Google questions family’s story on XXX Gemini account bans

Losing access to an account is one of the worst things many of us fear will happen to us online, and when it’s a Google account with much of your digital life tied to it, that impact will be even more severe. We just shared with you the story of how some bad decisions by a family member allegedly led to the The entire family has their Google accounts banned.but now Google is pointing out some potential holes in its story.

Just to catch you up, yesterday an anonymous Reddit account posted on the site UK legal advice sub, asking for help recovering their Google accounts. According to the poster, his 14-year-old son attempted a sexual encounter with Gemini, sharing photos of himself via the tablet he used to access it. They say Google banned the son’s account shortly after and subsequently also banned the parents’ and siblings’ accounts, all of which were associated with that tablet.

Before publishing, we reached out to Google for comment, and while we hadn’t received a response at the time, Google has now reached out to Android Authority to explain the big picture a little to us, and it turns out that there are more than a few reasons why we might want to question this story.

First, let’s start with the most important one: according to Google, the situation described in that Reddit poster simply This is not how account bans work.. If an account violates Google’s TOS, that particular account may be eligible for a ban, but the ban doesn’t “stick” to the hardware, and just because other people are logged in on the same device doesn’t mean they too are automatically banned.

What about children’s beads? If you are a parent and you do something to get your own account banned, then yes: your ban will extend to affecting your children’s accounts as well. But, fundamentally, Google tells us: that doesn’t work the other way around. Actions taken on a child account that result in a ban will not “flow uphill” or affect the parent account.

Still, Google was concerned about the appearance of this report and has been trawling its logs, trying to detect any recent patterns in the UK where all accounts in a household were banned as described here. And so far: nothing like it has been found.

The company also notes that Gemini Live doesn’t really work with camera loads in a way that makes a lot of sense given the way this story was presented. None of this is absolute proof of an invention, but the more we hear, the less it smells good. And although the initial post was made on March 31, we all know what day it is. Hopefully we can get some kind of resolution soon either way, because this is a story too strange to forget.