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

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

#321

Post by spookthesunset »

matsemann wrote: post #264
jrockway wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I see your point, when it's accounts with years of history, millions of downloads, thousands of dollars paid in sales etc., it should be easy to discern those from spammers creating thousands of new accounts with no standing.

Maybe. Or maybe the account in question has a long history but got taken over by a scammer. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Find long standing accounts and take them over. Boom, now they look totally legit!

Shit is hard. If it was easy to tell fraudsters from real people we’d never be discussing this. The fraudsters are willing to invest unimaginable amounts of time and effort to get into your systems and do their dirty work. Every fix you make will eventually be routed around. Always.

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

#322

Post by Macha »

skrtskrt wrote: post #258
throwuxiytayq wrote: post #234

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.

the editor for Google Docs is the one really good thing I can't get elsewhere, but I don't do that much important stuff in it - just like planning vacations, etc. Once I'm done editing something, if I want to back it up I can just export it elsewhere

I've really pared down my Google usage with the end of grandfathered GAFYD accounts as the last straw, so down to Sheets, YouTube, and Android as my last google usage. YouTube has no alternative, Android has too much sunk cost, Sheets I'm probably going to go back to Syncthing + Libreoffice I guess. Office 365 is the equivalent alternative, but not sure I feel much better about MS's consumer products than I do about Google.

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

#323

Post by andybak »

RexM wrote: post #257
tempnow987 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> there should be a pathway to a $5,000 fee where you get a higher level of human interaction That sounds like extortion... "We're going to ban your account because we want to, unless of course you pay us $5,000 so you can talk to a human to resolve this issue."

I agree but it would actually be better than the status quo.

Would you rather have a neighbourhood mafioso who is amenable to financial incentives or a local random psychopath?

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

#324

Post by CPLX »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #267
Closi wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone here is commenting about overautomation, but this isn't an overautomation problem. It's a secondary sanctions problem. It's both. When you work with tech companies this kind of overautomation is rife. When you work with any other type of business they give you an account manager and you manage these issues openly together with a relationship. If there was a human at Google who picked up the phone and worke…

Google is much more profitable than your bank, and this is why. The reason tech companies sit all at the top of most valuable companies is essentially because they've automated away a ton of tasks which normally require hiring a lot of employees. The only way to fix this is to legally require it, because nobody's going to stop the profit train by themselves.

> Google is much more profitable than your bank, and this is why.

That's not correct. Google is more profitable because it is a monopoly and routinely engages in illegal anti-competitive behavior.

It's precisely because this is the case that it's able to have nonexistent customer service and stay in business.

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

#325

Post by spookthesunset »

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…

One thing that never gets talked about is how do we go after the actual fraudsters and bring them to justice? How can private industry work with law enforcement across the globe and get some of these dudes behind bars?

I’m not saying it would be easy. Doing so would require insane amounts of coordinated with basically every country on the planet. But damn would it be nice if fraudsters couldn’t easily hide behind internet anonymity.

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

#326

Post by josephcsible »

voakbasda wrote: post #88
mikece wrote: post #28

Cases like this make me wish Google could be sued for $100,000,000 because it's clear that are they not following their own rules when it comes to banning accounts. This has REAL business impact, not to mention the implication of libel that the holder of the account did something to deserve to be banned. Yeah, I know: the business entered into an agreement with Google to abide by their rules and terms of service but…

They would happily pay that amount if they could continue business as usual. Add a couple of zeros and you might get their attention.

If they just had to pay it this once, I'd agree. But if they had to pay it every time they wrongly unpersoned someone, they'd change their ways really quickly.

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

#327

Post by josephcsible »

CalChris wrote: post #291

A Google Developer account costs all of $25, one time. You really should scale your expectations of service based on that number. You will not be partying with Larry Page in Fiji for $25. https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

No matter how cheap that is, I should not have to worry about losing my personal Gmail because one of my former co-workers broke one of Google's rules at a different job.

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

#328

Post by tempnow987 »

RexM wrote: post #257
tempnow987 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> there should be a pathway to a $5,000 fee where you get a higher level of human interaction That sounds like extortion... "We're going to ban your account because we want to, unless of course you pay us $5,000 so you can talk to a human to resolve this issue."

This type of setup is routine in most real businesses.

If you want to talk to a tech company engineer for bug fixes, you pay for that level of service.

There is something a bit almost scammy about all these "businesses" demanding white glove custom treatment, but complaining loudly about even being asked to pay a one time $25 fee to get on platform.

It used to be to deploy to a platform / get SDKs for the platform the costs were FAR higher.

There are something like 5M+ android developers. If you want to support this developer pool with 2-3 hours of work per developer per year, you are looking at 15M hours of work per year. And these people also become a risk - they can be socially engineered, they can be paid off etc. We've seen this over and over again.

If you look at phone co employees who are supposed to protect you from sim swap attacks etc, they have a large number of employees, so service is "good", but security? Not so much.

What you are proposing is that google should offer a human service in a very adversarial and tricky area (ie, your own staff may be working against you) and that asking to get paid for that is "extortion" that would result in jail time. This is perhaps why they don't even offer a way to pay (a lot) for a very careful high level review. Folks like you would demand jail time for them. Instead we are stuck with automation.

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

#329

Post by jelled »

dandare wrote: post #252
whymauri wrote: post #208

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?

I was able to get my Adsense account reinstated simply by sending Google a letter alleging they had breached our contractual agreement. In researching my case I found a lot of people who had sued Google.

One of the most interesting ones was Free Range Content v Google[1] where a number of Adsense publishers had their accounts closed after Google detected invalid click activity on their websites. The publishers sued alleging Google breached the Adsense terms of service.

Incredibly the Court denied Google’s motion to dismiss and allowed the breach of contract claim to continue. Google settled shortly thereafter but the takeaway is that these terms of service contracts are not as ironclad as Google would like you to believe.

[1]https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califor...

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

#330

Post by saulrh »

TuringNYC wrote: post #253
tempnow987 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> Google is dealing with a very real problem. There are bad actors, particularly internationally, who systematically and at scale try to subvert / cheat. I really dislike this explanation because there are so many obvious things they can do. Example: 1. Force uploads of Passport/ID for identity confirmation. If you have 100 accounts with the same passport...ok...issue, but if not, is it worth human review at least?…

The solutions you suggest would prompt more outrage than anything Google does in this space today.
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