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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

#121

Post by ars »

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.

Is the government allowed to shut them down without a court order? If not, why should you be able to? Do you feel you can do a better job?

There's something to be said for not shutting down someone unless they break a law. I do acknowledge the court would need to be much faster and easier to access for these kinds of things though, you don't want to burden a provider with enormous legal bills just to deal with this kind of thing.

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

#122

Post by zamalek »

heavyset_go wrote: post #34
mohamez wrote: post #22

At this point competition is one of the great solution to this problem.

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.

> Google Play's terms and conditions match Apple's App Store's terms and conditions

This is the type of damage the people who say "it's their store, they can do what they want" inflict. Apple got away with their dreadful behavior, Google would be foolish not to follow.

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

#123

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

andybak wrote: post #105
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Maybe your platform shouldn't allow such abuse? They can fix their platform so this isn't possible without banning anybody. This feels more like handwaving than brainstorming ;-) It's a tricky problem and I think your suggestions should try and reflect that as much as possible.

Are all platforms equally abusable?

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

#124

Post by heavyset_go »

kovvy wrote: post #111
Beltalowda wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Was that a complete ban, or was it an attempt to get your phone number and other personal details? Instagram has always banned my accounts for suspicious behaviour on whatever page is first used after the account is created - the only way they offer to progress is to give them a phone number. It's a pretty transparent grab for more info to sell.

Twitter does this, as well.

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

#125

Post by heavyset_go »

janto wrote: post #112
WinterMount223 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can’t scale customer support then you can’t scale the customer base.

I'd guess that Google's support for their ad services are good enough? The problem here is that Play publishers are not really Google's customers.

Play Store publishers pay Google $25 for access to the Play Store, and then pay them 15% to 30% of all revenue collected via the apps.

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

#126

Post by 41b696ef1113 »

kd913 wrote: post #28
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They could begin by segmenting their accounts such that a trivial youtube ban doesn't result in a full google service account ban. That seems pretty damn basic right?

It is because of polices like that which guarantees I will never use Google Cloud. Why risk getting my email pulled so I can host cat videos when AWS will not dangle the sword of Damocles above my head.

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

#127

Post by syshum »

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?

We already have the answer. We do not really need new laws, or regulation

We need enforcement of contract law (and maybe a prohibition on binding arbitration which would be a new law)

However today these "Terms of service" are not really treated like a normal contract, in a few ways

One most of them are massively one sided, which should make them unenforceable and disallowed. Also standard contracts most of the time require notification of specific violations with documentation of the violation that triggers termination of the contract, not these vague assertions that with no documentation of the violation. Also for the most part contracts do not allow these open ended catch all type of provisions most Terms of service have, there are exceptions of course but it seems to have enacted a completely different level of provisions for these "terms of service" agreements that would not be permitted in other contexts of contract law

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

#128

Post by _vdpp »

germinalphrase wrote: post #119
_vdpp wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My advice - just rip the bandaid off and do it. I had anticipated taking a whole weekend to update the email address on all my accounts, but it was a lot less painful than I had anticipated. Changing over ~50 accounts took me about 3 hours all told. Most services allowed me to change my email even if it used email as the “username.” Using a password manager made this much easier, as I could easily keep track of which…

Mind sharing why you choose Fastmail over alternatives?

I used ProtonMail a few years back, it was kind of “spartan”.

I had heard good things about Fastmail from other GMail switchers and signed up for their free trial account, and liked the experience.

The mobile app is great, they support 2FA with hardware security keys, and the price seemed reasonable.

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

#129

Post by carn »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #107

Man, I really need to get off Gmail to reduce exposure to something like this, but there are sooooo many accounts to update.

Gmail has an option to send all the emails you get to another email address, and also delete them from the original email if you want. The way I'm currently doing it is waiting for something to send me an email and then changing the account for that particular service. Eventually, I would have completely left google's influence.

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

#130

Post by syshum »

shadowgovt wrote: post #106
LinAGKar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the alternative? Google essentially has a monopoly on distributing Android apps.

The alternative is don't feed the dragon. There are already enough Android apps in the world; don't incentivize the ecosystem by building more. Build for another platform or build for something other than mobile devices.

Right I will build for iOS.... ohh wait....

Ok that is out... so what is the other platform?

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