Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated” • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by nonameiguess » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

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…

It's unfortunate this comment was grayed out so quickly and I hope that changes.

The sentiment is basically correct. Enforcing a ban on stores being able to control who they do business with is a radical break with all precedent and violates freedom of association. All stores have always had the ability to kick out any buyer or seller for any reason whatsoever short of systematic discrimination against specific protected minorities. Whether or not any particular seller thinks this is a morally optimal situation or bad for their personal business isn't going to change the centuries of history behind this.

The actual problem here isn't the arbitrariness with which Google bans sellers or the false positive rate of their decision-making process. The problem is the device vendor, OS vendor, and app store vendor are all the same company, and there are, practically speaking, only two options for the entire mobile market. Solving this is basic antitrust enforcement. Force competition for app distribution platforms. At least Android allows you to sideload and has F-Droid, but the situation is still anticompetitive and bad for both consumers and sellers.

And yes, with all respect to mobile app developers, access to a selling platform is not a utility. You don't need to be an Android developer to meet the basic necessities of life. It doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't do anything to make the situation better, but this drive to call everything a utility is not helping.

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

#112

Post by thedeadfish » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:41 PM UTC

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

No post body was provided.

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

#113

Post by boredumb » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:41 PM UTC

The discussion of "ethics" in ML tend to revolve around race and sex in order for large organizations to pretend they have some moral high ground when their models are being used to ruin peoples lives and enable billion dollar companies to not hire and manage non technical employees to make human decisions involving human problems. These people _are_ evil and their code and models are being used for destructive purposes, and so we are forced to read about their "ethics" applied to some obscure race, sex or "toxicity" problems as a way to cope with themselves. Banning someone on youtube for being racist is objectively less good than banning a team of people from pursuing their livelihoods, but focusing on the prior is a great way to distract from the fact that with a revenue over $50,000,000,000 they can't hire a small fleet of people to handle customer and partner relations. If it makes you feel better though, you don't have to see opinions on the internet that google data scientists deem toxic as often.

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

#114

Post by anaccountexists » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:41 PM UTC

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…

In my experience, the algorithms are much more forgiving than humans. At least, when I worked with the risk team at my FinTech company, algorithms flagged people for review and then humans decided to unflag or terminate their accounts. The only time we’d do a freeze is if it looked like an account take over (since that could super badly affect the account owner).

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

#115

Post by bogwog » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:42 PM UTC

matsemann wrote: post #91

bogwog wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s because you probably have a moral compass, but that still isn’t enough. If you were a decision maker at Google, those morals would probably get you fired at some point.

The people running a company have a legal responsibility to act in the interests of their shareholders. Even if making a morals>economics decision doesn’t get them into legal trouble, it can get them into trouble with shareholders, and they may be fired and replaced with someone who doesn’t have a moral compass.

So if the infrastructure doesn’t have room for morally correct decisions, no amount of martyrdom from executives is going to eliminate bad behavior in the long run.

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

#116

Post by boredumb » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

jahnu wrote: post #109

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…

Microsoft have a better solution, or at least one of their departments does. You pay for support questions and if it turns out it’s actually Microsoft’s fault they refund you the fee. It’s great and most of the time I never had to pay. When I did it was still money well spent as I got good support. There have been a few occasions where I would gladly have paid Google/Twitter/Apple to answer my questions.

Honest question, why on earth would you ever have a question for twitter so important that you'd consider paying them to answer it?

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

#117

Post by rexreed » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

inafewwords wrote: post #55

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.

Nope. You can tell by how it is implemented.

Exactly. You think that developers are paid to stop and think about the outcomes of what they do? They're all too busy running sprints and meeting OKRs and performance metrics and hustling design and code reviews and playing internal politics to worry about the effect of what they are doing on their users and ordinary people. Besides, even if they did have an end user in mind, it's not the "users". They're motivated by the customers - advertisers.

I really found this video to be enlightening on our current techno-dystopian state: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=GWvFZ99s558

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

#118

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

yunohn wrote: post #61

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…

> It's simply not economical for many companies to deal with the long tail of false positives, so they don't. This happens everywhere, not just Big Tech. Even as humans, we try to handle the 99% and ignore the 1%. I still don’t understand what anyone is proposing - force companies to provide support against their will?

[deleted]

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

#119

Post by qwertox » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

"Innocent until proven guilty"... This sentence has zero value in Google's enforcement of their ToS, even though it is a fundamental right.

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

#120

Post by jmyeet » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

bnj wrote: post #99

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?

Imagine someone working in support. When an activity gets flagged it gets assigned to someone. An automated system might take action (eg shadow banking).

Given the automation that worked might process 5000 cases a day.

If the automation can resolve more cases that figure might go up to 8000.

But if there’s an appeal that takes manual review and resolution that might wear up a lot of time stick that the rate drops to 3000.

This means two things:

1. There is an impact on the metric from false positives; and

2. Having human review is still part of the system ultimately. It rather it can always be escalated to such.

Now you might say the worker might be motivated to take the least time consuming action possible even if wrong but an appeal might be escalated above then and further time spent rectifying their mistake still counts against them.