We hear about problems on here all the time... and that's probably about 0.01 percent of the problems that actually happen.
Given the diversity and sheer boneheaded stupidity of the problems we do hear about, there's no chance that they don't have a ton of false positives... especially among apps developed by people who haven't yet learned how to work around whatever stupidity currently obtains. But you can't learn definitively, because they keep changing the stupidity.
After my app got some traction due to a reddit post i made, admob instantly disabled earning for 2 weeks due to "suspicious activity" or something like that.
I tried to reach someone to at least get a clarification...am I not allowed to have a surge of ~100 real users? but there really was no way to present my issue to anyone. It really is bad, there was nothing I could do. If this wasnt a hobby project I would have been really frustrated instead of being just disillusioned.
Its a remake of an old 90s game that is also offline so there is not much risk in it.
I suspect there are a lot of these stories never shared.
Is it really rarely? I feel like I'm hearing about it all the time. The comments in this thread reenforce this feeling. Having to make it to HN frontpage to get support from Google seems also a much too common occurrence.
My assessment would be false positives are way too high and customer support is close to non-existent. And we're hearing only about a tiny fraction of the problems with the majority being stuck in customer support hell.
HM is a bubble with bias against Google. People here seem to believe that bashing this company publicly will somehow change how they operate.
Interestingly enough, back in the day Google used to be a darling of HN community. I suspect folks might be disappointed to see how things turned out at the end.
It's almost as if over a decade or more if time that people can see the result of behavior they didn't see as problematic initially.
Or that google might have changed how they operate in small ways as they are steered differently.
Expecting any one person to still have the same opinion of any one other person a decade later might be asking a lot. It's nothing strange that a community of people would have differing thoughts on a whole company of people and product and policies.
It seems to me what people are complaining about isn't the false positives, its the fact that there aren't proper channels to address the issues - and your basically a hostage till someone at Google decides to take pity and talk to you.
This. Reality is going to cause false positives. While you can try to minimize them you'll never get rid of them.
The measure of a system is how they are dealt with. Note that this is not limited to Google by any means. I'm thinking of the police throwing some people in jail as terrorists because they pinged on a geiger counter. Cancer patients, not terrorists. Compare that to what happened when my wife tripped a detector in China. The officials knew it was almost certainly a false positive and were looking for why rather than playing gotcha. (However, I think they went too far in the other direction--it was due to a nuclear heart test, but they didn't even doing the simple test of seeing what the distribution of the radioactivity was.)
Given the diversity and sheer boneheaded stupidity of the problems we do hear about, there's no chance that they don't have a ton of false positives... especially among apps developed by people who haven't yet learned how to work around whatever stupidity currently obtains. But you can't learn definitively, because they keep changing the stupidity.