In the latest case of “people who can’t even begin to read legalese properly,” quite a bit of a stink was made over a phrase in the most recent YouTube Terms of Service update, which is effective on December 10th 2019.
The text in question reads as follows:
YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.
This caused one hell of a stir in the online community when it was shared online, as a multitude of people, and online “news” agencies, reported that this was YouTube saying they will terminate your account if it isn’t making money.
Go ahead and search the first line of the quoted text above, or the phrase “Dec. 10th YouTube Update.” You will find tons of blog posts and videos discussing this and how horrible it will be — that it’s “the end of YouTube” and crap like that.
This seemed a little too much, honestly. It didn’t add up. Like, seriously, think about this for a minute: why would Google, a company which makes its money off of information provided by willing users, want to restrict usage of its platform and the benefits that user accounts have in collecting information on said users?
Why would one of the top companies in the world do something that would obviously piss off virtually everyone in its user base? It would be effectively suicide, and they know it. Why in the fuck would they do this? Do you seriously think everyone there is that stupid?
That’s why that isn’t at all what the text says. If you read it carefully, with knowledge of complex grammatical structure, the meaning becomes pretty obvious, as explained in this reply on Twitter to one of the people who initially posted about this — or at least, is the first person I personally saw bringing this up.
If you re-read the text with that in mind, it’s obvious that is exactly what it’s saying. Well, it should be, but for some people that’s not the case — if you follow the thread above you will see people making comments on this still insisting that the text says that Google will terminate your access to Google services all around (gmail, for example) for whatever reason.. which again, makes no damned sense!
As someone who has actually written legal contracts for his job, and who, as you can see on this site, has quite the complex writing style, I can say it certainly does say what the reply from TeamYouTube on Twitter says: that this text refers to Google shutting down or removing access to services it doesn’t find viable — think Google+, for example. Nothing more.
A few outlets have reported on this not being the case, and YouTube has tried to ensure that people are aware of this, but some still insist on that Google is, for some reason, going to just kill off whole accounts that don’t make them money, ignoring how completely absurd the idea is. Oh well, as the old Southern saying goes, “you can’t fix stupid.” Especially when they claim that the text “clearly says” what it does not, if you read the text completely.
So, in the end, don’t worry – your account is as safe as it ever was, or ever will be in the hands of a company that makes all its money off of ever bit of information you willingly share with it, and much more that you don’t know about. 🙂