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Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

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Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#51
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call your congressional rep [1]. That's what it takes; to get policymakers to write and pass the law. I imagine there's bipartisan support at the moment for reining in Big Tech [2]. Google is never going to improve the situation out of the goodness of their corporate heart (if such a thing were even to exist). [1] https://www.commoncause.org/find-your-representative/ [2] https://nypost.com/2022/03/29/biden-doj-backs-…

Quoted post unavailable.

Sitting out means those who do reach out have a louder voice with policymakers. You can't not participate and also be upset by the outcomes due to your lack of participation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, just don't do business with this evil company. Simple as that.

Except they are so big it's hard to avoid. So perhaps the real solution is to split up these giants..?

Is that their fault? There's other operating systems one can install on mobile, they can even argue Android is open source and no one is stopping you from installing a different OS on your phone.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#54

Share the "previous emails" they sent you, you either ignored them, or you know what you did wrong and are trying to play the innocent actor Hard to judge without having all the data in hand

What previous email? It seems you did not read the post, the first email we received was "your account has been terminated" (from a noreply address) with the screenshot in the post, we sent an appeal afterwards and that was their response which you see.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#55

Googles dumb machine learning is destroying peoples lives and will continue to do so for decades unless somebody stops them. They control most of the internet and mobile space, it’s like having your water cut off permanently

I wonder if the devs behind these kind of automations ever stop and think about the ethical sides of it.

Nope. You can tell by how it is implemented.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really unsure why people still decide to build their companies under Google products

Is there any cloud/PaaS/SaaS company without a "we can terminate your account at any time for any reason"-clause? Otherwise you still have the same problem wherever you go.

Technically sure, but in reality that's not the case. I've personally seen people lose their GCP account for weeks over amazingly stupid stuff- if that same stuff happened at AWS I'd get a phone call from an account manager to clarify things and humans would be involved in the decision to shut things down.

Google has a history of excluding humans from their processes, with no recourse for when their automation breaks except to complain online and hope someone important enough hears you. That's not something people can trust.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#57
post #7

We need legislation forcing companies to manually review algorithmic decisions that impact people's lives - there has to be a proper appeals process. It's simply not economical for many companies to deal with the long tail of false positives, so they don't. Google has billions of users, and if their algorithms are 99.999% right about bans, their metrics look great but that's still tens of thousands users wrongfully b…

GDPR Art. 22: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ But that's only part of it. A business account might not fall within these rules, and Google can enforce them anyway (after human review) with very little recourse available. Breaking the App store duopoly is the solution.

It's coming but from the EU.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#58
post #7

We need legislation forcing companies to manually review algorithmic decisions that impact people's lives - there has to be a proper appeals process. It's simply not economical for many companies to deal with the long tail of false positives, so they don't. Google has billions of users, and if their algorithms are 99.999% right about bans, their metrics look great but that's still tens of thousands users wrongfully b…

GDPR Art. 22: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ But that's only part of it. A business account might not fall within these rules, and Google can enforce them anyway (after human review) with very little recourse available. Breaking the App store duopoly is the solution.

Every day I'm more thankful to live in the EU.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#59
Everyone here is commenting about overautomation, but this isn't an overautomation problem. It's a secondary sanctions problem. The developer isn't being banned for breaking Google's rules, he's being banned for having hired someone else who later broke those rules; and then that ban was transitively applied to their personal account as well.

This is beyond the pale. Google should not have the power to decide who you are and are not allowed to hire. It both goes against the basic concept of a limited-liability corporation, and harms worker rights.

Re: Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated”

#60
I have worked at four large scale mobile app companies [10 million downloads+]. All four were thrown out of the Apple store for various reasons. The real killer is the time between getting thrown out and finishing appeals. It's a real corrupt system too - like dealing with Russian oligarchs. You need to know the right people, know the right things to say, etc. If you don't you sort of play Russian roulette with the reviewer. That time between appeal and getting back in is usually enough to destroy all momentum - two of the companies just closed afterwards. I am still in mobile but in education teaching children to read [20+ million downloads]. I sleep well at night knowing we cannot be thrown out.... but any "phone call" from apple [they don't put anything in writing] I would probably throw up and have a full blown panic attack.
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