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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”

#91

Post by matsemann »

bogwog wrote: post #64
matsemann wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even if they do, it’s not their responsibility to fix those problems. It’s government’s responsibility to step in and fix bad behavior that market forces can’t fix (like when it’s more economically viable to destroy thousands of livelihoods per year than to invest in human review processes)

I do feel it's my responsibility to think of the side-effects of what I do and the consequences that bear on others.

But as a sibling to you say, maybe I therefore self-select away from those kind of companies, and those not thinking or caring about those things end up taking those jobs.

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

#92

Post by reaperducer »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #32
lima wrote: 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…

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-…

I don't know if it's still true, but pre-pandemic I used to have occasional contact with legislative types, and they regularly told me that physical letters carry more weight than phone calls, and email was a distant third.

Pretty much, the amount of effort you put into your communication is a reflection of how important the issue is, and how important it is to you.

Which kind of goes hand-in-hand with lobbyists. Companies don't pay them millions of dollars to send emails or rant on web forums.

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

#93

Post by leros »

matsemann wrote: post #34
gentleman11 wrote: post #5

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.

It's probably something they're not really aware of. My company does something kinda similar. We're an aggregator of sorts. We have all sorts of quality and safety rules and we de-list things all the time for violations. As long as we aggregate 95% of what's out there, our users are happy, so we don't have massive incentive to spend lots of time manually working with rule violators, especially when a good chunk of them are actually scammers manipulating the system and harming our users.

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

#95

Post by buscoquadnary »

lima wrote: post #85
rileymat2 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need legislation forcing companies to manually review algorithmic decisions that impact people's lives, and have a proper appeals process. What you want is human judgement, but it will be hard to legislate that. What can easily happen is the human parroting back the underlying reasons for the decision. In this case "We have reviewed your case, and according to our records the account is associated with the probl…

We have courts and the ability to appeal to courts when bureaucracies make mistakes.

That seems like the same problem we have hear just now you get the headache of the courts on top of the decision, how many people avoid court now for much more impactful and legitimate situations simply because they can't afford the time and money?

What we want isn't review of automated decisions, what we want is openness, transperancy and clarity in the process. The problem people have isn't so much the appeals process it is the opaqueness and seeming arbitrary nature of the whole thing.

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

#96

Post by headmelted »

notreallyserio wrote: post #47
lima wrote: 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…

Google doesn't have billions of developers publishing Android apps, not even close. They shouldn't need to make these irreversible, algorithmic decisions on the Play Store. They choose to, and there are engineers and product managers and etc that individually choose to support those efforts.

It's true that there aren't so many developer accounts, but there was a thread on here not long ago that discussed how someone's life was turned upside down by getting locked out of a cloud account without recourse. Not even the account being hacked, just being unable to access it.

I would imagine any broad-based regulation around recourse for account locks is likely to start with the individual B2C user due to how many more of them there are (essentially everyone, even if you only count Apple and Google - legislation would of course cover every provider).

The bigger issue is that I don't even know where or how you would start with this. Ironically, there's a certain amount of comfort in knowing that your data is behind an unresponsive brick wall these days as it makes it harder/impossible for someone to socially engineer their way in. The downsides to that are many and varied, and what the post references.

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

#97

Post by ceejayoz »

kmeisthax wrote: post #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…

> Google should not have the power to decide who you are and are not allowed to hire.

Especially not retroactively.

"Your former employee broke the rules at their next job, so you're banned" is just bizarre.

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

#98

Post by rootusrootus »

epolanski wrote: post #37
lima wrote: 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…

> We need legislation forcing companies to manually review algorithmic decisions that impact people's lives, and have a proper appeals process. I don't think this is enforceable nor I think it's even possible to have such legislature. At the end of the day Google has every right to decide what they put and what they don't put on their store, with whom they do business and with whom they don't. > With how much our mod…

> De-googling and de-duopoling is the answer to these situations. At the end of the day you can't force Google or Apple to have your products on their shop.

Eh, just de-googling is probably enough. This isn't really a walled garden problem, this is mostly a Google problem. Apple can do stupid things, for sure, but you can reach a human there. And they definitely don't have the same Google algorithmic "scorched earth" account banning style.

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

#99

Post by bnj »

jmyeet wrote: post #75

I feel this user’s pain. Obviously we don’t know of food action was warranted in this case. Sometimes it isn’t and there being no recourse is unacceptable. Knowing someone at the company, having a sufficient Twitter audience or relying on posts like this getting attention should not be how this is resolved. Side note: I absolutely won’t use my Gmail account for any other Google service. It’s just too great a risk and…

> What they should use is the number of cases tax workers can deal with.

I'm curious about this and not completely sure I understand what it would look like in an example. Would you be willing to expand on the point?

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

#100

Post by thatguy0900 »

voakbasda wrote: post #78
bluescrn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android has a ~70% share of the mobile device market, that seems reason enough. (Although more focus on the mobile web rather than apps might be a good thing)

They only have that share because developers continue to support their platform. Too bad developer greed prevents an effective boycott of their ecosystem. If enough people stopped giving them money, they would change.

To go further, any competition to Google and Apple are killed in the cradle by developers refusing to support their platform.
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