271–280 of 501 posts
All software giants hold too much power in their hands and nobody can touch them. What can you do? They have at least 50% of the market.
One possible preventive measure could be to have separate developer accounts for each product and keep everything air-gapped between those accounts. I was banned from AdSense for a never disclosed reason. I guess I still am - never tried again, in part because the alternative I used after that paid better.
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…
I can feel the downvotes coming deep in my bones. But Google has its own reputation (and users) to protect. It's taking a risk whenever it allows a developer on its platform. If a developer with low name recognition uploads malicious software, it's not the developer's name that makes the headline. Crucially, there's no information on what the employee (and later contractor) 'H.' did to get themselves banned. Or fired…
Once again, the resolution of this problem will come down to either the OP knowing a Google employee or a Google employee happening to see this and feeling pity. For the vast majority of people who deal with Google support and don't have access to Google employees how many of us on HN do, when the hammer strikes: they are completely out of options. I have such little trust in Google's automation for banning accounts…
I don't understand why the fear of being sued is not preventing Google (and other big players) from misusing their position like this. Is it impossible to sue Google?
1.8T is an unimaginable amount of money.
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…
I don't think regulation is the answer. The US government should just create app.gov with a 1% fee or something and out compete them.
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…
This appeal is required to be real, actually reviewing the content or conduct in question to determine if it violates the law or terms and conditions. If there is enough information to conclude that no violation occur, the company is required to reinstate the account.
If after the appeal, the user is still not satisfied they can appeal to one of a set of government approved arbitrators, who will listen to the dispute and decide the case. It is the user who gets to decide which of the arbitrators will be used (among those certified for the relevant category of platform). The company always handles its own expenses associated with this process, and if the company loses, they must reimburse reasonable fees and expenses incurred by the user.
These appeal processes also apply to removed content, not just account suspension/termination.
There is an exception for "small and micro enterprises" though.
The main downside of this law is that its primary purpose is to create a DCMA++ framework over in Europe, but it still looks to have a much better balance of concerns that the laws here in the US have.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
After reading so many posts like this, I decided to bite the bullet and start moving off-Google. Funny thing is, ProtonMail and Obsidian are much better than Gmail and Keep anyway. I'm still forced to use Google stuff here and there but I'm no longer dependant on them, and coincidentally I've been sleeping much better recently.
In my case, I moved to Fastmail... and yeah, the hilarious thing is people remember moving from AOL to Gmail over a decade ago, and think Gmail is still so much better than everything else. Gmail is worst-in-class at this point. It's slow, it's bloated, it's bad at spam filtering compared to the alternatives. They've been riding on people remembering email before Gmail, but not really actually stayed competitive with…