[sn41]

Underrated comment. If the government freezes your bank account, at least you can take them to court. If Google mistakenly disables your account, there does not seem to be any legal recourse. Considering the extent to which people depend on their services, perhaps there should be a more elaborate appeal process.

[noir_lord]

They can freeze the account but I own the domain so I can point it anywhere I want and I have copies locally via imap.

At this point the only reason I use it is because I grandfathered in on an old plan it's still free, if that changes I'll go elsewhere.

[rightbyte]

Google doesn't disable ordinary rulefollowing accounts by mistake. They are aware of the false positive rate and don't care.

[sn41]

I agree, but the problem is that "ordinary rulefollowing" is not clearly defined by Google. Perhaps it was that innocent park frisbee party video with a Metallica sound played in the background by some other party there... and not only your video, but also your YouTube account, and worse, email account gets blocked. Maybe this scenario is dystopian - the point is that it is a black-box no-appeal/limited appeal system when such an event happens.

[sellyme]

Google account terminations typically only affect the one service. If your YouTube account gets terminated for ToS violations, your email account will still work perfectly fine.