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Comment by braydo25 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what specifically caused it, but a representative from the Play policy team just reached out to us and has given a thorough review of our developer account and reinstated it.

We are extremely grateful to anyone in this community that may have played a hand in having a real person at the Play policy team reach out, as well as the ongoing conversation here to improve overall relations between the Play store and it's developers.

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I was just rationalizing in my head that I only hear one side of the story, that surely there were some good reasons they were banned. Google has a lot of users, and I only hear about those worst cases and so on.

But no, get to the frontpage and poof, it's solved. It really sucks for all those startups who didn't have luck getting their post viral.

Even if you do go viral there's no guarantee :-/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3803568

It's 7 years later and my company is still banned from Adsense and to this day they've never told us why.

On the bright side, I should be seeing some of the class action settlement money any day now.. http://www.adsensepublishersettlement.com

I had about 30 domains at one point so I set them all up on Adsense as I wasn’t using them. I spent about 3 days setting it up. On the last day I went and checked all 30 domains to make sure I setup all of them. 2 days later I got banned. So I was on Adsense for 5 days total. But I’ve never cared to contest it cos I don’t care. But I don’t understand how Google can’t ignore my views to Adsense.

Exactly, they can definitely detect your own views, why they can't just toss them out, I don't know. One time I got curious what the ads on my site were for and checked a few of the links out. I was banned permanently shortly after.

We need a change in anti-trust law given how many markets are now dominated by network effects.

Any company that controls more than (some) percent of a significant (by some definition) market/medium/distribution channel loses the ability to unilaterally ban/refuse to serve a user except for VERY limited reasons, such as non-payment, intentional vandalism, fraud, or other criminal (not company policy-violating but actual law-breaking) activity. If such serious violation is alleged, account can be suspended pending ruling by regulatory agency. If reg agency rules that no such violation took place, the suspension will be ordered lifted and a fine imposed as compensation--no lawsuit by MomsBasementStartup against WeOwnYouMegaCorp is necessary.

So, if you really want to have the power to ban whoever you want for whatever "terms of service" reasons please you, better make sure you never grow very big. Your ability to reject users falls as their ability to reject you and go with your competitors falls.

As someone who wrote a Deep Learning-based anomaly detection pipeline used in real world I doubt they know precisely what the issue was. It could have been a simple flagging slightly over whatever threshold they set to their system, maybe ticking off a tiny majority voting of their "suspicion" detectors. Not having humans involved, nor having clearly human-interpretable results will be always an issue at scale.

Or it could also be that people who code these algorithms are not quite skilled enough to develop them in the first place? "If it is too big to fail, it is probably too big to exist"

Good reasons for being banned? I know developers who have been banned for

1) Reselling their pixel devices (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...)

2) Using paypal and not Google wallet (when it launched)

3) App being too similar to other popular apps

4) Related account that has a ban using multi-sign (This thread)

5) Invalid traffic to adsense

6) For expired credit cards or invalid charges in Google wallet

7) For bank account switching problems even if there is no fraud (https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/3ki65d/warning_to_a...)

8) For attempts to avoid buying apps or too many refund requests (https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...)

Some unlucky people had all their google accounts purged including Drive and Gmail (Especially with monetary issues like invalid adsense clicks, invalid charge on wallet, too many app refunds)

Keep in mind that the ban is LIFETIME and any account that you multi-sign at any point in your LIFE will also be banned AND there is zero customer support. Some users have been banned for multisign issues even after 8-10 years.

The exact same ban happened to the startup I was working before but unfortunately we didn't post to hackernews or Reddit and they never got their account back.

Banned for the entire life of all the devs that ever worked in the startup because one dev had multiple sign-in enabled

That is positively insane policy. I love Google but this completely violates the "Don't Be Evil" motto.

Scarlet letter....

We all love Google until we get their boots on our face with absolute no customer support whatsoever.

More proof google support only works if you manage to get publicity... otherwise you are SOL

Many companies are like that.

What happens when your outlets for complaints are blocked as well?

What if HN, Twitter, Reddit mods, etc. were asked by the company to stifle any dissent against it, and obliged, where would you go?

The difference is I give zero shits about twitter, reddit, HN , facebook. Google has absolute monopoly on mail, maps, android, play store, apps, dev, drive.

Is being banned by twitter the same as being banned by google?

> What if HN, Twitter, Reddit mods, etc. were asked by the company to stifle any dissent against it, and obliged, where would you go?

Huh? Why would you expect any of those entities to oblige such a request? Other than perhaps some Reddit mods, depending on the subreddit.

An automated DMCA system could be abused to stifle dissent.

Like JetBrains recent DMCA to shutdown the /r/piracy subreddit [0], not for all the probably illegal stuff, but for "Asking about JetBrains Licensing".

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/b2xslo/reddit_legal...

I run a Healthcare company and we got banned. No reason, nothing. The only thing I can think of is not updating the expo SMS api in time; we hadn't even published anything before. You may have gotten lucky but there are countless others who didn't.

This has happened often enough in the past that they probably have a procedure in place. It keeps the internet from blowing up in their face but it doesn't solve the underlying problem.

They probably have a bot that monitors Reddit and HN and flags to a human if the story gets enough upvotes

Or they have humans who work there who see these threads and message a friend saying "hey what's going with this?"

Since you have a point of contact, it might not be a bad idea to ask them what you are supposed to do if it happens again? Surely they don't want you to post on HN every time?

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