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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”

#121

Post by duxup »

I know a group of devs collaborating on a side project. Same thing happened to them. They created a new developer account for this project, worked together on it, and the app vanished off the store and dev account terminated, along with one of the developer's personal developer account.

They assumed, but don't know, it was because the developer who had his personal account suspended as well once worked for a company who was kinda scummy and went fully scummy a few years after that developer left. Somehow that was associated with him personally and then the chain of guilt made its way to them.

This seems to re-enforce that this kind of chain of guilt is a thing.

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

#122

Post by CPLX »

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?

Yes of course we propose to make them provide support against their will.

Like we force telecom companies to serve rural areas against their will.

Like we force construction companies to use safety gear and have insurance for injuries against their will.

Like we force credit companies to provide mandatory disclosures.

Like we force airlines to do what the people in the control tower tell them to do.

And so on. The entire concept of a corporation is a legal fiction, a privilege granted by the state that enables them to pretend they even have something analogous to free will. Without the consent of the state companies wouldn’t exist at all. Maybe we should do a better job of reminding them of that.

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

#123

Post by nerdawson »

anaccountexists wrote: post #104

Before saying anything else: I’m sorry OP. This is miserable to deal with and I know you’re probably very upset right now. On the other hand- at every company I’ve worked at, this is why there’s clear onboarding and off boarding policies. Yes- if you have someone on your developer account violating terms of service, they’ll shut down the account. No, it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t you personally. To put this differ…

I may have misinterpreted the explanation given in the post. It sounded to me like a developer they'd employed violated the TOS on their personal Google dev account. Google then recognised a connection between the dev and another Google account belonging to a company and opted to suspend that as well.

To use your example, that would be like an employee getting their bank account frozen for something they'd done in their personal life, and then the company having their bank frozen too for depositing money into the employee's account.

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

#124

Post by lima »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #95
lima wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proc…

> openness, transperancy and clarity in the process

But that's what a public court gets you.

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

#126

Post by anaccountexists »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #95
lima wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proc…

There are problems with how transparent you make things though (i.e., giving away the underlying signals). There’s a moving target between fraudsters and risk teams at companies where the fraudsters will try to run just up to the edge of alerting systems without passing over, then scale and repeat it.

If the signals used are made public, fraudsters will win every time. It’s the same with search engines- if they publish how a score is calculated, people will game it immediately.

Maybe the signals should be required to go through a review with authorities? Idk.

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

#127

Post by encryptluks2 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #39
Shadonototra wrote: post #24

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

Where are you seeing that previous emails were sent? The screenshotted notice indicates it may be due to actions by the individual developer on their own account, for which the company would not necessarily have been notified.

I think it is due to account level access. They tried claiming they hadn't been associated with them for 3 years but then admit that the developer had access to their account as recent as Dec 2021. Let's say this developer did something really dirty like stole user data and then Google finds out this developer still has app store permissions through this other company account.

I think Google handles these situations terribly from a PR perspective, because the moment someone posts negative publicity would be the perfect time to Google PR to show their hand and say no they are misleading the public.

There is probably a good reason they don't do that though. I could see how a company isn't really responsible for what another developer did that they may have not known about, but I don't think we are getting the full story here.

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

#128

Post by kuu »

anaccountexists wrote: post #104

Before saying anything else: I’m sorry OP. This is miserable to deal with and I know you’re probably very upset right now. On the other hand- at every company I’ve worked at, this is why there’s clear onboarding and off boarding policies. Yes- if you have someone on your developer account violating terms of service, they’ll shut down the account. No, it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t you personally. To put this differ…

The main difference is that with your bank, in case you get locked out, you can call them or even go to a physical office where they'll attend you, and you, maybe, are able to fix this false positive case, even if from detection point of view is a justified one.

For Google, good luck if you get in contact with a person.

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

#129

Post by e9 »

boredumb wrote: post #116
jahnu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If they ban your account and you don’t know why

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

#130

Post by mikem170 »

nonameiguess wrote: post #111
epolanski wrote: post #37

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. 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 prote…

Companies originally were given charters by the government, and limited liability for their owners, in order to perform a public good. Over time that "public good" part seems to have been completely forgotten about.

So now do we say that companies have the innate right to make profit without any regard for the public good? That profits are more important than what voters in a democracy want?

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