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Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

purpleleafsoftware.com

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Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#61

Post by dragonwriter »

hedora wrote: post #59
echelon wrote: post #8

Can we sue Google when they do things like this? No single entity should wield this much power. And we should rewrite the laws to make this so. Google and Apple wanted to be in the role of gatekeeper, so they should be beholden to the apps on their platform. We had a web where developers were in control of their own deployment. Everything was decentralized and required responsibility and diligence. Now the power is o…

So far, the law has been doing everything it can to make these problems worse. The DMCA outsourced due process for copyright infringement. SOSTA did it for illegal advertising (really, for policing morals, in general, but even the title of the bill agrees it was outsourcing sex trafficking law enforcement to private entities). The CLOUD act did it for illegal domestic searches and also foreign espionage. Caveat empto…

> The DMCA outsourced due process for copyright infringement.

No, it didn't. What it did was protect online service providers from liability for either hosting or removing allegedly infringing content if they took certain action when notified of potential problems from either side (to the extent the results seem asymmetrical, it's because the pre-existing legal risk was asymmetrical.)

> SOSTA did it for illegal advertising

SESTA/FOSTA was kind of the opposite of DMCA; instead of creating a safe harbor that protected firms from existential risks that were starting to drive them out of hosting user content, it creates new holes on an existing safe harbor and drove providers out of carrying broad categories of user content around the area legally targetted.

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#62

Post by rjf72 »

KirinDave wrote: post #56
rjf72 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem and solution are one and the same. Google is trying to automate tasks that are nowhere near ready for automation. This doesn't even really make any sense either. You might argue its because they're huge, but the numbers don't add up. Google netted about $31 billion in 2018. It's hard to tell exactly how many apps are published on Google Play per year, but it seems to be in the ballpark of 200,000 [1]. Let…

Apple doesn't automate it and it's difficult to make a case that it's better. They've certainly made errors and bad decisions. So... I'm not sure automation is to blame. What's more, you could make an argument that any process will have an observable error rate at scale. Would we be having a different conversation in a different universe where this same post exists, but Google didn't automate? I'm not so sure. > Crea…

- The United States is not California. Here [1] are the US poverty lines. For 1 person, it's $12,490.

- $20,800 a year puts you ahead of 26% of earners in the US. [2]

- The guy making your $5 latte gets on average about $9/hour [3].

- A private company engaging in behavior to create jobs and offer increased value to their customers is not the "language of socialism."

[1] - https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines

[2] - https://dqydj.com/united-states-income-brackets-percentiles/

[3] - https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Starbucks-Hourly-Pay-E2...

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#63

Post by ucaetano »

dwighttk wrote: post #39
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the process is largely automated, both for approval and removal. If trash wasn't let into the Play Store in the first place, there wouldn't be so many issues with pulling content back out of it. Consumers and developers alike would be far better off dealing with a properly human-curated store with actual customer service, even if it meant there were less apps in it.

This is Google. If you want human-curated go to Yahoo!

We all know how that ended :)

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#64

Post by lvturner »

hrayr wrote: post #53
_jgvg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. You don't matter, consumers matter. > Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. And you didn't have distribution either. > But it wasn't always this way! Indeed, there wasn't even distribution. Do you actually remember what was shipping mobile software back in 2005? > I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us. Again, you as…

I don't entirely disagree with you, but what do we call the web if not distribution?

Someone still has to at least pay for the bandwidth though...

I agree it's not an Apples to Apples comparison, but it always strikes me that people forget they used to have to pay for distribution too.

I remember one piece of software I was working on would cost the company around $5K per release in download costs alone.

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#65

Post by KirinDave »

rjf72 wrote: post #62
KirinDave wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't automate it and it's difficult to make a case that it's better. They've certainly made errors and bad decisions. So... I'm not sure automation is to blame. What's more, you could make an argument that any process will have an observable error rate at scale. Would we be having a different conversation in a different universe where this same post exists, but Google didn't automate? I'm not so sure. > Crea…

- The United States is not California. Here [1] are the US poverty lines. For 1 person, it's $12,490. - $20,800 a year puts you ahead of 26% of earners in the US. [2] - The guy making your $5 latte gets on average about $9/hour [3]. - A private company engaging in behavior to create jobs and offer increased value to their customers is not the "language of socialism." [1] - https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines [2]…

Firstly, you suggested:

> Let's hire some low wage employees to spend just 1 hour per app which is generally enough time to determine if an app is at all legitimate. That's obviously 200,000 man hours.

But folks have already been down this road, and the ugly fact is that you can't source folks to do work like this outside of metropolitan areas. This is why already this work is outsourced to areas where low wages are common but infrastructure is present.

And you'll find, as several businesses I've worked with, that the difficulty of validating these jobs is very high. Turns out, you essentially get half the work you'd think you would.

Secondly:

> The United States is not California. Here [1] are the US poverty lines. For 1 person, it's $12,490.

Sorry, I just assumed an average family of three with a single wage earner as the default, which is like $20.5k for most guidelines I've read. [0]

> - A private company engaging in behavior to create jobs and offer increased value to their customers is not the "language of socialism."

It absolutely is, and its historical success in America is exactly why capitalists have adopted it as a talking point even when it's not actually their goal in any scenario.

[0]: I googled https://q1medicare.com/q1group/MedicareAdvantagePartD/Blog.p... before I wrote my post.

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#66

Post by drdaeman »

ddingus wrote: post #51
echelon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this. I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat. You might argue that it's their platform and that's the cost for us to pay. But it wasn't always this way! These companies leveraged their advantages to steal eyeballs away from an open web and lock them in…

Please, you engineer, do your best to make the app usable from a browser. I dislike apps. Sometimes they make sense. Fine. Often, they do not, or offer less functionality than PC or web does. If you need payment, make that easy, same. Cancel easy too. Just because that is nice, and we all could use nice. You like nice, I like nice. Let us be nice. If you need profanity, whatever, I get it. Let's be adults. I don't li…

I happen to prefer the exactly opposite - I don't want to run the browser (or a browser-wrapper), I want app to be native.

Websites lack solid, consistent and platform-native look-and-feel. They are always limited, they aren't integrated with the operating system (i.e. task switcher), they are slow on almost anything (because modern web browsers are ugly giant behemoths. I've recently built myself a very beefy machine (16-core CPU, 128GiB RAM) and even now _sometimes_ sites are still choppy. On mobile, lots of sites are performing poorly.

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#67

Post by chessturk »

bitL wrote: post #40
echelon wrote: post #8

Can we sue Google when they do things like this? No single entity should wield this much power. And we should rewrite the laws to make this so. Google and Apple wanted to be in the role of gatekeeper, so they should be beholden to the apps on their platform. We had a web where developers were in control of their own deployment. Everything was decentralized and required responsibility and diligence. Now the power is o…

If Mozilla folks weren't so inflexible, we could have had writable local file access long time ago (Google was pushing that actually), making PWAs with WebAssembly viable desktop app replacements, rendering walled gardens useless. Yet here we are when a heuristics in a bot causes false positives with far reaching consequences and customer support is ran as an automated joke as well, making innocent victims helpless.

Can you elaborate / link me to more info on this? I'm curious about this WebAssembly-PWA-everywhere land I don't live in.

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#69

Post by ok_coo »

hug wrote: post #22
echelon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this. I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat. You might argue that it's their platform and that's the cost for us to pay. But it wasn't always this way! These companies leveraged their advantages to steal eyeballs away from an open web and lock them in…

> Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat. You still don't! You don't have the play by their rules, and you can still target everyone who has a non-Google or non-Apple phone, which as a target market is appreciably no one, much as it was before Google and Apple entered the phone market. You can target them if they have phones produced by your hated ma…

Google still has complete control over how well your web app is ranked in search results and they change rules and criteria all of the time, sometimes with little notice. Google search console is infuriatingly vague. Google is inescapable and opaque and I’m glad politicians are finally seeing these entities as monopoly powers that need to be addressed. They have a monopoly market share in web search and mobile devices so how is anyone supposed to NOT play by their rules?

Re: Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”

#70

Post by jdminhbg »

KirinDave wrote: post #56
rjf72 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem and solution are one and the same. Google is trying to automate tasks that are nowhere near ready for automation. This doesn't even really make any sense either. You might argue its because they're huge, but the numbers don't add up. Google netted about $31 billion in 2018. It's hard to tell exactly how many apps are published on Google Play per year, but it seems to be in the ballpark of 200,000 [1]. Let…

Apple doesn't automate it and it's difficult to make a case that it's better. They've certainly made errors and bad decisions. So... I'm not sure automation is to blame. What's more, you could make an argument that any process will have an observable error rate at scale. Would we be having a different conversation in a different universe where this same post exists, but Google didn't automate? I'm not so sure. > Crea…

> Uh, minimum wage is $15 in most places

No, it definitely is not: https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/minimum-wage-by-state...

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