Another day, another termination by Google Play.
The reason? None. Just a generic response sent to the developers on Christmas Day. Might have been the grinch himself issuing those automated responses to others.
This company and its services (including, YouTube) are run by bots and they are the ones doing the moderation and not even the humans running them care at all.
Unless something completely fundamental happens, Google (and its services) don't care and they will never change.
Not to really defend Google here, but how else would you do it? The amount of data on these platforms is enormous and having people review the videos/apps/whatever would be simply prohibitively expensive.
I think they need to balance how strict their abuse detection is. Making it too strict will kick out legitimate users without mercy. Making it less strict will allow potentially harmful (for business) content to spread on their platform, which could lead to lawsuits, loss of advertisers etc. You can see which direction is more appealing for a corporation.
So concretely, now we complain about mistreated users, but if the automatic moderation was less strict, we'd complain about extreme content. It's not an easy problem.
> Not to really defend Google here, but how else would you do it? The amount of data on these platforms is enormous and having people review the videos/apps/whatever would be simply prohibitively expensive.
Google is not incapable of providing customer support. Netflix, Apple, and Amazon all manage to provide free, robust customer service.
Google is simply unwilling.
Exactly. Additional this is not a free platform like YouTube or Gmail: creating a Google Play account costs money, and Google took a cut of every app sale. Saying that Google has too many free users to provide support doesn't make sense here...
If you can’t scale customer support then you can’t scale the customer base.
I'd guess that Google's support for their ad services are good enough? The problem here is that Play publishers are not really Google's customers.
Play Store publishers pay Google $25 for access to the Play Store, and then pay them 15% to 30% of all revenue collected via the apps.
Is that a lot from Google's perspective? If apps follow some power law distribution it might only be worth providing human support to a very limited number of them.
Customer support is provided for sub $20 items from e commerce sites who don't have Google's market cap. Not to mention that a customer support agent's time isn't exactly worth hundreds of dollars an hour.
It depends on how narrowly focused Google's strategy and commitment to reliable income is.
Linearly scaling up on human support agents doesn't look aligned with an AI driven strategy to enable income that is only coming from their advertising services.
From https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busin...
So Google Play can only exist in ways where it supports advertising. Sales are trivial in comparison. "Delighting" every app publisher is simply distracting.
Various sources indicate that Google play made >10 billion in revenue, much of that being profit: https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/android/254978/google-play-h...
These horror stories would mostly come from publishers that rely on the source of income, from whom the yearly Google play is likely to be at least a few thousands. There's no excuse to not involve a human in a decision as drastic as account termination.
Following to the original Reuters article
I would also prefer that Google have more tolerable support for publishers (and users), but it looks like those at the helm might be thinking it's irresponsible to see publishers as important customers. The publishers are not the ones providing the vast majority of the revenue - that seems to be advertiser.
The attention economy is addictive for those pushing it as well.
> The amount of data on these platforms is enormous and having people review the videos/apps/whatever would be simply prohibitively expensive
Let people pay for a manual review (say $300) with Google refunding the amount if it's found to be erroneous.
That’s how Microsoft support worked, at least for a while. A support call was $99 and then if it was a problem on their end, they wouldn’t charge you.
That would incentivize Google not to find it erroneous.
If they blatantly lie to steal your money, you can now prove actual damages in court. That's an improvement over trying to sue over a lost free gmail account. Not that I think going to court is an ideal solution, but what other choice do you have as a lowly civilian without friends in Mountain View?
Why? I appreciate the "always assume bad faith" approach for corporations (hell, I'm the biggest advocate) but what's the benefit for Google here?
1. The support cost is totally offset -- at $50/hour, it would give someone four hours to investigate and two hours to prepare a report.
2. Bad actors won't pay, and neither will people who haven't really made money on the store
3. Google develops an actual framework for resolution
4. Some level of trust is developed again
5. It helps provide better training data for Google's automated process -- the engineers behind it probably cost $300/day each.
I really can't see a situation where this would incentivise Google to steal money. It would land them in much hotter water than anything else they've been involved in before. We're talking international lawsuits if just one single support staff decides to be a whistleblower. It's too involved of a conspiracy.
If it is a service they provide for free, charging a fee to get something important (like a total account ban) fairly reconsidered would be perfectly reasonable. Google is big enough the government should require that sort of thing.
"Let's be as evil as we want to be" is a fairly inappropriate guideline for a company like that.
Oh man... wait till some beancounter finds out that they can earn $X per every banned account,... that would be a pain in the ass for everyone.
They could begin by segmenting their accounts such that a trivial youtube ban doesn't result in a full google service account ban. That seems pretty damn basic right?
It is because of polices like that which guarantees I will never use Google Cloud. Why risk getting my email pulled so I can host cat videos when AWS will not dangle the sword of Damocles above my head.
> simply prohibitively expensive.
No, it isn't. Google wouldn't go out of business. I doubt that they'd even take a hit of a few percent in profit.
They don’t need to filter and moderate everything, but they should at least have humans for taking care of escalations and issues like the one reported here. Sure 5hey have all sorts of AI/ML algorithms doing the automated banning and removal of apps but they could have real people taking care of the false positive cases.
Google can definitely afford it, except they won't because they prefer to be greedy and keep the money.
In general though, if you really can't afford proper customer service, then you should simply not be providing services at that scale.
> The amount of data on these platforms is enormous and having people review the videos/apps/whatever would be simply prohibitively expensive.
For free accounts, maybe. But it wouldn't be very expensive to provide basic service to accounts with significant money flow where google is taking a cut. Or accounts that are directly paying every month.