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Comment by busymom0 | Hacker News Reader

"Guilt by association" is a bad way to run companies - especially when you don't even know who and how someone is guilty. They also do not apply rules fairly. Bigger companies like Facebook, Uber etc get to have more of a "human" connection to sort out issues while the small developer doesn't even get told what exactly they did wrong.

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Which itself reinforces cartel behavior. The small players get the full force of the automated rulings, the large orgs get infinite levels of undo.

"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law." - Óscar Benavides

Guilt by association is the only way to cope with a world where bad actors can trivially switch pseudonyms whenever they’re caught.

Google doesn't pay you in Bitcoin. Isn't it hard to switch pseudonyms when you need to receive real money?

I don’t think malicious apps are making their money through Play Store purchases. Probably ads and data, and maybe by taking user credit cards directly.

Yeah the genuinely malicious apps are unlikely to be using Google ads or other services to generate revenue.

> "Guilt by association" is a bad way to run companies

It's frighteningly common in big tech. Amazon is known for banning people for life because someone else with the same address returned too many items. Pick your roommates carefully I guess.

You have no clue what information Google used to reach this decision.

That's precisely the point. People want to understand what they did wrong.

Google didn't give a reason in this case. Have you heard of a big company getting terminated like this without being given a reason? So as far as I know the rules are unfair.

Isn't that a serious problem, when the final decision withholds information related to the case.

For all we know it could be the virus attack that lead to Googles decision.

Yeah no one outside of Google does including the developers who got banned, that's kinda the whole problem...

We need an anti-Kafka law to force tech companies to disclose the reasons behind account bans and provide for an appeals process.

This will naturally make their jobs a whole lot harder, but currently they're just externalizing their costs onto people like in this article.

Just like all the recent articles pointing out that "identity theft" is a term offloading incompetence of the companies onto the individual.

We need to stop putting up with this shit.

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