Live data from Hacker News

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

old.reddit.com

161–170 of 501 posts

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

#161
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any cloud/PaaS/SaaS company without a "we can terminate your account at any time for any reason"-clause? Otherwise you still have the same problem wherever you go.

Technically sure, but in reality that's not the case. I've personally seen people lose their GCP account for weeks over amazingly stupid stuff- if that same stuff happened at AWS I'd get a phone call from an account manager to clarify things and humans would be involved in the decision to shut things down. Google has a history of excluding humans from their processes, with no recourse for when their automation breaks…

[deleted]

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

#163
post #141

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.

Credit worthiness, yes, though that’s typically at approval time and not later on.

Risk bans or bans for suspicious / illegal activity? Totally different story (see the stories of Stripe / PayPal / etc shutting down accounts). The government (at least in the US) will punish banks pretty hard if they don’t crack down on fraud hard, so banks tend to lean more towards over enforcement.

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

#164
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also suggests a need for app development companies to ban developers from using personal accounts to associate with a project. I realize this just sends more money in the direction of Google but if every app developer was set up with a G-Suite (or whatever it's called this week) account for developer access then there could be no question of actions a developer does on their own accounts coming back to bite the…

> ban developers from using personal accounts to associate with a project As I understand it, this may not be sufficient, since Google also looks at things like "logged in from the same browser" or "logged in via the same IP" to find associated accounts. > mark a developer's account as "fired for cause" Which, practically (and maybe legally) speaking is not something Google needs to know. Then again, in a world where…

So you need to have separate WiFi networks, separate corporate devices that are so locked down that developers can never use their personal accounts from your devices or your corporate IP range (and ensure the same applies in reverse).

To absolutely prevent any and all association.

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

#165
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 find it would be far more effective and faster to simply demand enforcing the Constitution (at least in the USA), while also enforcing competition and shatter all the cartels and de facto monopolies.

If there were more competition, there would also be alternatives that companies like in the subject case could choose from and which would deter companies from making mistakes in order to prevent loss of market share.

A good measure should be that anything should have more than 3 equal competitors, is 4+ search engine companies of equal scale, 4+ App marketplaces for 4+ phone OS/hardware makers, that can operate on 4+ telecom services, etc.

And that transfer of data and services between each must be effortless.

We don’t need new legislation that will not be enforced or is flawed because it is too specific and myopic, we need enforcement of basic and fundamental law and concepts that expand freedom and choice and our fundamental human rights.

Submit to our every tech company dictate whim or we will destroy everything you have worked for and not be able to work in your industry ever again or feed yourself is not freedom and is a crime against humanity.

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

#166
post #132

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…

Yes good point. A better analogy would be that an employee you had a few years ago who left the company, started using their personal account for money laundering a few years later, and the bank confiscated/closed the business account, plus their parent's account because dad co-signed on a minor bank account for the person 20 years ago.

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

#167
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

No, I'm sorry, this is a horrible, horrible idea. As long as these companies are targeted by automated spambots, they need automated systems to counteract and remove spam accounts. That's just the reality of the internet arms race in the last 20 years. If you make them manually review everything, you hand a victory over to the spammers and degrade service quality for everyone.

>and have a proper appeals process.

This is a much better idea. Do this and require them to have a functioning customer service department.

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

#168

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 bank would give you your money and tell you to bank somewhere else, the government would consider confiscating the money

Major difference

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

#169
post #83

These stories are always one sided and gloss over the minor policy violation parts. When we get the full story it's usually less black and white. Quick skim over the thread and it sounds like they let an ex-employee have access to one of their accounts and he committed multiple violations? Was he spamming? Was he uploading malicious content to the store? Also, don't build on others platforms if you want to control yo…

It is not black and white, as I mentioned in the post, the former employee had violations in his own developer account. But in case of our company? None!

Our company account is assumed to be "associated" with wrongdoing of my former employee. This is the black side.

Post reply on HN