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Comment by cbuq | Hacker News Reader

Aren't these services (and even adblockers) against YouTube's TOS? As much as I don't like ads as the next person, my Google account is one thing I don't want to risk.

Anybody hear of this happening or think it's a possibility down the road?

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Google can block you at any time for any reason. Terms of Service are never relevant. If you're doing something many other people do, you're okay.

Besides, suppose they do block you. What's the worst that going to happen? If you can think of something really bad (e.g. I'm going to lose all my photos) then you should do something to address that. Regardless.

Photos would be a one evening worth trivial task to back up to another system .

Switching your phone from android or changing an email address with hundreds of contacts over many years is far more difficult and expensive.

Google or Apple for that matter can make life difficult for a single person by banding their account , there is not a whole lot an average person can do to mitigate that risk.

This is why I use a separate throwaway account for Android and no longer use a Google account for anything else.

It doesn’t matter how many different accounts are used, google is known to ban related accounts as they see fit .

How they classify accounts being related is anyone’s guess .

> Aren't these services (and even adblockers) against YouTube's TOS?

It's probably a grey area. It's hard to claim that I'm acting against YouTube's TOS by using Piped. Aside from the fact that I haven't agreed to them, I'm also not interacting with YouTube.

As for the devs: they're merely writing a proxy. I'm sure some creative lawyer can find a way to portrait this as illegal, but it's likely a stretch.

The game is rigged, so you should stop caring about the rules.

Also, don't associate your google account with your youtube usage. Problem solved.

This is my question too. If I am going to risk my Google Account getting banned, there is no way I want to try something like this. If it is actually explicitly allowed, then sure I will use it.

I don't think it allows you to login with your Google account. You can have a local account on the instance but it does not have anything with your google account.

So you cannot interact with videos (comment, like..etc) although you can create Playlists that will be linked to your local instance account.

How would your Google account be linked to piped usage?

I can't speak for piped, but I use a self-hosted Invidious instance to watch Youtube. You don't log into it with your Google account, it has its own authentication so that it can save your (distinct) subscriptions. Even if Google decided to crack down on alternate front-end usage, they can't correlate it back to your actual account.

> they can't correlate it back to your actual account.

Can't is a strong word. They might not bother, but if you're logged in to your Google account on other services from the same IP they might tie those together. Wouldn't be 100% accurate but if they decided to go nuclear ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If this is truly frightening, you should reduce your reliance on Google since too much of your life is tied with them.

I use the SmartTube frontend on my TV and do not have it linked to my Google account for exactly this reason. I just leave it set as the default user. Yes, it's a bit of a pain if I find a channel that I would like to subscribe to, that I need to do it twice (once on the TV, once in YT on my phone), but that's a very hurdle.

I recommend having a separate account where important data is stored (Gmail, photos) and another for everything else (search, youtube, hangouts, etc.). I also still keep personal backups of all import data (see takeout.google.com).

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