Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#181

Post by dvfjsdhgfv » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 8:24 AM UTC

palant wrote: post #156

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #34

I'm very curious to see how this plays out. Obviously, the reason for banning the extension is that it prevents Google from tracking our clicks (I'm surprised it took them so long!) But they can't clearly spell out the reason as it would make them look bad, so they just used some template and try to sweep it under the carpet. Now that it's on HN it's no longer so easy to ignore, so I'm really curious to see what happ…

No, the reason isn't obvious. The extension wasn't popular enough on Chrome, Google simply wouldn't bother doing anything about it. This might be a trademark issue, the extension's name has "Google" in it - then it's a major messup then, failing to spell out the correct reason. Or maybe it was flagged by some automated tool and whoever checked output of that tool didn't properly validate it. Impossible to tell from t…

It seems that they quietly brought it back without explaining the reasons. So yes, we'll never know.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#182

Post by paulie_a » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 4:02 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #70

foobarbazetc wrote: post #47

Meanwhile there’s an extension on there with our company name and logo (both trademarked) that might be stealing peoples data and Google have done nothing about it after many submissions of their trademark infringement form.

Legal demand letter time.

Which can and will be promptly ignored.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#183

Post by norswap » Thu, Jul 05, 2018, 4:21 PM UTC

How to get tech support from Google: get a lot of upvotes on HN. Sad.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#184

Post by lgats » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 2:57 AM UTC

I had an extension, NoBing which redirected Bing searches to Google. Removed due to copyright so I rebranded it as "Bongle" removed again due to copyright despite no mention of Bing. Gave up.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#185

Post by busterarm » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

paulie_a wrote: post #182

busterarm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal demand letter time.

Which can and will be promptly ignored.

Which, when you eventually sue them, is looked upon extremely unfavorably when you are in the right.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#186

Post by crobertsbmw » Fri, Jul 06, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

I had similar problems with an extension that I am developing. They threatened to take it down because it didn't have a privacy policy attached, although their developer guidelines state that you only need a privacy policy if you collect personal or sensitive user data, which I am not. It took me several resubmissions (each time I was scared I would be banned from all google products), before they finally approved my extension. The clincher was that my extension was marked as unlisted the whole time; it wasn't even open to the public.

Re: Google to developers: We take down your extension because we can

#187

Post by exikyut » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 1:02 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #178

shezi wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I developed such a service some time ago, but it's impossible to find any market for it. The non-technical people say "but I have it on Google already?!" and the technical people say "I just created a DO droplet and configured backup to Backblaze, easy and cheap!!". I find both options to be not ideal, since I'd like a simple, secure and safe way of storing my pictures. But that's the way the market is.

> and the technical people say "I just created a DO droplet and configured backup to Backblaze, easy and cheap!!". That's very much missing the point. The non-technical option is inside that post: Backblaze. Do that twice, the second time with crashplan or carbonite, and you can keep your files safe without any trouble. The real problem is that it can only protect the files on your computer. If you have data that's f…

What if you're a bit cheeky, mount eg your Drive storage on a VM via one of the various 3rd-party filesystem-mounting systems out there, then run $backup_client on the VM pointed at the Drive local mountpoint?

Plenty of uncomfortable chances for failure, but a few heaped handfuls of error reporting would probably be mitigation enough.

Getting the initial clone done might be a little fun, you might need to actually download the Drive folder structure to somewhere spacious so you don't run into transfer ratelimiting for the initial upload.