Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 501 posts

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

#221

Post by [deleted] »

mikece wrote: post #38
falcolas wrote: post #4

In the discussion of the last article, there was a discussion about weaponizing "associated accounts" when Google shuts things down. Looks like it's 100% a valid tactic. Looks like you need to make sure your employees all leave on good terms, and stay on good terms in the coming years. Otherwise, you too might find your Google accounts terminated with no recourse.

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…

[deleted]

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

#222

Post by jhgb »

nightpool wrote: post #210
jhgb wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may very well depend on how regulated the banking industry is in your country.

You're right. In less regulated countries, they may be more lenient. But in countries with strong anti-fraud and anti-moneylaundering regulations, banks often will take the most risk-adverse course, which is to terminate accounts for very little reason and at the slightest hint of bad behavior. I'm not against government regulation of these sorts of decisions, but to pretend that the regulations we currently have are…

In more regulated countries, the state limits what banks can do to their customers. In the EU that means a legal right to a basic bank account, among other things, so "terminating accounts for very little reason" is not going to happen.

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

#223

Post by pfortuny »

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…

“ we’re required but governments across the world to be on the lookout for people doing “fraudy” things and terminate their accounts ASAP.”

And that is the difference. Google is not the Govmnt and there is no legislation supporting them (except their probably murky and possibly ilegal TOS -ilegal because of lack of human oversight).

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

#224

Post by tempnow987 »

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…

Google is dealing with a very real problem. There are bad actors, particularly internationally, who systematically and at scale try to subvert / cheat. This includes multiple accounts, and businesses that hire folks who try to cheat the system. Google almost certainly has statistics supporting the increased risk of working with developers / businesses that hire folks who break various rules. Certainly there are false positives as well.

A lot of folks are offended by $100 / year developer fees. If Apple et al charged $10,000 to get going as a developer, they would probably be better positioned to deal with all this less automatically. In fact, game dev historically might have followed a bit of this model (xbox etc).

Anyways, my own thought, there should be a pathway to a $5,000 fee where you get a higher level of human interaction.

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

#225

Post by bedast »

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…

iPhone user, not a developer - it's my understanding the review process and support are, generally, with humans. To the point that some app developers have run into human mistakes rather than automation mistakes.

Apple is nowhere close to perfect, though. They probably have even more problems with control over the app store and what you can put on it. To make it worse, unlike android, sideloading is not only not supported, it can be a violation of terms.

I saw the comments about developing for iOS instead and shook my head, to be honest. It's just as difficult to deal with, possibly even more frustrating when you make a simple app update and it gets rejected because something that was already in the app now violates app store policies, or you do something with your app that does, but you're not allowed to. And their explanations can be just as useless.

But, at least you can get support. Which is why I switched to Apple for many of my devices and services. Probably the main exception is I don't use macOS devices (macbooks, etc).

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

#226

Post by onion2k »

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

This is more like giving someone a credit card associated with your business account, them leaving, and three years later your business account is closed because they committed a fraud using their personal bank account.

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

#227

Post by hwers »

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).

To everyone reading this who feel the same: Please avoid commenting too much (unless necessary) since HN pushes down stories with lots of comments (to disincentivize flame threads) even if it has tons of upvotes.

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

#228

Post by tempnow987 »

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…

My question, is there some statistical support for this? I scummy company employees tend to trend towards scummy stuff? No doubt lots of false positives, but folks keep on seeing this as a "mistake" google is making, and google may not think this type of associative banning is actually a mistake.

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

#229

Post by nadalizadeh »

jddil wrote: post #176
nadalizadeh wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

His own developer account was linked to yours ... that's how this works. In the future, fully control the accounts yourself or don't build in someones walled garden and then complain when they ask you to leave.

Sure, you are good in giving advice!

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

#230

Post by Aeolun »

peckrob wrote: post #215
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?

A few months ago I was banned from Twitter for sharing a meme that literally said "I fucking love outer space." [0] That was it. Just an image with some text on it. For some reason this angered some algorithm and 10+ years of tweets and interactions were gone. It was heartbreaking. For a lot of people I followed that was my only real way of engaging with them. The worst part was the complete and absolute silence from…

Hmm, I know how you feel. Got banned on some subreddit for some stupid post. 10 years of comments linked to that account. Will never be able to post in there any more, and there is zero appeals process. The moderators themselves are just silent, no response to my appeal at all. The response from the admins I got to my ticket on an ‘unjust ban’ was basically ‘tough luck, subreddit moderators can do whatever they want’.

Living in a liberal democracy has made me so used to the system working mostly fairly that these interactions with a ‘fiefdom’ introduce some sort of cognitive dissonance.

Post reply on HN