15 ms·

Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and don't have any real context into why this occurred. Speaking as myself, a private citizen. I work in Spam & Abuse and

Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and don't have any real context into why this occurred. Speaking as myself, a private citizen. I work in Spam & Abuse and it's possible that this is the result of some clustering algorithm that was trying to take down sharders / phone buying rings. It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility (that legitimate customers would be used to shard purchases) and I'm pretty sure if the affected customers appeal they'll be reinstated, maybe with a warning. I certainly wouldn't characterize this as intentionally punishing the individuals who purchased phones on Google's part -- notice that only users who directly sent their phones to the reseller's address were taken down. Smells like automation to me. The "deleting all their data if the appeal doesn't go through" thing is actually because of privacy policy and Google can't keep your data around for longer than 90 days give or take after your account is suspended. Again it seems heavy-handed but is more a perfect storm of big-company policy decisions with good intentions overall. Know that if you ask Google to remove your account, you'll actually get everything wiped! (That's a good thing imho!) It really is unfortunate that FPs (or "mostly-FP"s) in Google's systems impact people so badly. FWIW for most Google services if you abuse them you usually get a service level suspension rather than your entire account suspended, probably for this exact reason.

BorisMelnik 10y ago
thanks for clarifying, I thought the same thing right away as well: smells exactly like automation. I could never see Google suspending an entire account for one person selling one phone.
lifthrasiir 10y ago
I believe automating a whole account suspension is not a good idea at all.
brlewis 10y ago
Retention should be longer if an account is suspended on Google's initiative than on the user's initiative.
ubernostrum 10y ago
It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility "Very possible"? More like "guaranteed". Everybody who pays the slightest bit of attention knows Google has a gigantic blind spot when it comes to thinking through the consequences of algorithms and automation. And there's no sign that the company is interested in fixing that, ever.
- mistermann 10y ago
  Wait until they get into the thought police business for some real interesting situations. All jokes aside, for those who remember, it's pretty amazing what Microsoft got punished for (bundling a browser with the OS, with no other restrictions) compared to what Apple and Google get away with.
  - holri 10y ago
    Wait if they get into the automated car driving business for some real sad situations.
    - Asooka 10y ago
      > please drive me to the hospital, I broke my arm > I can't do that, the hospital is within 50 miles of a school and you're banned from being within 50 miles of a school, because you commented "she's very pretty" to a picture of your 5-year-old niece and we've decided you're a paedophile.
    - simonh 10y ago
      Due to suspension of your Google account this GoogleCab service is no longer available to you. Please be careful exiting the cab on this narrow strip of interstate hard shoulder 50 miles from anywhere. We have also disabled google authentication access to your phone. Have a nice day.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    It's amazing what owning the FTC can do. Obama appointee Joshua Wright was a paid Google shill... and Trump just picked him up for the FTC transition team. Google's ability to infect our justice system transcends partisan politics.
throwaway98237 10y ago
If you watch an old tech talk re: Google disaster recovery topic, the Googler explains that a user's info is never fully deleted because it's too expensive to do so given back-up duplication is processed multiple times in multiple locations and sometimes over multiple technologies. In other words, cancel your google account today and your data may be "deleted" but it's really, as in actually really, still on magnetic back-up in several locations, but it's just really hard to get to and put back together, so is considered "gone". Unless you're a really big organization with the means to go to such troubles, like maybe the government or Google.
- bluecmd 10y ago
  Things change
- majewsky 10y ago
  How is that compatible with legal requirements for deletion? I think that, at least in Germany, you can demand that a company delete all data associated with you, and the company has to comply with it. (Whether German data protection law applies in Google's datacenters is a wholy different story though.)
  - toennisforst 10y ago
    Though this requirement is moot even in Germany, as it is impossible for you to verify such a deletion.
  - easychris 10y ago
    It's not required in Germany either. The data protection law allows to "lock" data instead of really deleting it from all devices. And IMO that's the only sane solution to deletion requests. Otherwise, any kind of backups would be unlawful for a company.
- mikejb 10y ago
  Can you point me to that tech talk? I think this info is outdated, at least it conflicts with what I believe to know.
kutkloon7 10y ago
Yay for algorithms without any human supervision! In googles defense, you can't really expect them to spend such a small company to pay a human when the task is so trivially automated and handled so well.
calcifer 10y ago
What does "FP" stand for?
- spotirca 10y ago
  False Positive
rebootthesystem 10y ago
You are kidding, right? Human decency dictates that, at the very least, someone be warned that their account is now headed for non-negotiable suspension and be given 30 days to clear out their stuff and move on. I couldn't care less what algorithm decided what. At some point a person coded-in the rules and, for some incomprehensible reason, this person or people decided it would be perfectly fine to take the path of most damage to consumers. Your company, Facebook, Amazon and others deserve to get hit with a massive class action lawsuit that results in equally massive financial penalties and requires corrective actions. Maybe then you'll learn how to behave like human beings.
eloisant 10y ago
I can confirm that I heard many stories of Android developers getting their Google Play dev account suspend for various reasons (which is already really bad in itself, if you have a popular app that makes a significant part of your revenue), but I rarely heard about full Google account suspension for a Play Store violation (maybe once or twice among dozens of Play Store suspensions stories). I'm still puzzled that they take such a drastic measure automatically, without having one human checking whether the account is actually a real person's account. I really want to see what comes out of this, if everyone gets his account reinstated and how long they had it suspended.
- bujak 10y ago
  Yeah my account was wiped without warning after what I suspect was an automatic app review that Google introduced in Play Store at that time. It was just a niche hobby app but damn, it's not like I was a free user. I paid for the dev account. Good thing I had a separate google account for that. I had some sloppy ndk computer vision running there, maybe it triggered something? I have no idea really. It's not like you can appeal anywhere. I was very busy with other things and let it slide at the time. I got away with a very cheap lesson I guess
i336_ 10y ago
Hopefully you haven't given up on reading the comments to your post and you see this. Small practical suggestion, no flames. It might be a very very good idea to lobby to get company policy instated that says "if the system thinks a user has gone rogue/bad, their account gets locked and all, but the data gets kept around until the user says to kill it, or for 6 months." Because if Google thinks the account has gone bad, that's not the user saying "delete me," so the privacy policy (and associated laws) don't apply! There's nothing stopping you even stashing the data away indefinitely until the user explicitly asks for it to be killed (but that's scary). At the end of the day though, algorithms fail, and IMO this is a practical edge-case policy glitch in the business architecture that should have been countered for. Or does "user account gone rogue" have to be interpreted as "delete me" for crazy obscure Reasons™?
forgottenpass 10y ago
is more a perfect storm of big-company policy decisions Naming storms like this is about rare they are. A "10 year storm" or "100 year storm" only happen once in that period. So they refer to a 10% or 1% chance that an X-year storm that would happen in any given year. Is this cock-up is so bad that you don't expect a Google company to make a similar or more severe cock-up for DECADES? Then it's not a perfect storm. This was a common storm. In fact, I'm very doubtful it was as a "storm" inside of google at all. This is just another "whoopsie" bug fix, isn't it? This right here is why people get the impression google thinks it's farts don't stink. Not only that you act as if this is a "perfect storm" but the arrogance it takes to design a system where just because an engineer didn't consider a use case, you're perfectly happy to assume it must be abuse. Yes, this case will probably be fixed, but would it have been if it didn't pop up on the right back channels to get Googlers attention?
Pigo 10y ago
Honestly, I feel like if you start trying to game the system with some shady practices, you should be ready for eventualities like this. That's almost as careless as putting your real info up on an .onion site, and almost exactly like torrenting without any kind of proxy. I hope they get off with a warning, but these people were up to some shenanigans.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
I recommend the takeaways you get from this thread (especially as someone in Spam & Abuse) to communicate with those you work with and your superiors at El Goog. - Automation is going to be the end of your job. Not because your job will be replaced by an algorithm, but because overuse of algorithms is leading to the collapse of trust people place in Google. Major actions like the banning of someone's Google account should never be done by algorithms. If you can't afford the humans[0], you shouldn't be in the business of holding people's valuable data. - The support and appeals process must be human. Ever tried Microsoft's Answer Desk? Talking to humans isn't difficult even with one of your largest scale competitors, even for free tier products. Humans want to talk to humans, and Google's customer base consists of humans. FastMail ticket support? Incredible. It feels like Google isn't even trying to treat customers well in comparison. - Google shafted 200 of their customers, and from the looks of it, this thread has another 200 ready to leave. The Guardian just picked up the story, so expect this effect to continue. One bad behavior by automation can cost you multiples of damage, especially if someone writes a blog post about the incident. [0]Google can definitely afford the humans, especially with that princely sum they have stashed in offshore accounts.

BorisMelnik 10y ago

thanks for clarifying, I thought the same thing right away as well: smells exactly like automation. I could never see Google suspending an entire account for one person selling one phone.

lifthrasiir 10y ago

I believe automating a whole account suspension is not a good idea at all.

brlewis 10y ago

Retention should be longer if an account is suspended on Google's initiative than on the user's initiative.

ubernostrum 10y ago

It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility "Very possible"? More like "guaranteed". Everybody who pays the slightest bit of attention knows Google has a gigantic blind spot when it comes to thinking through the consequences of algorithms and automation. And there's no sign that the company is interested in fixing that, ever.

mistermann 10y ago
Wait until they get into the thought police business for some real interesting situations. All jokes aside, for those who remember, it's pretty amazing what Microsoft got punished for (bundling a browser with the OS, with no other restrictions) compared to what Apple and Google get away with.
- holri 10y ago
  Wait if they get into the automated car driving business for some real sad situations.
  - Asooka 10y ago
    > please drive me to the hospital, I broke my arm > I can't do that, the hospital is within 50 miles of a school and you're banned from being within 50 miles of a school, because you commented "she's very pretty" to a picture of your 5-year-old niece and we've decided you're a paedophile.
  - simonh 10y ago
    Due to suspension of your Google account this GoogleCab service is no longer available to you. Please be careful exiting the cab on this narrow strip of interstate hard shoulder 50 miles from anywhere. We have also disabled google authentication access to your phone. Have a nice day.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  It's amazing what owning the FTC can do. Obama appointee Joshua Wright was a paid Google shill... and Trump just picked him up for the FTC transition team. Google's ability to infect our justice system transcends partisan politics.

throwaway98237 10y ago

If you watch an old tech talk re: Google disaster recovery topic, the Googler explains that a user's info is never fully deleted because it's too expensive to do so given back-up duplication is processed multiple times in multiple locations and sometimes over multiple technologies. In other words, cancel your google account today and your data may be "deleted" but it's really, as in actually really, still on magnetic back-up in several locations, but it's just really hard to get to and put back together, so is considered "gone". Unless you're a really big organization with the means to go to such troubles, like maybe the government or Google.

bluecmd 10y ago
Things change
majewsky 10y ago
How is that compatible with legal requirements for deletion? I think that, at least in Germany, you can demand that a company delete all data associated with you, and the company has to comply with it. (Whether German data protection law applies in Google's datacenters is a wholy different story though.)
- toennisforst 10y ago
  Though this requirement is moot even in Germany, as it is impossible for you to verify such a deletion.
- easychris 10y ago
  It's not required in Germany either. The data protection law allows to "lock" data instead of really deleting it from all devices. And IMO that's the only sane solution to deletion requests. Otherwise, any kind of backups would be unlawful for a company.
mikejb 10y ago
Can you point me to that tech talk? I think this info is outdated, at least it conflicts with what I believe to know.

kutkloon7 10y ago

Yay for algorithms without any human supervision! In googles defense, you can't really expect them to spend such a small company to pay a human when the task is so trivially automated and handled so well.

calcifer 10y ago

What does "FP" stand for?

spotirca 10y ago
False Positive

rebootthesystem 10y ago

You are kidding, right? Human decency dictates that, at the very least, someone be warned that their account is now headed for non-negotiable suspension and be given 30 days to clear out their stuff and move on. I couldn't care less what algorithm decided what. At some point a person coded-in the rules and, for some incomprehensible reason, this person or people decided it would be perfectly fine to take the path of most damage to consumers. Your company, Facebook, Amazon and others deserve to get hit with a massive class action lawsuit that results in equally massive financial penalties and requires corrective actions. Maybe then you'll learn how to behave like human beings.

eloisant 10y ago

I can confirm that I heard many stories of Android developers getting their Google Play dev account suspend for various reasons (which is already really bad in itself, if you have a popular app that makes a significant part of your revenue), but I rarely heard about full Google account suspension for a Play Store violation (maybe once or twice among dozens of Play Store suspensions stories). I'm still puzzled that they take such a drastic measure automatically, without having one human checking whether the account is actually a real person's account. I really want to see what comes out of this, if everyone gets his account reinstated and how long they had it suspended.

bujak 10y ago
Yeah my account was wiped without warning after what I suspect was an automatic app review that Google introduced in Play Store at that time. It was just a niche hobby app but damn, it's not like I was a free user. I paid for the dev account. Good thing I had a separate google account for that. I had some sloppy ndk computer vision running there, maybe it triggered something? I have no idea really. It's not like you can appeal anywhere. I was very busy with other things and let it slide at the time. I got away with a very cheap lesson I guess

i336_ 10y ago

Hopefully you haven't given up on reading the comments to your post and you see this. Small practical suggestion, no flames. It might be a very very good idea to lobby to get company policy instated that says "if the system thinks a user has gone rogue/bad, their account gets locked and all, but the data gets kept around until the user says to kill it, or for 6 months." Because if Google thinks the account has gone bad, that's not the user saying "delete me," so the privacy policy (and associated laws) don't apply! There's nothing stopping you even stashing the data away indefinitely until the user explicitly asks for it to be killed (but that's scary). At the end of the day though, algorithms fail, and IMO this is a practical edge-case policy glitch in the business architecture that should have been countered for. Or does "user account gone rogue" have to be interpreted as "delete me" for crazy obscure Reasons™?

forgottenpass 10y ago

is more a perfect storm of big-company policy decisions Naming storms like this is about rare they are. A "10 year storm" or "100 year storm" only happen once in that period. So they refer to a 10% or 1% chance that an X-year storm that would happen in any given year. Is this cock-up is so bad that you don't expect a Google company to make a similar or more severe cock-up for DECADES? Then it's not a perfect storm. This was a common storm. In fact, I'm very doubtful it was as a "storm" inside of google at all. This is just another "whoopsie" bug fix, isn't it? This right here is why people get the impression google thinks it's farts don't stink. Not only that you act as if this is a "perfect storm" but the arrogance it takes to design a system where just because an engineer didn't consider a use case, you're perfectly happy to assume it must be abuse. Yes, this case will probably be fixed, but would it have been if it didn't pop up on the right back channels to get Googlers attention?

Pigo 10y ago

Honestly, I feel like if you start trying to game the system with some shady practices, you should be ready for eventualities like this. That's almost as careless as putting your real info up on an .onion site, and almost exactly like torrenting without any kind of proxy. I hope they get off with a warning, but these people were up to some shenanigans.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

I recommend the takeaways you get from this thread (especially as someone in Spam & Abuse) to communicate with those you work with and your superiors at El Goog. - Automation is going to be the end of your job. Not because your job will be replaced by an algorithm, but because overuse of algorithms is leading to the collapse of trust people place in Google. Major actions like the banning of someone's Google account should never be done by algorithms. If you can't afford the humans[0], you shouldn't be in the business of holding people's valuable data. - The support and appeals process must be human. Ever tried Microsoft's Answer Desk? Talking to humans isn't difficult even with one of your largest scale competitors, even for free tier products. Humans want to talk to humans, and Google's customer base consists of humans. FastMail ticket support? Incredible. It feels like Google isn't even trying to treat customers well in comparison. - Google shafted 200 of their customers, and from the looks of it, this thread has another 200 ready to leave. The Guardian just picked up the story, so expect this effect to continue. One bad behavior by automation can cost you multiples of damage, especially if someone writes a blog post about the incident. [0]Google can definitely afford the humans, especially with that princely sum they have stashed in offshore accounts.