YouTube Terms 2022

This page is a preview of our updated YouTube Terms of Service, including a summary of changes, that takes effect on January 5, 2022. Until then, the existing YouTube Terms of Service continue to apply.

We are updating our Terms of Service on 5 January 2022.

This summary is designed to help you understand some of the updates we’ve made to our YouTube Terms of Service (Terms). We hope this serves as a useful guide, but please ensure you read the new Terms in full.

Develop, Improve and Update the Service

This section describes our approach to improving and changing our Service.

• We renamed the Changes to the Service section as Develop, Improve and Update the Service to better reflect the content of the section. In addition:
• We revised and reorganized some of the content in this section to make it easier to understand
• We explained the reasons we modify and update the Service
• Finally, we described the advance notice we provide if we make changes that negatively affect your ability to access the Service and your rights in those situations

Community Guidelines Strikes

Your use of YouTube has always been subject to the Community Guidelines and its strikes process.

• In order to increase transparency, we’re explicit including YouTube’s Community Guidelines strikes process in the Terms. Strikes are issued to channels that violate our Community Guidelines.
• There are no changes to how strikes operate, or when content might receive a strike, but we wanted to be more transparent and make it easier for you to find the relevant information.

Account Suspension and Termination

This section describes how you and YouTube may terminate this relationship.

• We amended the wording to make it more straightforward and easier to read.
• We deleted the section headed Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes because our ability to discontinue service, should we need to, is now covered by the Develop, Improve and Update the Service section.
• We also moved the sentence describing your ability to export content from the Account Suspension and Termination section to the Develop, Improve and Update the Service section.

Downloadable Software

This section describes software that you may find in the Service (such as the YouTube Studio application), and explains the permissions given to you to use that software.

• We moved the sentence dealing with automatic updates to the Develop, Improve, and Update Google Services section and clarified when an automatic update may be required.

Changing this Agreement

This section sets out when we might need to modify our Terms and the notice we’ll give you when we do.

We’ve changed the section heading from Modifying this Agreement to Changing this Agreement to avoid any confusion with Develop, Improve and Update the Service around modifying the Service.

• In addition to some clarifying updates to make it easier to read, we’ve also provided some examples of reasons why we might change the Agreement.