this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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Privacy
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yes, they're linking it to the identity of the school machine, or the (many other) students/teachers in the school that used that computer
not sure wdym, haven't experienced that personally. just create the google account on school machine once, setup gmail's mail forwarding feature to send mails to your burner email, which forwards them to your primary email, and never bother with the google account at all. if there's something necessary you can use the school computer again.
If you use a shared IP (eg on a school machine) whose fingerprint isn't uniquely tied to your real world identity (name, birthday, etc), then they will flag it and demand a phone number or an image of a State issued ID so that they can link it to your identity.
If you don't provide this, they will lock you out of the account and delete your account.
Google isn't providing email for free. They need to be able to sell data about you to third parties. And if they can't link it to your identity when they sell that data, they'll delete it because you're not giving them enough $$ to offset the expense of your account hosting
If you managed to not have this happen to you with your other accounts, it's because they saw you login on another device that is uniquely fingerprinted and tied to your identity. Or they read your email and determined your real identity from the emails (eg amazon account purchases, address or name somewhere in an email)
i've already said enough that there's at least some case where it works like i said, since i've had the exact usecase. i didn't get flagged, asked for phone number or got the account removed. i see no point in replying any further.