[drankula3]

This is frightening. I use newpipe and depend on Google for work, email, and data storage. I use Google cloud to host my websites, and Google domains to control their domain names. What's next? Will they suspend an account for using an adblocker on their website while using a browser?

The fact that Google would suspend their account instead of just blocking their access to YouTube is an abuse of their near-monopoly. I'll be taking steps to migrate off the Google stack for this.

[dx034]

I was similarly dependent on Google but started diversifying for exactly those reasons. Domains are with a third party, Email is (Fastmail with own domain, GMail still forwards), hosting is also a separate provider. If any provider now blocked my account this would still be bad but I could easily restore services.

Especially if your work depends on it, I would encourage everyone to do the same. No other company (including your bank) should be able to shut down your business and/or ruin you financially because they close your account temporarily.

At the same time, this also means you're less affected by discontinued products or price hikes.

[shadowgovt]

At the very least, I recommend sharding your accounts for work, email, and data storage if you're nervous about those failing simultaneously.

The attack surface is larger than a TOS violation (someone could spear-phish your login credentials, or a coordinated attack on your account could lead to denial-of-service if Google can't disambiguate your legitimate attempts to login from attackers' attempts).

[ghaff]

Yes. Whatever the real specifics of this particular case, some number of users will inevitably lose access to their accounts in a way that they can't recover from. Arguably, with business services, there will always to some way to reliably establish identity with fallback systems. But, at some point with free/ad-supported/etc. consumer services a provider is sometimes, if hopefully rarely, just going to go "Nope. Can't establish your identity or overlook this ToS violation. No recourse." and showing up in Mountain View with physical documentation isn't going to be an option.

It's not an ideal state of affairs. But the alternative would probably need to be more rigorous identity verification and locking down of systems.

[sorenjan]

I'm afraid I can't find the source, so take this with a grain of salt. But I seem to remember reading a few years ago about a small company having all their employee's Google accounts suspended because one of them had previously been banned for something, and his banned account then "infected" any other accounts it came into contact with, like common projects.

I question whether separate accounts would help, Google's automated systems probably connect them and bans all of them anyway.