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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”

#141

Post by CPLX »

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…

In this scenario you would have access to due process. There are very specific rules when banks make decisions about credit worthiness, and for the part involving authorities you’d have access to a well developed legal system where you have rights.

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

#142

Post by rvz »

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…

> At the end of the day you can't force Google or Apple to have your products on their shop.

Correct. AdSense worked the exact same way on YouTube. They are just doing the same thing with apps on their platform so really nothing has changed here.

These companies can do business with whoever they want to. You can criticise them, scream at them, protest, etc but they will never change, unless you split them all up.

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

#145

Post by shadowgovt »

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…

It's both (over-automation and secondary sanctions).

The secondary sanctions exist because it's near-trivial to automatically create dozens of proxy accounts for a bad actor to launder reputation through. So in addition to direct fraud detection, Google has had to automate secondary "Is this account probably the same bad actor" detection.

That system, like any such system (including human review), has false-positivies where two accounts are believed to be the same owner when they are not. But the automation-with-insufficient-human-review problem is specifically Google's mistake, and there's room for improvement.

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

#146

Post by phaistra »

matsemann wrote: post #44
nightski wrote: post #40

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..?

This is actually the real solution IMO. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with endless stream of various abuses across all the bad business practices they do, these giants should not be able to exist in their current size and scope.

The fact Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Disney, Verizon, and others [1], etc are even allowed to exist in their current forms is absolutely bonkers to me. The outsized roles and influence they have on the economy and their individual markets just highlights that the government is incompetent or willfully corrupt.

[1]: Just a random selection of giants I can think of in a split second. But there are tons of other companies that dominate other less-sexy markets that should absolutely broken up.

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

#147

Post by snowwrestler »

boplicity wrote: post #131
boredumb wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Find your way to your local Twitter ad rep. They may be able to facilitate transfer of an inactive handle. It obviously helps if you are buying or intend to buy ads on Twitter.

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

#148

Post by silon42 »

e9 wrote: post #129
boredumb wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also, to prevent an automated ban (or at least immediate manual review).

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

#149

Post by Msw242 »

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-…

Call the district office and see if you can get a meeting with the district manager to talk about the issue.

Then go to district events that your rep will be at, get the district manager to introduce you to the rep.

That's way better than calling the same phone line all the wackos call

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

#150

Post by hbn »

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.

I'd be willing to bet that there was no one developer or team who was given a task such as, "run our audit AI on accounts and permanently blacklist them forever if that's what the algorithm wants"

It was more likely years worth of minor changes that got it into this state. Teams adding different algorithmic checks for various things, where the output is just setting a flag on the account. And other teams adding account termination logic for certain flags or a certain number/combination of flags, not knowing exactly how the flags are set. Though maybe that would be the bad task. I'm just spitballing.

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