<story><title>YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account</title><url>https://medium.com/@alexhowlett/youtube-accidentally-permanently-terminated-my-account-4b5852c80679</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hpcjoe</author><text>I keep hearing stories about similar issues.  Suddenly someone is terminated from a Google service for unknown reasons, without any possibility of reversing such decisions.&lt;p&gt;This appears to be true of Twitter and others as well.&lt;p&gt;From my vantage point, it appears to be quite arbitrary.  And quite concerning in a number of cases, given the centralization of email, docs, etc.&lt;p&gt;I do make backups of google content every so often.&lt;p&gt;I guess the irony of making a copy of a cloud set of services data locally, as you may not be able to trust that these services will be there over longer intervals, is either ironic ... or problematic.&lt;p&gt;It speaks directly to the concept of risk of extended supply chains ... is the risk to your data, and ability to interact with services worth maintaining a presence on the systems?&lt;p&gt;This behavior on their and related tech giants generally makes me question how much we should rely on them for important things (like permanent email addresses) over time.  This has been making me uneasy for a while, and seeing more stories like this is not quelling my discomfort.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>apostacy</author><text>It used to be much harder to knock someone you didn&amp;#x27;t like offline. You used to have to organize a DDOS attack. But now, all you have to do is organize a much easier mass-flagging attack. We need to update our threat models to account for how unreliable major platforms have become.&lt;p&gt;We can no longer rely on these companies. After big tech spent so much time investing in their own infrastructure, they are undermining themselves like this.&lt;p&gt;We need to just accept that a major liability of using a major platform like this is that your content may be removed and your account deleted, for unknown reasons.&lt;p&gt;Want to host your podcasts? Well don&amp;#x27;t rely solely on Apple Google or YouTube, they are not up for the job. Instead, you have to span it on multiple platforms and tell your audience where to find you if you get deleted.</text></comment>
<story><title>YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account</title><url>https://medium.com/@alexhowlett/youtube-accidentally-permanently-terminated-my-account-4b5852c80679</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hpcjoe</author><text>I keep hearing stories about similar issues.  Suddenly someone is terminated from a Google service for unknown reasons, without any possibility of reversing such decisions.&lt;p&gt;This appears to be true of Twitter and others as well.&lt;p&gt;From my vantage point, it appears to be quite arbitrary.  And quite concerning in a number of cases, given the centralization of email, docs, etc.&lt;p&gt;I do make backups of google content every so often.&lt;p&gt;I guess the irony of making a copy of a cloud set of services data locally, as you may not be able to trust that these services will be there over longer intervals, is either ironic ... or problematic.&lt;p&gt;It speaks directly to the concept of risk of extended supply chains ... is the risk to your data, and ability to interact with services worth maintaining a presence on the systems?&lt;p&gt;This behavior on their and related tech giants generally makes me question how much we should rely on them for important things (like permanent email addresses) over time.  This has been making me uneasy for a while, and seeing more stories like this is not quelling my discomfort.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>Yeah, I think there are two broad relationships between a person and a company: personal and statistical.&lt;p&gt;At my corner grocery store, it&amp;#x27;s personal. I know all the staff, we say hello, we look out for one another. My doctor knows me as a person, and we talk as equals. You see the same thing between companies of similar scales. If my company is a significant customer of yours, we can talk as peers when we need to.&lt;p&gt;Google Youtube and Twitter, on the other hand, are mainly selling eyeballs to advertisers. Not only do they not care about any given individual, they couldn&amp;#x27;t if they wanted to. The ratio between users and workers is 10,000:1 or worse. At that scale they know they&amp;#x27;re going to screw over people; at best, at best, they make sure the errors aren&amp;#x27;t too biased in any one direction. And of course they will work hard to clean up PR problems, as those are expensive enough to justify actual attention.</text></comment>