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Comment by ZoomZoomZoom | Hacker News Reader

What's your plan on possible user account terminations, if Google decides to act on their Terms Of Service?

> YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube reasonably believes that its provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.

https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=GB&template=terms

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They have clarified that this means they can terminate their services, not your accounts. However with recent balls ups it was easy to read it differently

If the text hasn't been changed, what they say it means isn't relevant - they can still end up going for a different interpretation later and be entirely in the right.

It written right ther:

> Terminations and Suspensions by YouTube for Cause

> YouTube may suspend or terminate your access, your Google account, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service

The question is why we still don't believe it even when it's written in black and white?

What is there to terminate if you browse Youtube without signing in?

When regular users visit youtube.com, they get a page with some videos on it. Regardless of whether they're logged in or not, there are videos there.

Banned users visiting youtube.com will just get a text page[0] with zero video content. Google will use all the dirty tracking tricks to make sure that banned users remain banned even when their IP or device changes.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/qTTGhhG.png

Please, do you know how to get banned from Google? I'd love to not be tracked by them anymore.

Open an Adsense account and click your own ads. Though I'd think these days it just bans you from the Adsense program.

Why am I getting down voted for asking an honest question?

Didn't he just described that they were in fact heavily tracking you in order to make sure you didn't see the content?

Incognito window, different browser, clear cookies... any of these will make you look like a new user to youtube. Just don't sign in of course.

I stopped signing in when they broke Gmail on Firefox. Now I just use Chromium as my mail browser and everything else is on my secure browser.

It may not apply to this particular implementation, but users who've downloaded alternative YT clients (which offer ad-free experiences, or playback while the screen is off) an Android devices, may have their Google account flagged, even if the apps were sideloaded.

I admit having never heard or encountered that, so do you have any kind of evidence to support the claim?

The new terms of service go into effect on December 10th, so I wouldn't expect there to be any reports before then.

I block doubleclick and randomly get a degraded YouTube page with no content outside the video box rendered. It also goobers up the browser history so you can't go to previous videos.

That's because you are randomizing your user agent, not because of the doubleclick ban. (source: had some problem, solved it by emitting a consistent but fake user agent to youtube. It sniffs UA, against all recommendations and common sense)

Your accounts? As if they don't know who you are when you're not signed in.

Well, if you can imagine that there is a world where people can use the same device in the same home to access videos (ever heard of families?), surely you can imagine that Google would not terminate all accounts used on that device because they have no clue who is watching what when they are not logged in.

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't care and ban the device

I can imagine it would. My experience tells me it's not out of the question. With Google it's improbable at the moment, but it happened to me (someone got nasty under my ISP's CGNAT) with the other service which will remain unnamed.

This is not true. They can and will suspend your accounts for blocking ads or not being "Economically viable".

One reason I removed youtube vanced and reinstalled official youtube app.

Hmm. The reason doesn't look immediately obvious to me. What does your switching from Vanced to the official yt app have to do with someone's account getting suspended? Care to expand on it?

By using the official app then you get the ads, and won't be singled out as unprofitable by google. Hopefull as a result hopefully you won't be banned.

I'm fairly sure this applies to content creators, not consumers. To avoid storage and bandwidth for content that doesn't show ads but has a high maintenance cost.

If they really intended to remove the bandwidth cost from people watching youtube without ads they would start by implementing ad blocker detection.

Has it been verified in a lawsuit? It seems silly to give the benefit of the doubt in this situation. Especially when the grammar of the wording empowers them to do more than just terminate services.

As long as you don't use your account, it'll remain working. Google can't just ban 33% of the internet users (read: those with adblockers) over night without repercussions. If they'd, a YouTube clone with network effect would rise up right away. So they'll want to play some kind of other game. A long game (Manifest v3), a FUD game, who knows?

May be they can't do it to 33%, but they might start with some smaller strata, Invidious users for example.

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