Several years back I wanted to try my hand at making an Android app and putting it in the Play Store. I knew ahead of time from reading all the horror stories that it's best to make a second dedicated developer Google account because once you turn an account into a developer account you're basically painting a target on your back to be randomly deleted by the powers that be. Additionally, not sure if this is still the case but at the time once you converted to a developer account you could never change your account's country again.

The last time I tried to make a new Google account it required a valid phone number, so this might require getting a second phone line these days. I wouldn't trust Google to only disable one account if there is a related one using the same number.

Even that won't protect you from being banned if Google ever infers that the two accounts are related.

I just refuse to use Google for anything other than mail at this point.

I even got off gmail because of these horror stories. If they banned my gmail account it would be a major pain and I'd have no recourse.

"can't trust Google"

There, fix that for you. If it's mission-critical, there are better customer-focused solutions out there than Google. Despite their massive brain power, they just can't seem to get dealing with users correctly.

I recall there was a time in my life where I thought that knowing exactly why a project was failing would make me feel better, but it ended up just making me feel worse. Being right while a project crumbles around you is not an accomplishment. Fix what you can, and move on when they get tired of fixing things.

I don't understand why so many people find comfort in being able to blame a vendor for problems that could potentially end in mass layoffs.

  they just can't seem to get dealing with users correctly

I guess internally it is considered a major failure if they ever have to deal with a user vs their automation incorrectly banning users without recourse. :-/

Thing is they have products that we use personally and all of those are linked to GCP. So if we do a chargeback on GCP billing that was by error, nobody to respond, they have the potential to impact ALL of our personal Google accounts.

Doesn't get more dystopian than this. Fuck Google.

Google seems to be a giant case study in "why spend ten minutes doing something when I can spend a week automating it instead?"

How do you have so many employees and yet everything important is run by unsupervised computers?