181–190 of 406 posts
These companies need to be regulated ASAP. Especially when it comes to terminating users.
Also teach people to use and prefer F-Droid over Google Play when possible, and make your open source app available on it: - no obscure ban for application vendors - no mandatory account for installing apps and from which you can be banned - no user tracking If you don't like vendor lock-ins and its consequences, push for the alternatives.
Would F-Droid have accepted them with an ad bundle included? I seem to remember that as an anti-feature for them.
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Well we are talking about companies with questionable ethical practices. It would be weird to NOT mention the neo-nazi tolerance when suggesting epik in a discussion like this.
As someone who has a lot to lose if nazis ever get back in power: isn't the correct thing to still register their domains and just go to the police with it? Based on my sysadmin background I actively try to know as little about my customers as possible: sure I might become a hero whistleblower but more likely I'll taint myself in various ways.
Sorry if that might seem naive, if it makes anyone feel better I'm not operating a domain registrar or hosting provider so my opinion is kind of moot anyway :)
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(Author here.) This is excellent advice for consumer apps/products, (it's especially important to keep enterprise accounts fully separate from your individual consumer accounts), but it wouldn't have helped DroidScript in this case. DroidScript is a non-profit organization; when they signed up for Google AdMob and Google Play Store, they provided the same tax ID (their EIN) in both cases. Creating separate Google acc…
> Creating a subsidiary business for every type of Google account you have would be quite expensive Costs roughly $1000/yr to run a properly sheltered LLC. Just saying, that’s a low barrier to overcome for any company turning modest revenue.
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> If there's a good alternative never use Google anything. Brave instead of Chrome. Duck Duck Go instead of Google. Proton Mail instead of Gmail. The only thing I haven't been able to replace is YouTube. That's a tricky one because it's the content creators that keep me locked into it.
Many content creators are starting to move to a Patreon+Twitch model, in addition to YouTube.
Their top streamers can literally spread their asshole on camera and get a 3 day ban. All this while normal streamers can get permanently banned for any small offence.
Vimeo or Floatplane seems to be the way to go, depending whether you want to be subscriber-only or have free viewers too.
Also teach people to use and prefer F-Droid over Google Play when possible, and make your open source app available on it: - no obscure ban for application vendors - no mandatory account for installing apps and from which you can be banned - no user tracking If you don't like vendor lock-ins and its consequences, push for the alternatives.
Is it feasible for anyone attempting to make an app paid in some form? Would they accept any form of ads or requiring login into a paid account? Note that F-Droid often has build issues, with app version on F-Droid lagging months behind actually released version.
Ads are probably fine if they are shown using free software but will be marked as an anti-feature. Same for tracking.
In app payment is probably fine too, and will not be subject to a 30% fee or something.
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> - Your Amazon shopping account and your AWS account should definitely not be the same account. My Amazon account has been locked for a few days now because I tried to buy a friend a gift card, and I can't even access my AWS account at all. Thankfully all I have on there currently is some old backups in S3, but I previously used AWS for some projects and this could've been a fucking disaster. I tried to buy an Amazo…
I've just had a similar experience with ebay. About 75% of the times I log on to ebay, (no exaggeration, I only purchase something a few times a year and this happens almost every time), my account gets locked for suspected unauthorised access and I'm forced to reset my password. I have a static IP, and only ever use the same two devices. I have a strong unique password. I spent 15 minutes on the phone with their acc…
They keep spamming me with the meaningless "help us protect your account" emails tho. The kind with a lock icon and zero useful information. I set up a rule to auto-delete those.
Because I have so little traffic, I'm exposed to more ad-fraud and false clicks from competitors.
I shut off all ads on my apps for now, and my goal changed form making money to acquiring users
I keep reading about all of these people who got their Google accounts nuked, both business and personal, and keep wondering how there hasn't been a class-action lawsuit yet. Their marketing says "your data in the cloud, safe", but then uploading a single copyrighted movie to GDrive (even if you don't share it) can result in not only losing access to all your other unrelated files, but also emails, app purchases, etc…
If they're banning a free account and you haven't suffered any monetary loss I doubt if the court will take kindly to its time being wasted with a case like this. Any argument about data loss would be put back on you with "back up better next time"
This way, Google can keep the general muck banned but the actual troublemakers or those capacity for such will stay up.
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Can confirm this solid advice. Even at a mega-scale social games publisher like Zynga, we had to deal with automated bans all the time. That's why at one point we used an avatar for each game that was separately managed and was basically a separate identity with a separate bank account with a holding company etc. - Invent an avatar that has their own profile, residence, birth date, gender etc. - Use separate email ad…
How do you make an avatar with a bank account?