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The following articles may be of help: 1) https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695 2) https://support

The following articles may be of help: 1) https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695 2) https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802168?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802168?hl=en Despite claims in this thread that Google likes to do things without due process and clear guidelines, the reality is that something like an account deletion is both pretty rare and not done lightly (you'll see that in some of the language in support articles and T&Cs related to this course of action). Product managers and engineers put a lot of thought into how to identify accounts that only exist to provide content that break TOS vs a case like this. In this case, it's not clear if it's the YouTube account or the Google account that has been flagged for deletion (support articles suggest there is a distinction). Either way, support articles indicate that rationale for the action taken would have been provided to the user. With regard the "how to escalate?" issue: The company still struggles with corner cases like this. When you're building systems that cater for billion+ users, you have to look at systematic ways to deal with incoming requests such that the set of requests that need human intervention is as small as possible (assuming you don't want a company with millions of employees). At the end of the day, it's a balancing act and I personally feel that Google's approach is sane. Unfortunately that means a small number of users do get a bad experience. Disclaimer: I worked at Google for over a decade. I am aware of some of the process and legality decisions that go into how these type of things are structured internally. I did not work in the area of abuse or policy.

josephg 9y ago
> In this case, it's not clear if it's the YouTube account or the Google account that has been flagged for deletion (support articles suggest there is a distinction). Either way, support articles indicate that rationale for the action taken would have been provided to the user. We've heard a number of stories like this of people who have their youtube videos flagged for various reasons. The lived experience of people who go through it sounds hellish. Their entire digital life on google is suspended and held to ransom by some completely opaque, inscrutable, byzantine process that is not accountable to anyone. There is no real way to appeal, and once deleted there may or may not be any way to recover lost data or have emails sent to your old address forwarded to another account. If your account was suspended, would you really trust that the knowledge base answers are correct? If you're wrong you'd have no account, no access to your own email address, no power, and no way of contacting anyone at google to help. If my account was suspended by a machine and couldn't get in touch with a human to help fix it, there's no way I'd continue to trust google's automated processes to get everything figured out. Not when so much is at stake. As someone who's worked at google for over a decade if something happened to your account, you'd be fine - you'd be able to contact someone and get it fixed. But without that recourse, scared paranoia seems pretty reasonable.
flukus 9y ago
> With regard the "how to escalate?" issue: The company still struggles with corner cases like this. When you're building systems that cater for billion+ users, you have to look at systematic ways to deal with incoming requests such that the set of requests that need human intervention is as small as possible (assuming you don't want a company with millions of employees). Maybe part of the lesson here is that it's simply impossible to scale to a billion+ users.
chippy 9y ago
>I worked at Google for over a decade. Thanks for your comment. I would like to hear from people who work from Google right now. The policies and priorities have changed. Their approaches have changed. It has changed since many people have worked there. I very much doubt anyone from youtube will speak up here, even with a throwaway.
- donalhunt 9y ago
  I only left ~ 2 months ago so it probably hasn't changed that much in that time. ;)
yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
> regard the "how to escalate?" issue: The company still struggles with corner cases like this This is not a corner case. Being able to appeal and escalate that appeal are the only possible way to have any semblance of due process.
st4rbuck 9y ago
Does not make sense to me. I agree, that an account deletion is very rare. So you do not need millions of employees to handle this. To me, it seems, that google simply doesn't care.

josephg 9y ago

> In this case, it's not clear if it's the YouTube account or the Google account that has been flagged for deletion (support articles suggest there is a distinction). Either way, support articles indicate that rationale for the action taken would have been provided to the user. We've heard a number of stories like this of people who have their youtube videos flagged for various reasons. The lived experience of people who go through it sounds hellish. Their entire digital life on google is suspended and held to ransom by some completely opaque, inscrutable, byzantine process that is not accountable to anyone. There is no real way to appeal, and once deleted there may or may not be any way to recover lost data or have emails sent to your old address forwarded to another account. If your account was suspended, would you really trust that the knowledge base answers are correct? If you're wrong you'd have no account, no access to your own email address, no power, and no way of contacting anyone at google to help. If my account was suspended by a machine and couldn't get in touch with a human to help fix it, there's no way I'd continue to trust google's automated processes to get everything figured out. Not when so much is at stake. As someone who's worked at google for over a decade if something happened to your account, you'd be fine - you'd be able to contact someone and get it fixed. But without that recourse, scared paranoia seems pretty reasonable.

flukus 9y ago

> With regard the "how to escalate?" issue: The company still struggles with corner cases like this. When you're building systems that cater for billion+ users, you have to look at systematic ways to deal with incoming requests such that the set of requests that need human intervention is as small as possible (assuming you don't want a company with millions of employees). Maybe part of the lesson here is that it's simply impossible to scale to a billion+ users.

chippy 9y ago

>I worked at Google for over a decade. Thanks for your comment. I would like to hear from people who work from Google right now. The policies and priorities have changed. Their approaches have changed. It has changed since many people have worked there. I very much doubt anyone from youtube will speak up here, even with a throwaway.

donalhunt 9y ago
I only left ~ 2 months ago so it probably hasn't changed that much in that time. ;)

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago

> regard the "how to escalate?" issue: The company still struggles with corner cases like this This is not a corner case. Being able to appeal and escalate that appeal are the only possible way to have any semblance of due process.

st4rbuck 9y ago

Does not make sense to me. I agree, that an account deletion is very rare. So you do not need millions of employees to handle this. To me, it seems, that google simply doesn't care.