Far from the same.

A bank might suspend your checking account if it detects suspicious financial transactions on the account. The goal here is (ostensibly) to protect the account owner.

Google, as per the precedents it has repeatedly set, could suspend your checking account for participating in a stream on YouTube and following the streamer's instructions to spam chat with emotes in order to vote on his path through the game, as happened to Markiplier and his followers. That's far beyond what anyone should consider reasonable risk for being able to access their bank account.

The bank might suspend your card until you clear it up (and my bank is much lighter touch, granted after having blocked my card a dozen times), it doesn't close your account and lock you out of all your financial services.

> That's already how fraud protection works in the majority of banks.

Yes, but what bank has the surface area of google? If I do something in a an area that has _literally nothing_ to do with banking ( say google stadia ) that a bot thinks is fishy - will I have all of my funds locked up over that mistake?

But your bank will have humans making sure it's not a false positive. With google, you can appeal so a bot can tell you that your appeal was rejected.

The bank won't close your account if your child put an emojy on a youtube comment while using a tablet. The proper response is to block your YT account but Google forced merged your accounts.

Really? We know banks use machine learning models too but can you really get suspended for a comment on a video site?

The surface area for misclassification is much larger in Google’s case as they close down the entire account without any mechanism for appeal.

> That's already how fraud protection works in the majority of banks.

That's not the entire story. Not only do banks have tons of regulations that they have to follow, a concept of "algorithm determined that we shutdown the account and we can't explain to you why" does not exist there.

It's pretty easy to resolve that with the bank. Google has notoriously bad customer service for people whose accounts it disables.

But you can actually call your bank. It's not run by bots, like Google is.

Not only that, I can physically walk into my bank and speak with an actual human being face to face.

If a bank terminates you, you can sue at a court. With Google? Good luck trying to sue them, even if you are an EU citizen.

Because of a nationality I hold, I often get some vague replies from financial institutes or online payment gateways when processing my transactions or credit that due to some "internal" or "unknown" reason their service is unavailable. That's mostly a workaround for EU anti-descrimination laws.

With Google, there is no human recourse.