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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”

#391

Post by ncann »

kmeisthax wrote: post #338
shdon wrote: post #220

15-20 years ago, I had a pretty good opinion of Google, as they seemed competent and true to their then motto "don't be evil". Now I avoid them wherever I can personally (unfortunately, and to my great dismay, my employer is fully dependent on Google cloud products). It seems they have become very evil. And what's worse... casually evil. The fact that these things happen is bad enough, but not having any recourse or…

Even 15 years ago we were hearing stories of Google summarily terminating whole accounts without stating a reason beyond some business-ese for "You know what you did". They have always treated their anti-fraud teams as secret police rather than just a way to mitigate business risk.

10-15 years ago me and I assumed most people here viewed Google in a very positive light. At that time they seemed to be doing everything right and were somehow at the top of everything they did. Gmail was game changing, Search had no equal, Youtube was mind boggling, and Android and Chrome and so many other things. Somehow they lost their way in the process which is a shame.

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

#392

Post by Seattle3503 »

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…

In banking and financial services we have regulations that require "model validation". Any automated decision needs to be tracked and compliance needs to check the decisions to see that they are sound. They were required after the financial crash in 2008 in order to get a better handling on financial risk modeling, but the laws were written broadly enough that they apply to other automated decisions in financial institutions. We could take lessons from these regulations and apply them elsewhere.

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

#393

Post by stonemetal12 »

nekopa wrote: post #346
ajross wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he's being banned for having hired someone else who later broke those rules FWIW: there's some reason to suspect that the "later" bit is being spun here. Per the timeline in the article, there were only 5-6 weeks between the employee being fired and Google taking action against the employer[1]. That's pretty tight, and from an enforcement perspective is going to make it extremely difficult to distinguish which enti…

If you are referring to this section: Mar 2019 - H. Left the company, all permissions removed except on one game which we were still using H.'s consultation on - The app was unpublished later on 04 Dec 2021 - Termination of H. (Former Employee) account because of multiple policy violations 26 Jan 2022 - Termination of our company account (Raya Games Ltd - AKA TOD Studio) without prior notices and warnings I think the…

By that timeline they never fully terminated the association with H. H went from FTE to consultant, who had privileges for what he was working on.

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

#394

Post by ocdtrekkie »

joemi wrote: post #367
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I tried switching to Fastmail (from Gmail) 7-ish yrs ago, and I ended up switching back to Gmail specifically because the spam filtering was far worse with Fastmail. Is it Fastmail's spam filtering actually better now, or does it just seem that way when you start a new account because you're not getting much spam in general?

So, I moved to Fastmail in 2016, and I'd say I've never had to get a legitimate email out of my spam folder, and I've never seen obvious spam hit my inbox. I do occasionally get the "my husband left me five mil overseas" type garbage, it's always spam-binned correctly. (Meanwhile, my Gmail account I retain in case someone tries to reach out to it, regularly has emoji-subject-filled spam and other garbage Gmail fails to classify, and also has a deluge of garbage spam coming in... at this point, Gmail is 98% spam for me?)

One important point here, and I don't know how long you used Fastmail when you tried it, is that Fastmail uses a personalized spam filter. It probably took me six to eight months to receive enough spam on Fastmail to actually train it. (In the interim, they use a non-personalized filter, which as I said, still worked!) Gmail doesn't seem to be able to make personal spam decisions: When I was regularly using Gmail, some types of regular messages would spam-bin no matter how many times I marked them not spam or classified them as a particular category of mail.

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

#395

Post by KarlKemp »

lmkg wrote: post #304
KarlKemp wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR Art. 4: „ personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’)“. This is a business, not a natural person.

Data can be both, in which case GDPR right still apply. Several GDPR fines have been handed down for processing business data about a person. Especially (but not only) data about sole proprietors/solo traders.

Got a link? Because while I don't doubt the logic, it just seems too esoteric to be an actual "issue" that people know about. Plus, I can't find anything.

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

#396

Post by laurent92 »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #380
koonsolo wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you know those services don't pull the same stunt? I use various google services, and do a monthly backup of everything. I guess that's a sane thing to do with any service, even self hosted ones.

Depends on the service. For example, if proton bans me I can move my email to a different provider because I own my domain. In case of Obsidian, it's an offline app that uses Markdown, so I can easily migrate to a different note-taking software for any reason. Your backup note is on point; I highly recommend everyone to do a Google Takeout every few months (or at least years!!). If you've never done one, like most Go…

If your domain registar bans you, you’ll lose your email all the same.

“GoDaddy has two major problems.

First, their customer service (…).

Second, if there are accusations made against you, they will shut you down and side with your accuser more often than not.“ https://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discuss...

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

#397

Post by cutler »

gigel82 wrote: post #290
skrtskrt wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Microsoft has a very usable online version that's free (with a bit of upsell here and there). Arguably more capable than Google Docs.

Wait until you're locked out of your Outlook.com account. No way back.

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

#398

Post by jgod »

commandlinefan wrote: post #357
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 should not have the power I can't help but notice the "they're a private company, so they can do whatever they want" folks that pop up whenever somebody's account gets banned for political views are strangely silent right now...

They were cheering it on a week or two ago when it was against Russians.

My favorite was when they were licking their lips and reaching ecstasy over Parler getting deplatformed but then throwing a tantrum like a week later when Terraria dev got banned by Google.

Terraria guy and this guy simply need to build their own Google, Gmail, Play Store, and Android, easy! ;)

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

#399

Post by duxup »

ncann wrote: post #388
hbn wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reminds me of Nine familial exterminations in China back in the days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations

In the Apple TV series Foundation they do that, including extending beyond the family to any kind of connections, friends and etc. Eventually including something around 1500+ individuals tied to one person. The point being to eliminate whatever impact that person had on the universe.

Maybe Google's algorithm is more concerned with being a tyrannical emperor than we think ...

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

#400

Post by throwuxiytayq »

laurent92 wrote: post #396
throwuxiytayq wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the service. For example, if proton bans me I can move my email to a different provider because I own my domain. In case of Obsidian, it's an offline app that uses Markdown, so I can easily migrate to a different note-taking software for any reason. Your backup note is on point; I highly recommend everyone to do a Google Takeout every few months (or at least years!!). If you've never done one, like most Go…

If your domain registar bans you, you’ll lose your email all the same. “GoDaddy has two major problems. First, their customer service (…). Second, if there are accusations made against you, they will shut you down and side with your accuser more often than not.“ https://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discuss...

Fair point. I think in this case relying on a domain registrar or an email service is somewhat inevitable, though.
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