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.
You're exactly right. It's been my experience from community moderation that you can give people an itemized list of things they did that led to a response, and often all they'll take away from reading it is the one item they have a strong emotional reaction to.
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.
Has anyone wiresharked its transactions to Google? If it's literally doing it like it's a browser, what cookies or storage API (or other) state is it leaking?
This seems like an argument from ignorance. eg. "Well, there's no evidence to support this hypothesis, but it could be x (no proof given), so unless we look into x, we won't know for sure".
Using the system browser or webview doesn't send any user identifying information (other than device type and version) in http requests. There's no plausible reason why using the download manager API would do it either.
I'm not sure I'd call it an argument, but the ignorance part was right (note upthread this began with a question as to whether anyone had attempted to packet capture on what NewPipe is sending in a session).
There isn't evidence other than the user in question's account apparently got banned and they claim to be using NewPipe. So it's one possible avenue of further investigation if one tries to figure out how Google would even know to ban a user that was using a tool that allows connection to YouTube anonymously.
If Google PlayProtect is enabled it'll be aware of the NewPipe app on the phone or any other Google components may track its usage. Alternatively Youtube could detect the newpipe usage on their end and cross check with the client IP adress collected via the regular YT app. It's certainly possible to detect it.
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.
Not to be that guy, but do you have anything to back that claim up? I'd love to know if it's actually true or not; it seems like GDPR is often used as a catch-all magic wand for "I want my data therefore the company has to give it to me", but I'd love to know if it actually applies in the case of a terminated/suspended account and/or an account found to be in violation of the service's terms & conditions.
