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Comment by babypuncher | Hacker News Reader

For what reasons does Google actually ban accounts?

Google owns Youtube, which bans people for any reason they feel like, including people for whom it had become a full-time job with their channel monetization paying the bills.

It is extremely unwise and very much against the founding spirit of the Internet to allow one company this much control, especially one that has shown itself to be censorious in the past.

Wait, does a YT ban extend to all Google products? Does this lock someone out of, say, webmaster tools?

Not normally but they do ban your entire account if their bots believe you've been very naughty.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47278362

Despite the ban being due to a violation of YT terms of service they lost their entire Google account. > "But because my Google account was terminated as well I didn't have access to my email so I couldn't see what happened."

Now imagine you had a profitable business on Google Cloud and this happened.

There are even horror stories about personal accounts getting banned and the ban subsequently propagating to the corporate GApps account of the violator's employer, thus completely shutting down corporate email and document sharing.

This kind of nonsense happened rather frequently when Google+ was suspending people for using "not-real" names. The suspension extended to youtube, to gmail, and to other services.

No, it doesn't.

Information withheld - https://www.reddit.com/r/k12sysadmin/comments/9qg2vw/google_...

System errors - https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/7nrx07/google_...

We're twenty years in so likely there are actually thousands of legitimate reasons, the problem is their system seems designed to dismiss any evidence to the contrary so a false positive is a lifetime ban too.

>I remember your story. I clicked this expecting to hear that everything is wonderful and you're living the good life. Instead, the nightmare continues. I'm sorry

Something is really fucked up if getting one of your Google accounts banned is a "nightmare".

To everybody who's reading this: make the necessary arrangements to make sure getting one of your Google accounts banned is not the end of the world for you.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, but perhaps lack of empathy? For people dependent on Youtube for their income, it's not easy (or perhaps even possible) to just diversify so you aren't dependent on Google.

Your advice is good tho. Diversify as much as possible so that any one company can't ruin your life.

Maybe, I don't know. The thing is that most people don't make a living out of youtube. But they might have a gmail address, then lots of files in drive or photos, stuff from work in docs, their schedule in calendar... Losing all of that at once is like having the rug pulled from under their feet. I'm just saying: if that's your case, please diversify.

Credit card chargebacks to the Google store can do it.

Reselling a Pixel Phone:

https://forums.dansdeals.com/index.php?topic=68066.0

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