“My Google account got suspended because of NewPipe”
github.com
github.com
I got my whole Vimeo account suspended by some script that had the impression I was violating some of their ToS. I just uploaded 3 demo videos of an app I created. Then they told me I should click on a link to contact support, where they told me I have to log in to contact support, which I couldn't do because my account was shut down.
I just released a blog article that needed these videos, so I didn't have any time for these things so I quickly uploaded the videos to Youtube.
I mean that was just a small account with three videos, but they simply nuked the whole thing. That's just crazy.
I don't think I'm save at Youtube either, I just didn't have a better idea at the time.
Ever thought of hosting the videos just like you would any other static file?
Otherwise, I'll take a look into S3/CloudFront.
Didn't even think that far, lol. Thanks for the info!
Those on 3g will have to wait ages for the video to buffer. Those on an old device won't be able to play it at all if you used new codecs. Users won't be able to select playback quality, and on a slow connection, they'll get endless buffering.
You'll have to come up with your own systems for counting how many people viewed the video and which bits they bailed out on. You'll have to reinvent caption translations and go to extra effort to get captions working at all.
Self hosted videos have mostly died for the above reasons.
This advice is pretty stale: 3G is rather old by now – 4G came out in 2009 – and unless you’re still supporting IE8 HTML5 makes it easy to let the browser select from multiple sources (subtitles have similarly had wide support for at least half a decade). Properly hinted video will start playing pretty quickly — certainly not massively slower than someone with 3G on an old device is going to experience everywhere else, especially since that old device isn’t going to pick the 4K version anyway.
When traveling to places with 4G or LTE coverage I'm often downgraded to 3G or edge. My parents' home has mostly 2G/edge connectivity, with some spotty 3G coverage on the second floor. They're "only" on the outskirts of a greater metropolitan area.
Just because some tech is old doesn't mean it's not very much still relevant.
The point is with HLS or DASH and CloudFlare you can provide the exact same experience to all your users. You can easily automate the process, which I've done. All other problems are already solved by player software like Clappr, JWPlayer, VideoJS, etc. They all use HLS.js and Dash.js in the background...
It’s a nice feature to allow clients to stream the max bitrate they can handle without buffering. Without this, you sacrifice either quality of those with good connections, or the complete experience of those with poor ones. I ended up struggling with ffmpeg and JPlayer which is never a good day.
Additionally, you need to make sure you use the right codec, something supported on FF, Chrome, and Linux/Mac/Windows/Android/iOS. Due to codec power struggles, this is not self evident.
Hosting video is harder than it seems :(
So if you have 5GB of videos that ALL get watched 10,000 times you will be out $500, so maybe problematic. Or calculated another way, 2.2mbps is good for 720p and comes out to 1GB/hour, so your cost is basically $0.01 per hour of video streamed (plus $5/month).
But as far as I know, CF has more free traffic than S3.
You are not going to get even one video watched 10k times, not to mention all of those videos. 10K video views is pretty darn close to head rather than the tail.
If you did, you would be making a million a year like @BrunchBoys on IG and hiring people to build an independent platform so when Youtube/Google/FB shut you down you would still have a way to deliver your awesome videos and make money.
P.S. You can always proxy EC2 traffic through the Lightsail to have a cheap delivery.
10K views of a video that's more than a few minutes long is a big deal. Having a hundred of those means a producer is either a celebrity or a real business specializing in video content.
While traditional hosters often include traffic with their offerings or charge a much lower amount. For example Hetzner (Big traditional German hoster) costs 1 EUR/TB and traffic is inclusive with most bigger/dedicated offers.
Nitpick: you mean either "extortionate" or something to do with ogliopolies, cartels, and price fixing; usury is when the perpetrator charges interest on a non-defaultable loan.
None of my stuff gets enough attention for me to care about exposure, but big content creators who rely on YouTube ads really can't get away from it.
I've been looking at the same thing.
Jesus Christ. Just pay for the bandwidth! You can't at the same time go "I dont want to be subjected to this automation stuff" and "I don't want to pay!"
referral https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=1881&_ga=2.233890075.4420892...
Gotta love Silicon Valley Customer Service!! The same thing happened to me with LinkedIn. Multiple Catch-22s and/or Chicken and the Egg.
https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/1176234693466787840?s=19 https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/1176246620452573184?s=19 https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/1183808406601097216?s=19
Silicon Valley Customer Service!!
Now think about any of the previous similar stories you've seen over the years. Doesn't even have to be about a full account being suspended. E.g. maybe it's about an app or extension being removed from a store, or about a site being removed from the search index, etc. The messages will always have been quite vague on exactly what happened, e.g. just saying that there was a violation of the terms of service.
The level of specificity claimed by the poster is just totally implausible.
Another pointer leading to a probable troll on this one: the original OP's nick is just a bunch of profanities in Finnish [1].
Oh, how can they receive an email stating the account suspension if the account was suspended in the first place?
[1] (careful; NSFW) https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...
Even 15 years ago right after they launched the service they were already having computers make decisions without human review or oversight.
I've had similar experiences with most of Google's services, including my phone nearly being bricked due to a cyclic error on Play Store. I keep a list of these little joys (on gdocs, ironically).
It was hard enough getting someone to look at these insanely frustrating errors and problems when I was a SWE there and could pinpoint someone who could fix them. Fixing these problems doesn't advance anyone's career, so nobody is incentivized to care. The idea of getting anything resolved from "out here" is just comical. Instead, I get to +1 a report on their forums, where one of their "community experts" gleefully tells us not to worry, someone will probably fix it someday. And in the meantime, have you tried power cycling? Because, Google! (Cue cute xylophone music.)
[1] Guess I'm not the only one with problems. Two stars for the Chrome app that's required: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-play-music/.... Does anyone actually care at Google? I doubt it. Too many cool new features to build to worry about existing ones working. Someday I might even write up a piece on how I was shipped off to the Goolag (Google Seattle) because I insisted on having a team to keep our product's data up to date.
Attempts to add a payment method always fail and it won't let me remove the one that doesn't seem to be working. The help support articles linked on that same page 404 and I can't seem to find a way to get any assistance on the issue. It has been stuck like this for years, occasionally I try to remedy it and end up in the same loop. It is extremely frustrating.
What the user describes sounds like an account lockdown, not an IP ban.
It doesn't have the required permissions to get IMEI, so no.
'shadowgovt owes me 12.3 BTC.
To which they replied that they couldn't because the account was locked. That certainly doesn't seem to add up, though it might just be a mis-communication.
It's important to remember that all stories have 2 sides, and to consider other possibilities when you only hear one side of a story.
In this case however the account holder is being totally up front about their activities: they were using a proxy network to rip off YouTube. This is a bit like Trump committing treason on live TV and then later whining about impeachment on Twitter. What's in question is not the facts but the policy.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/reyhan/tech-confessiona...
If just looking were illegal, you could shove it in someone's face on the sidewalk and they'd instantly be guilty of a serious crime.
Lots of people use NewPipe with unrooted phones, so if it is an actual policy, we should see more widespread bans. If we don't, I'm going to dismiss it as, "we don't have the full story, or its made up entirely."
That being said, of course you should take steps to mitigate the impacts of being banned by Google. But you should have been doing that anyway, so I don't think this story changes anything.
But... no, I wouldn't panic over using NewPipe.
It's super cheap (I prepaid for two years or something and it came out to less than $3/mo), faster than Gmail and won't kill your life.
EDIT: I hear Protonmail is also good, just use one of the two. They're great.
- google maps
These are the two things I find more or less impossible to replace on android. For Pay, there is no alternative at all. For Maps, there is Osmand, which is good as static map, but not for finding addresses.
Mapbox does realtime traffic these days, https://benmaps.fr can show this layer (I haven't found that button in mobile view though, might need to do a pull request), as well as your local traffic authority probably or some other local companies.
Business info can be found through regular search engines, or if that is really difficult, then you can always fall back to google maps every once in a while.
Street view is not available where I live anyway, and Mapillary is doing reasonably. They also have OsmAnd integration. OpenStreetCam is another alternative.
Satellite imagery is not exclusive to google maps either, there are lots of sources for this, and often also plane-shot imagery from your local government. You can configure a layer in OsmAnd. Personally I use Bing Maps most frequently for this (not the app, just bing.com/maps) since it is a lot more smooth/lightweight than the awfully heavy google maps website. (I don't really use sat imagery on mobile anyway.)
Trip recording ("location history" in google) can be done with OsmAnd or many other apps as well. I configured it to automatically turn on when routing: then I have GPS on anyway and I might as well store the data. Often fun to see stats afterwards (max speed, avg speed, asc/descend, or sometimes it's practical to see the time it took).
I think that should cover the functionality of google maps.
Google pay I never heard of, unless you mean paying for apps in the Play Store, in which case the solution is to contact the developers directly, though they usually don't seem to care enough to get you as a customer (I tried this four times, never got a reply, thus never became a customer since quitting google play).
Hope this helps!
If you don't want to use Google Pay, can you not just carry a credit card?
Australia's government sucks ass, yes. But Fastmail seems focused on its product and has been conveying their positions and opposition to such legislation. Google does not do this, they run Google Suite like it's an automated hobby project. I'm quite certain that it's more likely that our data with Google would be used to provide data sets that could be used for advertising or sold/adapted to state surveillance (sensorvault anyone?). Even if it wasn't, we're still worse off when they arbitrarily suspend accounts and only provide us with outsourced customer service lacking an escalation path that only takes calls overnight.
Fastmail wrote a blog post about the law: https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/
Not telling you it'll definitely work for you, but there is something similar out there.
Anyways I since switched to Protonmail for frivolous web signups & registering on sites, and then I use Fastmail for various business dealings / freelancing / anything related to finance like Paypal, online banking, etc. I simply can't afford to be arbitrarily banned by Google again.
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/how-google-and-microsoft-made...
..although e-mail delivery has seemed to be getting better in the past year.
My current Google account has no g-mail connected to it, which has lead to some interested bugs in Hangouts (you can't search for Google contacts once G+ went away, even if you clearly see them in current chats).
I also host my own Calendar/Contacts using Radicale + DavX (formerly DavDroid)
I want to emphasize just how bad the spam filtering has gotten. I didn't realize it for a long time, but now that I check the spam folder regularly I've realized that a LOT of legit emails get flagged by Google. Even ridiculously obvious stuff, like a non-automated reply to an email that I initiated sometimes gets flagged as spam.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21248111
(I assume that's the one you meant. "Ctrl-F" is very vague when you have a bunch of comments in this thread.)
The assurance that they've used no other apps I put little faith in; I've too often both delivered and received the incorrect "but I'm sure I did nothing else, it had to be this!" claim. We do a lot of things without forming strong memories of them all the time. No offense intended to the original reporter, it's just my experience says that's rarely a highly trustworthy claim, even when trustworthy people make it.
(Obvious solution: use the approved clients.)
One would have to do a deep-read of the implementation of those APIs to know what they might leak (or toss a packet sniffer in the network stack).
Using the system browser or webview doesn't send any user identifying information (other than device type and version) in http requests. There's no plausible reason why using the download manager API would do it either.
There isn't evidence other than the user in question's account apparently got banned and they claim to be using NewPipe. So it's one possible avenue of further investigation if one tries to figure out how Google would even know to ban a user that was using a tool that allows connection to YouTube anonymously.
But if that guy built a custom build of NewPipe that did a million simultaneous downloads, and that impacted service availability for other users, that would make Google ban him.
Do you have the enhanced security features turned on? Google's systems trust the logins more if you have to 2-factor them against a phone or somesuch.
I completely get it being flagged, I even wrote ML/DL-based anomaly detector for mobile stuff myself, but it really gets in the way, so I switched my primary account over to ProtonMail.
I had the opposite problem not too long ago; was away for a relative's wedding and had my phone die during the trip. Even after replacing the phone, getting back into my Google account on the new phone was a chore, because the phone that died was all my trusted devices (2FA key holder and receiver of phone calls for verification at the same time).
Oops. :-p
That's not actually two factor authentication anymore. Also that's pretty typical of 'two' factor authentication systems IME.
(unlike IMAP, it only downloads things No way the server can tell the client to delete something)
I also use a NAS device (cheap!) and a lifetime Plex account for my viewer. Only iOS “live” photos are inconvenient to back up anywhere but iCloud so I don’t take many Live Photos.
Apart from that, I keep a Google Takeout archive the same way (RAID 1, B2)
Google Photos is a handy worst-case backup for your photos, but it's not magic and you really need to keep another copy somewhere.
I used to use offlineimap and as far as I know it should still work...
FYI, it still works.
It's true that I had to create my own google console project[1] to have my own tokens some months ago, but I think that's a very good move in any case.
[1] https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/issues/335#issuecomment-4...
Disclaimer: I'm the developer.
* Items/characters cannot be trademarked unless they are the source of goods or services (so therefore this service would have the right whereas JK. Rowling et al wouldn't) [1]
* Items/characters are copyrighted when featured in a copyrighted piece of fiction (which Horcruxes are). [1]
* JK Rowling et al are crazy litigious [2][3]
* JK seems to endorse/praise fan collections of stuff, but the team come down hard on people trying to sell that commercially. [2] That does, however, seem to be for publishing books eg. fan fact books.
[1] https://corporate.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/protecti...
[2] https://www.legallanguage.com/legal-articles/harry-potter-co...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_disputes_over_the_Harry_...
And anything else you care about.
People were bad at backing up local data, but what they're worse at is backing up data that is in someone else's hands ("cloud").
Recently I was listening to a tech podcast (Tweakers, Dutch) and they discovered how dependent the presenters were on Spotify for their entire collection of playlists and library that they spent lots and lots of time gathering and curating. The reason I don't have this problem is because I already had this problem: Grooveshark happened to me. My music was all on there, including custom mp3s that I pulled from Youtube. So after spending some time importing all of that to Spotify from memory, I used the API calls to export my data from time to time. These days, people have it easy: just run a GDPR export from the Spotify website. (That reminds me, I should still email the guys at Tweakers.)
I guess I also grew up with data loss more than average. As someone who wrote code from ~12 years old, but who didn't understand the rest of their computer well enough to take proper care of it, the family computer guy had to reinstall it a bunch of times and I lost data every time for different reasons (he also didn't really give a damn). And I overwrote an external hard drive once when I thought that backup software would just put the backup there, not clone the disk. And 000webhost cancelled my account one summer. And a hard drive died, then (I actually had a backup!) the backup hard drive was accidentally destroyed by my little brother. In that summer, I lost all code, school documents, game save files, browsing history, chat history, nearly everything I ever did digitally. Taught me a thing or two...
I do find these account suspensions terrifying. It's the biggest issue I have with using GMail, but I treat it like any very low probability event of shit happening to my data.
Step Two: Set up gmail to forward all emails to the new email account.
Step Three: Stop giving out your gmail address.
Step Four: Start marking all emails that get forwarded to you through gmail that you don't want to see as spam in gmail.
Step Five: Start migrating all real-life contacts and online accounts to use your tutanota email account.
-----------------------
SERIOUSLY, start paying for email from an email-specialized company in some European country with extremely strict privacy (such as Germany). GET OUT OF GMAIL and OUT OF U.S.A. EMAIL-BASED PROVIDRES A.S.A.P.
See for example this [Dutch provider](https://www.transip.nl/webhosting/) that I myself use, but it includes webhosting. So you can probably find email providers for less.
I'd suggest instead, for much cheaper, Posteo.de, Runbox.com, Mailbox.org, Mailfence.com or Migadu.
Even still, I find that other people's address books are remarkably immutable and despite this auto-response having been employed for around five years I still have important emails directed at the dead address.
- What's the best way to fully back up a G-Suite instance, so you could get back on your feet really quickly if something like this happened?
I use G-Suite for email and docs and a bunch of stuff for my company, and I'm willing to pay money to have it all backed up in real time and ready to switch in the event of a disaster.
What's the best way to do that? I know Spanning and Backupify are two popular solutions. Would be curious if anyone has experience.
You should also run your email on your own domain, and make sure the registrar isn't Google nor requires them for logging in.
Using takeout manually every so often is a pain.
The fact that Google would suspend their account instead of just blocking their access to YouTube is an abuse of their near-monopoly. I'll be taking steps to migrate off the Google stack for this.
Especially if your work depends on it, I would encourage everyone to do the same. No other company (including your bank) should be able to shut down your business and/or ruin you financially because they close your account temporarily.
At the same time, this also means you're less affected by discontinued products or price hikes.
The attack surface is larger than a TOS violation (someone could spear-phish your login credentials, or a coordinated attack on your account could lead to denial-of-service if Google can't disambiguate your legitimate attempts to login from attackers' attempts).
I question whether separate accounts would help, Google's automated systems probably connect them and bans all of them anyway.
It's not an ideal state of affairs. But the alternative would probably need to be more rigorous identity verification and locking down of systems.
If I lose those accounts, I'm pretty sure I'm screwed, there are many online services that require you to open an email and retrieve a temporary code, or require you to have access to the original email account in order to switch to a new one. I don't know what I'd do if I'd lost those.
After a few pages, the linked github issue devolves into discussions around "how Google could detect you're using NewPipe" instead of whether or not you should be allowed to use it. That makes me think it's more in the realm of "we know this is against the rules but you can secretly use it" rather than a grey area of what's allowed or not.
It's more of a controversial take, but I'm honestly surprised people don't get banned for using Adblockers in general. This seems even worse than an adblocker (in that it just flat-out steals videos from YouTube and puts it in its own ad-less interface), so I'm not surprised that 1) it likely violates YouTube's terms and conditions, and 2) that violating YouTube's T&C is grounds for terminating your account.
Do you want to block me from using YouTube with this account? Fine. Do it, that's fair. But terminating the account, effectively blocking someone to access anything tied to that account is a "piece of shit" move.
But well, maybe it's my way of justification. I already use an ad blocker on desktop and don't even notice that I don't get YT ads. Please don't ban me, Google!
If you Do Something Bad in Facebook Marketplace, I'd expect the entire Facebook account to be banned -- not just restricting access to where Bad Thing happened (FB Marketplace). Or, if you broke T&C on Amazon's marketplace, I'd expect your AWS account to be banned also. If you cheat in one game sold through Steam, your entire Steam account gets banned/penalized, not just your access to that one game.
I can kind of understand why people think Google's services are different, but I'm not sure why that continues to be the case over time as we move further and further away from back when YouTube had its own accounts.
Actually it depends on the anticheat system used by the game. Anything from Valve will use VAC, and cheating in a game using it will ban you from all games using it. Other games uses EAC, others BattlEye, etc. You won't get banned from all multiplayer games that you own.
You may disable history but that don't mean they will stop logging.
See the history at https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity
Edit: get out of Google now!
If this story turns out to be what it seems, that might mean Google shows you only a subset of the app activity log that they actually keep, adding another layer of intransparency to the injustice.
Do note that if the poster had some apps published on google play those would be gone too.
Google refused two letters by their legal counsel, now the company will attempt to file an emergency injunction / court order, but jeez it sucks that Google can not be bothered to have ANY place where you can contact an actual human.
Recovery email doesn't exist anymore. There's no phone number attached (I haven't accessed the account since before I had my first smartphone). And the account must be like 12 years old or so, there's no possible human way to remember the precise month I created it (I don't even remember the year).
I have all my Google accounts connected through gmail, and I can even receive the emails that go to that account, since they go to my main account. I tried for a full whole work day to get the account back, but there's just isn't any human I can talk to, so the account now belong to some russian hacker or who knows. Luckily for me is not a very important account and I haven't found anything important attached to it, but it's very scary.
Be sure to close the sub org first, then remove it from the root org. If you don't and don't have the root login for the sub account, you're going to have a bad time.
Google has literally no way to talk to a human, neither do Facebook and Twitter.
Fun fact: the reason why I know a lot of Finnish swear words is that I used to play this videogame: https://www.amistech.com/msc/
For me, Funhaus' play of this game is more fun than playing it myself. (Look it up on YouTube, but is it safe to use NewPipe?)
For some strange reason not paying for YouTube content and bandwidth seems to be just fine here on HN as opposed to doing the same on iTunes or other services.
Those downvoting the parent, can you add to the discussion?
- Delete your Google account (if you can);
- Install NewPipe [0] on Android;
- Install gtk-youtube-viewer [1] on your computer;
- Install mpsyt [2] if you'd like a terminal client.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/
And NewPipe doesn't even link to the Google account, so it's not clear how Google made the connection.
Does NewPipe circumvent the YT ToS in any way? Then it's pirating.
Please don't bend reality to align with your morals. Bend your morals instead :)
https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/2723#issuecomm...
This could easily ruin someone's life.
What the fuck, Google.
We seriously need to break this company up into its constituent pieces. This is beyond unacceptable.
Yandex, pretty decent email web interface, and I can have my own @domain.com emails for free, if I ever need to move away from Yandex I can do so without telling everybody I "changed my email".
But I doubt Yandex will ever "inspire" me to move away form them, I think they dont even think of me at all, unlike Googles algorithms.
Unfortunate that it’s necessary but I think it’s a good idea for everyone who can.
I don't use GMail's web interface but prefer an actual mail reader which has no problem with using a different address. Maybe I should use an IMAP mailreader for GMail on Android as well.
By having G Suite and your own domain, you get to port that domain to another email provider if something bad did happen with Google.
Admittedly this doesn't work from my mobile GMail app, but I don't send a lot of work-related email (which my alternate address is for) from my smartphone.
If you want to send from a different address without the sender header being set to your gmail account, I think you have to have Gsuite.
Then when you compose a message from either the website or the Android app, your From address is a dropdown containing the addresses you set up.
I've had it this way for a long time, but I believe it was optional and it's also possible to only read the mail from the domain but send it via gmail.
This is different to the various techniques, such as IMAP/POP and forwarding, used to get them@theirdomain.com email (actually hosted elsewhere) into a theirgoogleacct@gmail.com mailbox
Hyperbole but not by far. Google's filter is trained on billions of messages a day, tuned by their own systems and by other users. It's the single best selling point for hosted email. Nothing compares when you've got that sort of volume.
I've had about three spam come through in the past year and they've all been personally addressed, non-bot but unsolicited marketing emails. I have three catch-all domains in this account.
We used to run our one domain through a passthrough service (at the cost of hundreds of pounds a year). Gmail was always right, easier to correct and by the point you're paying per-user (not per address), much much cheaper.
Sure, you can start to rebuild without changing your email address, but it's no less catastrophic when you get locked out.
It's been said many times before, but it's best to pay for stuff, even (and especially) when you can get a good product/service for only ~$5/month.
If you have regular backups, all you have to do is change a DNS record to switch to a different provider and you shouldn't lose any email in the process.
This is what I and many others do. I have had the same email address for ~20 years and have had it hosted on at least a half dozen providers over that time with no loss in data.
We already have that if the e-mail address was "yours" to begin with, you can buy domains and keep using e-mail addresses pointing to them, moving to whatever e-mail provider you prefer this decade.
You have no ownership claim to the domain gmail.com. You are merely renting it, and for free no less!
Stop acting entitled. If you want ownership, the option already exists, and it’s easy: get your own domain.
That’s yours to keep and manage as you see fit, with Gmail a possible service attached to it as you see fit.
But your attitude seems to convey that you find this behavior acceptable.
The majority of people don't have the tech know how to do what you're saying. Are we to leave them unrepresented and vulnerable? How many other people has this happened to that haven't been able to file bug reports on Github?
The solution here isn't a fine. Companies just laugh at those and continue on with business as usual. The real fix is to take Gmail (and the domain) away from Google.
I'll be voting for legislators with the nerve to do this.
Irrelevant, and also true of phone numbers (not accounts, numbers).
> Stop acting entitled. If you want ownership, the option already exists, and it’s easy: get your own domain.
You and I can do that easily. Doesn’t mean other people can. Division of skills and focusing on what you’re good at is a foundational principal of our global economy.
On the other hand, making a thing available at below cost so as to push the competition out of business sounds to me like an “unfair monopoly”.
No one is stopping anyone from paying Fastmail or using a slew of other services than Google, other than people’s unwillingness to pay for things.
A natural monopoly exists anywhere there are extremely high infrastructure costs, such as running pipes and wires to every home. The same thing exists with mobile networks, as it requires towers everywhere.
And that’s without roaming, which I don’t understand, as it means I have cheaper mobile minutes/texts/data in the USA and Germany than most locals.
Google's policies, as required by their privacy policy, are to delete all data associated with a suspended account in 30 days.
That means any GDPR request submitted after the account is suspended will be responded to on the 30th day, and the response will be "we hold no data about that account".
If you are allowed to use takeout, they link you to that on the account suspended page.
I don't disagree that Google could do a better job firewalling TOS violations in one service from blowing up all your interaction with Google, but in the short run, defense in depth.
It's a rock-and-a-hard-place problem, since the most common scenario Google is dealing with is criminal enterprises trying to obfuscate their activity behind dozens of "independent" accounts (so of course they have to try unifying accounts). But this is analogous to the scenario one deals with separating concerns when forming an LLC; you keep your work and personal stuff separate, including finances and capital (i.e. don't do work stuff on your personal computer; that's riksing having your LLC status collapse if someone has occasion to sue you).
There's no "unlinking" it unless you manually modify the serial numbers on the device, which is possible, if you have qualcomm diagnostic tools (QPST/QXDM) and are able to communicate to the modem softband directly.
If you really want to break up Google, people are going to have to get used to paying for a ton of other services.
I’m not saying this is wrong, but it will come as a shock to many people when they have to start paying for email again (or start seeing ads in gmail again).
Then charge me 1-2$ a month for gmail access... oh wait I already pay for extra storage. I'm quite fine paying if it means that if for some reason I offend them and they decide to suspend my service that I have a window where I'm allowed to exit their ecosystem.
Remove my ability to send email, allow me to receive email and give me a 1 week period to export everything and change contact info elsewhere.
I and a lot of other people are fine with that. Patron et al. showed that people are willing to support things they like. From podcasts to open source projects.
The narrative that the only way to have nice things on the internet is via advertisers' money is pushed by the advertisers themselves.
Not everyone has to do it, but there is enough of people to keep creativity free from influance ad companies.
There's upside to this too: it provides business opportunities. I think it's necessary for a healthy well-functioning economy.
However, it shouldn't be a corporate product. It should be a public service, paid for by the taxes everyone already pays and regulated to ensure privacy abuse and productizing of the user base doesn't happen.
This is how things used to be done - when a new technology became important enough to society, it became part of the national infrastructure, everyone was guaranteed access and no one was allowed to profit off of it. That's how the original telephone network came to be in the US.
Gmail and other private services have been allowed to take the place of something the government should provide so someone can make money off it it, and it's open to abuse and inequity. Some services are important enough that not having them makes you a second class person.
Imagine how you'd feel if the US post office told you that you couldn't receive mail any more because you had an unpaid parking ticket in another city? That's not punishment, that's behavior control. Maybe the parking ticket wasn't fair, or maybe it was someone else with the same name as you, or maybe you had a legal, legitimate reason for parking there.
The US government is required by law to treat people fairly and protect them (to some extent). More importantly, public services are (in theory) controlled by the people they benefit.
Private companies are not, and private companies should not be allowed to provide critical services without regulation to ensure equal treatment for everyone and a means to contest the actions of the company for every user.
The US government is far, far behind where it should be as regards updating laws and services for the computer age. It's time to clean out the dusty, old computer illiterate career politicians and replace them with technically adept younger people.
This is flat out wrong. AT&T made A LOT of money off this.
And to add to that public telephone service couldn't exist without a heavy public infrastructure investment in telephone lines, and continued support of that infrastructure.
The costs of supporting an email service are probably not great enough that government intervention is necessary.
No, that would lead to even worse abuses.
Cf the present day Hong Kong protests, and Yellow Vests protests - in both cases, the government would use snooping power to spy on the communications, dragnet style. Anybody seriously suspected of partaking would have the account shut down. Since the account would be "the official one", that would most probably render them unable to access other major services, like banking, judiciary, or healthcare records.
Having a corporate steward of email is one more level of indirection. While imperfect, the corporations do put up at least a bit of resistance against governmental over-reach. Even just the fact of having to create, send & monitor official correspondence to demand snooping & take-downs is slowing down the snooping a bit.
Moreover, it would be highly probable the government would mandate a "real name" policy, or otherwise tie the email service to your offline identity. Cue the abusers by online platforms like Facebook & other advertisers.
Lastly, it's more feasible to compete with corporate services than with tax-paid services. And it's competition that drives innovation, quality increase, and cost reduction.
The USG has been working quite diligently on that already. I don't think there's any particular reason to believe it can't read (almost?) any email it wants to. Very few emails are encrypted and host-to-host encryption is optional anyway. Various providers that have tried to resist USG secret warrants have just given up because it's not really possible.
Big email providers already do that.
It's exception, not rule. Even if they want you to give name, it's not something available for others if they only have e-mail address (unless address contains name).
In the UK I don't think it's possible to get a credit/debit card without giving up name & address that are backed by ID.
Gmail, IIRC, requires a phone number, which again is tied to your payment account (if you buy it in the UK). Though you could buy a stolen pre-paid SIM, so it's possible if you're not bothered about being legal.
In USA I understand you have pre-pay credit cards you can buy in a shop, in the UK you have to register those (using a phone number IIRC, thus tying it to a supposed real identity) and they're really expensive.
Even with custom domain, there are some mail providers that accept Bitcoin. See here: https://www.privacytools.io/providers/email/
And, once more: my previous point was that even if providers know your id, it is not public. There is no service you can use to ask what is name of e-mail address owner (I'm ignoring "whois", which is domain-specific, not mail).
Secrecy of correspondence is one of the basic constitutional rights in many countries. And also there is a public postal service almost everywhere.
Any example you could name would be highly contested as to validity of the claim.
Specifically, "elected by the people" doesn't grant any immunity by and of itself; you would need a huge public protest or other such expression of public will. You may still be ignored by the media, which prevents you from getting anything done[0]. On the other hand, "strong legal immunity from demands of the executive branch" would take a constitutional amendment; anything less can be rescinded with a simple majority vote or a judicial decision.
>But this doesn't mean that private, feudal and corporate power is the only other option.
You would need to create a very strong legal shield around such institution. Right now the government (particularly the judiciary branch) considers every private contract to be in its purview, with ability & willingness to void, add, or rewrite any and all clauses it considers wrong. Even institutions like marriage are subject to retroactive change of the original terms&conditions. Even the media, with its oversized influence through gatekeeping the political parties & candidates, is still bound by various regulations regarding falsehoods, besmirchment, etc., while at the same time tied intimately to their insider sources. About the only exceptions I can think of is the internal dealings of the churches, and the diplomatic matters [1].
On the other hand, any NGO is subject to the wishes of whoever finances it. Whether it is public donations or corporate sponsorship (or outright corporate structure); whoever holds the spigot of the money gets a say. Another important say is held by the media; with ability to either prop up or sink any NGO or public figure.
As of recent, the social media mobs seem to be gaining the gatekeeping ability just as well.
--
[0] quick examples of media keeping mostly quiet: weekly Yellow Vests protests, Paris, France, 45+ weeks; annual March for Life, Washington DC, US, 45 years.
[1] bit of a stretch, but also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...
I'd say if you are an institution established by public law, you don't need expression of public will for your normal operation. Or you need it to control you, not to affirm you. You just exercise your legal powers.
But I agree that my comment was abstract, and by the pervasive conflation I mean not only in common perception, but also in practice. What I have in mind as positive example is Tocqueville's "Democracy in America", or perhaps Switzerland as states deeply amalgamated with their populations. Anyway, if someone is strongly pro-government or pro-corporate, it's in their interest to present those as binary options. I think this should be opposed in principle, whenever possible, even if the present state of Western democracies is not that great.
I just would not use it for everything (not for criticizing the West; for that you could use a Chinese or Russian e-mail service). They can already snoop all the metadata anyway.
and run without a profit motive
Don't forget to include veterans benefits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...
Don't forget to include veterans benefits
That wasn’t a non-profit, neither were the first telegraph companies. Monopolies are problematic, private companies are not.
As far as cleaning out “old” politicians — that’s ageism. One’s birthdate doesn’t determine technical literacy.
Statistically speaking, it very much does...
Would you bet your money, when age is the only available information, that 1000 randomly chosen people in the 60-80 bracket would have equal or more technical literacy than 1000 randomly chosen people in the 30-50 bracket rather than less?
Didn't think so.
We acknowledge that infants do not have the capability to competently vote, yeah? We have a minimum voting age requirement, which shows that we don’t find all action based on correlation with age to be illegitimate.
I think I am probably forgetting the original context.
Suppose that you are running a class at a local library on how to use some software, and you intend for it to be accessible whether or not the people attending have some specific background knowledge, but it is easier and faster if they do, because you don’t have to explain the background first. Suppose you also have a note sheet that you give out for them to take home in case they forgot any details. You actually have 2 versions of the note sheet, because one version also includes an explanation of the background information, and therefore takes more pages of paper.
Every time you run this class, you find that some of the people attending need the version including the background information, even if all of them are young, but you also notice that people over a certain age are statistically more likely need the longer sheet.
Therefore, when you know that a particular session you are running has a greater than average number of people over that age, you print more of the longer version of the notes sheet. Have you acted wrongly in doing so?
Is doing so “ageist”?
I don’t think so.
I would imagine in such situations, that the people with the largest amount of background in the topic would likely also skew somewhat older, at least for some topics.
But, seeing as I forgot the context outside of your comment itself, probably this hypothetical is quite unlike the situation in the context.
Edit: Ah, the context was politicians. Ok. Idk how to apply this to politicians.
I suppose I am not especially concerned for the individual politicians’ interests, as, aiui, politicians in the US tend to be fairly well off, have enough savings to retire, etc.
Therefore, the goal should be primarily based on how the choice of politicians impacts the rest of the populace.
There may be issues where a way of choosing politicians could cause or reenforce harmful stereotypes that harm other non-politicians?
I agree that it's draconian and goes too far but government very commonly screws people over over minor things by using monopolistic behavior like this and there are many people (including many people here) that endorse it when it (dis)incentivizes something they want (dis)incentivized. Point is this behavior will not go away if you have a public email provider. The list of triggers just becomes different. What Google doesn't like is different than the US government doesn't like is different than... you get the point. You may at least get due process though which would be good but the fundamental "this person has offended our organization so we're gonna screw them every way we can" behavior won't change unless society demands it.
edit: I'd be interested to hear why everyone finds my opinion so disagreeable.
But what would this take? If there were municipality-owned servers that allowed for basic email how could abuse be prevented? Make it an open source project with public inspection allowed to prevent abusive manipulation of data? E2E throughout the system? What would this take? Someone has to have thought about it before.
Better would be a standardized, secure public service to store and retrieve data on top of which any protocol could be built.
Once people own and control their service data, lots of things will become decoupled.
Sounds like a good idea. Do you know if any public entity has made an attempt at this space? I don't even know how to begin a search for this kind of work let alone if it exists.
What if you could get a free email account through your internet service provider... oh wait.
Instead, maybe an extension of existing mail protocols to allow for updating address information would be better - for instance, mailing a deactivated address would give a special response announcing the change in address, so that information stored about addresses can be updated without user intervention.
Any thoughts on this?
Something like Gmail... I'm not sure if you mean by this; a multi-billion dollar tech stack built by the leading internet company in the world, securing exabytes of data for its customers with redundant backup, provided in hundreds of countries (and languages?), hosted across dozens of data centers, offering easy access through native apps on every dominant platform, with 5-nine availability,...
> [E]veryone should have free access to a basic web based email service.
There are two issues here, first is internet access and second is services available via the internet.
I think it is a great ideal to state that everyone in the world should have the ability access to the Internet in some form, with the ability to benefit from the online learning and communications tools it provides. Governments should use tools like spectrum licensing, and eminent domain to promote fair and equitable infrastructure deployments which provide reliable high speed access at reasonable prices to their entire population.
I disagree that government should outright purchase internet access for its citizens. The market for internet access is fairly anti-competitive already, government subsidies for specific levels of access work out poorly in practice, and tend to provide substandard service at above-market prices. This means the taxpayer loses and the citizen getting subsidized access loses. It works out better in theory and in practice to ensure your population has good paying jobs and can decide how they want to spend that money, including, whether they spend it on phones or laptops with LTE or wired internet access, which service provider they use, etc.
As to "free access to a basic web based email service" -- and to be sure, there's nothing "basic" about Gmail at all -- the amazing thing is that there are already a plethora of choices that netizens can make when setting up an email account, and many good free choices. Each of these free choices are usually subsidized either by paying customers of a premium offering, advertisements services with the email, or other services that the company offers.
What's great about this model is that companies are competing to provide the best possible email interface, at the lowest possible infrastructure costs to them, and attempting to offer such a great experience that they can ultimately convert those users into more frequent [paying] customers.
Practically everything about this model breaks down when you try to have "the government" provide the service.
> Gmail and other private services have been allowed to take the place of something the government should provide so someone can make money off it it, and it's open to abuse and inequity. Some services are important enough that not having them makes you a second class person.
Gmail and other private services paved the way by spending their hard-earned R&D dollars to innovate and invent new delivery models for these services. To be sure, this was a public/private partnership at the most foundational level (ARPANET) and it has grown to be perhaps the crowning example of what private industry properly supported by government research and hands-off regulatory approach can achieve.
> Imagine how you'd feel if the US post office told you that you couldn't receive mail any more because you had an unpaid parking ticket in another city?
That unpaid parking ticket will mean, in many jurisdictions, that you cannot renew your registration or your license, which means the day will come when you cannot legally drive. That's the thing with State control of critical services; the day always comes when they will use a big stick to make you comply with their demands, or they will take those services away.
Private communication infrastructure must never be directly provided by the government, most especially. I'm sure you've heard of PRISM, or how a secret court allowed the government to vacuum up call meta-data for basically everyone in the United States for a period of time. Maybe you've heard of "reverse warrants" where the government pulls geo-location data from phones of everyone in an area that a crime was committed to create a list of suspects. Just this week the Courts rules [again] that government has trampled on the Constitution in wide-spread data collection.
Do you suspect that government provided email services will be instituted with the best-in-class end-to-end encryption algorithms? Do you suspect those troves of emails in a government server will be protected by government employees from overly broad subpoenas? Do you suspect the government will hire the best & brightest engineers to constantly push the envelope of how those services are delivered and the features they provide? Do you suspect government servers will consistently run on reliable, cost efficient infrastructure?
> Private companies are not, and private companies should not be allowed to provide critical services without regulation to ensure equal treatment for everyone and a means to contest the actions of the company for every user.
Who gets to define "critical services"? Email didn't even exist as such a widespread part of our lives until private enterprise invested the hundreds of billions of dollars getting us to this point. Now that the ecosystem is established, you think the government should step in and strictly regulate it because a private company offering a private service terminated the account of one of its billions of users.
What else do you suppose is a "critical service" beyond email? Should we include cell phones? What about the news? Email seems such an arbitrary choice, but it is a great example to illustrate the dangers of this approach.
To switch back to TFA - and Google canceling this pour soul's account... What we don't hear about are the millions of accounts which Google terminates due to actual "valid" ToS violations. What we have is anecdotes, but what don't know are the true and false positive rates, or even the true/false negative rates of their abuse detection systems.
I believe Google needs to do a lot better with dispute resolution when an account is flagged for termination. This is true across their properties -- Gmail, AdWords, Store, etc. But I don't have the context & data I would need to pass judgement on the anecdotal failures I hear about semi-regularly.
I'm glad for the services that Google has created, because they push the whole industry forward in many ways, and they also provide incredible value for both users and Google alike. The ecosystem Google has created is an extremely impressive technological achievement, and the scale that they operate on is boggling.
The past is littered with failed examples of governments taking over and then failing to innovate or maintain an industry, whereas the examples of when government works side-by-side with private enterprise to create opportunities where the incentives did not align to allow a fully private solution are equally numerous. Government works best when it builds the roads to allow private industry to innovate upon, but doesn't try to build the figurative cars and trucks too.
The USPS or some similar highly-regulated corporation could easily provide basic email, banking, etc.
That, or we should start regulating email providers since it's no longer rocket science.
Everyone with internet access already has free access to email and to any of several basic web based email services [1], but, to get that free access the owner has to be willing to host their own email server on their own infrastructure.
Email (as in SMTP email) is one of the original free and open protocols of the internet. No one is required to have 'google' to have email, although a lot of people prefer to 'let someone else handle the plumbing', which is ok if they understand the ramifications of that choice.
Note -- I am deliberately ignoring the sad fact that SPAM has made 'running their own server' much more difficult than it used to be for many. But a lot of that difficulty stems directly from allowing a single giant corporation to hoover up too much of the service, such that the single giant corporation has gotten big enough to start dictating terms to everyone else who is not part of their system.
[1] some examples (note: just found these via a search, no suggestion of good/bad is being made, just the availability for free):
http://squirrelmail.org/
https://roundcube.net/
https://www.zimbra.com/
This link: https://www.jotform.com/blog/10-ajax-webmail-clients/ lists ten (some overlap with items above).
IMO it's really not a workable option, the administration is time-costly too.
I bet people will prefer "need to pay" as a shock instead of "locked out" as a shock (with no option of getting your stuff back). I certainly would prefer the former.
Email existed before Google. The email services didn't all used to be owned and controlled by giants. Remember Hotmail and Yahoo Mail?
Email doesn't have to be a Government-provided utility service as another poster claims. It doesn't have to be free or paid. The market will make it work.
Just don't let Google operate it.
It's a simple narrative.
Google doesn’t “operate” email. Gmail one email service among many, that people can choose to use or not. Yahoo Mail is still an option.
Its not yet known whether its true or not. There are no proofs in the github thread. He could at least post his google email so some google employee could check since this thread got heavily upvoted
So make sure you never access them both from the same computer, phone or IP.
In the case of AdWords, your billing address is also a linking factor.
In the case of Google Cloud, being Owner of the same project or organisation is a linking factor.
In the case of Google Payments, using the same bank details is a linking factor (also applies to GCloud).
That's the thing, you have no control over what Google does and little recourse once they do it.
We know nothing about this person. Isn't it very possible he was actually violating Google's terms in some way?
So the probleme to be able to use that GDPR feature... is to still have an account
All you can ever really do is hope to not be caught up in something Google (or its bots) considers "bad".
EDIT: A few catchall terms from YouTube's TOS:
"YouTube may, in its sole discretion, modify or revise these Terms of Service and policies at any time, and you agree to be bound by such modifications or revisions."
"You agree not to access Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Service itself, the Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate." (There go all New Pipe accounts)
"YouTube reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the Service at any time."
"YouTube reserves the right to decide whether Content violates these Terms of Service for reasons other than copyright infringement, [...]. YouTube may at any time, without prior notice and in its sole discretion, [...] terminate a user's account for submitting such material in violation of these Terms of Service."
The kicker is I am authenticated on the new phone! But cannot make changes because of the 2FA bug. So at some point, randomly, it decided to revert to an old phone number. Even though I am certain I disabled it!
I feel even submitting a detailed report, it would take quite a while to pierce the layers of bureaucracy and come into contact with a technical human that can diagnose and understand the nature of this issue ;(
In these contexts, you should have a recovery mechanism in place such as recovery codes or a recovery email.
Which of course completely defeats the "security" of this "security feature", but that's probably not the point of it anyway, they just want your phone number for meta data collection.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#sig...
AFAIK Google has no such requirements for apps on Android.
As more and more people use "Sign in with Apple" it will end up being the same issue. If Apple locks your account they'll ruin your life.
I generally use neither. I don't sign into things with Google nor Apple nor Facebook. The exception is I do sign into a few dev related things with github but only of they are related to my github account (example, Travis CI). I also have my own domain as I learned the hard way in the 90s that losing your email address to your ISP is no fun.
Basically Apple says: you are required to offer choices and you can’t force users to only use Facebook/Google. A big difference and a big win for choice.
It's harder and harder, Sign-up UIs are hiding it. Sign-in with Google or Facebook is really the norm nowadays.
ANY identity provider (meaning email, facebook, ...) can terminate any account BUT MUST provide a temporary (maybe 1 month) minimum service (maybe only replying to incoming emails for example, with a cap) to allow identity migration out of the platform... because identity can't be owned by anybody.
It doesn't need to apply to ANY website, ONLY to website providing some identity service (like email or auth provider).
And this could be quite a simple law. It wouldn't forbid the website to cancel accounts, only would they have to give enough time and functionalities to properly manage the cancellation and its impact on the user digital life
But really humans are happy to do it to each other ...
Whereas Drive, Mail, etc. are all deeply connected to it. So seems the punitive measure is specifically setup to have the most impact on you. Within their right, granted, but I feel for anyone who shares a device with someone who wants to circumvent ads in YouTube while they're logged in as they could be the person punished for reasons they don't understand.
Also after hearing these stories, I keep my cloud accounts as light as possible and use S3 + NAS for actual data.
Stuff like this are downright scary but there is absolutely nothing we can do. Google is too big to fail now for consumers
I'm always amazed at how quickly people jump into these massive corporate product/service ecosystems gung-ho as if we haven't learned anything about large business behaviors (including technology companies) over decades and decades of history.
You should always remember that a business has one goal: to make money for its shareholders. Anything and everything else is a side effect, so if you can forsee any goals you have utilizing a business product/service ecosystem not in direct alignment with a specific businesses' shareholders' interest in profit, then you should hedge your bets and have backup plans if you interconnect important aspects of your life with that business.
To me, this includes career paths which is why it's always fun to see businesses get heavily entrenched in AWS or some other ecosystem when their needs don't even require the benefits AWS actually provide. I'm singling out AWS because that's the case I'm dealing with on current projects at a current employer but it applies to any similar ecosystem.
This companies should not be able to suspend your account for everything, if my son broke some TOS rule on my console I should not have to have access blocked to anything except online gaming, my emails. my phone , my apps should still work.
How about users that don't like the TOS just find another service? I'm perfectly happy with the way things are.
But this is just the beginning. Cloud is next, raising prices, preventing people from leaving by crating apis you cant simply rewrite... Mainframe history all over again.
(disclaimer: googless for a decade, once I prediceted where this is going I became completely self hosted, learned to build my own roms without gms etc. Today is much easyer with microg, newpipe, aurora, apktool, ... On the other side, people are less and less knowlidgable as a result of helpers from companies and dependant to them. I am eager to see how this will end)
As an American living in Europe, the Google Voice number hugely makes my life easier (give GV# to bank, to friends, etc). Being able to call and text to the US for free on wifi or using a little bit of my own plan data is so very nice.
I suppose there are some alternatives?
I try to use my ProtonMail account for friends, family, and important business email. I do use gmail for stuff like travel reservations and as a junk email for registration on sites I don’t much care about.
It would offer email, photos, and office. Would also receive all the necessary security updates.
There has to be a business in there as gitlab seem to have done quite well with this model.
Then we could all move to that.
Move your account(s) elsewhere because they are ephemeral and untrustworthy.
i.e. something like replacing every logged in view with a consent form akin to "i hereby permit google to publish the reasons why the account was terminated"
every claim and bad publicity like this would end in "use the consent form", which i doubt basically anyone would use... but would still destroy the legitimacy of these claims.
its probably for liability reasons, which i still don't understand... how would they be held liable for terminating a service offered for free? i just cant comprehend it. but i guess thats just my insufficiency
It was a stupid mistake on my part. I didn't save any of my backup codes, and then ended up doing a factory reset on my Android phone. Well, on a fresh device, I no longer had the Authenticaor app that spits out the 2FA codes. And that was all.. she... wrote.
My primary e-mail. All of my play store purchases. Everything... gone. I tried the accounts recovery process. Followed everything to a 'T. Even directly identified recent e-mail in my inbox as they asked. But it was not sufficient, and I have never been able to get it back.
I am using android only because i get freedom to do anything i want. If this type of thing will happen to me, my entire internet life will be ruined.
I don't really want to host my own mail server, what's a good mail alternative (free or paid) for an European user?
Some domain registrars also offers free email services with domain purchase, Gandi.net being one of them.
Fastmail has been a great provider for me but, despite being Australian, I believe they are US hosted.
Go get a droplet or a shell account, make sure it’s backed up automatically, and keep your stuff there.
If evilG banned an account, it means the event that triggered it was a correlation between YT usage and IP addresses. Interesting.
I wonder if it's leaking things Google could use for correlating signal (IP address is an obvious one, but I wonder if the phone is sending IMEI in a header, or if YouTube is setting a cookie / using a storage API that NewPipe honors, but then that cookie / API tag is also readable from the browser when the user uses their regular account).
Android is designed to not allow an app to read information from another one, so it should prevent the second scenario -- except that Google has root-level access to our phones so it can spy everything anyway.
For example, if it's fetching data from YouTube via a WebView, the HTTP requests made to the server will carry all kinds of cookie state and enable all kinds of APIs that can be used to tag a client in a cross-session fashion (though I don't personally know what WebView's state-sharing model is).
Remember, the security model for web sites isn't "app"-based; it's domain-based. Hypothetically, if YouTube were setting a cookie via NewPipe's interactions onto the youtube.com domain that says "Hey this user-agent used NewPipe," then if some other piece of Android (such as the browser) were sharing the same cookie jar, it would vend that cookie back and Google could correlate it to a logged-in user. The question is whether the cookie jar gets reused.
If Google is providing an API to easily download things through (e.g.) HTTPS, it may also intercept and poison these requests when they are directed to one of their services and get some extra information from it!
That's one possible vector...
Even though I have Youtube Red (through my google music subscription), I watch most of my Youtube videos through mpv which uses youtube-dl to download the videos. There are no ads and it requires no account to use yet I've seen no reports on their bug tracker of getting banned.
Soon in a theater near you: Google account blocked for using uBlock origin or jsblock. Citizens shall not opt-out of being relentlessly bombarded with advertising on penalty of digital purgatory.
Why not use firefox, and install ublock origin to block the ads?
The control is only authoritarian if those being controlled by it have no recourse. As applied to governments, authoritarianism has strong central power and limited political freedoms. In the US, we believe in the principles of limited central power, and many political freedoms. (Whether or not this is the situation depending on who you are is the topic of another day because this is how it should be, and the only way it may have become not that is if we have allowed our complacencies to kick in and allow it to happen. I am a firm believer in the concept of "people get the government they deserve in a democracy." ) Ultimately the governmental authoritarian control is beholden to the people and can be eradicated. The only reason we feel as if it can't be is because we have allowed the power to creep up over the years and it seems like an insurmountable mountain, but rest assured if you pick up that pick axe and start chipping away rock by rock you absolutely can tear it down.
Likewise, authoritarianism applied to a corporation implies strong central power, and limited consumer freedoms. This is also patently false in the US. The US has anti-trust laws to prevent centralized control, consumer protection agencies, and the free market. The consumer ultimately always has the freedom to choose another option. If the corporation loses too many consumers, then the corporation goes under. I understand there is a lot of nuance, but this is the basic principles of how things should operate in this country, and the mechanisms for things to operate are in fact there. The question then becomes what are it's people doing about it?
You had me going until this, nice satire
It is so commonplace that we miss it, but one ruling organization steps down and another, often with opposing views, steps up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Denmark
(Though it probably helped that the French Revolution had happened before ;))
Just wanted to observe that this belief presupposes the US ever lived up to the principles you outline. US history shows that the country has never quite lived up to its touted values.
I don’t like that OP was locked out of his email.
But besides that, it’s not as if he broke some obscure TOS clause. He actively subverted the company’s revenue model to take its product for free. That’s about as obvious as it gets that you’re risking being blocked from a service.
How is this different than using an ad blocker in the browser?
I don't use an ad blocker, and if I don't want to see ads I pay for the service, such as with Reddit, Ars Technica, Windows Live Mail, Netflix, and YouTube. Technically, I quit Netflix once they started showing me ads, even though they were for their own shows (general dark patterns were the more significant factor though).
So in principle I would have to say that one shouldn't mute TV ads, or skip them using +10 second buttons. Of course I will not always live my life up to that principle...
That just doesn't make sense. Not using their services has zero advantages compared to blocking ads. But by using them, you raise their costs, making their business model less viable.
> I don't use an ad blocker, and if I don't want to see ads I pay for the service, such as with Reddit, Ars Technica, Windows Live Mail, Netflix, and YouTube.
By paying for services, you show that you have disposable income. You cannot escape ads that way except in the short term.
But to your question, if the ad blocker is subverting the company's revenue model and they can detect it, you risk the company blocking you. Per the Issue, it looks like the service that is there to scan for bad actors on your device may've picked up that NewPipe was installed on their device which may've caused them to look (speculation on all counts).
Would that mean that using progs like `youtube-dl` to fetch videos from Youtube may get your Goog Account deleted?
Imagine you using adblock in the CNN website without being logged in and they block your access to all Time Warner services (for example HBO).
That said, fuck that. It's not like people haven't been subverting ads for ages. (From the simple pause recording when the ad starts, rewind just a tad bit and resume-recording when the movie continues to Pi-Hole and Blockada on Android.)
It just flashed through my head how much Google services I rely on. I even use G-Suite for my own domain.