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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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