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

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

#151

Post by freedomben » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

anaccountexists wrote: post #114

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).

Very true, I've seen similar things. Humans can be just as cold-hearted and unempathetic as a computer is, especially when they deal with problem "people" all day every day.

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

#152

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

bogwog wrote: post #87

qalmakka wrote: post #22

I will say this once again: App Stores are too important in the current world to be left to the mercy of some big Internet company. I agree they should get a cut due to them being both the creators and maintainers of their platforms, but their ability to regulate what's in them should be left to a third party or government agency, just like trade is not left to its own devices and has regulators. Apple and Google are…

Figuring out a fair and effective set of laws/regulations to control how these companies run their app stores seems way too hard and unrealistic. The easier and more effective solution is to simply force them to allow alternative app stores (without suppressing competition, like Google currently does). A free market tends to correct itself in the long term, so that should solve the majority of problems plaguing the m…

[deleted]

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

#153

Post by qwertox » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

One of the comments on Reddit states that:

> Develop for iOS. Apple has humans who answer phones and create support tickets and escalate issues and follow up and respond.

Is this true? Because if it is, my next phone will be an iPhone and I will completely move into the Apple ecosystem and develop for publishing in the App Store instead of Google Play Store.

Even though I don't do anything bad, these kind of news do have me absolutely scared that it's simply not worth it. It's beyond ridiculous how Google is treating developers. At least be precise in the cause of the termination, explain exactly what has happened.

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

#154

Post by anaccountexists » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

kuu wrote: post #128

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.

Maybe we work with different banks, but in my experience it’s more of a “1 strike you’re out” type of thing if they detect illegal activity and to me that feels like what happened here. I get what you’re saying though.

Fraud is hard. If you don’t crack down enough, you get in trouble with the government, many legitimate account users, and companies working with you. If you crack down too hard, you might mess up people’s lives who did nothing wrong. Even with an appeals process- its rare to get everything right. I think the reason we had about it with big tech so much is because their userbase is so large, so even with a low false positive rate, you’ll see high numbers of people getting flagged.

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

#155

Post by duped » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

jahnu wrote: post #139

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?

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.

You can sue them, which is the normal recourse for disagreements between companies. Usually that starts with a letter requesting documents from your lawyers to theirs

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

#156

Post by freedomben » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

yunohn wrote: post #110

browningstreet wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be amazed at how a little regulation right-sizes things in corporations. I work in banking -- there's no grumbling about our regulatory landscape. We just have teams of people who make sure we're compliant, and we get through our audits. So, to answer your question: yes.

Why are you comparing banking regulations to tech support? The former is crucial to trust in money, governance, and societal functioning. Tech support is easily overrun and exploited by bad actors, and the upside for the company is very minimal.

The upside of good support for the company wouldn't be minimal anymore if giant and/or frequent mistakes could get them kicked out of the market, either temporarily or permanently.

What I worry about most is that human support requirements will apply to smaller companies and essentially guarantee supremacy of big tech since no startup would ever be able to disrupt them.

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

#157

Post by GordonS » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:57 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…

This is a bad take - the person who violated ToS hadn't worked at the OP's company for 3 years!

In addition, it hardly seems relevant that a ToS violation from an employee's personal account should result in effectively destroying a business.

Something really has to change with how Google handles this kind of thing. At the very least they need to have a working appeals process handled by people.

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

#158

Post by hnbad » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #42

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…

I believe the GDPR already has that. The problem is that the GDPR is not enforced enough and not enough resources/willingness are allocated to enforce it. The problem in account termination cases would also be that: 1) they can claim they've reviewed the ban, that it's legitimate and they're refusing to disclose the reasons behind it to avoid helping people circumvent the ban, while in reality they didn't do any inve…

The GDPR does require algorithmic decisions to be non-final. However it provides no mechanism beyond allowing the company to just claim they manually reviewed the case and came to the same conclusion as the algorithm. The purpose of that requirement is really more to limit the effect of automated decisions by insurance companies and such.

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

#159

Post by jrockway » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

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've spent an inordinate amount of time banning fraudsters from my own cloud platform. The bots that companies write to do this are designed to fight off other bots. If you have an appeals process, the humans that control the malicious bots will show up to abuse the appeals process. One of my favorite cases was a user that signed up with hundreds of stolen credit card numbers (all from the same IP address, as they are apt to do), got banned, and then opened an issue in our open source repo complaining of trouble logging in. Yeah, you're having trouble because I banned you and your entire network of bots.

There is a balance, of course, but if you haven't seen how much automated abuse there is on the Internet, be careful of what you wish for. Even the tiniest of the tiny services suffer from massive amount of automated abuse. At that tiny scale, it was nearly impossible for me to keep up with the abuse without the help of automation, very broad bans, and deleting related accounts by walking a reputation graph (like Google is being criticized for doing here). At Google's scale, I don't think there are enough humans on Earth to deal with the abuse. As a result, there are going to be some innocent casualties.

I don't think it's an ethics thing, it's simply not possible to run a business without some sort of process like this. There are laws, rules, and processes that could cut all this down to levels that could be managed by humans, but the cure might be worse than the disease. (For example, it would be great if there was a 1:1 mapping between your national ID card and your IP address. All of these stolen-credit-card users could then be imprisoned. But, you know that that's a terrible thing, because it will also be used against anyone criticizing governments or large corporations.)

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

#160

Post by CharlesW » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #90

muzani wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apps are effectively utilities today. Apps have replaced taxis and phones. Order food through an app. Transfer money and buy things through apps. Find jobs and work those jobs through apps. Pay parking with apps. A lot of the developing world don't have a web app for certain things. Refusing to have say, Telegram, on your app store is similar to not allowing a telco to operate. Also as much as I dislike Meta, if Appl…

I can't speak for the developing works. In the US at least, where these companies are headquartered, every example you gave has an alternative that doesn't require an app. There might be an argument for more regulation, but calling apps utilities most definitely is not one.

> In the US at least, where these companies are headquartered, every example you gave has an alternative that doesn't require an app.

There are countless U.S. examples where an app (native and/or web) is the only practical interface you have to a company or service.

For example: What's the phone number to YouTube customer service if someone needs to discuss a misunderstanding about a copyright strike?