anaccountexists (u/anaccountexists)

anaccountexists commented on Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated” old.reddit.com/r/androidd... · Posted by u/nadalizadeh

hbn · 4 years ago

> if you had a bank account shared between your developers, and someone who left the company started using it for money laundering, the entire account would be shut down and you would not be getting that money back. In fact, you might even be investigated by authorities for money laundering since it ran through your account.

I don't see how that analogy applies here. It would be more like if someone who had access to the shared bank account was using their own personal bank account for money laundering.

The developer wasn't breaking ToS on the company account, it was their own personal developer account. Quote from the reddit post:

> Our company used to have several employees with access to the business's Play Console, and one of them recently had done something wrong with "his own personal" Google Play Developer account.

anaccountexists · 4 years ago

My impression from the article is that they were still linked (directly) to the company’s developer account.

If that’s wrong, and they were removed, then you’re completely right and everything I said is very wrong.

anaccountexists commented on Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated” old.reddit.com/r/androidd... · Posted by u/nadalizadeh

GordonS · 4 years ago

This is a bad take - the person who violated ToS hadn't worked at the OP's company for 3 years!

In addition, it hardly seems relevant that a ToS violation from an employee's personal account should result in effectively destroying a business.

Something really has to change with how Google handles this kind of thing. At the very least they need to have a working appeals process handled by people.

anaccountexists · 4 years ago

That’s exactly my point though. If they hadn’t worked there in 3 years, why were they still associated with the developer account in the first place?

There’s a couple of ways (that are best practices for any company) to avoid this problem: - Have separate Google accounts for work / personal use - Remove old employees from the developer account when terminated

anaccountexists commented on Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated” old.reddit.com/r/androidd... · Posted by u/nadalizadeh

CPLX · 4 years ago

In this scenario you would have access to due process. There are very specific rules when banks make decisions about credit worthiness, and for the part involving authorities you’d have access to a well developed legal system where you have rights.

anaccountexists · 4 years ago

Credit worthiness, yes, though that’s typically at approval time and not later on.

Risk bans or bans for suspicious / illegal activity? Totally different story (see the stories of Stripe / PayPal / etc shutting down accounts). The government (at least in the US) will punish banks pretty hard if they don’t crack down on fraud hard, so banks tend to lean more towards over enforcement.

anaccountexists commented on Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated” old.reddit.com/r/androidd... · Posted by u/nadalizadeh

kuu · 4 years ago

The main difference is that with your bank, in case you get locked out, you can call them or even go to a physical office where they'll attend you, and you, maybe, are able to fix this false positive case, even if from detection point of view is a justified one.

For Google, good luck if you get in contact with a person.

anaccountexists · 4 years ago

Maybe we work with different banks, but in my experience it’s more of a “1 strike you’re out” type of thing if they detect illegal activity and to me that feels like what happened here. I get what you’re saying though.

Fraud is hard. If you don’t crack down enough, you get in trouble with the government, many legitimate account users, and companies working with you. If you crack down too hard, you might mess up people’s lives who did nothing wrong. Even with an appeals process- its rare to get everything right. I think the reason we had about it with big tech so much is because their userbase is so large, so even with a low false positive rate, you’ll see high numbers of people getting flagged.

anaccountexists commented on Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated” old.reddit.com/r/androidd... · Posted by u/nadalizadeh

nerdawson · 4 years ago

I may have misinterpreted the explanation given in the post. It sounded to me like a developer they'd employed violated the TOS on their personal Google dev account. Google then recognised a connection between the dev and another Google account belonging to a company and opted to suspend that as well.

To use your example, that would be like an employee getting their bank account frozen for something they'd done in their personal life, and then the company having their bank frozen too for depositing money into the employee's account.

anaccountexists · 4 years ago

I’d liken the latter to having a company credit card account. Regardless, in the bank case there’s a high chance adjacent / connected accounts would be frozen (at least for a time) because money laundering tends to happen in rings.

I see your point, though.

anaccountexists commented on Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated” old.reddit.com/r/androidd... · Posted by u/nadalizadeh

buscoquadnary · 4 years ago

That seems like the same problem we have hear just now you get the headache of the courts on top of the decision, how many people avoid court now for much more impactful and legitimate situations simply because they can't afford the time and money?

What we want isn't review of automated decisions, what we want is openness, transperancy and clarity in the process. The problem people have isn't so much the appeals process it is the opaqueness and seeming arbitrary nature of the whole thing.

anaccountexists · 4 years ago

There are problems with how transparent you make things though (i.e., giving away the underlying signals). There’s a moving target between fraudsters and risk teams at companies where the fraudsters will try to run just up to the edge of alerting systems without passing over, then scale and repeat it.

If the signals used are made public, fraudsters will win every time. It’s the same with search engines- if they publish how a score is calculated, people will game it immediately.

Maybe the signals should be required to go through a review with authorities? Idk.

anaccountexists commented on Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated” old.reddit.com/r/androidd... · Posted by u/nadalizadeh

lima · 4 years ago

We need legislation forcing companies to manually review algorithmic decisions that impact people's lives - there has to be a proper appeals process.

It's simply not economical for many companies to deal with the long tail of false positives, so they don't. Google has billions of users, and if their algorithms are 99.999% right about bans, their metrics look great but that's still tens of thousands users wrongfully banned.

I'm not usually a fan of government intervention but this is such a no-brainer for regulation.

With how much our modern lives are dependent on services like Google's, they effectively become utilities and should be regulated as such.

anaccountexists · 4 years ago

In my experience, the algorithms are much more forgiving than humans. At least, when I worked with the risk team at my FinTech company, algorithms flagged people for review and then humans decided to unflag or terminate their accounts. The only time we’d do a freeze is if it looked like an account take over (since that could super badly affect the account owner).

anaccountexists commented on Google terminated our Developer Account, says it is “associated” old.reddit.com/r/androidd... · Posted by u/nadalizadeh

anaccountexists · 4 years ago

Before saying anything else: I’m sorry OP. This is miserable to deal with and I know you’re probably very upset right now.

On the other hand- at every company I’ve worked at, this is why there’s clear onboarding and off boarding policies. Yes- if you have someone on your developer account violating terms of service, they’ll shut down the account. No, it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t you personally.

To put this differently: if you had a bank account shared between your developers, and someone who left the company started using it for money laundering, the entire account would be shut down and you would not be getting that money back. In fact, you might even be investigated by authorities for money laundering since it ran through your account.

As someone who works in FinTech, we deal with tons of people just trying to steal / defraud others on a daily basis, and we’re required but governments across the world to be on the lookout for people doing “fraudy” things and terminate their accounts ASAP. If we just said “oh, it’s fine, you’re not in trouble because your (insert X relative here) was the bad person, not you,” then social engineering fraud would be rampant everywhere.

To me, the Google situation is identical to the bank situation. There’s not a good way to prove the bad account shouldn’t be associated with your Play store account. This is why you have to be diligent about who has access to these things.

anaccountexists commented on EU is going to require interoperability between messaging platforms techcrunch.com/2022/03/24... · Posted by u/goodpoint

rpadovani · 4 years ago

The interoperability is lovely, looking forward to having just one app!

> And among the restrictions are stipulations that gatekeepers cannot: > [...] > require app developers to use certain services (such as payment systems or identity providers) in order to be listed in app stores.

This is a giant blow for Apple.

I am very curious to see how and if this will be implemented, and enforced!

anaccountexists · 4 years ago

Isn’t it… the opposite of a blow to Apple? If there interoperability, why would I ever use anything than my phone’s default messaging app? (Especially if E2E encryption is a requirement, which it looks like it is)

This is just regulatory capture cementing the OS owners above app developers.

anaccountexists commented on GitHub incident: 2022/03/24 githubstatus.com/incident... · Posted by u/rsstack

_fat_santa · 4 years ago

After this latest incident I brought it up to my company that we should start considering alternatives if this situation doesn't improve. From an outsiders perspective, it looks like all the new features they recently introduced seem to be crippling their databases.

Microsoft needs to get a grip on this situation as the parent company. Their golden goose acquisition is about to become persona non grata if these outages continue.

anaccountexists · 4 years ago

My company uses the same DB sharding tech. It took us about a year of daily / weekly outages until we finally were able to fix our performance issues. 256 database splits, lots of cross-shard queries removed, etc before we finally reached a happy-ish state for a year.

Now it’s scheduled to fall over in about 6 months and everyone is freaking out again. It’s not new features that are hurting us, it’s the existing core product line. All the new stuff is built on horizontally sharded DBs from the get-go.