what point does the software being covered by an open license changes the responsibility model?
- squeaky-clean 7mo agoThat's exactly what self hosting is, you install some app on your own computer host(s). > At what point does the software being covered by an open license changes the responsibility model When you agree to an open license that says you're liable for anything and not the author of the software. > THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
- NicuCalcea 7mo agoWhen's the last time you read the ToS of a service you signed up for?
- sowbug 7mo agoThis would be a great job for an AI agent. Even better if a few million such agents collectively refused to agree to unconscionable terms.
- jamesnorden 7mo ago>It's great that Google is giving these users a second chance. I hope this is sarcasm. A permaban as the first action is never a good idea.
- 982307932084 7mo ago[dead]
- sneak 7mo agoTelling your users they can't use certain software to access your HTTP API is exactly the same as telling people they can't use certain browsers to load https://google.com https://google.com.
- theturtletalks 7mo agoThey were banning people and those people couldn’t even cancel their subscription. That’s a rookie mistake and you expect the same company to have a flawless ban system?
- HardCodedBias 7mo agoAFAIK it has clearly been a ban of Gemini and not of all people's Google accounts. 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.
- nottorp 7mo agoWhy? Google has been doing automated bans for ages, even before "AI". By now they lost any trace of goodwill they ever had and are guilty until proven innocent.
- tjoff 7mo agoUse a custom domain and don't use google for email. 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.
- aliljet 7mo agoHow do you even pull away from a Gmail address? I'm nearly twenty years into that service. Getting banned would be absolutely devastating...
- calcifer 7mo agoUse your own domain to sign up for a paid email service, provided by a company that focuses on email. I use Fastmail, but there are many other options. 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.
- genxy 7mo agoSolid advice, but I want to double, watch out for things you only log into once a year. Making a new local account on your machine is a good first step.
- caseysoftware 7mo agoSame here but ~8 years. 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.
- wafflemaker 7mo agoFor quite some time (approx 8 years) I've used an email forwarding (Blur, but any works) to avoid spam. This looks like perfect case for change of email, since lot of these accounts can be moved out from Gmail by changing the address that email is forwarded too. Looks like all this hassle with generating a new email for each service pays for the second time (by ease of changing the main mail), in addition to spam and privacy protection.
- jijji 7mo agoyeah exactly have you ever tried to call Google support? it doesn't exist. the only way to contact Google is by posting something on news.ycombinator.com and then hoping that some person who works at that company actually responds to you and logs in somewhere and then changes your access.
- jauntywundrkind 7mo agoIt's not 100% clear to me, but supposedly it was just access to Antigravity that was shut off. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115805
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- TacticalCoder 7mo ago> The digital death sentence of losing access to your email 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rootnod3 7mo agoHere’s an idea: run your digital life away from a corporate shitbucket like Google. Don’t run your email there. Plenty of good other options.
- aprentic 7mo agoThat's a big part of why I switched to paid email. I'm the customer, not the product.
- baby_souffle 7mo ago> Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account As a hedge, you can google.com/takeout on a monthly cadence. At least a few years ago when raspberry pi nodes were cheap, you could set up rClone to sync the `TAKEOUT` folder of your gdrive account locally and then encrypt it and shove it into backblaze. Then set up a monthly reminder to quickly request a takeout and make sure that you choose the "deliver to google drive" option.
- joe_the_user 7mo agoUsing Gmail as your primary email has become a serious risk. Email was once a distinct thing but Google tying it to your everything-account makes gmail terrible.
- wnevets 7mo ago> Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account. I would also avoid using the same credit card between accounts. I used a Venmo card for my chrome extension account as an extra layer of separation.