I dunno, but you weren't banned for not having a phone number attached to your account, because I and many others have accounts without phone numbers and are not banned.
I think you've made your opinion clear. Why continue to try pushing it as fact? There are a thousand factors at play in spam/fraud/whatever detection, how can you possibly say with a straight face that you're certain the phone number is not a leading reason?
It may be that this persons knows something more that we do not (does not seem to be the case) or has very different experience.
I do not mind this. It is indeed possible that the cause of the ban originated from some other source as from entered personal details and sequence of actions.
It actually motivates me to create another experiment.
While this statement will be really buried, it reminds me that we still should be thankful that we can somewhat conceal our identity as a private enterprise can be much more unforgiving that the state.
From just now, I went to gmail.com and created a new account without entering a phone number or email address.
I then went to Youtube and uploaded a video.
I signed out, then in again. Google asked for a number and recovery email, but let me press "Done" without providing one.
I'll sign in later from a different IP, and see what happens.
Edit: I've come across [1], which says a phone number is required to upload videos longer than 15 minutes to YouTube, or in some cases to upload anything.
No, it's a hasty generalization[1] where personal experience is assumed to match other cases.
Of course Google could have simply stated the reason for the suspension clearly, if they weren't so reliably opaque in support and service management issues,
I'm concerned about your ability to control the necessary variables. For example, any one of your anti-tracking measures (you're big into Internet privacy, yes?) may be triggering the suspension.
My only concern in that point of time was giving out the phone number, as it will give Google an unique identifier without the ISP and state cooperation. As such I did not use any additional measures.
I am grateful of your comments as it will motivate me to give it another try.
Btw. in fact I do not use regularly any anti tracking measurements. I am only protecting the local businesses against their own stupidity.
I really would like to keep visiting my favorite supermarket regardless of their decision to include their video ads into the Youtube videos I happen to watch time to time. Some careless fools already lost me as an client, I would not like to let this happen again.
