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Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

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11–20 of 530 posts

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#11
One thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of automated decision making going on. In [1], the ICO offers guidance around what the GDPR says in regards to this subject.

What I don't understand is why the GDPR doesn't enforce the following:

1: Clear and concise information about the action being taken, and clear identification this was done using automation and did not involve any human oversight.

2: A process the user can invoke to request human intervention, and a confirmation email that a human will review the decision that was made within 30 days

3: Public statistics and transparency - any decision that was made that did not involve a human must be published, with stats on % of decisions made, number of cases flagged to human reviewers, and the success/failure rates (for example, number of cases resulting in an overturned AI decision by a human).

This could also be beneficial in other sectors too, like automated credit decisions and insurance policies, to publish statistics and data to afford transparency and identify possible biases. It should also be a requirement in law to preserve any code or algorithms should they need to be audited, including an AI system to be preserved "in time", so that the 2017 version can be audited in 2020 if an investigation is launched for example.

Right now, it's a complete free for all, too many edge cases and ways to game the system if you can figure its loopholes, and no requirement in law to provide a fair basis for users to appeal to a human without causing a PR shitstorm.

This early adoption of AI is quite bad, and I suspect we'll see such developments in the long term future as it matures.

[1]: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#12

I’m sorry that you had that experience. Maybe enough up votes will get Google’s attention.

I finally stopped using chrome and thanks to Brave, I can use almost all the extensions that I still am used to, since all of them are compatible with Brave.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#13

It is disgusting that no one from media asks Sundar Pichai touch questions like: 1. Non human (AI) usage for termination google accounts. 2. No repeal process At least some employee from Google here in hn must do things and understand mentality of other people. It increasingly looks like - well... we employees live in bubble but if you are unlucky then you are screwed. Do not ask us? What kind of programmers wrote su…

> What kind of programmers wrote such code that terminates account without human intervention? Please do not blame it on Project Managers. One who gets paid half a million a year to not question the policies and their consequences and just does what they are told?

It’s pretty apparent that they think people who don’t work for google are vastly inferior human beings. It honestly runs counter to their “social justice” facade.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#14
post #8

I don't understand how we've normalized Googles behavior to the point where this doesn't even shock me anymore. When I used Google Play Music a couple years ago there was a feature that was broken for YEARS according to the bug reports I could find, and in a classic Google move they shut the service down before ever fixing it. That might sound like a non sequitur but it's ridiculous to me how little Google cares abou…

Stop worshiping the ground Google walks on, which seems common on HackerNews.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#16
I feel you...

We had similar issues with the Google Play store for the ArtStation App (https://magazine.artstation.com/2018/12/happened-artstation-...), it simply got taken down and appealing continually got rejected. It was only after the issue got picked up as the top story on Hacker News and other sites that exposed the dysfunctional nature of their moderation that finally Google subtly changed their policy so that if the content is primarily “artistic” it’s allowed, but the catch is that only they deem what is appropriate and not...

We recently updated our Chrome extension also and it just seems to me that not a whole lot of effort is going into the Chrome Web Store, at least on the developer side where you update the extensions.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#17

I’m sorry that you had that experience. Maybe enough up votes will get Google’s attention.

google dgaf There are only a handful of extensions that are deal breakers (the lack of which would send users to other browsers). uBlock Origin, for example. All the others can fuck right off.

lol. If you think uBlock Origin going away will make people switch browsers, I think you've got another think coming. We will soon see...

1. When (not "if") Google kills UBO 2. How Chrome's market share doesn't drop

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What kind of programmers wrote such code that terminates account without human intervention? Please do not blame it on Project Managers. One who gets paid half a million a year to not question the policies and their consequences and just does what they are told?

It’s pretty apparent that they think people who don’t work for google are vastly inferior human beings. It honestly runs counter to their “social justice” facade.

I really think this is unreasonable. Even at google there are different subcultures, including many with an anti-corporate streak. Furthermore I’m not going to blame an employee for not sticking out their neck for client businesses who also don’t give a shit about them. This isn’t a problem of individual providence.

Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#19
Is it possible that Google writes code to automate the moderation (for lack of better word) of the extensions in the Chrome Store because they are trying to avoid paying hundreds of people to do it manually? I know it's easy to say "Google doesn't care about you," and generally it as a company may not care, but they also are not in the business of putting us out of business.

It feels like to me that they have just become a sprawling mass of interconnected yet disjointed divisions but without any real customer service department that can handle the amount of requests or situations like in OP. I am not on their side in any way, but Occam's razor and all, it just seems the most likely explanation to me is that they are just too cheap to pay people to handle the volume of customer issues they have? Or would it not be economically feasible? What do y'all think?

[Edited to divide into two paragraphs for slightly easier reading]

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#20
post #12

I’m sorry that you had that experience. Maybe enough up votes will get Google’s attention.

I finally stopped using chrome and thanks to Brave, I can use almost all the extensions that I still am used to, since all of them are compatible with Brave.

Brave is based on Chromium
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