Google Banned Me From Google Voice

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2024-11-07 17:00:03

After 15 years, Google banned me from Google Voice. This post is a summary of what happened, with the hope that it might help someone in the future who runs into the same situation. At the end, I have some thoughts about the latent danger of being banned from Google at any time with no notice.

I got my first cell phone in high school and immediately signed up for Google Voice simply because I wanted to be able to send and receive texts from my computer. So my Google Voice number is the only one I’ve ever given out to friends, and I use it as my phone number whenever I can. The only time I use my “real” Verizon phone number is when I can’t receive verification codes because some services block VoIP numbers.

That was a minor annoyance, and I’ve loved being able to text and even call from any device, even if my phone was off or not in service (e.g. traveling internationally). So I stuck with it for 15 years. My only worry has been that it seems like another product that Google could easily decide to kill off and send to the Google graveyard at any moment. But that turned out to be the wrong worry for me.

My problems started on October 4, 2024. I got a notification on my phone saying I had been logged out of my Google account. This had never happened to me before, and I thought someone might be trying to hack into my account. I was concerned but not terribly worried because I had two-factor authentication turned on. On my personal laptop, I saw a notification that I had been logged out of Google Drive.