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Comment by ameshkov | Hacker News Reader

This “shoot first ask questions later” approach is typical not just for Google, but for AV vendors as well. The problem is that in the case of Google the potential consequences for a legit developer are much scarier: all browsers are affected, the whole website may be blocked.

The other, even more serious issue, is that with Google there is no way to get the feedback and learn what exactly they consider wrong?

Let’s also talk about their “unwanted software policy” that leads to this kind of warnings. The policy mostly sounds okayish, but there are some points that bother me. For instance, there is a point explicitly prohibiting working with Google APIs in a nonstandard manner. What does that even mean? Is ad blocking software blocking google’s ad server can be categorized as unwanted now? Or any AV that scans Chrome downloads?

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Google’s typical approach is more like, “shoot first, ask no questions, and provide no contact method”.

People would have a lot fewer issues with Google if it actually had support contact that functioned. It is awful that they just kill a thing without even contacting the author but it is made so much worse by the utter lack of willingness as a company to even accept the possibility they made an error.

These sorts of problems are the reason I stopped doing Android and OS X apps, being that beholden to companies who have shown time and again to do not just wrongfully takedown apps but also act anticompetitively in their marketplaces, it is just asking for trouble. Stick to games and website apps and avoid genuinely innovative takes on anything that Google (and Apple) has any remote interest in or your business might just disappear overnight and you won't have the funds to stop them.

This sort of protection is just messed up but I can't see the USA taking action against this giant of a company any time soon. You still see people complaining about EU fines for anti-competitive behaviour regularly here on HN and yet they are a drop in the bucket. The web isn't free anymore and those that want their data to be their own went underground into the self-hosting community.

> People would have a lot fewer issues with Google if it actually had support contact that functioned.

Fun fact:

According to German law a company is required to provide (real) support under its support contact address.

Google ignored this law for years.

A few years ago they got sued over this. Now there is a legally binding court ruling demanding from Google that they comply with the law in force.[1]

Fast-froward 5 years, and guess what. Google continues to ignore the law, and since than additionally the court ruling.

[1] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Google-muss-unter-Su... (It's in German, but the translation I've tested on https://www.deepl.com/translator is quite perfect)

Specifically, this is a result of the imprint laws in germany, which require you put up contact data. An E-Mail Address is optional but if you put it up, you need to respond to incoming requests (mostly of legal nature). The automated response wasn't considered by the court to be sufficient.

Google ignores it because they can afford to.

Consider the scale at which they operate... How could they possibly turn a profit given the number of people who use their free and paid services, and the number of people who are pissed off at their business practices? I know I want to call and harangue them at least once a month... Imagine if every single Gmail user could do that. They would crumple over their own tech support costs in just a few years.

They could afford it. It would be expensive but they are so hugely profitable that the cost of a large customer support team would be a small drop in the bucket of incoming cash.

They figured out that ad agencies are not really accountable to anyone. So that's what they pretend to be.

Yeah, well, you nailed it, unfortunately.

There needs to be accountability. I can't put out notices accusing random businesses of being scams without opening myself to some sort of libel or defamation lawsuit. The same should apply to security vendors that falsely mislabel other peoples' software as being malicious without good cause.

That is just silly from both a security standpoint and a libel and defamation standpoint.

They are specifically heuristic algorithm based and by definition they aren't perfect but can actually keep up with the massive volumes and unknowns. It is /not/ random or capriciously applied even if outcomes are flawed which makes the comparison apples to hand grenades regardless of false positives.

Even if their approach utterly sucked it wouldn't be libel or defamation any more than saying "Never trust a company which changes its name without the old name featuring sonething which becane obsolete." or "Any company with a rate of growth over 10% for ten consecutive quarters is probably a Ponzi Schene".

No, that's not how things work. You don't get to apply a defective algorithm to a problem, and then claim that you aren't responsible for the results since the algorithm that you created is defective. Google has a very high false-positive rate with this.

Any time they make a statement about another entity which is demonstrably untrue and causes harm to somebody's reputation or prevents them from generating revenue, that is grounds for a defamation lawsuit. The fact that they have automated their defamation does not remove their culpability.

It might also be a violation of anti-trust law since Google has its own software-delivery channels which are not subject to the same warnings.

>Even if their approach utterly sucked it wouldn't be libel or defamation any more than saying "Never trust a company which changes its name without the old name featuring sonething which becane obsolete." or "Any company with a rate of growth over 10% for ten consecutive quarters is probably a Ponzi Schene".

It's completely different because those statements are not made about specific entities, nor do they make specific accusations about any entities.

It is capriciously applied if they don't acknowledge the possibility of mistakes and have some way of dealing with them.

I am not sure if an indie developer can afford doing that anyway.

This sounds like something the EFF could take to court and clear up the ambiguity in one case than hundreds of defamation cases

> Is ad blocking software blocking google’s ad server can be categorized as unwanted now?

Obviously not. The UWS policy has been around for a long time and adblockers haven't been swept up in them.

Which part of the UWS policy states that this will stay like that in the future?

This complaint could be made for literally all policies.

"What if they change the rules in the future and suddenly do something I don't like?"

If the Safe Browsing system suddenly starts doing things that people don't want, then the other browser vendors will stop using it. Problem solved.

Oh, you've misunderstood my point.

They don't have to change anything about the rule!

They need only to change their "interpretation" of said rule. In fact the rule is so vague they can interpret it in any way they want.

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