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How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension with 24k+ users (2016)

by.graffino.com

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Re: How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension with 24k+ users (2016)

#111

Post by p49k »

shadowprofile77 wrote: post #79
Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that's against tos..

And.... Who cares? Given Google's absurdly shitty behavior to so many users, its opacity, frequent mendacity, casual indifference to small organizations and let's not even go into all the gory details of its globe-spanning not-even-disregard-but-outright-hatred for any notion of privacy, I'd say anyone who can subvert its TOS and get away with doing so simply to save their livelihood deserves applause much more than…

You need stability to run a business. Google would most likely eventually find and shut down the account; it would just be a matter of when. It’s not a sustainable plan to try to operate in that kind of precarious situation.

Re: How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension with 24k+ users (2016)

#112

Post by vaccinator »

kranner wrote: post #7

> You can still find the ad blocker extension here. However, you will not be able to run it. Chrome made changes so that extensions cannot be side-loaded without an enterprise profile. You can currently sideload extensions in Chrome by turning on Developer Mode, right?

The new Firefox mobile is really bad for extensions too... they block them all except about 20 of them... I switched back to Firefox v68/Fennec

Re: How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension with 24k+ users (2016)

#113

Post by koheripbal »

Ap0c wrote: post #52

Ran a online retail business for 12 years. One day, Adwords account suspended. Some generic 'voilation' email. No way to resolve, no person to speak to, no comment on the issue. Tried to resolve for months. Fired 15 staff, gave up. Basically the internet = Google when you run online retail.

We had all of our business listings on Google Maps/Business suspended a month ago because I had our GSUITE admin account suspended (due to some confusion with enabling/disabling 2FA repeatedly while doing a GSUITE Data Export), and it cascade suspended the company's Google Maps/Business listings.

The Google account was unsuspended in minutes, but there is no way to unsuspend Google Maps/Business listings, even though we are PAYING customers of Google.

GSUITE support says they don't own Google Map listings (they only support the core apps), so they can't help, and Google Business listings support has a canned response that says because of Covid they aren't responding to requests.

We are already hurting because of the pandemic and now we're not even listed anymore. This is exactly how it was dealing with 1980s telecom monopolies.

Re: How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension with 24k+ users (2016)

#114

Post by tluyben2 »

whazor wrote: post #95
Ap0c wrote: post #52

Ran a online retail business for 12 years. One day, Adwords account suspended. Some generic 'voilation' email. No way to resolve, no person to speak to, no comment on the issue. Tried to resolve for months. Fired 15 staff, gave up. Basically the internet = Google when you run online retail.

Not sure when this happened. But Adwords does have a phone number and companies have their own agent.

I understood you have your own agent when you spend large amounts of money; i'm not sure what large is in this case, but maybe larger than most people spend?

Re: How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension with 24k+ users (2016)

#115

Post by ffpip »

nvrspyx wrote: post #96
tn890 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not use Ungoogled Chromium [1] instead? Why not use Firefox instead? Then you've solved the problem for good.

The same restriction applies on Firefox. Sideloaded extensions disappear after every restart. Only Developer Edition allows sideloaded extensions to persist.

> Sideloaded extensions disappear after every restart

No. I have 2-3 extensions installed directly from Github. You can't do that on chrome.

Re: How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension with 24k+ users (2016)

#116

Post by nullc »

appleflaxen wrote: post #89
shadowprofile77 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And.... Who cares? Given Google's absurdly shitty behavior to so many users, its opacity, frequent mendacity, casual indifference to small organizations and let's not even go into all the gory details of its globe-spanning not-even-disregard-but-outright-hatred for any notion of privacy, I'd say anyone who can subvert its TOS and get away with doing so simply to save their livelihood deserves applause much more than…

Even if I don't care about the morality/legality of it, I probably wouldn't bother. Google knows every profile and IP address I've ever used. It would be trivial for them to detect this, and close it down again. It's just not worth the effort.

The irony is that the honest users won't expend a lot of effort evading, while the scummier users will (and have a much easier time of it, since they've done it 100 times before).

In this way anti-fraud filters sometimes act as pro-fraud filters: False positives kill honest use, and dishonest use finds a way.

Re: How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension with 24k+ users (2016)

#118

Post by dkneeland »

fakedang wrote: post #38
StavrosK wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're in the short list of companies that practice shame-based support.

What's that?

I'm tempted to give you the same answer just to make you say thanks again... But I won't. Thank _you_ for being a nice person!

Re: How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension with 24k+ users (2016)

#119

Post by darepublic »

ByteJockey wrote: post #91
darepublic wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the internet being so predominantly web pages with html on them that you have little power to customize ad a user may seem antiquated one day. The internet should simply beam you data on demand, and you can visualize it any way you like client side

So, apis with multiple non-browser native clients? Basically the current app model, but decoupling the owners of the client ant the api? I think it could work, but you'd probably have to mix ads directly into the return values for it to be at all profitable. Then again, if clients are one time download, and the owner of the api doesn't have to deliver 5-10 meg of JS every single time, you might be able to get away wi…

currently the web doesn't let you mix data from sites very easily. Like maybe I want to cross reference my google calendar with my bank spendings on a particular day or something. We also get stuck with crappy UIs all the time (often from banks in particular). Dunno about how ads would work if sites just provided data, but I can imagine an intermediate step where we have a tool that can real time scrape a site for only what we are interested in and discard the rest. Then present it to the user using custom real time presentation

Re: How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension with 24k+ users (2016)

#120

Post by fakedang »

dkneeland wrote: post #118
fakedang wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's that?

I'm tempted to give you the same answer just to make you say thanks again... But I won't. Thank _you_ for being a nice person!

Doing justice to everyone :)

But it still befuddles me how that simple explanation never crossed my mind.

And thanks for calling me a nice person - I don't really deserve that.

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