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

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

#191

Post by gambler » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

To all the people who think this is some sort of accident that will get corrected. It is and it isn't. This particular manifestation of ban by association might be a corrected if it gets enough pushback. The general idea, however, is something Alphabet and the rest of Big Tech clearly like, because there are more and more cases of this sort.

Moreover, you likely supported this when it manifested a bit differently. Most of HN seems to firmly believe in guilt-by-association as a way to control behavior, speech and thought. You get all preachy and act horrified when it goes "too far" (i.e. when it looks like something that might happen to you personally), but in general it's a concept endorsed or at least tolerated by the majority here. Well, you know what they say about Karma.

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

#192

Post by natch » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

napoleoncomplex wrote: post #2

Upvoting just because Google's (and Apple's) app store processes are so horrible, and this is probably the best way the case gets noticed by someone human in a normal timeframe (according to the post, they've been going through it for 2 months already).

Please don’t lump Apple with Google on this. Apple has humans that answer the phone and help.

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

#193

Post by nkrisc » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #159

matsemann wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

> 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.

Perhaps they've scaled too large then. I don't think "we're too big to be held accountable for screwing innocent people" is a valid excuse.

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

#194

Post by Gareth321 » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #164

falcolas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This sounds virtually unenforceable. Gated and protected phones and computers are the domain of highly secretive projects, and cost an arm and leg to enforce. It means searching personnel as they enter the protected zone for watches, phones, computers, tablets, etc. Since phones geolocate and Google has this data, the protected zone needs to be enormous. Like, an entire city block to prevent the algorithm from detecting the handover. If you somehow overcome this, you need to ensure that the employee never ever, for any reason ever logs into anything personal on the gated devices. It basically means preventing them from using the internet. How productive are developers who can't go online? It also means zero cross-communication to outside the zone. No emails to/from home/work. No sending files, no checking emails, no taking calls (someone could easily use a connected service to make the call). This "air" gap is extremely difficult to enforce.

I've ever seen anyone successfully pull off this kind of secrecy in anything larger than a 10 person team, and the cost was insane.

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

#195

Post by frankfrankfrank » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 3:14 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…

That’s the problem with all these abstracted types of legislation.

All it would take is to reestablish that you are the sole owner of your information that is your property, as has been established by the courts, and it cannot be sold without a formal contract, e.g., the way real estate is transferred; and that any tracking is illegal stalking and wire fraud (because it is) just like tapping someone’s phone would be since it is using the public internet. Alternately, these companies can stop relying on the public internet for illegal criminal actions and fraud, and build their own internet if they want to track and stalk people.

The law exists, it doesn’t matter what other laws you make when none, even the fundamental Constitutional law, is not enforced and simply ignored. We have too many people who have these narcissistic perceptions that the real problem is that their pet legislation hasn’t been added to the mountain of legislation; when the real problem is people trying to control others, some in business, some through legislation.

If the general public does not recognize this soon, the clutter of legalization will become a prison, if it isn’t already.

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

#196

Post by hbn » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 3:14 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #121

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…

It's the new virus! Your account was terminated because you know a guy who knows a guy who worked at a company whose CEO is the cousin of a guy who broke Google ToS.

6 degrees of termination.

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

#197

Post by natch » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 3:15 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #182

qwertox wrote: post #153

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…

We had a fun merry go round with Apples humans just copy-pasting policy answers and refusing to actually understand the issue as well. They're not quite as bad as Google in this respect, but tying Apple chain over your neck for slightly less abusive system is a pretty Stockholm syndrome thing to do as well. You can't fix this by paying corporations more money.

You can ask Apple people to escalate to second tier support and beyond that if warranted they will even pull in engineering (not to talk to you directly but to resolve the issues behind the scenes). And with Apple you are talking to humans who also happen to be good communicators in my experience.

If you’re having trouble with Apple, it’s probably you.

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

#198

Post by brailsafe » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 3:15 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…

Agreed. I'm facing this right now with my Amazon account, and posted a question related to it. Basically they detected something suspicious, locked my account a while ago, and now the account is irrecoverable for an opaque set of reasons that they won't elaborate on. I feel totally fucked.

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

#199

Post by nightpool » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 3:15 PM UTC

hbn wrote: post #132

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…

Yes, but if you read closely, you'll find that OP never actually said that employee "H" was removed from their Google Play account. Instead, they say that "H [had] all permissions removed except on one game which we were still using H.'s consultation on - The app was unpublished later on". So H was still associated with the company's developer account as part of the unpublished game.

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

#200

Post by freedomben » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #164

falcolas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And it's the end of the era of a few friends building an app together and spinning it into a startup.