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Everyone here is commenting about overautomation, but this isn't an overautomation problem. It's a secondary sanctions problem. The developer isn't being banned

Everyone here is commenting about overautomation, but this isn't an overautomation problem. It's a secondary sanctions problem. The developer isn't being banned for breaking Google's rules, he's being banned for having hired someone else who later broke those rules; and then that ban was transitively applied to their personal account as well. This is beyond the pale. Google should not have the power to decide who you are and are not allowed to hire. It both goes against the basic concept of a limited-liability corporation, and harms worker rights.

ceejayoz 5y ago
> Google should not have the power to decide who you are and are not allowed to hire. Especially not retroactively. "Your former employee broke the rules at their next job, so you're banned" is just bizarre.
shadowgovt 5y ago
It's both (over-automation and secondary sanctions). The secondary sanctions exist because it's near-trivial to automatically create dozens of proxy accounts for a bad actor to launder reputation through. So in addition to direct fraud detection, Google has had to automate secondary "Is this account probably the same bad actor" detection. That system, like any such system (including human review), has false-positivies where two accounts are believed to be the same owner when they are not. But the automation-with-insufficient-human-review problem is specifically Google's mistake, and there's room for improvement.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  As somebody whose worked in the large scale anti-fraud area… I always make sure my team knows that the real people who fall through the cracks matter big time. Anti-fraud is a tough space because you can never be 100% sure which actors are legit and which are scammers… after all if you knew who the scammers actually were you’d have blocked them all ready. I always make sure there is some kind of escape hatch for legit users who get caught in our system. These escape hatches might not be super awesome for real users, especially if they fell into a bucket that strongly labels them as scammers, but at least they have an out.
Closi 5y ago
> Everyone here is commenting about overautomation, but this isn't an overautomation problem. It's a secondary sanctions problem. It's both. When you work with tech companies this kind of overautomation is rife. When you work with any other type of business they give you an account manager and you manage these issues openly together with a relationship. If there was a human at Google who picked up the phone and worked out the problem with the developers before this ban was imposed, this could have all been nipped-in-the-bud before an account was terminated. My current account doesn't have much money in it, but my bank would call me if there is an issue which would terminate my account, and I'm confident that they would work with me to offer up solutions rather than instantly terminate it. Google should provide developers more respect than my bank offers average consumers. There is no excuse for them not picking up the phone and just talking these things through before they implement the bans (unless there is active malicious behaviour in an app, in which case I would expect a suspension to happen and be followed up with a phone call straight away).
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  Google is much more profitable than your bank, and this is why. The reason tech companies sit all at the top of most valuable companies is essentially because they've automated away a ton of tasks which normally require hiring a lot of employees. The only way to fix this is to legally require it, because nobody's going to stop the profit train by themselves.
  - JacobThreeThree 5y ago
    >because they've automated away a ton of tasks which normally require hiring a lot of employees Or they've simply removed those tasks under the rubric of automation.
  - CPLX 5y ago
    > Google is much more profitable than your bank, and this is why. That's not correct. Google is more profitable because it is a monopoly and routinely engages in illegal anti-competitive behavior. It's precisely because this is the case that it's able to have nonexistent customer service and stay in business.
TuringNYC 5y ago
I had a scare last year where Google supposedly gave me 30 days before they would shut off my Google account of 20yrs. Family photos, youtube videos, 20yrs of email, not to mention the treasure trove of personal documents on GDrive. It took two weeks to duplicate the content and back it up elsewhere. This is a paid tier Google account and I've yet to get an explanation on why this happened. It appears to be because of an "associated" (whatever that means) Google Business account for a startup where I worked where they shut off my GSuite account after I resigned, but customer service couldnt provide a real explanation why it would also terminate my personal Google account. The automated websites where you upload photo ID to prove identity didnt work and didnt give an absolute confirm/reject...so i slept uneasily for almost a month knowing that my 20yr account might disappear. Ultimately it did not disappear in 30 days. Was it because I upload passport photos? Not sure. Because I spoke to customer service? Not sure. Because the original shutdown notice was a mistake? Not sure. The lack of clarity made it worse. I've heard stories about people losing personal accounts like this due to GCloud usage. At work, where I'm CTO, I have open access +MSAs to the three major cloud providers -- BUT I am very hesitant to use anything but AWS/Azure. The risk of something going wrong with GCloud and that metastasizing to my (or anyone's on the team) personal Google account (or vice versa) is huge and just not worth the risk.
- boppo1 5y ago
  What did you use to backup your google photos?
  - TuringNYC 5y ago
    BlackBlaze. It required some manual effort and scripting. It is on a manually triggered batch that i'm running quarterly. I wish there was a service that could do it, ideally on a more regular cadence.
    - boppo1 5y ago
      Does photos have an api, or are you doing some cursor/screenspace stuff?
- 5y ago
tempnow987 5y ago
Google is dealing with a very real problem. There are bad actors, particularly internationally, who systematically and at scale try to subvert / cheat. This includes multiple accounts, and businesses that hire folks who try to cheat the system. Google almost certainly has statistics supporting the increased risk of working with developers / businesses that hire folks who break various rules. Certainly there are false positives as well. A lot of folks are offended by $100 / year developer fees. If Apple et al charged $10,000 to get going as a developer, they would probably be better positioned to deal with all this less automatically. In fact, game dev historically might have followed a bit of this model (xbox etc). Anyways, my own thought, there should be a pathway to a $5,000 fee where you get a higher level of human interaction.
- TuringNYC 5y ago
  >> Google is dealing with a very real problem. There are bad actors, particularly internationally, who systematically and at scale try to subvert / cheat. I really dislike this explanation because there are so many obvious things they can do. Example: 1. Force uploads of Passport/ID for identity confirmation. If you have 100 accounts with the same passport...ok...issue, but if not, is it worth human review at least? 2. Force credit card payment with address verification, ideally match to passport. Same credit card used across 1000 accounts...ok...issue, but if not, perhaps worth a review at least? 3. Still an issue? Force user to pay $100 for verification and run credit check routine. The idea that blanket account terminations are the only way to handle issues seem lazy.
  - saulrh 5y ago
    The solutions you suggest would prompt more outrage than anything Google does in this space today.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Those are still secondary sanctions. Op wants to be able to hire somebody with a history of abuse without google enforcing them
    - 5y ago
miohtama 5y ago
GDPR Article 22 > The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her. > In the cases referred to in points (a) and (c) of paragraph 2, the data controller shall implement suitable measures to safeguard the data subject’s rights and freedoms and legitimate interests, at least the right to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller, to express his or her point of view and to contest the decision. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
- zo1 5y ago
  Cool sounds like this guy can open a police case, a detective or police person looks into it, finds "yeah, sure enough, we audited Google's code and they broke rule 2c, so we'll give you X-million in compensation for this." And then the detective (because it's an open-shut case mind you) goes further with: Getting an extract of 12,393,333 other people affected by this "problem" so they issue a court order to charge Google 12,393,333 * X-million in damages. And then further also issuing a court order for Google to stop all operations immediately until they deactivate this automated process. As if that will ever happen. We don't live in a world of rules and logic until things play out as simply as above.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  GDPR Art. 4: „ personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’)“. This is a business, not a natural person.
  - tremon 5y ago
    > and that ban was transitively applied to their personal account as well
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lmkg 5y ago
    Data can be both, in which case GDPR right still apply. Several GDPR fines have been handed down for processing business data about a person. Especially (but not only) data about sole proprietors/solo traders.
Reason077 5y ago
I suppose the best practice solution to this is to try to keep company Google Play accounts as "sterile" as possible? Give access to as few employees as possible, and have all access to Google Play go through a designated, trusted release manager or "play account manager"? And don't log in to Google Play from random browsers and IP addresses which could create an association with other Google accounts?
- 3np 5y ago
  Or just don't link personal and company accounts. Even these issues aside , there are so many reasons to keep them separate and unrelated. That's not unique to Google but goes for GitHub, AWS, and whatever else. Use company e-mail addresses to register for everything. Enforce it for your employees. This is in the interest of both the company and the employee. Yes, the summer intern gets a corp email too, which at minimum gets access to internal resources beyond the OT chatroom revoked when they are out. (Your advise is not bad though: grant granular access as it's needed)
  - Reason077 5y ago
    It sounds like Google have other means to establish links between accounts, though? An employee using their personal account and a company account from the same browser is likely to result in a "link" or association being established between those accounts.
    - 3np 5y ago
      From what's written here, it's not clear if such links have been used for these terminations. But yes, my point of not mixing accounts does go that far - if you don't have separate hardware, at least use separate browsers or browser profiles. Don't put the cookies in the same jar.
    - JacobThreeThree 5y ago
      Most likely yes, but as usual it's a black box, we don't really know how it works.
ajross 5y ago
> he's being banned for having hired someone else who later broke those rules FWIW: there's some reason to suspect that the "later" bit is being spun here. Per the timeline in the article, there were only 5-6 weeks between the employee being fired and Google taking action against the employer[1]. That's pretty tight, and from an enforcement perspective is going to make it extremely difficult to distinguish which entity is doing the bad things. And, frankly, given the spin elsewhere in the story, I'm inclined to suspect more ambiguity here and not less. What's the ask here, that Google (which correctly detected the association between the accounts) audit the IT permissions logs of accounts that commit bannable offenses before taking action? That just doesn't seem feasible. [1] They further spin this by trying to claim that the employee left in 2019, but have to admit that he was still present as a consultant.
- nekopa 5y ago
  If you are referring to this section: Mar 2019 - H. Left the company, all permissions removed except on one game which we were still using H.'s consultation on - The app was unpublished later on 04 Dec 2021 - Termination of H. (Former Employee) account because of multiple policy violations 26 Jan 2022 - Termination of our company account (Raya Games Ltd - AKA TOD Studio) without prior notices and warnings I think the 04 Dec 2021 is Google's termination of the "H" account.
  - stonemetal12 5y ago
    By that timeline they never fully terminated the association with H. H went from FTE to consultant, who had privileges for what he was working on.
    - LorenPechtel 5y ago
      And this is why they got hit with the banhammer. A known bad actor had access to their account.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
whoknew1122 5y ago
I can feel the downvotes coming deep in my bones. But Google has its own reputation (and users) to protect. It's taking a risk whenever it allows a developer on its platform. If a developer with low name recognition uploads malicious software, it's not the developer's name that makes the headline. Crucially, there's no information on what the employee (and later contractor) 'H.' did to get themselves banned. Or fired. From the OP's own timeline, the ban came less than two months after they severed their relationship with 'H.' Google isn't swinging around the ban hammer years after the OP separated with 'H.' The OP's games could still include code contributed by 'H.' And 'H.' is apparently untrustworthy. Is that a risk Google should be forced to take as the curator of the Google Play store? I don't think so.
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  There’s a difference between banning an app and banning an account.
  - whoknew1122 5y ago
    Are you suggesting that Google ban all current apps in their account? Google has no idea which apps 'H.' contributed to. Or whether 'H.' still has a relationship with Raya Games. If 'H.' is a malicious developer, then all apps that were extant while 'H.' was associated with Raya should be considered suspect. Google (and its user base) have no idea what apps 'H.' touched. The very least Google should do is ban all apps uploaded and/or updated during 'H.'s employment. And even then Google has no way to know whether 'H.' still works at the company, or will work again there in the future. Google doesn't (and can't reasonably) have any insight into personnel decisions at Raya Games. Is Google throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Yeah, probably. But Google can't differentiate between baby and bathwater when it comes to malicious developers. Google has an affirmative responsibility to protect its userbase. It doesn't have an affirmative responsibility to let any individual publisher sell apps on the Google Play store.
    - jonathankoren 5y ago
      That’s whole another sentence dude.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> Google should not have the power I can't help but notice the "they're a private company, so they can do whatever they want" folks that pop up whenever somebody's account gets banned for political views are strangely silent right now...
- jgod 5y ago
  They were cheering it on a week or two ago when it was against Russians. My favorite was when they were licking their lips and reaching ecstasy over Parler getting deplatformed but then throwing a tantrum like a week later when Terraria dev got banned by Google. Terraria guy and this guy simply need to build their own Google, Gmail, Play Store, and Android, easy! ;)
  - rvz 5y ago
    > They were cheering it on a week or two ago when it was against Russians. Also celebrating that Google was ‘on their side’. Until they are not. > My favorite was when they were licking their lips and reaching ecstasy over Parler getting deplatformed but then throwing a tantrum like a week later when Terraria dev got banned by Google. That was my favorite one. Basically the chickens cheering on the wolves eating the other chickens that disagreed with them. Now the wolves are eating them as well and they are complaining why they are ‘not on their side’ anymore. They thought it could never happen to them. Just use the same ‘private platform’ logic towards them for everyone else that is getting banned after Parler and now they are all crying in the comments here. These companies are not on anyone’s side and these bans can happen to anyone on their platform. They won’t change.
  - dymk 5y ago
    > They were cheering it on a week or two ago when it was against Russians. Tired of seeing people equate war crimes to Google screwing over some company.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      Tired of people not complaining about war crimes in Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
8note 5y ago
Google has freedom of association. If they don't want to work with you based on your employees, that's their prerogative. That's not controlling who you can hire. Really, it's a monopoly problem. You shouldn't be affected by whether google wants to work with you or not
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I'm not buying this line of reasoning entirely. The problem isn't that you don't have options with regard to hosting, email, etc (with the notable exception of google play store), the problem is that once you've picked your option it's hard to migrate out, and as a customer you have a right IMO, whether in the terms or not, to a good faith effort on the part of the service vendor to sort our any problems you encounter with the service. If a robot just shuts you down no notice and there's nobody to reach to sort it out that's a negligent business practice and I believe any vendor of any service that operates this way is liable. If they want to offer migration tooling, notice and access to your data I can see it being alright. A pain in the ass, but at least not the end of your business one morning while making coffee. As far as google play goes, I think there's the monopoly aspect to work on and hopefully legislation brings a resolution to this problem, like offering independent repositories as a default option or something like that, til that time though, do not rely on it entirely. If you have to open source it and put it on f-droid, maintain an aptoide repo, apk download on your site and market that heavier than your google play account, whatever you have to do, just do not rely primarily on the play store because you're basically giving google the keys to your kingdom.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Pick a provider with that option. Building a business on top of a business that can shut you without recourse is risky.
    - ThunderSizzle 5y ago
      So no one should make an Android app, since the persistence of Android (with or without the play market) relies on Google not trying to lock it down into something similar to what Apple has.
splonk 5y ago
The timeline makes me wonder if the personal account ban triggered an audit of their previous actions and found similar activity from when they were an employee.
rmbyrro 5y ago
Agree with everything. Just clarifying that the concept of a limited liability company has nothing to do with this. It is about not having company liabilities (e.g. debt) reaching stockholders (e.g. banks seizing your personal car and house to pay for your business defaulted debt).
marcosdumay 5y ago
Guilt by association is the kind of thing people create when they want to terrorize a population for control. It not existing is a basic human right. What we are seeing is a monopolist abusing its power by directly harming somebody and the civil society refusing to acknowledge any harm. And it's doing so by the most visible power demonstration it can.

ceejayoz 5y ago

> Google should not have the power to decide who you are and are not allowed to hire. Especially not retroactively. "Your former employee broke the rules at their next job, so you're banned" is just bizarre.

shadowgovt 5y ago

It's both (over-automation and secondary sanctions). The secondary sanctions exist because it's near-trivial to automatically create dozens of proxy accounts for a bad actor to launder reputation through. So in addition to direct fraud detection, Google has had to automate secondary "Is this account probably the same bad actor" detection. That system, like any such system (including human review), has false-positivies where two accounts are believed to be the same owner when they are not. But the automation-with-insufficient-human-review problem is specifically Google's mistake, and there's room for improvement.

spookthesunset 5y ago
As somebody whose worked in the large scale anti-fraud area… I always make sure my team knows that the real people who fall through the cracks matter big time. Anti-fraud is a tough space because you can never be 100% sure which actors are legit and which are scammers… after all if you knew who the scammers actually were you’d have blocked them all ready. I always make sure there is some kind of escape hatch for legit users who get caught in our system. These escape hatches might not be super awesome for real users, especially if they fell into a bucket that strongly labels them as scammers, but at least they have an out.

Closi 5y ago

> Everyone here is commenting about overautomation, but this isn't an overautomation problem. It's a secondary sanctions problem. It's both. When you work with tech companies this kind of overautomation is rife. When you work with any other type of business they give you an account manager and you manage these issues openly together with a relationship. If there was a human at Google who picked up the phone and worked out the problem with the developers before this ban was imposed, this could have all been nipped-in-the-bud before an account was terminated. My current account doesn't have much money in it, but my bank would call me if there is an issue which would terminate my account, and I'm confident that they would work with me to offer up solutions rather than instantly terminate it. Google should provide developers more respect than my bank offers average consumers. There is no excuse for them not picking up the phone and just talking these things through before they implement the bans (unless there is active malicious behaviour in an app, in which case I would expect a suspension to happen and be followed up with a phone call straight away).

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
Google is much more profitable than your bank, and this is why. The reason tech companies sit all at the top of most valuable companies is essentially because they've automated away a ton of tasks which normally require hiring a lot of employees. The only way to fix this is to legally require it, because nobody's going to stop the profit train by themselves.
- JacobThreeThree 5y ago
  >because they've automated away a ton of tasks which normally require hiring a lot of employees Or they've simply removed those tasks under the rubric of automation.
- CPLX 5y ago
  > Google is much more profitable than your bank, and this is why. That's not correct. Google is more profitable because it is a monopoly and routinely engages in illegal anti-competitive behavior. It's precisely because this is the case that it's able to have nonexistent customer service and stay in business.

TuringNYC 5y ago

I had a scare last year where Google supposedly gave me 30 days before they would shut off my Google account of 20yrs. Family photos, youtube videos, 20yrs of email, not to mention the treasure trove of personal documents on GDrive. It took two weeks to duplicate the content and back it up elsewhere. This is a paid tier Google account and I've yet to get an explanation on why this happened. It appears to be because of an "associated" (whatever that means) Google Business account for a startup where I worked where they shut off my GSuite account after I resigned, but customer service couldnt provide a real explanation why it would also terminate my personal Google account. The automated websites where you upload photo ID to prove identity didnt work and didnt give an absolute confirm/reject...so i slept uneasily for almost a month knowing that my 20yr account might disappear. Ultimately it did not disappear in 30 days. Was it because I upload passport photos? Not sure. Because I spoke to customer service? Not sure. Because the original shutdown notice was a mistake? Not sure. The lack of clarity made it worse. I've heard stories about people losing personal accounts like this due to GCloud usage. At work, where I'm CTO, I have open access +MSAs to the three major cloud providers -- BUT I am very hesitant to use anything but AWS/Azure. The risk of something going wrong with GCloud and that metastasizing to my (or anyone's on the team) personal Google account (or vice versa) is huge and just not worth the risk.

boppo1 5y ago
What did you use to backup your google photos?
- TuringNYC 5y ago
  BlackBlaze. It required some manual effort and scripting. It is on a manually triggered batch that i'm running quarterly. I wish there was a service that could do it, ideally on a more regular cadence.
  - boppo1 5y ago
    Does photos have an api, or are you doing some cursor/screenspace stuff?
5y ago

tempnow987 5y ago

Google is dealing with a very real problem. There are bad actors, particularly internationally, who systematically and at scale try to subvert / cheat. This includes multiple accounts, and businesses that hire folks who try to cheat the system. Google almost certainly has statistics supporting the increased risk of working with developers / businesses that hire folks who break various rules. Certainly there are false positives as well. A lot of folks are offended by $100 / year developer fees. If Apple et al charged $10,000 to get going as a developer, they would probably be better positioned to deal with all this less automatically. In fact, game dev historically might have followed a bit of this model (xbox etc). Anyways, my own thought, there should be a pathway to a $5,000 fee where you get a higher level of human interaction.

TuringNYC 5y ago
>> Google is dealing with a very real problem. There are bad actors, particularly internationally, who systematically and at scale try to subvert / cheat. I really dislike this explanation because there are so many obvious things they can do. Example: 1. Force uploads of Passport/ID for identity confirmation. If you have 100 accounts with the same passport...ok...issue, but if not, is it worth human review at least? 2. Force credit card payment with address verification, ideally match to passport. Same credit card used across 1000 accounts...ok...issue, but if not, perhaps worth a review at least? 3. Still an issue? Force user to pay $100 for verification and run credit check routine. The idea that blanket account terminations are the only way to handle issues seem lazy.
- saulrh 5y ago
  The solutions you suggest would prompt more outrage than anything Google does in this space today.
- 8note 5y ago
  Those are still secondary sanctions. Op wants to be able to hire somebody with a history of abuse without google enforcing them
  - 5y ago

miohtama 5y ago

GDPR Article 22 > The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her. > In the cases referred to in points (a) and (c) of paragraph 2, the data controller shall implement suitable measures to safeguard the data subject’s rights and freedoms and legitimate interests, at least the right to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller, to express his or her point of view and to contest the decision. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

zo1 5y ago
Cool sounds like this guy can open a police case, a detective or police person looks into it, finds "yeah, sure enough, we audited Google's code and they broke rule 2c, so we'll give you X-million in compensation for this." And then the detective (because it's an open-shut case mind you) goes further with: Getting an extract of 12,393,333 other people affected by this "problem" so they issue a court order to charge Google 12,393,333 * X-million in damages. And then further also issuing a court order for Google to stop all operations immediately until they deactivate this automated process. As if that will ever happen. We don't live in a world of rules and logic until things play out as simply as above.
KarlKemp 5y ago
GDPR Art. 4: „ personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’)“. This is a business, not a natural person.
- tremon 5y ago
  > and that ban was transitively applied to their personal account as well
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lmkg 5y ago
  Data can be both, in which case GDPR right still apply. Several GDPR fines have been handed down for processing business data about a person. Especially (but not only) data about sole proprietors/solo traders.

Reason077 5y ago

I suppose the best practice solution to this is to try to keep company Google Play accounts as "sterile" as possible? Give access to as few employees as possible, and have all access to Google Play go through a designated, trusted release manager or "play account manager"? And don't log in to Google Play from random browsers and IP addresses which could create an association with other Google accounts?

3np 5y ago
Or just don't link personal and company accounts. Even these issues aside , there are so many reasons to keep them separate and unrelated. That's not unique to Google but goes for GitHub, AWS, and whatever else. Use company e-mail addresses to register for everything. Enforce it for your employees. This is in the interest of both the company and the employee. Yes, the summer intern gets a corp email too, which at minimum gets access to internal resources beyond the OT chatroom revoked when they are out. (Your advise is not bad though: grant granular access as it's needed)
- Reason077 5y ago
  It sounds like Google have other means to establish links between accounts, though? An employee using their personal account and a company account from the same browser is likely to result in a "link" or association being established between those accounts.
  - 3np 5y ago
    From what's written here, it's not clear if such links have been used for these terminations. But yes, my point of not mixing accounts does go that far - if you don't have separate hardware, at least use separate browsers or browser profiles. Don't put the cookies in the same jar.
  - JacobThreeThree 5y ago
    Most likely yes, but as usual it's a black box, we don't really know how it works.

ajross 5y ago

> he's being banned for having hired someone else who later broke those rules FWIW: there's some reason to suspect that the "later" bit is being spun here. Per the timeline in the article, there were only 5-6 weeks between the employee being fired and Google taking action against the employer[1]. That's pretty tight, and from an enforcement perspective is going to make it extremely difficult to distinguish which entity is doing the bad things. And, frankly, given the spin elsewhere in the story, I'm inclined to suspect more ambiguity here and not less. What's the ask here, that Google (which correctly detected the association between the accounts) audit the IT permissions logs of accounts that commit bannable offenses before taking action? That just doesn't seem feasible. [1] They further spin this by trying to claim that the employee left in 2019, but have to admit that he was still present as a consultant.

nekopa 5y ago
If you are referring to this section: Mar 2019 - H. Left the company, all permissions removed except on one game which we were still using H.'s consultation on - The app was unpublished later on 04 Dec 2021 - Termination of H. (Former Employee) account because of multiple policy violations 26 Jan 2022 - Termination of our company account (Raya Games Ltd - AKA TOD Studio) without prior notices and warnings I think the 04 Dec 2021 is Google's termination of the "H" account.
- stonemetal12 5y ago
  By that timeline they never fully terminated the association with H. H went from FTE to consultant, who had privileges for what he was working on.
  - LorenPechtel 5y ago
    And this is why they got hit with the banhammer. A known bad actor had access to their account.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

whoknew1122 5y ago

I can feel the downvotes coming deep in my bones. But Google has its own reputation (and users) to protect. It's taking a risk whenever it allows a developer on its platform. If a developer with low name recognition uploads malicious software, it's not the developer's name that makes the headline. Crucially, there's no information on what the employee (and later contractor) 'H.' did to get themselves banned. Or fired. From the OP's own timeline, the ban came less than two months after they severed their relationship with 'H.' Google isn't swinging around the ban hammer years after the OP separated with 'H.' The OP's games could still include code contributed by 'H.' And 'H.' is apparently untrustworthy. Is that a risk Google should be forced to take as the curator of the Google Play store? I don't think so.

jonathankoren 5y ago
There’s a difference between banning an app and banning an account.
- whoknew1122 5y ago
  Are you suggesting that Google ban all current apps in their account? Google has no idea which apps 'H.' contributed to. Or whether 'H.' still has a relationship with Raya Games. If 'H.' is a malicious developer, then all apps that were extant while 'H.' was associated with Raya should be considered suspect. Google (and its user base) have no idea what apps 'H.' touched. The very least Google should do is ban all apps uploaded and/or updated during 'H.'s employment. And even then Google has no way to know whether 'H.' still works at the company, or will work again there in the future. Google doesn't (and can't reasonably) have any insight into personnel decisions at Raya Games. Is Google throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Yeah, probably. But Google can't differentiate between baby and bathwater when it comes to malicious developers. Google has an affirmative responsibility to protect its userbase. It doesn't have an affirmative responsibility to let any individual publisher sell apps on the Google Play store.
  - jonathankoren 5y ago
    That’s whole another sentence dude.

commandlinefan 5y ago

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

jgod 5y ago
They were cheering it on a week or two ago when it was against Russians. My favorite was when they were licking their lips and reaching ecstasy over Parler getting deplatformed but then throwing a tantrum like a week later when Terraria dev got banned by Google. Terraria guy and this guy simply need to build their own Google, Gmail, Play Store, and Android, easy! ;)
- rvz 5y ago
  > They were cheering it on a week or two ago when it was against Russians. Also celebrating that Google was ‘on their side’. Until they are not. > My favorite was when they were licking their lips and reaching ecstasy over Parler getting deplatformed but then throwing a tantrum like a week later when Terraria dev got banned by Google. That was my favorite one. Basically the chickens cheering on the wolves eating the other chickens that disagreed with them. Now the wolves are eating them as well and they are complaining why they are ‘not on their side’ anymore. They thought it could never happen to them. Just use the same ‘private platform’ logic towards them for everyone else that is getting banned after Parler and now they are all crying in the comments here. These companies are not on anyone’s side and these bans can happen to anyone on their platform. They won’t change.
- dymk 5y ago
  > They were cheering it on a week or two ago when it was against Russians. Tired of seeing people equate war crimes to Google screwing over some company.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Tired of people not complaining about war crimes in Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.

8note 5y ago

Google has freedom of association. If they don't want to work with you based on your employees, that's their prerogative. That's not controlling who you can hire. Really, it's a monopoly problem. You shouldn't be affected by whether google wants to work with you or not

betwixthewires 5y ago
I'm not buying this line of reasoning entirely. The problem isn't that you don't have options with regard to hosting, email, etc (with the notable exception of google play store), the problem is that once you've picked your option it's hard to migrate out, and as a customer you have a right IMO, whether in the terms or not, to a good faith effort on the part of the service vendor to sort our any problems you encounter with the service. If a robot just shuts you down no notice and there's nobody to reach to sort it out that's a negligent business practice and I believe any vendor of any service that operates this way is liable. If they want to offer migration tooling, notice and access to your data I can see it being alright. A pain in the ass, but at least not the end of your business one morning while making coffee. As far as google play goes, I think there's the monopoly aspect to work on and hopefully legislation brings a resolution to this problem, like offering independent repositories as a default option or something like that, til that time though, do not rely on it entirely. If you have to open source it and put it on f-droid, maintain an aptoide repo, apk download on your site and market that heavier than your google play account, whatever you have to do, just do not rely primarily on the play store because you're basically giving google the keys to your kingdom.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Pick a provider with that option. Building a business on top of a business that can shut you without recourse is risky.
  - ThunderSizzle 5y ago
    So no one should make an Android app, since the persistence of Android (with or without the play market) relies on Google not trying to lock it down into something similar to what Apple has.

splonk 5y ago

The timeline makes me wonder if the personal account ban triggered an audit of their previous actions and found similar activity from when they were an employee.

rmbyrro 5y ago

Agree with everything. Just clarifying that the concept of a limited liability company has nothing to do with this. It is about not having company liabilities (e.g. debt) reaching stockholders (e.g. banks seizing your personal car and house to pay for your business defaulted debt).

marcosdumay 5y ago

Guilt by association is the kind of thing people create when they want to terrorize a population for control. It not existing is a basic human right. What we are seeing is a monopolist abusing its power by directly harming somebody and the civil society refusing to acknowledge any harm. And it's doing so by the most visible power demonstration it can.