I think these automatic suspensions are really alarming.
I got my whole Vimeo account suspended by some script that had the impression I was violating some of their ToS. I just uploaded 3 demo videos of an app I created. Then they told me I should click on a link to contact support, where they told me I have to log in to contact support, which I couldn't do because my account was shut down.
I just released a blog article that needed these videos, so I didn't have any time for these things so I quickly uploaded the videos to Youtube.
I mean that was just a small account with three videos, but they simply nuked the whole thing. That's just crazy.
I don't think I'm save at Youtube either, I just didn't have a better idea at the time.
> Then they told me I should click on a link to contact support, where they told me I have to log in to contact support, which I couldn't do because my account was shut down.
Gotta love Silicon Valley Customer Service!! The same thing happened to me with LinkedIn. Multiple Catch-22s and/or Chicken and the Egg.
Video can still cost a lot of bandwidth on your personal hosting. .. I've actually been meaning to rehost all the stuff I have on either Vimeo or YouTube on a personal PeerTube instance, change all my embeds on my blog to point to PeerTube with YouTube/Viemo removed and links under the video to those respective sites as mirrors.
None of my stuff gets enough attention for me to care about exposure, but big content creators who rely on YouTube ads really can't get away from it.
People say google has good engineers, and that their systems have few bugs. However, their algorithmic bugs routinely de-platform people and often seem to take away people’s incomes (eg, the AdWords people losing accounts every other day). To me, that sounds like one of the most severe types of bugs possible and the Internet is rife with these stories
There's an easy way to tell that this did not actually happen. The person reporting this claims that they were notified that the account was suspended for "using 3rd party app outside of Play Store to go around Youtube ads".
Now think about any of the previous similar stories you've seen over the years. Doesn't even have to be about a full account being suspended. E.g. maybe it's about an app or extension being removed from a store, or about a site being removed from the search index, etc. The messages will always have been quite vague on exactly what happened, e.g. just saying that there was a violation of the terms of service.
The level of specificity claimed by the poster is just totally implausible.
This makes it especially hilarious. You can spot the fake by the utter implausibility of Google giving a single fuck about explaining their actions to a mere mortal. There isn't even a hypothetical mortal in hypothetical existence that could hypothetically expect such abundant largesse.
Every time an automatic google account suspension comes up, I like to let everyone know that my google adsense account has been suspended for 15 years. I’m still waiting waiting for my follow up on why.
Even 15 years ago right after they launched the service they were already having computers make decisions without human review or oversight.
For six years now I've been trying to use Google Play Music, but enter a comical loop of errors that neither the support staff nor their eng team shows any understanding of[1]. They always run through the same utterly useless script of suggestions, even when I make it painfully clear that I've already tried each of them multiple times.
I've had similar experiences with most of Google's services, including my phone nearly being bricked due to a cyclic error on Play Store. I keep a list of these little joys (on gdocs, ironically).
It was hard enough getting someone to look at these insanely frustrating errors and problems when I was a SWE there and could pinpoint someone who could fix them. Fixing these problems doesn't advance anyone's career, so nobody is incentivized to care. The idea of getting anything resolved from "out here" is just comical. Instead, I get to +1 a report on their forums, where one of their "community experts" gleefully tells us not to worry, someone will probably fix it someday. And in the meantime, have you tried power cycling? Because, Google! (Cue cute xylophone music.)
[1] Guess I'm not the only one with problems. Two stars for the Chrome app that's required: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-play-music/.... Does anyone actually care at Google? I doubt it. Too many cool new features to build to worry about existing ones working. Someday I might even write up a piece on how I was shipped off to the Goolag (Google Seattle) because I insisted on having a team to keep our product's data up to date.
My adsense account seems to be permanently stuck in limbo too. Every once in a while I get an email that my payments are on hold because I have no payment method (a little over $100 sitting in there).
Attempts to add a payment method always fail and it won't let me remove the one that doesn't seem to be working. The help support articles linked on that same page 404 and I can't seem to find a way to get any assistance on the issue. It has been stuck like this for years, occasionally I try to remedy it and end up in the same loop. It is extremely frustrating.
Eventually Google will release it to your state as unclaimed funds which you can then claim. I think it took them 7 years to send my $70 over. never could cash it out as it wasn't at the threshold.
I have the same exact story, it happened about 10+ years ago. I had a banner on a small community forum and they banned my AdSense account for life for click fraud. Of course I never clicked on my ads and the revenue was few cents. They never replied - except for automatic replies that the decision is final.
To be honest this sounds like some fake story. NewPipe really don't use any Google credentials and even considering how little trust I have in Google I don't buy like they going to buy account this this kind of stuff. Like seriously think on it: why should they ban someone based off IP address alone that can be shared with many devices / accounts.
I'm inclined to agree because of one contradiction in the issue: they say they got an email when they were banned but then they say they can't access their Gmail to provide proof because they were banned. Either your account stays unbanned for a few minutes so your Gmail can sync in which case it should still be available offline, it's on another email which they can still access, or they're lying.
Same reaction. I'm skeptical this story is true. I've never heard of Google banning a user over blocking ads before -- frankly, even with the amount of crap I usually give Google, this feels out of character for them.
Lots of people use NewPipe with unrooted phones, so if it is an actual policy, we should see more widespread bans. If we don't, I'm going to dismiss it as, "we don't have the full story, or its made up entirely."
That being said, of course you should take steps to mitigate the impacts of being banned by Google. But you should have been doing that anyway, so I don't think this story changes anything.
I don't know anything about this specific story, and won't comment on it. But, this is actually a common attack vector that people with nefarious purposes use. They come up with a story that makes some company look bad, but leave out important details (like they were trying to hijack accounts, spamming, etc...). Some of these people will do this either to get policies changed in their benefit, or as a form of revenge for getting caught.
It's important to remember that all stories have 2 sides, and to consider other possibilities when you only hear one side of a story.
I used to work with Google's account abuse team. The company will never comment on suspensions, so you are right that you only get 1 side. Every consumer account suspension I ever looked into was due to severe abuse on the part of the account holder: folders full of child porn, account being used to spam or distribute viruses, etc. Every advertiser account that some jerk whined about being "wrongly suspended for no reason omg google is satan" was actually due to either click fraud or advertisers' sites distributing malware. Whenever you see one of these complaints you should reach for a massive, galaxy-scale grain of salt.
In this case however the account holder is being totally up front about their activities: they were using a proxy network to rip off YouTube. This is a bit like Trump committing treason on live TV and then later whining about impeachment on Twitter. What's in question is not the facts but the policy.
Some commenters on the thread suggested that Play Protect reports to Google that your device (linked to your account) uses this app. I'm not sure that's true, but I disabled it nonetheless.
They wouldn't. But if there's enough secondary signal for them to determine what account is running the access that is grabbing videos but not ads (i.e. do NewPipe's requests carry the phone IMEI? Can Google correlate that IMEI to a user account?), Google could lock down the account.
What the user describes sounds like an account lockdown, not an IP ban.
It sounds to me like this user was banned for an entirely different reason. Like for example, someone stole his login credentials, fired up hundreds of VM's on GCloud, and started mining Monero.
The culprit could be Google Play protect. You need to use a google account to use Google Play, and then Google Play periodically scans apps, even if they aren't downloaded from Google Play like F-Droid (even apps I loaded for testing using adb). So that scan, whose results are sent back to google could reveal NewPipe and associate that with your account.
There are multiple ways for Google to know that NewPipe is installed in a device. Play Protect scanning is one way mentioned in the OP’s github link.
Another method I can think is, when I download a mp3 file using newpipe, it adds the text “NewPipe” for the Album mp3 tag. and PlayMusic automatically uploads any new mp3 file downloaded to your device.
Also isn't there another setting to track app usage activity on Android? I'm pretty certain that also keeps a record of opening and using apps outside of just what's on the Play store as well. If anything I'd suspect that was used rather than Play Protect.
I can't stress this enough: Use FastMail (and pay for it), it's better than GMail and doesn't pull this kind of shit on you. The post is very alarming, but at least you have a better option when it comes to arguably the most important part of Google, your email.
It's super cheap (I prepaid for two years or something and it came out to less than $3/mo), faster than Gmail and won't kill your life.
EDIT: I hear Protonmail is also good, just use one of the two. They're great.
I recently started using Fastmail for a new project I'm working on. The web app might be the snappiest I've ever used. Way better than Gmail. Protonmail is painfully slow in comparison. I'm seriously considering switching everything to Fastmail, but there's always a ton a FUD about surveillance when comparing them to Protonmail. But there's always a lot of FUD thrown at Prontonmail, too. Hard to know how much is true.
Seconded. Fastmail's support is great. I had some issue trying to sync emails with my laptop that messed up all the dates on my email (I don't remember the details) and fastmail support told me what I was doing wrong and wrote a script to correct all the dates on their server. I was blown away.
I'd like to, but none of the other services offer Priority Inbox. Even if they did, I've spent years training Gmail what is and is not spam. It's nearly perfect now. That would be super hard to replicate.
These are the two things I find more or less impossible to replace on android. For Pay, there is no alternative at all.
For Maps, there is Osmand, which is good as static map, but not for finding addresses.
Google Maps' map data can be replaced by Microsoft/Here/TomTom data, or OSM-based maps (OsmAnd, maps.me). Apple Maps seems to be unavailable outside of iOS, not even through third-party apps or a website, as far as I know.
Mapbox does realtime traffic these days, https://benmaps.fr can show this layer (I haven't found that button in mobile view though, might need to do a pull request), as well as your local traffic authority probably or some other local companies.
Business info can be found through regular search engines, or if that is really difficult, then you can always fall back to google maps every once in a while.
Street view is not available where I live anyway, and Mapillary is doing reasonably. They also have OsmAnd integration. OpenStreetCam is another alternative.
Satellite imagery is not exclusive to google maps either, there are lots of sources for this, and often also plane-shot imagery from your local government. You can configure a layer in OsmAnd. Personally I use Bing Maps most frequently for this (not the app, just bing.com/maps) since it is a lot more smooth/lightweight than the awfully heavy google maps website. (I don't really use sat imagery on mobile anyway.)
Trip recording ("location history" in google) can be done with OsmAnd or many other apps as well. I configured it to automatically turn on when routing: then I have GPS on anyway and I might as well store the data. Often fun to see stats afterwards (max speed, avg speed, asc/descend, or sometimes it's practical to see the time it took).
I think that should cover the functionality of google maps.
Google pay I never heard of, unless you mean paying for apps in the Play Store, in which case the solution is to contact the developers directly, though they usually don't seem to care enough to get you as a customer (I tried this four times, never got a reply, thus never became a customer since quitting google play).
I haven't had a Google account for over 5 years now, after my account got suspended for no apparent reason. The only thing I can think of that raised the alarm at Google was that I created two other accounts using the same IP and device, and Google must have thought I was gaming their system and engaging in some sort of Sybil attack[0] on their network. Two other accounts is hardly grounds for suspension. But 100 or even 1000 other accounts and Google are within their rights to ban me.
Anyways I since switched to Protonmail for frivolous web signups & registering on sites, and then I use Fastmail for various business dealings / freelancing / anything related to finance like Paypal, online banking, etc. I simply can't afford to be arbitrarily banned by Google again.
I use to have three Gmail accounts (notifications, mailing lists and personal). After the 2012 domestic spying revelations, I deleted all of them, extracted all my Gmail and hosted my own. It's so much nicer than dealing with Google's fucking terribly broken IMAP interface and over aggressive spam filter (which has bitten me too):
..although e-mail delivery has seemed to be getting better in the past year.
My current Google account has no g-mail connected to it, which has lead to some interested bugs in Hangouts (you can't search for Google contacts once G+ went away, even if you clearly see them in current chats).
I also host my own Calendar/Contacts using Radicale + DavX (formerly DavDroid)
I want to emphasize just how bad the spam filtering has gotten. I didn't realize it for a long time, but now that I check the spam folder regularly I've realized that a LOT of legit emails get flagged by Google. Even ridiculously obvious stuff, like a non-automated reply to an email that I initiated sometimes gets flagged as spam.
Unless I'm wrong Google explicitly allows you to use multiple Google Accounts for different purposes, unlike say Facebook. Were all your accounts banned together or your main account was closed for creating the rest? In any case they should give valid reason for account closure... this is just unethical.
I was about to mention this. I've been setting up some things for a new business and somewhere along the lines Google explicitly recommended creating a new account.
Sounds like some trolling to me, especially since he can't produce the email. If Google was actually doing this they would have emailed other NewPipe users, not just this one guy.
I find it perfectly plausible that Google would suspend someone's account arbitrarily. Even if it's not true, it is a reminder that Google can and will suspend your account and fuck up your life because of some algorithm, and you should probably do something about it.
The most likely scenario to me is that Google did suspend the account, but either this is not the reason, or it was only a minor aspect of the algorithm's decision. People are often bad at figuring out what they did wrong when you send a message explaining exactly what it was, people are hopeless when they get no message at all, which is how these suspensions work.
The assurance that they've used no other apps I put little faith in; I've too often both delivered and received the incorrect "but I'm sure I did nothing else, it had to be this!" claim. We do a lot of things without forming strong memories of them all the time. No offense intended to the original reporter, it's just my experience says that's rarely a highly trustworthy claim, even when trustworthy people make it.
Their system isn't even likely detecting NewPipe. It is probably detecting signals indicating the ads it serves are being blocked and the user's account isn't a Premium account. Any client that failed to vend the ads (or failed to spoof the ads-vended signals) could trigger this.
Google does not care about one user not seeing ads. It isn't worth even 5 seconds of an engineer's time.
But if that guy built a custom build of NewPipe that did a million simultaneous downloads, and that impacted service availability for other users, that would make Google ban him.
One of my GMail accounts was fairly recently disabled due to Google not recognizing any device logging into the account. I had to dig up some old Android phone to even attempt recovery which was unsuccessful. After I involved some of my Google contacts, the account was back within 2 days, yet while my phone can log in, none of my other computers are allowed to log in. I am guessing something in their ML system went seriously wrong in some corner cases (in my case, accessing the same account from >10 computers/phones/tablets on different operating systems via Firefox with private browsing, likely triggering their anomaly detection).
No enhanced security, I travel a lot abroad with different phones and can't handle SMS or some type of authenticator reliably.
I completely get it being flagged, I even wrote ML/DL-based anomaly detector for mobile stuff myself, but it really gets in the way, so I switched my primary account over to ProtonMail.
Readit News
I got my whole Vimeo account suspended by some script that had the impression I was violating some of their ToS. I just uploaded 3 demo videos of an app I created. Then they told me I should click on a link to contact support, where they told me I have to log in to contact support, which I couldn't do because my account was shut down.
I just released a blog article that needed these videos, so I didn't have any time for these things so I quickly uploaded the videos to Youtube.
I mean that was just a small account with three videos, but they simply nuked the whole thing. That's just crazy.
I don't think I'm save at Youtube either, I just didn't have a better idea at the time.
Gotta love Silicon Valley Customer Service!! The same thing happened to me with LinkedIn. Multiple Catch-22s and/or Chicken and the Egg.
None of my stuff gets enough attention for me to care about exposure, but big content creators who rely on YouTube ads really can't get away from it.
Ever thought of hosting the videos just like you would any other static file?
Now think about any of the previous similar stories you've seen over the years. Doesn't even have to be about a full account being suspended. E.g. maybe it's about an app or extension being removed from a store, or about a site being removed from the search index, etc. The messages will always have been quite vague on exactly what happened, e.g. just saying that there was a violation of the terms of service.
The level of specificity claimed by the poster is just totally implausible.
Another pointer leading to a probable troll on this one: the original OP's nick is just a bunch of profanities in Finnish [1].
Oh, how can they receive an email stating the account suspension if the account was suspended in the first place?
[1] (careful; NSFW) https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...
Even 15 years ago right after they launched the service they were already having computers make decisions without human review or oversight.
I've had similar experiences with most of Google's services, including my phone nearly being bricked due to a cyclic error on Play Store. I keep a list of these little joys (on gdocs, ironically).
It was hard enough getting someone to look at these insanely frustrating errors and problems when I was a SWE there and could pinpoint someone who could fix them. Fixing these problems doesn't advance anyone's career, so nobody is incentivized to care. The idea of getting anything resolved from "out here" is just comical. Instead, I get to +1 a report on their forums, where one of their "community experts" gleefully tells us not to worry, someone will probably fix it someday. And in the meantime, have you tried power cycling? Because, Google! (Cue cute xylophone music.)
[1] Guess I'm not the only one with problems. Two stars for the Chrome app that's required: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-play-music/.... Does anyone actually care at Google? I doubt it. Too many cool new features to build to worry about existing ones working. Someday I might even write up a piece on how I was shipped off to the Goolag (Google Seattle) because I insisted on having a team to keep our product's data up to date.
Attempts to add a payment method always fail and it won't let me remove the one that doesn't seem to be working. The help support articles linked on that same page 404 and I can't seem to find a way to get any assistance on the issue. It has been stuck like this for years, occasionally I try to remedy it and end up in the same loop. It is extremely frustrating.
Lots of people use NewPipe with unrooted phones, so if it is an actual policy, we should see more widespread bans. If we don't, I'm going to dismiss it as, "we don't have the full story, or its made up entirely."
That being said, of course you should take steps to mitigate the impacts of being banned by Google. But you should have been doing that anyway, so I don't think this story changes anything.
But... no, I wouldn't panic over using NewPipe.
It's important to remember that all stories have 2 sides, and to consider other possibilities when you only hear one side of a story.
In this case however the account holder is being totally up front about their activities: they were using a proxy network to rip off YouTube. This is a bit like Trump committing treason on live TV and then later whining about impeachment on Twitter. What's in question is not the facts but the policy.
What the user describes sounds like an account lockdown, not an IP ban.
It doesn't have the required permissions to get IMEI, so no.
It's super cheap (I prepaid for two years or something and it came out to less than $3/mo), faster than Gmail and won't kill your life.
EDIT: I hear Protonmail is also good, just use one of the two. They're great.
Not telling you it'll definitely work for you, but there is something similar out there.
- google maps
These are the two things I find more or less impossible to replace on android. For Pay, there is no alternative at all. For Maps, there is Osmand, which is good as static map, but not for finding addresses.
Mapbox does realtime traffic these days, https://benmaps.fr can show this layer (I haven't found that button in mobile view though, might need to do a pull request), as well as your local traffic authority probably or some other local companies.
Business info can be found through regular search engines, or if that is really difficult, then you can always fall back to google maps every once in a while.
Street view is not available where I live anyway, and Mapillary is doing reasonably. They also have OsmAnd integration. OpenStreetCam is another alternative.
Satellite imagery is not exclusive to google maps either, there are lots of sources for this, and often also plane-shot imagery from your local government. You can configure a layer in OsmAnd. Personally I use Bing Maps most frequently for this (not the app, just bing.com/maps) since it is a lot more smooth/lightweight than the awfully heavy google maps website. (I don't really use sat imagery on mobile anyway.)
Trip recording ("location history" in google) can be done with OsmAnd or many other apps as well. I configured it to automatically turn on when routing: then I have GPS on anyway and I might as well store the data. Often fun to see stats afterwards (max speed, avg speed, asc/descend, or sometimes it's practical to see the time it took).
I think that should cover the functionality of google maps.
Google pay I never heard of, unless you mean paying for apps in the Play Store, in which case the solution is to contact the developers directly, though they usually don't seem to care enough to get you as a customer (I tried this four times, never got a reply, thus never became a customer since quitting google play).
Hope this helps!
If you don't want to use Google Pay, can you not just carry a credit card?
Dead Comment
Anyways I since switched to Protonmail for frivolous web signups & registering on sites, and then I use Fastmail for various business dealings / freelancing / anything related to finance like Paypal, online banking, etc. I simply can't afford to be arbitrarily banned by Google again.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/how-google-and-microsoft-made...
..although e-mail delivery has seemed to be getting better in the past year.
My current Google account has no g-mail connected to it, which has lead to some interested bugs in Hangouts (you can't search for Google contacts once G+ went away, even if you clearly see them in current chats).
I also host my own Calendar/Contacts using Radicale + DavX (formerly DavDroid)
I want to emphasize just how bad the spam filtering has gotten. I didn't realize it for a long time, but now that I check the spam folder regularly I've realized that a LOT of legit emails get flagged by Google. Even ridiculously obvious stuff, like a non-automated reply to an email that I initiated sometimes gets flagged as spam.
Dead Comment
The assurance that they've used no other apps I put little faith in; I've too often both delivered and received the incorrect "but I'm sure I did nothing else, it had to be this!" claim. We do a lot of things without forming strong memories of them all the time. No offense intended to the original reporter, it's just my experience says that's rarely a highly trustworthy claim, even when trustworthy people make it.
(Obvious solution: use the approved clients.)
But if that guy built a custom build of NewPipe that did a million simultaneous downloads, and that impacted service availability for other users, that would make Google ban him.
Do you have the enhanced security features turned on? Google's systems trust the logins more if you have to 2-factor them against a phone or somesuch.
I completely get it being flagged, I even wrote ML/DL-based anomaly detector for mobile stuff myself, but it really gets in the way, so I switched my primary account over to ProtonMail.