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

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

#131

Post by boplicity » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:48 PM UTC

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?

There's a Twitter account that has our company name, but it hasn't been used for a decade, and has only one Tweet. I'd love to pay Twitter to talk to them, so we can take over the account. Maybe they have a process for this anyways? I don't know. All I know is this account gets tagged all the time by people trying to tag our company.

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

#132

Post by hbn » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:48 PM UTC

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…

> if you had a bank account shared between your developers, and someone who left the company started using it for money laundering, the entire account would be shut down and you would not be getting that money back. In fact, you might even be investigated by authorities for money laundering since it ran through your account.

I don't see how that analogy applies here. It would be more like if someone who had access to the shared bank account was using their own personal bank account for money laundering.

The developer wasn't breaking ToS on the company account, it was their own personal developer account. Quote from the reddit post:

> Our company used to have several employees with access to the business's Play Console, and one of them recently had done something wrong with "his own personal" Google Play Developer account.

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

#133

Post by lima » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

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?

Plenty of people use Twitter for commercial purposes.

It's also a big part of many people's social lives these days (like it or not).

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

#134

Post by himinlomax » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

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…

You have misunderstood the issue,

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

#135

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #105

reaperducer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Com…

Can confirm, worked as a Congressional intern. Order of importance was (at least in 2011): 1. In person meeting 2. Physical letter 3. Phone call

[deleted]

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

#136

Post by anaccountexists » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:50 PM UTC

nerdawson wrote: post #123

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 th…

I’d liken the latter to having a company credit card account. Regardless, in the bank case there’s a high chance adjacent / connected accounts would be frozen (at least for a time) because money laundering tends to happen in rings.

I see your point, though.

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

#137

Post by Dave3of5 » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:50 PM UTC

Google is it's own judge, jury and executioner on it's platform and they rule with an Iron fist.

If you fall out of favour with them you're screwed. They know they have a monopoly on their platform and it's their house their rules.

Remember this when making any business decisions about using their products

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

#138

Post by micromacrofoot » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:50 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…

> We need legislation forcing companies to manually review algorithmic decisions that impact people's lives

It's not hard to argue that all algorithmic decisions impact people's lives though, Facebook for example, prioritizes certain friends' posts over others... it doesn't seem like a stretch to say this could actually impact who you're close to.

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

#139

Post by jahnu » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:50 PM UTC

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?

The algorithm banned our first company account. Nothing could get them to respond, including the appeal form.

We want to switch now to professional and can’t despite fulfilling all the criteria they tell you need.

I would like to see legislation forcing detailed explanations of bans though.

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

#140

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:50 PM UTC

encryptluks2 wrote: post #127

ceejayoz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An entire company shouldn't get wiped off the map because one contractor has been misbehaving on another gig.