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Hi folks, my Mastodon server is now blocked as a "deceptive site," likely because its login pages are similar to other Mastodon servers. To a machine learning o

Hi folks, my Mastodon server is now blocked as a "deceptive site," likely because its login pages are similar to other Mastodon servers. To a machine learning or rule-based system, I could see how that seems deceptive. But I'm now stuck in a several days to several weeks long wait for manual review. And of course there's no guarantee that manual review will result in a correct decision. Meanwhile, it's truly incredible how fully my site is now blocked off from the world. Firefox Android won't even let me access it, while Chrome hides the click-through underneath the "details" button. My friends who use the site are understandably concerned, but there's not much I can do. It's crazy how a false positive in one centralized system can impact my little piece of the fediverse.

thrtythreeforty 4y ago
Pushbullet has also learned the hard way how to respond to Google's faceless review process: > Now that you know you’re up against an automated policy enforcement AI, your goal is to look as much as possible like the training data. Unfortunately, this can be easier said than done since we do not have access to the training data. > All is not lost, however. You have actionable info in the simple fact that what your app looks like now is not acceptable. https://blog.pushbullet.com/2022/10/27/how-we-became-the-worlds-foremost-expert-on-google-play-store-policy-violations/ https://blog.pushbullet.com/2022/10/27/how-we-became-the-wor...
brenns10 4y ago
As an update, Google's "warning level" seems to have dropped to Yellow from Red: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?url=https:%2F%2Fsnake.club https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?u... I still see an exclamation mark in mobile Chrome, but it looks like the big scary red interstitial is gone from most browsers I've seen. Perhaps it was enough different people reporting false positive? Or maybe a re-scan or manual action. Unclear but it's appreciated. Wish there was more transparency (ironic given the "transparencyreport" subdomain that URL is hosted at).

thrtythreeforty 4y ago

Pushbullet has also learned the hard way how to respond to Google's faceless review process: > Now that you know you’re up against an automated policy enforcement AI, your goal is to look as much as possible like the training data. Unfortunately, this can be easier said than done since we do not have access to the training data. > All is not lost, however. You have actionable info in the simple fact that what your app looks like now is not acceptable. https://blog.pushbullet.com/2022/10/27/how-we-became-the-worlds-foremost-expert-on-google-play-store-policy-violations/ https://blog.pushbullet.com/2022/10/27/how-we-became-the-wor...

brenns10 4y ago

As an update, Google's "warning level" seems to have dropped to Yellow from Red: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?url=https:%2F%2Fsnake.club https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?u... I still see an exclamation mark in mobile Chrome, but it looks like the big scary red interstitial is gone from most browsers I've seen. Perhaps it was enough different people reporting false positive? Or maybe a re-scan or manual action. Unclear but it's appreciated. Wish there was more transparency (ironic given the "transparencyreport" subdomain that URL is hosted at).