It is well known that if Google bans your account it will ban any "related" account and that includes your immediate family including your spouse, parents, children and your official job/startup.
I never understood this bizarre behaviour from Google. My colleagues got a taste of it when they shared their laptop and one of them had a banned account.
It was a defence project and the work computers were not allowed to have internet. One common computer away from work area and in a different lan was a designated internet computer. Unfortunately one dev with a banned account set a chain reaction of getting everyone else banned.
Did their accounts end up permanently banned or could they recover them? Seems like something that could actually be abused if not. A weaponized banned Google account on a laptop. A laptop with cooties. The seven generations punishment.
I'm no longer doing android development, thankfully (never again!) -- I don't relish the thought of having to ask house guests if they or anyone they know have ever been banned from Google. I don't understand how Google can staff up their Play store with engineers given this keeps happening.
They are weaponised already unfortunately. There are HN stories of competitors reporting devs/apps and them getting irrevocably banned without a platform to complain on/to. I used to like/defend Google, but they keep disappointing.
I even have Google-anxiety and am considering moving everything away before it becomes too late
> Did their accounts end up permanently banned or could they recover them?
How could they recover them? The only support Google offers for situations like this is write a sob story on social media, and hope it gets enough traction that a Google employee intervenes.
> It is well known that if Google bans your account it will ban any "related" account and that includes your immediate family including your spouse, parents, children and your official job/startup.
I find this behavior terrifying. Destroying people's accounts just for having the same blood as someone deemed ban-able.
The reason? None. Just a generic response sent to the developers on Christmas Day. Might have been the grinch himself issuing those automated responses to others.
This company and its services (including, YouTube) are run by bots and they are the ones doing the moderation and not even the humans running them care at all.
Unless something completely fundamental happens, Google (and its services) don't care and they will never change.
Not to really defend Google here, but how else would you do it? The amount of data on these platforms is enormous and having people review the videos/apps/whatever would be simply prohibitively expensive.
I think they need to balance how strict their abuse detection is. Making it too strict will kick out legitimate users without mercy. Making it less strict will allow potentially harmful (for business) content to spread on their platform, which could lead to lawsuits, loss of advertisers etc. You can see which direction is more appealing for a corporation.
So concretely, now we complain about mistreated users, but if the automatic moderation was less strict, we'd complain about extreme content. It's not an easy problem.
> Not to really defend Google here, but how else would you do it? The amount of data on these platforms is enormous and having people review the videos/apps/whatever would be simply prohibitively expensive.
Google is not incapable of providing customer support. Netflix, Apple, and Amazon all manage to provide free, robust customer service.
Exactly. Additional this is not a free platform like YouTube or Gmail: creating a Google Play account costs money, and Google took a cut of every app sale. Saying that Google has too many free users to provide support doesn't make sense here...
Is that a lot from Google's perspective? If apps follow some power law distribution it might only be worth providing human support to a very limited number of them.
Customer support is provided for sub $20 items from e commerce sites who don't have Google's market cap. Not to mention that a customer support agent's time isn't exactly worth hundreds of dollars an hour.
It depends on how narrowly focused Google's strategy and commitment to reliable income is.
Linearly scaling up on human support agents doesn't look aligned with an AI driven strategy to enable income that is only coming from their advertising services.
Google Services generated $69.4 billion, or about 92% of total revenue, in Q4 FY 2021. Advertising revenue, at $61.2 billion, comprised 88% of the segment's revenue. The segment's revenue is up 31.3% compared to Q4 FY 2020. Google Services posted operating income of $26.0 billion, up 36.3% from the year-ago quarter.
This figure surpassed Alphabet's total consolidated operating income of $21.9 billion due to operating losses in the other two segments as well as unallocated corporate costs. Google Services is thus the only segment that currently makes positive contributions to Alphabet's overall operating income
So Google Play can only exist in ways where it supports advertising. Sales are trivial in comparison. "Delighting" every app publisher is simply distracting.
These horror stories would mostly come from publishers that rely on the source of income, from whom the yearly Google play is likely to be at least a few thousands. There's no excuse to not involve a human in a decision as drastic as account termination.
The figures include sales of apps, in-app purchase and *app store ads*.
I would also prefer that Google have more tolerable support for publishers (and users), but it looks like those at the helm might be thinking it's irresponsible to see publishers as important customers. The publishers are not the ones providing the vast majority of the revenue - that seems to be advertiser.
The attention economy is addictive for those pushing it as well.
If they blatantly lie to steal your money, you can now prove actual damages in court. That's an improvement over trying to sue over a lost free gmail account. Not that I think going to court is an ideal solution, but what other choice do you have as a lowly civilian without friends in Mountain View?
Why? I appreciate the "always assume bad faith" approach for corporations (hell, I'm the biggest advocate) but what's the benefit for Google here?
1. The support cost is totally offset -- at $50/hour, it would give someone four hours to investigate and two hours to prepare a report.
2. Bad actors won't pay, and neither will people who haven't really made money on the store
3. Google develops an actual framework for resolution
4. Some level of trust is developed again
5. It helps provide better training data for Google's automated process -- the engineers behind it probably cost $300/day each.
I really can't see a situation where this would incentivise Google to steal money. It would land them in much hotter water than anything else they've been involved in before. We're talking international lawsuits if just one single support staff decides to be a whistleblower. It's too involved of a conspiracy.
If it is a service they provide for free, charging a fee to get something important (like a total account ban) fairly reconsidered would be perfectly reasonable. Google is big enough the government should require that sort of thing.
"Let's be as evil as we want to be" is a fairly inappropriate guideline for a company like that.
They could begin by segmenting their accounts such that a trivial youtube ban doesn't result in a full google service account ban. That seems pretty damn basic right?
It is because of polices like that which guarantees I will never use Google Cloud. Why risk getting my email pulled so I can host cat videos when AWS will not dangle the sword of Damocles above my head.
They don’t need to filter and moderate everything, but they should at least have humans for taking care of escalations and issues like the one reported here. Sure 5hey have all sorts of AI/ML algorithms doing the automated banning and removal of apps but they could have real people taking care of the false positive cases.
> The amount of data on these platforms is enormous and having people review the videos/apps/whatever would be simply prohibitively expensive.
For free accounts, maybe. But it wouldn't be very expensive to provide basic service to accounts with significant money flow where google is taking a cut. Or accounts that are directly paying every month.
Based on the frequency with which this sort of post gets significant traction it's pretty clear that no one at Google gives a crap about this issue. I find it hard to imagine that people in Google are unaware of this problem.
I often wonder if this has happened to people with more clout who have managed to pull strings to get it sorted, or if Google have just got lucky and managed to avoid hitting someone who might actually be in a position to fight back.
> Based on the frequency with which this sort of post gets significant traction it's pretty clear that no one at Google gives a crap about this issue.
Lots of other reasonable explanations that match the available evidence and involve Google caring about this issue. For example, their hands could be tied by legal forces beyond their control. Or they could care a great deal, but perhaps they have been unable to resolve this issue with an acceptable false-negative level on actual bad actors. Another possibility is that the ban was well-earned and the article's author knows this and simply has not disclosed the fact to the readership.
What sort of legal issues would prevent Google actually providing some information on the reason for the ban, of prevent it actually engaging in any kind of useful communication?
My issue with these bans is not the bans themselves, but the Kafkaesc process in which you are supposed to argue why you think their decision is wrong without knowing what they based the decision on.
I'm not in a position to comment about what sorts of legal issues there might be. But Google is hardly the only company that hands down bans with scant explanation. It's endemic. I've actually not heard of a large company that gives detailed explanations in these sorts of situations. That leads me to believe there is a good reason for avoiding such explanations, since I would expect some variation in company behavior otherwise.
The reason is that it's expensive and companies don't want to waste resources verifying whether or not their bans followed their policy accurately or not.
For every account banned, one million new users will enter the Google ecosystem. Bans cost them nothing in the long run, but having reviews to justify bans would.
I suspect it's because a lot of these automated bans are done without any clear actual reason beyond "our machine learning model found something, but we can't really get a coherent picture of why".
Last week I created a brand new Facebook account as I recently moved to a new city and am somewhat desperate to meet people, and Facebook events can be useful for this (as much as I loathe Facebook, my mental health is a bit more important right now). I got banned after about 2 minutes. I didn't actually do anything on the platform. I managed to click to about 2 or 3 pages.
What set this off? Who knows. Maybe some browser settings? Previous user(s) of my IP address? Those pages I clicked on? Something else? It surely wasn't anything I actually did as I didn't really interact with the platform at all.
I suspect that if I asked some high-up Facebook engineer to look in to it they wouldn't be able to actually give me an answer either beyond "The Algorithm determined there were risk factors".
I doubt it, personally. At least in the case of the article. I have no special knowledge of this, but tenure would be one of the first override parameters I would use to trigger human review. It seems unlikely to allow an account that has been active and making money for six years to be banned without a human analyst in the loop.
As to your FB ban, I'm sorry that happened but I have no insight to share.
I'm not so sure about that; like you said in your previous comment: the scale of all of this is huge, and the amount of money these companies are making is similarly huge. It's genuinely a hard problem, and they can afford to lose this business.
Was that a complete ban, or was it an attempt to get your phone number and other personal details?
Instagram has always banned my accounts for suspicious behaviour on whatever page is first used after the account is created - the only way they offer to progress is to give them a phone number. It's a pretty transparent grab for more info to sell.
They did ask for my phone, but I think that's okay; it's somewhat effective at preventing spam/abuse.
Funny enough, when I checked after posting my previous comment I could log in and it was all good. I didn't do anything, and now I got an email saying "Your Facebook account has been disabled. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn't follow our Community Standards". All I did was log in, view the home page, and close the tab.
I think it's not strictly legal issues but one of two things.
The first is what I've heard being called "a healthy dose of obscurity". With a large enough pool of users, there is a finite number of behaviors that would trigger a certain ban rule. To avoid having their triggers reverse-engineered, they say as little as possible.
The second is is reasons being subject to interpretation. The risk there comes in a variety of flavors from PR risks to lawsuit risks when a developer are banned for X but there's an important nuance to X that the developer ignores by choice or otherwise.
I don't mean to defend anyone here, I'm just hoping that someone smarter than me will tackle this somehow.
But you see these stories again and again about Google specifically. The creator of Terraria was banned a while back and was also unable to get it corrected or get a real human to respond. You'd think if they are terminating accounts that are bringing in money they could put down the automation for one second and actually do the right thing.
> Lots of other reasonable explanations that match the available evidence and involve Google caring about this issue...
Or, more likely: they "care," but not enough to actually spend the money to fix the problem (e.g. quit relying so much on algorithms, and staff a department of real people to apply some human judgement).
My understanding is there's a cultural problem at Google, where they think stuff like this must be done algorithmically, even if it's not a actually a job for an algorithm.
I remember at least one case where a Google employee's spouse got banned by the company and he never was able to find out why. Your spouse got depersoned, get over it
We should probably reserve judgement until the author reveals more details about the things they were doing on the app store. The article is suspiciously light on details on what exactly they were doing that could have justified it, citing only "teach[ing] people to create their own applications and create their own app business".
To be clear, I'm not defending Google here. The "ban-you-and-everyone-that-has-ever-had-contact-with-you-without-telling-you-why" system is obviously nuts-o and has caught a bunch of innocent bystanders off-guard.
We can absolutely judge Google regardless, because even if their reasons for a ban could hypothetically be justified, their behavior in communication and appeal handling will never be.
The problem is they make everything powered by machine learning. Can you imagine getting such a thing to even 99% accuracy? Even if it was 99% accurate, that's still hundreds of thousands if not millions of mistakes.
What is the answer to this in a world of scammers, bad actors, etc? Perhaps it should be illegal to ban a user and if a user is truly abusive then sue them in court for damages.
Speaking of suing, why has nobody sued Google or others for this behavior?
Google really should have a manual process with actual humans one can interact with when Google accounts that had enough money pass through them are involved.
> Google really should have a manual process with actual humans one can interact with when Google accounts that had enough money pass through them are involved
Flip side of this is compromised accounts, or those doing illegal or dangerous things would run far longer.
Your account would get suspended, and google would contact you to verify what happened, that your account did whatever it did, and if it was you or someone else doing that.
It's not the suspending that's the problem, it's the inability to find out why it was suspended, and the inability to get someone to reinstate your account.
Given the number of legit bad actors, I don't think it's reasonable to make it illegal to ban users.
If anything it should be made easier to install programs without a "store" at all. Operating systems worked fine without this concept, and the play store and ios store are functioning as rent-seeking middle men, taking money without offering anything of value in return.
The same answer that existed in all other industries which do consumer services: proper customer services with humans and strong consumer protection law that stomps on the neck of corporations that abuse people without recourse.
Illegal to ban users? So a neo-nazi account spams, harasses, doxxes hundreds of users and spreads gore all over your platform, and you aren't allowed to shut them down unless you go through the court system first? This is one of the most absurd ideas I've ever heard.
Harassment is against the law. Maybe your platform shouldn't allow such abuse? They can fix their platform so this isn't possible without banning anybody. I'm just brainstorming here.
> They can fix their platform so this isn't possible without banning anybody.
How? You can't preemptively determine the output of a Turing-complete program without solving the halting problem, so while Google will always try to do their damnedest to predict a bad actor before they get to the store, they will definitely always fail to find some.
If they can't ban them when they find them, what should the alternative be?
Right. What makes some less abusable than others? Do more of that.
You obviously can't eliminate all abuse but it can be managed to an acceptable degree with thoughtful design.
This is getting away from my larger point that the incentives here are screwed up. Why is that? Why doesn't Google fix their shit? What is blocking this from fixing itself? Usually there is an incentive like threat of lawsuit or people leaving the platform.
Yes, perhaps we could come up with a set of rules that users must abide by to use the service, such as not being abusive. And if they're found to be breaking these rules, we could then restrict their access to the service. The worst actors would have their access restricted permanently.
If you're suggesting "stop 100% of all abusive content before it happens," that's just silly.
Is the government allowed to shut them down without a court order? If not, why should you be able to? Do you feel you can do a better job?
There's something to be said for not shutting down someone unless they break a law. I do acknowledge the court would need to be much faster and easier to access for these kinds of things though, you don't want to burden a provider with enormous legal bills just to deal with this kind of thing.
If I host a service for manchester city fans, why would I not be able to ban annoying united fans? Who cares if what they do is legal. What if I post NSFW content here on hn. It's not illegal so it's okay?
Just this month content creators from Russia or belarus have been banned from dozen of services, they did not violate any law.
It's ridiculous to think that yout platform isn't free to apply it's own rules.
Setting "is it illegal?" as the bar would allow nigh any content whatsoever as creators could just go host-shopping until we found a country where our objectionable material was legal.
If you do the same in a public space, a cop will stop you immediately without waiting for a court order. Or even a security guard. Judges are definitely not the starting point of all security actions.
Cops aren't allowed to stop you from saying neo-Nazi things on a government-owned public space unless you live in a country where free speech doesn't exist.
So you claim, random Internet user. The rest of the world sees things differently. Even in the USA, plenty of things are explicitly illegal to say out loud in public, such as calling out "fire" or anything pornographic. You also still have a political prison in Guantanamo where people are detained indefinitely without trial, but sure, tell us what freedom means.
We already have the answer. We do not really need new laws, or regulation
We need enforcement of contract law (and maybe a prohibition on binding arbitration which would be a new law)
However today these "Terms of service" are not really treated like a normal contract, in a few ways
One most of them are massively one sided, which should make them unenforceable and disallowed. Also standard contracts most of the time require notification of specific violations with documentation of the violation that triggers termination of the contract, not these vague assertions that with no documentation of the violation. Also for the most part contracts do not allow these open ended catch all type of provisions most Terms of service have, there are exceptions of course but it seems to have enacted a completely different level of provisions for these "terms of service" agreements that would not be permitted in other contexts of contract law
I would be in favor of legislation which allows for bans, but makes it harder to (not impossible) do so for the large companies. The EU's DMA (Digital Markets Act) defines "Gatekeepers", which is an OK definition of what could count as "large" in this context.
Large companies shouldn't be able to get away with banning people without good reason, documenting and stating that good reason, and have a reasonable and "real" appeals process, with courts being the last step of the process if needed.
Want to ban that person harassing others? Sure thing, document the harassment, clearly spell out in your account termination email that harassment was the reason (and what even constitutes harassment), offer that appeals process. Document the decision and evidence, in case an independent mediator (like a court) asks for it. Don't just vaguely point to some 70-page "Community Standards" document, and have bots auto-respond with "Denied" emails to appeals.
As the German constitution law (Grundgesetz) spells out: "Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen." ("Property obliges. Its use should also serve the public good."). I think that's a good approach to property.
> Large companies shouldn't be able to get away with banning people without good reason
Why not? I understand that a lot of people don't like this behavior, but why should it be illegal? The law is a very blunt instrument, and government is already far too intrusive into every aspect of people's lives. The fact that you see a problem does not mean the law/government can fix it.
Consider the law/government version of the old programmer's joke about regular expressions:
Some people, whenever they have a problem with behavior they don't like, think: Let's get the law/government to solve it! Now they have two problems.
>Why not? I understand that a lot of people don't like this behavior, but why should it be illegal?
Because these large companies are basically utility companies in my humble opinion, and wield a whole lot of power over people's lives and livelihoods. There are basically defacto monopolies in their respective spaces. This power and influence shouldn't go entirely unchecked. Same as we (try to) regulate other industries, often even players that are far "smaller" than the internet behemoths. Which brings me back to Eigentum verpflichtet.
>The law is a very blunt instrument, and government is already far too intrusive into every aspect of people's lives.
I see this argument a lot. First of all, we're not even talking about regulating people, we talk about regulating companies worth billions and sometimes even trillions, so I am a little less concerned about being "intrusive" there. And then, the law is quite often rather blunt, agreed, but it doesn't have to be that blunt.
Google's or Meta's "Community Standards" at the same time seem to be rather blunt as well, and the enforcement deliberately arbitrary.
>Some people, whenever they have a problem with behavior they don't like, think: Let's get the law/government to solve it! Now they have two problems.
At the least with the law/government[0], we have a theoretical control (through voting), theoretical checks and balances (through separation of power) and a theoretical way to have input into decision making (through activism, lobbying, opposition parties). We do not have any of that when it comes to companies.
And not everything the government does is always bad. The government is the reason you're drinking a lot less lead in your water, that we do not let regular companies sell heroin solution as cough syrup anymore, or that banks aren't allowed to redline black people anymore (whether enforcement works is another thing), or dump their toxic waste in your backyard. In my parts of the world, the government even made it so that I do not have to fear going bankrupt and homeless when I lose a job or become ill, or that an employer cannot knowingly assign me jobs that will make me ill without even telling me about that risk.
Yeah, there are plenty of things the governments did and still do that are not great, or outright bad and/or evil, sometimes because a policy didn't work out the way it was expected and lead to bad outcomes, sometimes because a policy had exactly the indented outcome. And it usually takes quite some effort and time to change that.
At the same time, there are plenty of bad things large companies did and are still doing, more often than not to maximize profits, or at least for power and influence, and the only real incentives we have to make them stop is market pressure (i.e. boycotts or protests, which hardly ever work) or regulation (which works quite well, but can have the side effect of regulatory capture). Take the instrument of regulation away, because it's too blunt, or the government cannot be trusted, or whatever, and we'll end up (again[1]) with a bunch of companies that are defacto governments - but of the dictatorial variety.
To me, the solution neither is no regulation nor always regulation, but finding a good balance of what and what not to regulate, and how to regulate. The power balance between those large internet companies and their users/customers/subcontractors and "gig workers"[2] is skewed very heavily in favor of the large companies and thus I think could use some unskewing by regulatory measures.
[0] When I keep talking about government(s) here, I mean our democratic governments.
[1] The East India Company, for example, while still technically beholden to the Crown, had their own military, and made their own defacto laws in large parts of the world. It took the Indian rebellion, with a toll of close to 1M lives, and the British Government to reign them in.
> these large companies are basically utility companies
I could see the Internet itself being treated as a public utility (and US law already does this in some ways, for example by requiring ISPs to serve rural areas where there aren't enough users to make it profitable). But app stores are not. App stores are the way they are not because of any fundamental limitation of app distribution over the Internet, but because users have chosen that model. If developers want to "fix" that, they need to use their own market power to not use Google Play at all, so that users have to switch to a different model because there are no apps on Google Play. The government doesn't need to get involved in this.
> and wield a whole lot of power over people's lives and livelihoods
Google only has power over your livelihood as a developer if you let them. Which, as I've already commented upthread, is not a choice any sane developer should make given Google's track record. Developers should simply stop distributing apps through Google Play if they don't like Google's behavior. That's how a free market is supposed to work.
> we're not even talking about regulating people, we talk about regulating companies worth billions and sometimes even trillions, so I am a little less concerned about being "intrusive" there.
Regulating companies worth billions and trillions just makes it harder for companies that aren't worth billions and trillions to compete. It doesn't faze the companies that are worth billions and trillions; they just buy the regulations that favor them. Look up "regulatory capture". Governments can't effectively regulate companies of this size. But they can certainly regulate potential competitors to those companies out of existence.
> We do not have any of that when it comes to companies.
But you have something a lot more powerful: the ability to boycott. All those government avenues you describe are extremely weak, and continue to get weaker over time. The US Congress has approval ratings in the single digits and incumbent reelection rates above 90 percent. That's a huge sign that you can't fix whatever problem you want to fix using the government. Whereas in the free market, you can exercise your market power immediately by changing what transactions you do and do not choose to make.
> not everything the government does is always bad
The fact that the government does some good things does not mean government regulation is a good thing all things considered. And even with the "good" things you describe, you don't see their downsides. You don't see what the world would have been like if people had chosen to use free market power to regulate those things instead of the government.
> boycotts or protests, which hardly ever work
Protests hardly ever work because they don't change the company's bottom line. Boycotts can and do work because they do change the company's bottom line.
> a bunch of companies that are defacto governments
Companies only get such power if governments give it to them. Your example of the East India Company illustrates that. Without the special privileges given to them by the British government, they would have been powerless to do the things they did.
> I would consider a lot of the small time app developers to be essentially gig workers
For Google (or Apple if they develop iOS apps), yes. Why? Why are developers continuing to feed these monsters?
>App stores are the way they are not because of any fundamental limitation of app distribution over the Internet, but because users have chosen that model.
Users have not chosen. App developers have not chosen. Apple has chosen and Google copied them.
Google and Apple effectively have a duopoly over app stores.
>Developers should simply stop distributing apps through Google Play if they don't like Google's behavior. That's how a free market is supposed to work.
No, the free market is supposed to work by having a seller and a buyer find each other and make a deal. However, with app stores, a middle man forcefully inserts itself into that equation in a way that cannot be sidestepped by buyer and seller. Some buyers and sellers are fine with it, but some is hardly all.
The option app developers have right now is to either be obedient to the app stores, or change profession.
>Regulating companies worth billions and trillions just makes it harder for companies that aren't worth billions and trillions to compete.
You're talking regulatory capture, which indeed is a concern. That's why I mentioned the "gatekeeper" definition of the upcoming EU DMA... It considers size and (market) power, and only regulates large companies.
>But you have something a lot more powerful: the ability to boycott.
Boycotts are a joke in general. They only work if you find a majority supporting that such a boycott, and often to a degree where it actually hurts. It doesn't do anything to protect any (large) minority. So when e.g. black people got redlined, were they supposed to boycott the banks that refused to do business with them in the first place? Because the white majority clearly didn't care enough; they got their loans, they were happy and content, and often didn't even really know about the plight of their fellow citizens.
>The US Congress has approval ratings in the single digits and incumbent reelection rates above 90 percent. That's a huge sign that you can't fix whatever problem you want to fix using the government.
The US political system can be changed. The Tea Party demonstrated that, Obama and Bernie and Trump demonstrated that (whether one agrees with these people is another matter, the point is that even in the US, which is plagued by the first-past-the-post voting, change is possible).
And you don't necessarily have to replace people, just make them fear enough that they might be replaced if they do not play ball. You could consider that a boycott at the ballot ;)
>The fact that the government does some good things does not mean government regulation is a good thing all things considered.
No, it doesn't necessitate that. But historically, it is, all things considered.
>And even with the "good" things you describe, you don't see their downsides.
Yeah, I somehow fail to see the downside of the government preventing companies from dumping toxic waste in my backyard, or government enabling me to get health care when I need it.
>You don't see what the world would have been like if people had chosen to use free market power to regulate those things instead of the government.
But I have seen that. I explicitly mentioned the East India company. I saw banks redlining people, fuel producers putting lead in gasoline, industry working people to literal death (making them sick, or working them in unsafe conditions) because human resources were cheap and replenish-able, and people were willing to do that work to avoid almost certain starvation and homelessness if they did not. And then there is this profession that doesn't care about laws anyway: narcos and other criminals. And they bring havoc wherever they go.
I have seen enough.
>Companies only get such power if governments give it to them. Your example of the East India Company illustrates that.
You're basically advocating for no government (or an entirely toothless government). In your system, the East India company wo...
> why has nobody sued Google or others for this behavior?
Because there are no legal grounds for such a suit. Google is providing a service (Google Play developer accounts), and its terms of service clearly state that it can terminate any account whenever it wants. However nasty you might find this behavior in a moral sense, legally Google is perfectly within its rights to operate this way.
The only real response any developer can make to this is to not use Google Play to distribute apps. And certainly not to build a business on whose income you and your family will depend on it.
Unfortunately, anytime you depend on a third party whether it be Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc., this is the exact risk you take. Don’t feed the dragon.
This. If you want to make any kind of mobile app, you have to deal with the Apple and Google duopoly that's had a stranglehold on the mobile app distribution market for over a decade now.
60% of mobile users in the US use iOS, and Apple has hobbled mobile Safari's browser and JavaScript engines in order to prevent web apps from implementing basic of features that native apps have had for a decade.
You can't even work around that problem because Apple bans any other browser or scripting engine from being distributed on iOS, so users are stuck with an intentionally limited browser for web apps, which makes web apps second-class citizens on the platform.
F-Droid is a second-class citizen on billions of existing Android phones, tablets and streaming devices. Google also shows numerous scary warnings meant to trick users into believing that F-Droid is going to hack them or give them malware should they try to use it.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are slowly getting us there, even though Apple fights tooth and nail at every step of the way.
I attended an event that had mobile food ordering and they actually promoted "No need to download an app. Just order online at food.example" and you got a nice mobile optimized web site.
Sure, you and I can do that. But as a developer wanting to distribute my app, how do I persuade every potential user to go that route? It feels sketchy as fuck when you are doing it.
I still think some congress person needs to pass a consumer rights bill that forces companies like this to disclose the exact reason and data relating the account termination. The excuse of security practices should not come before consumer rights.
Frankly, we would ALL also be safer if the decision had to be made based on conduct on that specific service and could not include anything outside that service. There is a certain scale where your company is now an internet utility and you should have to act like every other utility.
Companies making over a certain amount should be banned from outright removing your access to your account. At most it should be making the account read only.
People have a right to their photos, emails, conversations, and data they have safeguarded to these companies.
I think I agree with you, but I will say I don’t envy Google’s position on this one. They have massive amounts of fraud and spam to contend with. Coming up with a system that allows them to retain legit uses but prevents them from shutting down naughty people doesn’t sound good. There need to be a mechanism that allows account recovery in a way that is actually sustainable.
Seems reasonable to make Google liable for your damages. They've incentivizing people to use their store, and then pulling the rug out from under them.
Similar logic has already been applied in the US for e.g. rapes that occur on a business' property. If they're incentivizing you to come their, they are liable for bad thing that happen to you.
Well, Google is trying to get you to pay for it by putting you at risk of account suspension via poor policies.
If Google wants to neutralize spammers that's their business. The law doesn't have to stop them. But causing severe financial harm to your business partners with no recourse is something the law should care about and stop.
1. How exactly do propose a bill to limit a company in how they use their property and enforce use of that property by an end user?
2. Bad actors out number good actors with honest accidents at over 1 million to one and obviously disclosing gives unequal advantage to the bad actors and harms the one accident good actor.
> 1. How exactly do propose a bill to limit a company in how they use their property and enforce use of that property by an end user?
Is this a trick question? The same way all the other bills have been written. Most service providers have laws limiting how they can use their property in providing services. Banks, hotels, nightclubs, stadiums, taxis, etc.
I feel like the answer to 1 is that it shouldn't be any more difficult than the GDPR. It's just asking for a publicly available reason and evidence for bans, not actually forbidding them?
> 2. Bad actors out number good actors with honest accidents at over 1 million to one and obviously disclosing gives unequal advantage to the bad actors and harms the one accident good actor.
I don't even care if this is hyperbole, an outrageous claim like this needs a source. You're telling me that over 99.9999% of these issues are caused by bad actors?
2. Citation needed. "1 million to one" does not even pass the laugh test, not if it's measured in any meaningful way. And the actual numbers would matter... if they were available... which they are not...
In this case, this is the exact reason why Google charges for the creation of a developer account. Having them put the money towards manual review before termination sounds extremely sensible. Especially in this case, where it sounds like the apps were selling, and Google took a cut of that the entire time; it's not like they refunded it when they decided they didn't like that business anymore.
Never going to happen for the same reason companies don't tell you why your job application was rejected because it opens them up to unnecessary liability.
You dont really lose if you a job application is rejected, you can get a job somewhere else. You cant do that when there only 2 players who control mobile Apps.
As a small (or even medium) developer, relying on a Google Play app is very dangerous. Our app with user generated content was pulled from Google Play store, because they found one profile out of 36 million (!) that had a suggestive photo. They used our profile search functionality to find it, you could not get it just by scrolling profiles. We have a neural net that rejects anything resembling porn and extensive word vector based text filtering, that forbids searching for anything explicit (unlike their own Google search app). The app cost us about 1m. Appeals were rejected with template emails. The enforcement is clearly selective, because Twitter has plenty of much more explicit porn.
The irony here is Google hides behind Section 230 immunity to avoid any responsibility for bad actors on its platforms (claiming it's even vital that they are so immune), but it doesn't extend that idea to entities under it.
Never mind the tons of porn on Reddit. They did ban the OnlyFans app though.
How many people use their mobile phone as their only internet device? So we now have two companies with essentially identical policies deciding what is or isn't too sexy for us with essentially zero accountability...
Unfortunately, as of September of last year, Google Play's terms and conditions match Apple's App Store's terms and conditions, in that apps must use Google's payment method and cannot advertise or include links to alternate methods of paying for the app or distributing it.
Ultimately, these policies are meant to further restrict viability of competition by either company.
Just a few days ago Google announced that you could use Spotify's payment method as an alternative to Google play. The top-rated HN comment for that article was: "As a user, why would I choose this?"[0]
Competition only works if the competition is effective enough to change user habits. For the average person not educated in monopolies or tech regulation, is there any incentive for them to switch to paying Spotify instead?
Other examples of frustration induced by competition are:
- Epic Games Store timed exclusives (people would rather just use Steam)
- The fragmentation of streaming video across a dozen different paid services, each with their own exclusive licensed content (people would rather just save money by paying for a single service with everything on it).
> For the average person not educated in monopolies or tech regulation, is there any incentive for them to switch to paying Spotify instead?
If it's 30% cheaper, that may be enough of an incentive. Though I don't know if that's the case here or if Spotify just eats the fee when you pay through Google.
I'm not sure of Google's policy, but with Apple, after the court order, dating apps using alternative payment methods must give Apple a 27% commission on all purchases made using the method[1], so that there is little to no difference in cost to users choosing to use the non-Apple payment method.
> Google Play's terms and conditions match Apple's App Store's terms and conditions
This is the type of damage the people who say "it's their store, they can do what they want" inflict. Apple got away with their dreadful behavior, Google would be foolish not to follow.
Forcing App Stores to have more clarity behind terminations is a missed opportunity for the EU’s Digital Markets Act. This is absurd. #PlayFairGoogle #GoogleScrewsDevs
I can and it seems to be an app to listen to Latin American radios specialized in Cumbia music.
I am not sure of the legality of it ,though,since there are already a handful of online radio players available and those seem to be doing just fine as far as I am aware. Maybe it gave access to some paywalled content ? Either that or some algorithm thought it was something illegal and flagged it as a such.
If you don't like it, just build your own app store, phone, account management, email provider, search engine, web browser, ISP, payment processor, banking system, currency, DNS provider, registrar, colo facility, machines, chip fab, silicon wafers, electrons, and universe. Geez, don't be lazy.
It's certainly indicative of why building your entire revenue stream on the good graces of a company that can shut you down at any moment is a bad strategy.
I've written two. They're available for free. If Google decides to can me tomorrow I'll put them on my personal site available for side-loading, maybe put them on the Amazon app store, and call it a day.
Don't tie critical revenue streams to the whim of a private corporation. It's high risk.
Google recently flagged downloads of my app as a malware for no reason whatsoever. It's a B2B software used in companies worldwide since 2005, digitally signed, virus checked, not a freeware with some stange business model. Nothing even remotely shady. As good as it gets when we're talking about downloadable stuff.
When download gets flagged Chrome will block the download, but that's not all - Firefox is using Google's safe browsing service as well, meaning my Windows software was only available through Edge at that point. Essentially dead.
Luckily, it was sorted out in a day or two but it was really scary. First request for review was even rejected, so I poured more info and arguments into second one, mentioned that we're advertising this software on Google Ads for all those years...
If these requests were denied it would practically kill my company and the only source of income for my family. And I'm not even using their platform like Google Play where you're in contractual relation and they can argue you're breaching some of the clauses.
This also happens with websites that distribute application downloads. If one system flags your application download as malware and puts it on a list, those lists are shared to, and aggregated by, organizations that exist up and down the software and network stack. At no point does anyone actually verify if what is on those lists is actually malware.
Does GDPR not give the author some rights? I'm in no way an expert in this area, but multiple seem to apply to this situation, but the most important ones here seems would seem to be the "right to explanation" to know how such a decision was made, a "right to rectification" to correct any data which is incorrect, and (given the magnitude of the impact) a right to avoid automated decision-making (though article 22 says this applies to decisions with a "legal effect"; does this qualify?).
And if GDPR doesn't apply for some reason ... why not?
GDPR should help but if the apps were hosted on a developer account registered to a business entity, the majority of data will relate to the business rather than the individual, in which case GDPR may not throw up a huge amount. I don't believe the automated decision making parts of GDPR apply to businesses either.
In the UK at least, if it wasn't a registered business (limited company) then there is no legal distinction between you and the trading name and hence all the rights under GDPR would be available to you.
We don't know the background, and the content of the previous mails Google has sent this developer prior to the alleged account disabling.
OP conveniently left that information out.
Without that, it's hard to draw any conclusions.
Some infractions are also difficult to convey back to the developer. For instance, I believe a business might not be allowed to communicate details, if account is under police investigation and there is suspicion that the developer might destroy evidence, that sort of thing. I'm not saying this developer has done something wrong, but we just don't know.
It's definitely infuriating if you are trapped like that.
I agree we don't know all of the facts, but one fact not in dispute is that there is no recourse if Google Play has acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner. When startups choose platforms and partners, they can pick ones who are small and friendly but more likely to go out of business, or larger ones who will persist but may harm them without recourse. There may be some middle ground where the platform or partner is large enough that near term viability seems reasonably certain and they remain reasonable to deal with, offering transparency and due process.
The OP did single out Google Play, saying they were substantially more transparent and helpful:
"There are other Google services such as Admob and Google Ads and for example if I have a problem with Google Ads I can contact them and they quickly offer me support. To try to improve advertising campaigns, you don’t even have to be the one to contact them, but they themselves send you an email saying that they are at your disposal. In fact, on one occasion I had a conversation with a very nice woman on Google Meet. On the other hand, if I have a problem as a developer on Google Play, things change, I only get a text form and always answers from templates, so I can never get “Human” support when I have a problem with my developer account."
Which gives him points for honesty in my book. It's possible he has left damaging information about himself out of his story that would materially affect our perception of his situation. Bt to me it's more likely that he is telling the truth and for whatever reason Google Play is unwilling to explain their actions, much less justify them.
A good reminder to everyone who ever works on a software product. Architects, Developers, QA, Security, Product Owners, Managers, Marketing, Sales, etc. Don't make your decisions based on what "the business" wants. Make your decisions based on the human lives that are impacted by your work. People are more important than money.
If you are a business in EU you can request mediation (https://support.google.com/legal/answer/9792937#zippy=%2Creq...). In some cases filling an appeal might work. We usually get only "Google canceled account" part of the story, but no follow up how it ended. Recently was a similar case with Simple Keyboard app, where developer got account terminated, but it was re-instated after few weeks: https://github.com/rkkr/simple-keyboard/issues/333 . Makes me wonder how many incorrectly terminated accounts are actually recovered?
The first step is moving to a custom domain. You can stay on gmail if you want; but set up a custom domain, and set up email on it and tell everyone to use your new email address.
Once you have a custom domain, it becomes way easier to change to another email service without losing any messages.
Totally agree. I've been doing this for over a decade. I've barely used my actual Gmail address for anything. I've gone through many incarnations of email, but at some point Gmail was just a solid enough UI, had the best spam filtering, and so I switched.
Everything just forwards to my Gmail address. I have a personal domain which is also setup as an outbound address. Several other domains/addresses also forward. I also do a wildcard *@something.example.org which I use for accounts/signups (unique email per site), which lets me track who's selling my address (or is breached) and has some other security benefits.
The wildcards are fantastic. I got some spam the other week, emailed the company that passed on my address (they didn't even think to remove their website name from the address) and ask for them to remove all my personal information and they couldn't even a muster a reply. Guess they weren't expecting that.
I've had Google Workspaces/Gsuite like that, but how do you accomplish the same thing with just gmail? Do you have a separate email service forward to it, or is there some way to set gmail as your DNS MX mail server and have it direct a custom domain into (and out of?) your gmail address?
My advice - just rip the bandaid off and do it. I had anticipated taking a whole weekend to update the email address on all my accounts, but it was a lot less painful than I had anticipated. Changing over ~50 accounts took me about 3 hours all told. Most services allowed me to change my email even if it used email as the “username.”
Using a password manager made this much easier, as I could easily keep track of which accounts I needed to update and which ones I still needed to do. I switched over to Fastmail and haven’t looked back.
I didn't do a lot of shopping around, but I chose them because they appeared to have a good customer service, good pricing for single-person use, and all the features you might want like support for your own domain name, email aliases, caldav, etc. I have been a happy customer for years and all of these things turned out to be true. I have had zero reason to even consider looking elsewhere.
Also the web app is really good. Like really really good. And I don't normally like web apps.
Been using them for, I think, 16+ years at this point. Their support is great. Their product is great. The price is great. For a techie like me, it's perfect. I don't know if I would put Grandma on it, though, but perhaps I would.
> I don't know if I would put Grandma on it, though, but perhaps I would.
I don't see why not; I think that overall FastMail is easier to use than gmail for example. It's not like you need to use a custom domain and all these things.
Gmail has an option to send all the emails you get to another email address, and also delete them from the original email if you want. The way I'm currently doing it is waiting for something to send me an email and then changing the account for that particular service. Eventually, I would have completely left google's influence.
Ride both horses at the same time for about a year. Setup Fastmail on a custom domain, forward your Gmail there, and as you see people emailing your Gmail, update those accounts as you get the chance.
I had a Gmail as my primary for over 10 years, did exactly this for 3 years, and now I’ll get maybe 2-3 junk notices per year to my old Gmail.
My concern is the hundreds of GB of photos I have saved with Google and Apple. I assume one day I will wake up and find I've lost access to them with no recourse, which means backing them up on a large hard drive is my only real option, exactly like 2010.
This is true, but in any event I feel it's more likely I'll lose access to my Google account than that Google will suffer a storage failure and lose my photos. I didn't have a laptop or desktop for a few years, which makes having my own backups a lot more difficult, but at this point I should probably take care of it.
There are other options. You can use something like rclone to make multiple copies across cloud storage providers. You could also rent some cheap cloud storage like Backblaze B2 and use a backup software like restic.
With rare exceptions, I read my-account-was-canceled stories and there’s something sketchy. Here it’s:
I became part of a company where we teach people to create their own applications and create their own app business.
Logically there’s nothing wrong with that. Empirically, in 2022 the reliable ways for random developers to make money by publishing apps involve gray areas at best.
I mean, what are the generically applicable methods this company teaches likely to look like?
How Google handles whack-a-mole accounts isn’t surprising.
Sounds kind of like the old "marketing training" scam, where once you pay for $5000 or whatever what they teach you is... "spam a bunch of websites about how to start your own marketing business for $5000"
Not saying Google is in the right here by any means, but I'm a bit suspicious of these complaints where the party curiously omits the details of why they were banned, the nature of their previous earnings, etc.
Maybe not, but it stretches credulity that they have absolutely no idea, not even a guess, as to the cause. The ban letter says they previously received other notices. Where are they? And what steps, if any, did they take to resolve then? They don't even describe their app, which ordinarily would seen like the first thing to do to establish the injustice of the affair. "My app just makes generative cat photos. What's ban-worthy about that?"
> Maybe not, but it stretches credulity that they have absolutely no idea, not even a guess, as to the cause.
It doesn't, actually. Everything I've read about Google indicates they're extremely opaque and will ban for bizarre reasons.
Google itself might not even know. After all, machine learning isn't known for being able to explain itself.
> The ban letter says they previously received other notices. Where are they?
IIRC, I understand that someones those notices come all at once at the same time as the ban, if they come at all. It's also quite possible that the ban message from Google is in fact inaccurate.
> And what steps, if any, did they take to resolve then?
What steps could they take? My understanding is that Google offers no recourse to a human, and their automated appeals process might as well be a "reject all" rule (if it isn't literally that).
You seem to be operating under the assumption that Google has implemented a fair and reasonable process, so the onus is on the person who runs afoul of it. However, everything I've read has led me to believe Google doesn't have a fair and reasonable process, because they rely too-heavily on algorithms and automation.
Thanks for the disagreement; those are all very reasonable points. However I reiterate I'm not condoning Google's behavior. Rather, I'm talking about the app-creator's own lack of transparency in trying to make his case. He should be more forthcoming to his audience about the nature of his app and whether in his estimation there was anything potentially illegal or objectionable about it. And if not, state so unambiguously. This is information he could convey regardless of how opaque Google's own process is.
My Adsense was banned (many years ago) with similar wording and yet I was never given a real reason. The final termination email said the reason was outlined in earlier emails, but it was not actionable detail; the previous emails just said ‘click fraud’. We were getting millions of clicks a month from visitors to the content on our sites so there was nothing actionable we could do. Despite removing ads completely but that is not really a solution.
So it is not so clear if they received anything useful before or not. They did use ads and the ads team is quite trigger happy, which is interesting because competitors can indeed cancel your business by creating click fraud. The ‘AI’ can detect click fraud, but cannot filter it (wat?) so this happens a lot.
> The very email he posts clearly say "Prior violations ... as outlined in previous emails sent"
I helped someone out with a similar issue, a friend of mine who was doing something very very uncontroversial.
The "previous messages" had no extra information at all except, "You might have broken our terms of service with this page" - a link to their main page, with no additional information.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadI never understood this bizarre behaviour from Google. My colleagues got a taste of it when they shared their laptop and one of them had a banned account.
It was a defence project and the work computers were not allowed to have internet. One common computer away from work area and in a different lan was a designated internet computer. Unfortunately one dev with a banned account set a chain reaction of getting everyone else banned.
I even have Google-anxiety and am considering moving everything away before it becomes too late
How could they recover them? The only support Google offers for situations like this is write a sob story on social media, and hope it gets enough traction that a Google employee intervenes.
I find this behavior terrifying. Destroying people's accounts just for having the same blood as someone deemed ban-able.
Guilt by association taken to the extreme
The reason? None. Just a generic response sent to the developers on Christmas Day. Might have been the grinch himself issuing those automated responses to others.
This company and its services (including, YouTube) are run by bots and they are the ones doing the moderation and not even the humans running them care at all.
Unless something completely fundamental happens, Google (and its services) don't care and they will never change.
I think they need to balance how strict their abuse detection is. Making it too strict will kick out legitimate users without mercy. Making it less strict will allow potentially harmful (for business) content to spread on their platform, which could lead to lawsuits, loss of advertisers etc. You can see which direction is more appealing for a corporation.
So concretely, now we complain about mistreated users, but if the automatic moderation was less strict, we'd complain about extreme content. It's not an easy problem.
Google is not incapable of providing customer support. Netflix, Apple, and Amazon all manage to provide free, robust customer service.
Google is simply unwilling.
Linearly scaling up on human support agents doesn't look aligned with an AI driven strategy to enable income that is only coming from their advertising services.
From https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busin...
So Google Play can only exist in ways where it supports advertising. Sales are trivial in comparison. "Delighting" every app publisher is simply distracting.These horror stories would mostly come from publishers that rely on the source of income, from whom the yearly Google play is likely to be at least a few thousands. There's no excuse to not involve a human in a decision as drastic as account termination.
The attention economy is addictive for those pushing it as well.
Let people pay for a manual review (say $300) with Google refunding the amount if it's found to be erroneous.
1. The support cost is totally offset -- at $50/hour, it would give someone four hours to investigate and two hours to prepare a report.
2. Bad actors won't pay, and neither will people who haven't really made money on the store
3. Google develops an actual framework for resolution
4. Some level of trust is developed again
5. It helps provide better training data for Google's automated process -- the engineers behind it probably cost $300/day each.
I really can't see a situation where this would incentivise Google to steal money. It would land them in much hotter water than anything else they've been involved in before. We're talking international lawsuits if just one single support staff decides to be a whistleblower. It's too involved of a conspiracy.
"Let's be as evil as we want to be" is a fairly inappropriate guideline for a company like that.
No, it isn't. Google wouldn't go out of business. I doubt that they'd even take a hit of a few percent in profit.
In general though, if you really can't afford proper customer service, then you should simply not be providing services at that scale.
For free accounts, maybe. But it wouldn't be very expensive to provide basic service to accounts with significant money flow where google is taking a cut. Or accounts that are directly paying every month.
I often wonder if this has happened to people with more clout who have managed to pull strings to get it sorted, or if Google have just got lucky and managed to avoid hitting someone who might actually be in a position to fight back.
Lots of other reasonable explanations that match the available evidence and involve Google caring about this issue. For example, their hands could be tied by legal forces beyond their control. Or they could care a great deal, but perhaps they have been unable to resolve this issue with an acceptable false-negative level on actual bad actors. Another possibility is that the ban was well-earned and the article's author knows this and simply has not disclosed the fact to the readership.
My issue with these bans is not the bans themselves, but the Kafkaesc process in which you are supposed to argue why you think their decision is wrong without knowing what they based the decision on.
For every account banned, one million new users will enter the Google ecosystem. Bans cost them nothing in the long run, but having reviews to justify bans would.
Last week I created a brand new Facebook account as I recently moved to a new city and am somewhat desperate to meet people, and Facebook events can be useful for this (as much as I loathe Facebook, my mental health is a bit more important right now). I got banned after about 2 minutes. I didn't actually do anything on the platform. I managed to click to about 2 or 3 pages.
What set this off? Who knows. Maybe some browser settings? Previous user(s) of my IP address? Those pages I clicked on? Something else? It surely wasn't anything I actually did as I didn't really interact with the platform at all.
I suspect that if I asked some high-up Facebook engineer to look in to it they wouldn't be able to actually give me an answer either beyond "The Algorithm determined there were risk factors".
As to your FB ban, I'm sorry that happened but I have no insight to share.
Instagram has always banned my accounts for suspicious behaviour on whatever page is first used after the account is created - the only way they offer to progress is to give them a phone number. It's a pretty transparent grab for more info to sell.
Funny enough, when I checked after posting my previous comment I could log in and it was all good. I didn't do anything, and now I got an email saying "Your Facebook account has been disabled. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn't follow our Community Standards". All I did was log in, view the home page, and close the tab.
I requested another review :-/
Theres nothing stopping them from coming clean after the period of that order has dropped though.
The first is what I've heard being called "a healthy dose of obscurity". With a large enough pool of users, there is a finite number of behaviors that would trigger a certain ban rule. To avoid having their triggers reverse-engineered, they say as little as possible.
The second is is reasons being subject to interpretation. The risk there comes in a variety of flavors from PR risks to lawsuit risks when a developer are banned for X but there's an important nuance to X that the developer ignores by choice or otherwise.
I don't mean to defend anyone here, I'm just hoping that someone smarter than me will tackle this somehow.
Or, more likely: they "care," but not enough to actually spend the money to fix the problem (e.g. quit relying so much on algorithms, and staff a department of real people to apply some human judgement).
My understanding is there's a cultural problem at Google, where they think stuff like this must be done algorithmically, even if it's not a actually a job for an algorithm.
To be clear, I'm not defending Google here. The "ban-you-and-everyone-that-has-ever-had-contact-with-you-without-telling-you-why" system is obviously nuts-o and has caught a bunch of innocent bystanders off-guard.
Speaking of suing, why has nobody sued Google or others for this behavior?
Flip side of this is compromised accounts, or those doing illegal or dangerous things would run far longer.
It's not the suspending that's the problem, it's the inability to find out why it was suspended, and the inability to get someone to reinstate your account.
If anything it should be made easier to install programs without a "store" at all. Operating systems worked fine without this concept, and the play store and ios store are functioning as rent-seeking middle men, taking money without offering anything of value in return.
How? You can't preemptively determine the output of a Turing-complete program without solving the halting problem, so while Google will always try to do their damnedest to predict a bad actor before they get to the store, they will definitely always fail to find some.
If they can't ban them when they find them, what should the alternative be?
This feels more like handwaving than brainstorming ;-)
It's a tricky problem and I think your suggestions should try and reflect that as much as possible.
You obviously can't eliminate all abuse but it can be managed to an acceptable degree with thoughtful design.
This is getting away from my larger point that the incentives here are screwed up. Why is that? Why doesn't Google fix their shit? What is blocking this from fixing itself? Usually there is an incentive like threat of lawsuit or people leaving the platform.
Yes, perhaps we could come up with a set of rules that users must abide by to use the service, such as not being abusive. And if they're found to be breaking these rules, we could then restrict their access to the service. The worst actors would have their access restricted permanently.
If you're suggesting "stop 100% of all abusive content before it happens," that's just silly.
There's something to be said for not shutting down someone unless they break a law. I do acknowledge the court would need to be much faster and easier to access for these kinds of things though, you don't want to burden a provider with enormous legal bills just to deal with this kind of thing.
If I host a service for manchester city fans, why would I not be able to ban annoying united fans? Who cares if what they do is legal. What if I post NSFW content here on hn. It's not illegal so it's okay?
Just this month content creators from Russia or belarus have been banned from dozen of services, they did not violate any law.
It's ridiculous to think that yout platform isn't free to apply it's own rules.
We're talking about platforms that are not so restrictive in their topics.
Unless you can prove in a court of law you're being restricted for illegal reasons, there's not much you can do.
Internet is full of stories of people losing their livehood overnight in these services and there isn't much one can do.
We need enforcement of contract law (and maybe a prohibition on binding arbitration which would be a new law)
However today these "Terms of service" are not really treated like a normal contract, in a few ways
One most of them are massively one sided, which should make them unenforceable and disallowed. Also standard contracts most of the time require notification of specific violations with documentation of the violation that triggers termination of the contract, not these vague assertions that with no documentation of the violation. Also for the most part contracts do not allow these open ended catch all type of provisions most Terms of service have, there are exceptions of course but it seems to have enacted a completely different level of provisions for these "terms of service" agreements that would not be permitted in other contexts of contract law
Large companies shouldn't be able to get away with banning people without good reason, documenting and stating that good reason, and have a reasonable and "real" appeals process, with courts being the last step of the process if needed.
Want to ban that person harassing others? Sure thing, document the harassment, clearly spell out in your account termination email that harassment was the reason (and what even constitutes harassment), offer that appeals process. Document the decision and evidence, in case an independent mediator (like a court) asks for it. Don't just vaguely point to some 70-page "Community Standards" document, and have bots auto-respond with "Denied" emails to appeals.
As the German constitution law (Grundgesetz) spells out: "Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen." ("Property obliges. Its use should also serve the public good."). I think that's a good approach to property.
Why not? I understand that a lot of people don't like this behavior, but why should it be illegal? The law is a very blunt instrument, and government is already far too intrusive into every aspect of people's lives. The fact that you see a problem does not mean the law/government can fix it.
Consider the law/government version of the old programmer's joke about regular expressions:
Some people, whenever they have a problem with behavior they don't like, think: Let's get the law/government to solve it! Now they have two problems.
Because these large companies are basically utility companies in my humble opinion, and wield a whole lot of power over people's lives and livelihoods. There are basically defacto monopolies in their respective spaces. This power and influence shouldn't go entirely unchecked. Same as we (try to) regulate other industries, often even players that are far "smaller" than the internet behemoths. Which brings me back to Eigentum verpflichtet.
>The law is a very blunt instrument, and government is already far too intrusive into every aspect of people's lives.
I see this argument a lot. First of all, we're not even talking about regulating people, we talk about regulating companies worth billions and sometimes even trillions, so I am a little less concerned about being "intrusive" there. And then, the law is quite often rather blunt, agreed, but it doesn't have to be that blunt.
Google's or Meta's "Community Standards" at the same time seem to be rather blunt as well, and the enforcement deliberately arbitrary.
>Some people, whenever they have a problem with behavior they don't like, think: Let's get the law/government to solve it! Now they have two problems.
At the least with the law/government[0], we have a theoretical control (through voting), theoretical checks and balances (through separation of power) and a theoretical way to have input into decision making (through activism, lobbying, opposition parties). We do not have any of that when it comes to companies.
And not everything the government does is always bad. The government is the reason you're drinking a lot less lead in your water, that we do not let regular companies sell heroin solution as cough syrup anymore, or that banks aren't allowed to redline black people anymore (whether enforcement works is another thing), or dump their toxic waste in your backyard. In my parts of the world, the government even made it so that I do not have to fear going bankrupt and homeless when I lose a job or become ill, or that an employer cannot knowingly assign me jobs that will make me ill without even telling me about that risk.
Yeah, there are plenty of things the governments did and still do that are not great, or outright bad and/or evil, sometimes because a policy didn't work out the way it was expected and lead to bad outcomes, sometimes because a policy had exactly the indented outcome. And it usually takes quite some effort and time to change that.
At the same time, there are plenty of bad things large companies did and are still doing, more often than not to maximize profits, or at least for power and influence, and the only real incentives we have to make them stop is market pressure (i.e. boycotts or protests, which hardly ever work) or regulation (which works quite well, but can have the side effect of regulatory capture). Take the instrument of regulation away, because it's too blunt, or the government cannot be trusted, or whatever, and we'll end up (again[1]) with a bunch of companies that are defacto governments - but of the dictatorial variety.
To me, the solution neither is no regulation nor always regulation, but finding a good balance of what and what not to regulate, and how to regulate. The power balance between those large internet companies and their users/customers/subcontractors and "gig workers"[2] is skewed very heavily in favor of the large companies and thus I think could use some unskewing by regulatory measures.
[0] When I keep talking about government(s) here, I mean our democratic governments.
[1] The East India Company, for example, while still technically beholden to the Crown, had their own military, and made their own defacto laws in large parts of the world. It took the Indian rebellion, with a toll of close to 1M lives, and the British Government to reign them in.
[2] ...
I could see the Internet itself being treated as a public utility (and US law already does this in some ways, for example by requiring ISPs to serve rural areas where there aren't enough users to make it profitable). But app stores are not. App stores are the way they are not because of any fundamental limitation of app distribution over the Internet, but because users have chosen that model. If developers want to "fix" that, they need to use their own market power to not use Google Play at all, so that users have to switch to a different model because there are no apps on Google Play. The government doesn't need to get involved in this.
> and wield a whole lot of power over people's lives and livelihoods
Google only has power over your livelihood as a developer if you let them. Which, as I've already commented upthread, is not a choice any sane developer should make given Google's track record. Developers should simply stop distributing apps through Google Play if they don't like Google's behavior. That's how a free market is supposed to work.
> we're not even talking about regulating people, we talk about regulating companies worth billions and sometimes even trillions, so I am a little less concerned about being "intrusive" there.
Regulating companies worth billions and trillions just makes it harder for companies that aren't worth billions and trillions to compete. It doesn't faze the companies that are worth billions and trillions; they just buy the regulations that favor them. Look up "regulatory capture". Governments can't effectively regulate companies of this size. But they can certainly regulate potential competitors to those companies out of existence.
> We do not have any of that when it comes to companies.
But you have something a lot more powerful: the ability to boycott. All those government avenues you describe are extremely weak, and continue to get weaker over time. The US Congress has approval ratings in the single digits and incumbent reelection rates above 90 percent. That's a huge sign that you can't fix whatever problem you want to fix using the government. Whereas in the free market, you can exercise your market power immediately by changing what transactions you do and do not choose to make.
> not everything the government does is always bad
The fact that the government does some good things does not mean government regulation is a good thing all things considered. And even with the "good" things you describe, you don't see their downsides. You don't see what the world would have been like if people had chosen to use free market power to regulate those things instead of the government.
> boycotts or protests, which hardly ever work
Protests hardly ever work because they don't change the company's bottom line. Boycotts can and do work because they do change the company's bottom line.
> a bunch of companies that are defacto governments
Companies only get such power if governments give it to them. Your example of the East India Company illustrates that. Without the special privileges given to them by the British government, they would have been powerless to do the things they did.
> I would consider a lot of the small time app developers to be essentially gig workers
For Google (or Apple if they develop iOS apps), yes. Why? Why are developers continuing to feed these monsters?
Users have not chosen. App developers have not chosen. Apple has chosen and Google copied them.
Google and Apple effectively have a duopoly over app stores.
>Developers should simply stop distributing apps through Google Play if they don't like Google's behavior. That's how a free market is supposed to work.
No, the free market is supposed to work by having a seller and a buyer find each other and make a deal. However, with app stores, a middle man forcefully inserts itself into that equation in a way that cannot be sidestepped by buyer and seller. Some buyers and sellers are fine with it, but some is hardly all.
The option app developers have right now is to either be obedient to the app stores, or change profession.
>Regulating companies worth billions and trillions just makes it harder for companies that aren't worth billions and trillions to compete.
You're talking regulatory capture, which indeed is a concern. That's why I mentioned the "gatekeeper" definition of the upcoming EU DMA... It considers size and (market) power, and only regulates large companies.
>But you have something a lot more powerful: the ability to boycott.
Boycotts are a joke in general. They only work if you find a majority supporting that such a boycott, and often to a degree where it actually hurts. It doesn't do anything to protect any (large) minority. So when e.g. black people got redlined, were they supposed to boycott the banks that refused to do business with them in the first place? Because the white majority clearly didn't care enough; they got their loans, they were happy and content, and often didn't even really know about the plight of their fellow citizens.
>The US Congress has approval ratings in the single digits and incumbent reelection rates above 90 percent. That's a huge sign that you can't fix whatever problem you want to fix using the government.
The US political system can be changed. The Tea Party demonstrated that, Obama and Bernie and Trump demonstrated that (whether one agrees with these people is another matter, the point is that even in the US, which is plagued by the first-past-the-post voting, change is possible).
And you don't necessarily have to replace people, just make them fear enough that they might be replaced if they do not play ball. You could consider that a boycott at the ballot ;)
>The fact that the government does some good things does not mean government regulation is a good thing all things considered.
No, it doesn't necessitate that. But historically, it is, all things considered.
>And even with the "good" things you describe, you don't see their downsides.
Yeah, I somehow fail to see the downside of the government preventing companies from dumping toxic waste in my backyard, or government enabling me to get health care when I need it.
>You don't see what the world would have been like if people had chosen to use free market power to regulate those things instead of the government.
But I have seen that. I explicitly mentioned the East India company. I saw banks redlining people, fuel producers putting lead in gasoline, industry working people to literal death (making them sick, or working them in unsafe conditions) because human resources were cheap and replenish-able, and people were willing to do that work to avoid almost certain starvation and homelessness if they did not. And then there is this profession that doesn't care about laws anyway: narcos and other criminals. And they bring havoc wherever they go.
I have seen enough.
>Companies only get such power if governments give it to them. Your example of the East India Company illustrates that.
You're basically advocating for no government (or an entirely toothless government). In your system, the East India company wo...
Because there are no legal grounds for such a suit. Google is providing a service (Google Play developer accounts), and its terms of service clearly state that it can terminate any account whenever it wants. However nasty you might find this behavior in a moral sense, legally Google is perfectly within its rights to operate this way.
The only real response any developer can make to this is to not use Google Play to distribute apps. And certainly not to build a business on whose income you and your family will depend on it.
Build for another platform or build for something other than mobile devices.
Ok that is out... so what is the other platform?
You can't even work around that problem because Apple bans any other browser or scripting engine from being distributed on iOS, so users are stuck with an intentionally limited browser for web apps, which makes web apps second-class citizens on the platform.
I attended an event that had mobile food ordering and they actually promoted "No need to download an app. Just order online at food.example" and you got a nice mobile optimized web site.
Frankly, we would ALL also be safer if the decision had to be made based on conduct on that specific service and could not include anything outside that service. There is a certain scale where your company is now an internet utility and you should have to act like every other utility.
Companies making over a certain amount should be banned from outright removing your access to your account. At most it should be making the account read only.
People have a right to their photos, emails, conversations, and data they have safeguarded to these companies.
It's not like Google ever deletes the data these bad accounts made.
Similar logic has already been applied in the US for e.g. rapes that occur on a business' property. If they're incentivizing you to come their, they are liable for bad thing that happen to you.
If Google wants to neutralize spammers that's their business. The law doesn't have to stop them. But causing severe financial harm to your business partners with no recourse is something the law should care about and stop.
1. How exactly do propose a bill to limit a company in how they use their property and enforce use of that property by an end user?
2. Bad actors out number good actors with honest accidents at over 1 million to one and obviously disclosing gives unequal advantage to the bad actors and harms the one accident good actor.
Is this a trick question? The same way all the other bills have been written. Most service providers have laws limiting how they can use their property in providing services. Banks, hotels, nightclubs, stadiums, taxis, etc.
I don't even care if this is hyperbole, an outrageous claim like this needs a source. You're telling me that over 99.9999% of these issues are caused by bad actors?
How many people use their mobile phone as their only internet device? So we now have two companies with essentially identical policies deciding what is or isn't too sexy for us with essentially zero accountability...
Ultimately, these policies are meant to further restrict viability of competition by either company.
Competition only works if the competition is effective enough to change user habits. For the average person not educated in monopolies or tech regulation, is there any incentive for them to switch to paying Spotify instead?
Other examples of frustration induced by competition are:
- Epic Games Store timed exclusives (people would rather just use Steam)
- The fragmentation of streaming video across a dozen different paid services, each with their own exclusive licensed content (people would rather just save money by paying for a single service with everything on it).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30782735
If it's 30% cheaper, that may be enough of an incentive. Though I don't know if that's the case here or if Spotify just eats the fee when you pay through Google.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/04/apple-to-charge-27-fee-for...
This is the type of damage the people who say "it's their store, they can do what they want" inflict. Apple got away with their dreadful behavior, Google would be foolish not to follow.
These are, hypothetically, things that could be demanded by law.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935
Modern Google is defined by Hypocrisy.
If you don't like it, just build your own app store, phone, account management, email provider, search engine, web browser, ISP, payment processor, banking system, currency, DNS provider, registrar, colo facility, machines, chip fab, silicon wafers, electrons, and universe. Geez, don't be lazy.
Still need a work account, but use it only for work mail.
I've written two. They're available for free. If Google decides to can me tomorrow I'll put them on my personal site available for side-loading, maybe put them on the Amazon app store, and call it a day.
Don't tie critical revenue streams to the whim of a private corporation. It's high risk.
When download gets flagged Chrome will block the download, but that's not all - Firefox is using Google's safe browsing service as well, meaning my Windows software was only available through Edge at that point. Essentially dead.
Luckily, it was sorted out in a day or two but it was really scary. First request for review was even rejected, so I poured more info and arguments into second one, mentioned that we're advertising this software on Google Ads for all those years...
If these requests were denied it would practically kill my company and the only source of income for my family. And I'm not even using their platform like Google Play where you're in contractual relation and they can argue you're breaching some of the clauses.
Does GDPR not give the author some rights? I'm in no way an expert in this area, but multiple seem to apply to this situation, but the most important ones here seems would seem to be the "right to explanation" to know how such a decision was made, a "right to rectification" to correct any data which is incorrect, and (given the magnitude of the impact) a right to avoid automated decision-making (though article 22 says this applies to decisions with a "legal effect"; does this qualify?).
And if GDPR doesn't apply for some reason ... why not?
In the UK at least, if it wasn't a registered business (limited company) then there is no legal distinction between you and the trading name and hence all the rights under GDPR would be available to you.
It's clearly a mistake to bet your livelihood on a platform that can act in an arbitrary and capricious manner.
OP conveniently left that information out.
Without that, it's hard to draw any conclusions.
Some infractions are also difficult to convey back to the developer. For instance, I believe a business might not be allowed to communicate details, if account is under police investigation and there is suspicion that the developer might destroy evidence, that sort of thing. I'm not saying this developer has done something wrong, but we just don't know.
It's definitely infuriating if you are trapped like that.
The OP did single out Google Play, saying they were substantially more transparent and helpful:
"There are other Google services such as Admob and Google Ads and for example if I have a problem with Google Ads I can contact them and they quickly offer me support. To try to improve advertising campaigns, you don’t even have to be the one to contact them, but they themselves send you an email saying that they are at your disposal. In fact, on one occasion I had a conversation with a very nice woman on Google Meet. On the other hand, if I have a problem as a developer on Google Play, things change, I only get a text form and always answers from templates, so I can never get “Human” support when I have a problem with my developer account."
Which gives him points for honesty in my book. It's possible he has left damaging information about himself out of his story that would materially affect our perception of his situation. Bt to me it's more likely that he is telling the truth and for whatever reason Google Play is unwilling to explain their actions, much less justify them.
Once you have a custom domain, it becomes way easier to change to another email service without losing any messages.
Everything just forwards to my Gmail address. I have a personal domain which is also setup as an outbound address. Several other domains/addresses also forward. I also do a wildcard *@something.example.org which I use for accounts/signups (unique email per site), which lets me track who's selling my address (or is breached) and has some other security benefits.
Using a password manager made this much easier, as I could easily keep track of which accounts I needed to update and which ones I still needed to do. I switched over to Fastmail and haven’t looked back.
I had heard good things about Fastmail from other GMail switchers and signed up for their free trial account, and liked the experience.
The mobile app is great, they support 2FA with hardware security keys, and the price seemed reasonable.
Also the web app is really good. Like really really good. And I don't normally like web apps.
I don't see why not; I think that overall FastMail is easier to use than gmail for example. It's not like you need to use a custom domain and all these things.
I had a Gmail as my primary for over 10 years, did exactly this for 3 years, and now I’ll get maybe 2-3 junk notices per year to my old Gmail.
I became part of a company where we teach people to create their own applications and create their own app business.
Logically there’s nothing wrong with that. Empirically, in 2022 the reliable ways for random developers to make money by publishing apps involve gray areas at best.
I mean, what are the generically applicable methods this company teaches likely to look like?
How Google handles whack-a-mole accounts isn’t surprising.
I read it as the dev had no warning or explanation.
For example when the account of simple-keyboard's dev got banned: https://github.com/rkkr/simple-keyboard/issues/333
Maybe there were previous emails, maybe not. I wouldn't put too much stock in that sentence.
That's a difficult thing to accomplish when Google has not provided them the details of why they were banned.
It doesn't, actually. Everything I've read about Google indicates they're extremely opaque and will ban for bizarre reasons.
Google itself might not even know. After all, machine learning isn't known for being able to explain itself.
> The ban letter says they previously received other notices. Where are they?
IIRC, I understand that someones those notices come all at once at the same time as the ban, if they come at all. It's also quite possible that the ban message from Google is in fact inaccurate.
> And what steps, if any, did they take to resolve then?
What steps could they take? My understanding is that Google offers no recourse to a human, and their automated appeals process might as well be a "reject all" rule (if it isn't literally that).
You seem to be operating under the assumption that Google has implemented a fair and reasonable process, so the onus is on the person who runs afoul of it. However, everything I've read has led me to believe Google doesn't have a fair and reasonable process, because they rely too-heavily on algorithms and automation.
Indeed; it is just multiple flagging by ML and that is it. Not much you or anyone can do.
It sounds like he has violated something multiple times and was told what was in violation but he is choosing not to share this part of the story
So it is not so clear if they received anything useful before or not. They did use ads and the ads team is quite trigger happy, which is interesting because competitors can indeed cancel your business by creating click fraud. The ‘AI’ can detect click fraud, but cannot filter it (wat?) so this happens a lot.
I helped someone out with a similar issue, a friend of mine who was doing something very very uncontroversial.
The "previous messages" had no extra information at all except, "You might have broken our terms of service with this page" - a link to their main page, with no additional information.