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Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income

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Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income

#71

Post by nyuszika7h »

nonbirithm wrote: post #63
heavyset_go wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, as of September of last year, Google Play's terms and conditions match Apple's App Store's terms and conditions, in that apps must use Google's payment method and cannot advertise or include links to alternate methods of paying for the app or distributing it. Ultimately, these policies are meant to further restrict viability of competition by either company.

Just a few days ago Google announced that you could use Spotify's payment method as an alternative to Google play. The top-rated HN comment for that article was: "As a user, why would I choose this?"[0] Competition only works if the competition is effective enough to change user habits. For the average person not educated in monopolies or tech regulation, is there any incentive for them to switch to paying Spotify in…

> For the average person not educated in monopolies or tech regulation, is there any incentive for them to switch to paying Spotify instead?

If it's 30% cheaper, that may be enough of an incentive. Though I don't know if that's the case here or if Spotify just eats the fee when you pay through Google.

Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income

#72

Post by dielll »

vlunkr wrote: post #32
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Based on the frequency with which this sort of post gets significant traction it's pretty clear that no one at Google gives a crap about this issue. Lots of other reasonable explanations that match the available evidence and involve Google caring about this issue. For example, their hands could be tied by legal forces beyond their control. Or they could care a great deal, but perhaps they have been unable to resolv…

But you see these stories again and again about Google specifically. The creator of Terraria was banned a while back and was also unable to get it corrected or get a real human to respond. You'd think if they are terminating accounts that are bringing in money they could put down the automation for one second and actually do the right thing.

Maybe google only makes money from ads, other projects are hobby projects to them. hence why Admob has great customer service

Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income

#73

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

Beltalowda wrote: post #43
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in a position to comment about what sorts of legal issues there might be. But Google is hardly the only company that hands down bans with scant explanation. It's endemic. I've actually not heard of a large company that gives detailed explanations in these sorts of situations. That leads me to believe there is a good reason for avoiding such explanations, since I would expect some variation in company behavior…

I suspect it's because a lot of these automated bans are done without any clear actual reason beyond "our machine learning model found something, but we can't really get a coherent picture of why". Last week I created a brand new Facebook account as I recently moved to a new city and am somewhat desperate to meet people, and Facebook events can be useful for this (as much as I loathe Facebook, my mental health is a b…

I doubt it, personally. At least in the case of the article. I have no special knowledge of this, but tenure would be one of the first override parameters I would use to trigger human review. It seems unlikely to allow an account that has been active and making money for six years to be banned without a human analyst in the loop.

As to your FB ban, I'm sorry that happened but I have no insight to share.

Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income

#74

Post by dylan604 »

notreallyserio wrote: post #42
WinterMount223 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did their accounts end up permanently banned or could they recover them? Seems like something that could actually be abused if not. A weaponized banned Google account on a laptop. A laptop with cooties. The seven generations punishment.

I'm no longer doing android development, thankfully (never again!) -- I don't relish the thought of having to ask house guests if they or anyone they know have ever been banned from Google. I don't understand how Google can staff up their Play store with engineers given this keeps happening.

And we thought checking on COVID status was a problem, imagine if we now have to ask if someone has received a Google VAX

Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income

#77

Post by nyuszika7h »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #7
rvz wrote: post #3

Another day, another termination by Google Play. The reason? None. Just a generic response sent to the developers on Christmas Day. Might have been the grinch himself issuing those automated responses to others. This company and its services (including, YouTube) are run by bots and they are the ones doing the moderation and not even the humans running them care at all. Unless something completely fundamental happens,…

Not to really defend Google here, but how else would you do it? The amount of data on these platforms is enormous and having people review the videos/apps/whatever would be simply prohibitively expensive. I think they need to balance how strict their abuse detection is. Making it too strict will kick out legitimate users without mercy. Making it less strict will allow potentially harmful (for business) content to spr…

Google can definitely afford it, except they won't because they prefer to be greedy and keep the money.

In general though, if you really can't afford proper customer service, then you should simply not be providing services at that scale.

Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income

#78

Post by s17n »

winrid wrote: post #58
noneeeed wrote: post #4

Based on the frequency with which this sort of post gets significant traction it's pretty clear that no one at Google gives a crap about this issue. I find it hard to imagine that people in Google are unaware of this problem. I often wonder if this has happened to people with more clout who have managed to pull strings to get it sorted, or if Google have just got lucky and managed to avoid hitting someone who might a…

The problem is they make everything powered by machine learning. Can you imagine getting such a thing to even 99% accuracy? Even if it was 99% accurate, that's still hundreds of thousands if not millions of mistakes.

I doubt there's much ML involved here. Have you tried getting humans to 99% accuracy?

Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income

#79

Post by grujicd »

Google recently flagged downloads of my app as a malware for no reason whatsoever. It's a B2B software used in companies worldwide since 2005, digitally signed, virus checked, not a freeware with some stange business model. Nothing even remotely shady. As good as it gets when we're talking about downloadable stuff.

When download gets flagged Chrome will block the download, but that's not all - Firefox is using Google's safe browsing service as well, meaning my Windows software was only available through Edge at that point. Essentially dead.

Luckily, it was sorted out in a day or two but it was really scary. First request for review was even rejected, so I poured more info and arguments into second one, mentioned that we're advertising this software on Google Ads for all those years...

If these requests were denied it would practically kill my company and the only source of income for my family. And I'm not even using their platform like Google Play where you're in contractual relation and they can argue you're breaching some of the clauses.

Re: Google cancels Google Play publisher account and ends family’s source of income

#80

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

throwaway684936 wrote: post #56
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #5

What is the answer to this in a world of scammers, bad actors, etc? Perhaps it should be illegal to ban a user and if a user is truly abusive then sue them in court for damages. Speaking of suing, why has nobody sued Google or others for this behavior?

Illegal to ban users? So a neo-nazi account spams, harasses, doxxes hundreds of users and spreads gore all over your platform, and you aren't allowed to shut them down unless you go through the court system first? This is one of the most absurd ideas I've ever heard.

Harassment is against the law. Maybe your platform shouldn't allow such abuse? They can fix their platform so this isn't possible without banning anybody. I'm just brainstorming here.
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