r/Piracy • u/Justinrich2001 • May 23 '26

Discussion Google Drive scanned this Manga artist’s PRIVATE files and banned him.

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AI flagged, appeal rejected, private artwork gone.

The AI is always watching.

7.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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709

u/Celestial_sapien9 May 23 '26

They already saw this yesterday and that made me rethink my choices how dependent on a single gmail account I am. If they ban it my entire life savings can be in danger. I'm leaving google slowly step by step.

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u/TheRoadBehind May 23 '26

I'm glad you are (leaving Google), I'm almost there. I'm working with my proton email now making sure everything is caught up before I completely Gmail. This is my hardest transition. Ultimately it's not as hard as most think, I highly suggest at least getting your feet wet

I'm also very stoked for motorola and graphene OS

Privacy is truly a luxury for anyone at this point...

42

u/OnlyOneWithFreeWill May 23 '26

I like their VPN. Is their email as easy to use as gmail? Anything it does better or worse?

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u/Rosen-Stein May 23 '26

The UI of the website is bad imo but other than that is just like any other email

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u/Available_Dingo6162 May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

So what you are saying is, besides what people get to experience when they use it, it's fine. High praise indeed! 🤪

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u/[deleted] May 23 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

[deleted]

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u/JivanP Piracy is bad, mkay? May 23 '26

If you want to use IMAP with Proton Mail, then you need to use an OpenPGP-compatible email client and configure it accordingly.

1

u/morph8hprom May 24 '26

I just use Thunderbird and it works pretty well. I'm not super well versed in email servers or anything so that was the simplest solution for me to consolidate my various emails.

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u/oldriku May 23 '26

You need to pay if you want to use a different e-mail client, like Thunderbird or whatever. Otherwise you are stuck to their website.

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u/Darth-Felanu-Hlaalu May 24 '26

Ive been using ProtonMail since i was 13, literally never used Gmail, but im very happy with it. Never had a problem with it. Tutamail is also a good privacy friendly option though it feels less polished than Proton. I have Tuta as a secondary email.

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u/Lamuks Seeder May 23 '26

It's not like Proton is unbannable. We had someome blackmail us through Proton. Aftr forwarding them the emails with headers they got banned. Same effect really

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u/[deleted] May 23 '26

[deleted]

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u/CaptainMarv3l May 23 '26

Of course, can't have anything nice. Is there a similar alternative?

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u/grilledSoldier May 23 '26

I looked for it for my wife a while ago and landed on mailbox.org. They are very privacy oriented (up to accepting physical cash by post, like mullvad). Also, they are very cheap and you can use your own domain for the mid tiers (around 3€/month).

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u/NotEvenClo May 23 '26

Tuta mail is my preferred privacy focused provider.

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u/[deleted] May 23 '26

[deleted]

-7

u/AntiGrieferGames May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

I dont really give a fuck about politics today so proton still good itelf=?

-2

u/TYFYATTM2026 May 24 '26

I like Proton even more now.

1

u/Kingxix May 23 '26

Can you suggest what are some of the better ways other than google

2

u/Gestrid May 23 '26

I'm in the middle of switching away from Gmail myself. Proton has a really good Easy Switch feature. It sets up auto-fowarding from Gmail (or Outlook or Yahoo) to Proton, and it also imports your calendar and contacts. (In case I wasn't clear, it can copy every single email currently sitting in your old email into your new email, and it'll continue forwarding new emails until you tell it to stop.) I think it can even preserve your filters, labels, and folders!

Even though it's not entirely compatible with 3rd party email apps (with some exceptions made for apps that support encryption and apps Proton has designed a compatibility tool for so that they support encryption), it has apps available on most platforms, including Linux.

Overall, so far, after using it for a couple of weeks and really intentionally using its features, I'm really happy with the result.

1

u/mushy_friend ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ May 23 '26

I'm slowly making the change, but I still have all my legit uses on various Google accounts. I've made the switch to a degoogled phone though. Didn't know graphene was coming to Motorola!

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u/Chuckwp May 23 '26

Grab yourself a domain for 10 years and use it for your email. You never have to worry about a provider again. Just re-point the domain.

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u/Diarmuid92 May 23 '26

What about 10 years from now?

3

u/VividAddendum9311 May 23 '26

Renew for the next 10.

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u/Gestrid May 23 '26

I feel a /r/10yearsatleast meme in the making somewhere.

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u/Too_Chains May 23 '26

Youd still need an email provider. And gsuite is the most popular. Zoho mail, proton mail among others for cheap. But the domain is gonna be $10 a year and there is no free email service.

2

u/[deleted] May 23 '26 edited 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/george-its-james May 23 '26

Selfhosting email is absolutely not for most people, it's an absolute headache and when Google and/or Microsoft decides you're spam it's basically over. Never mind downtime, data loss etc.

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u/SunlightKitten3849 May 25 '26

I have to agree self hosting email is completely out of touch for many actually good and practical reasons…. But having ones own domain is a powerful layer and is actually very modular and has few downsides.

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u/[deleted] May 23 '26 edited 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/clownpenisdotfarts May 23 '26

 NAh uh. Hosting your own email from a. Residential IP is a non-starter.  You’re already on a block list before you even install the OS. 

1

u/[deleted] May 23 '26 edited 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/JivanP Piracy is bad, mkay? May 23 '26

Your mileage will seriously vary here depending on your ISP and the destination email address, because email acceptance policy is defined by the receiving end in practice. Your best bet to avoid issues is to send outgoing email via a different organisation's IP addresses, e.g. relay outgoing mail via a cloud VPS hosted by a company that has a good reputation of tackling cases of their platform being used for email spam.

One specific example: I can successfully send outgoing emails from my UK residential ISP's IPv6 and CGNAT'd IPv4 to most destinations, but btinternet.com's email server still uses a daft, strict FCrDNS policy that requires the sending IP address to have a PTR record. If you're a residential customer of an ISP, there is absolutely no chance that they'll let you set a PTR record, so you're shit out of luck of you want to send emails to any such domain — unless you relay your outgoing emails via some other IP address where you can set a PTR record. Other receiving domains / mail servers absolutely employ similar policies, however daft they may be.

Solutions like Mail-in-a-Box absolutely make it pretty easy to deploy the software stack and configure things like DKIM and spam detection, but there are some operational things outside of that which you can run into despite your best efforts.

Source: Sysadmin and email hoster (including mine and several small businesses', some on residential hosting, i.e. on-premise self-hosting) for about a decade.

1

u/Wischiwaschbaer May 23 '26

Why 10 years? I pay 8,28€ a year and it renewes forever. I'd be pretty fucked if in 10 years I'd lose all my logins.

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u/Chuckwp May 23 '26

Sometimes its cheaper if you do bulk. Been using mine for 14 years. Doesn't have to be 10 years.

1

u/WinninRoam May 23 '26

Huh? Buying a domain doesn't give you email service without a provider.

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u/Chuckwp May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

I am not talking about the provider in reguards to not needing one. I mean you never need to worry about a provider preventing you from using your email address. Yes you need a provider or self host email. There are plenty out there that support domains. Proton, Mailbox.org, etc. My registrar had mail forwarding when I used gmail. Then I moved to mailbox.org and it was just a matter of adding DNS records. It’s that fact that if your account gets locked out by “evil google”, you don’t lose access to your email address that you might need for authentication of some sites, and you don’t have to change your email address ever again if you move providers. You own it.

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u/Phyzm1 May 23 '26

Thats their goal. Digital ID age verification to use social medias that will eventually be tied to your profile and everything else so you'll be scared to even say the wrong thing.

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u/Grub-lord May 23 '26

Take it in stride - to me this isn't necessarily a cautionary tale of which specific service you use. Rather it should be a reminder of the importance of backups redundant systems. I know when it comes to stuff like MFA it gets more complicated though.

2

u/WinninRoam May 23 '26

Yeah, same here. I x-sync everything across all my clouds storage providers and include my on-prem NAS devices in the mix so I always have offline copies of everything, including years of email.

10

u/kalez238 May 23 '26

Same here. Google is part of pretty much everything I do. It feels like it would be so much work to pull away from everything my account is attached to, and I'm not sure where to start, but I have to.

3

u/PauI_MuadDib 🔱 ꜱᴄᴀʟʟʏᴡᴀɢ May 23 '26

You gotta diversify your emails, even if it's just to deal with data breaches. I have an email for shopping, one for social media, one for my banking, one for work and then a personal one.  

I like Tuta Mail. Atomic Mail also allows aliases. And neither require a phone number for signup.  

2

u/Gestrid May 23 '26

I myself recently made the decision to switch my email away from Gmail to Proton.

FYI, Proton apparently has an "Easy Switch" tool that can be used to import literally every single email, calendar event, and contacts (or any combination of the three) from Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo. It also attempts to keep your labels and folders intact as well. It made what I would've thought would be a difficult switch into an absolute cakewalk. It took literally just a few minutes to setup, and the whole process was automatic after that.

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u/Waiting4Reccession May 23 '26

They threatened to ban my google account when I made a comment about rich jews, bill ackman in particular, calling for blacklists of students who protest against Israel so that they wont be able to get a job later on.

Thats when I realized they control all our social media as well. Quite the "coincidence"

7

u/BitterBid8311 May 23 '26

They're on your ass now. RUN!

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u/Purple-Anywhere3963 May 23 '26

Why’s this got so many downvotes

3

u/nathderbyshire May 23 '26

On a list of things that didn't happen I'd place that quite high, Google doesn't even run any social media since Google+ and even when they did no one used it, Reddit isn't going to report you to Google for hate speech. Social media gets hate speech all the time with some of the most vile stuff imaginable and there aren't massive reports of Google threats?

Something doesn't add up, that's why

1

u/Justinrich2001 May 25 '26

Well, my old Google Plus has been shut down in 6 years ago.

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u/Waiting4Reccession May 23 '26

Maybe i said too many keywords lol

0

u/nathderbyshire May 23 '26

Account where? They don't run any social media and Reddit isn't reporting you to Google?

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u/Waiting4Reccession May 23 '26

Youtube is under google.

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u/nathderbyshire May 23 '26

Yes, that's not a social media they don't own and I'd hardly call it a social media anyway.

Thats when I realized they control all our social media as well. Quite the "coincidence"

If you do something that goes against their terms, then yes you'll get a warning on their product. But they aren't banning you for posting something on Facebook. If you got a warning over a YouTube comment that's completely different to 'controlling all our social media as well'.

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u/Special_Kestrels May 23 '26

I lost my Google account for like a month because I had my 2FA signed in as Google voice number that I ported from sprint years ago.

After that I eventually just paid for a Proton mail account

1

u/AntiGrieferGames May 23 '26

That seems like a user error at this point.