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Comment by randartie | Hacker News Reader

If I had to speculate based off my experience at other FANG companies, the videos still exist in the Youtube infrastructure somewhere to allow for the possibility of a human intervention to restore them (For example, to allow for recovering from a system gone haywire or just to give time for manually reversed decisions).

That said, I'd also guess there's a countdown timer before they get deleted permanently.

I hope you can get a human from YouTube to talk to you.

It may benefit you to post a link to the youtube channel so someone can proactively investigate. Lots of google employees read this forum.

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This was my thinking as well, it's safer to never delete data and simply null route requests to it. It's what I've done in the past when I was on their side of the ethernet cable.

The youtube channel in question.

https://www.youtube.com/user/tranresearchtraining/

Do you know what the channel ID (UCID) was?

Unfortunately no, and attempting to go to https://www.youtube.com/account_advanced redirects the suspended account page.

You may be able to find it in your browser history. For example: youtube.com/channel/UC* or studio.youtube.com/channel/UC*

You could use https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/chrome_cache_view.html to extract your browser cache, then grep the whole thing for something like `UC[A-Za-z_-]{20,30}`. That'll probably find an overwhelming amount of junk, but it might also work too. (The idea is to search the cache for UCID matches in JSON dumps.)

If this seems interesting, the immediate priority would be to backup your cache folder immediately (%AppData%\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache), then extract and search it at your leisure.

(This is all for Windows, but IIUC there are alternatives for Linux and macOS.)

Their side of the ethernet cable??

Is this situation really that bad? D:

I'm sure the 'why' this happened doesn't matter much to you now, but noticed in just searching for channel name "tranresearchtraining" google would auto-correct and search for "trans research training". Maybe that flagged the review algo to be extra sensitive to certain phrases, etc. Also, where you're dealing with multiple nationalities, wouldn't be surprised if it included non-native english speakers and/or words outside the standard english dicts... so their auto speech-to-txt may have taken creative liberties, and a mistranslation triggered other flags. So, basic edge case nightmare. Their automated support is the worst too. Probably worth trying to spread this story on twitter and linkedin as well to increase the chances of it reaching someone who might be able to help or create enough negative PR to get on the radar. good luck.

I was thinking that if OP's wife or the video subjects are European then a GDPR request# might surface the data. Strikes me the videos would probably only have a delete flag set if this is recent and even after deletion from live data may exist in backups?

(# AIUI companies are obliged to share with you any PII they hold that identifies you.)

I hate to be deceptive, but I was thinking that even if they are not EU residents (or residents of another entity that has similar laws, e.g. UK), then they might be able to fake residency for the purposes of using data laws to exfiltrate the videos. They might have to take the dishonesty further and say that they appear in all the videos.

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