At this point I'm really starting to become unsympathetic to the idea that they can't tell you what you're doing wrong because it'll enable people to figure out ways to work around the flagging algorithm. I kinda just don't care anymore. If you're going to run a platform like this and capriciously threaten to kick people off of it, it's pretty antisocial to hide the reasons why.

(And yes, I know, Google has no obligation to do anything differently here. But I can perfectly well think they suck for their current practices.)

(FWIW, I appreciate the idea that eventually it would be useful to be able to ban a bad actor entirely from something to exclude the possibility of future harm: the past tense of "correctable" was "avoidable", and it needs to be very clear exactly what was done wrong and what could have been done differently for someone to end up in the situation of being banned from the usage of a platform, service, or business: the alternative where people get to apply secret and obscure reasons to refuse service is madness.)

If you say "personal attacks aren't allowed", they'll say "I wasn't attacking him personally, I just suggested that anyone who says [the thing he said] should consider getting evaluated by a doctor for mental retardation."

At some point you just have to say "I know what you're doing, you're clearly not acting in good faith, and I have to ban you." Are all of those people now potential lawsuits?

This is especially important given google's market power in the browser industry. What if the extension is from Google's competitor? Google could ban the extension without a legitimate reason to hurt their competition.

1) That pretty clearly qualifies as a personal attack

2) There is a significant difference between a forum and a business critical software distribution platform.

Okay, let's take the obscurity up one level: I used to moderate a very small internet forum, where there was one user who had certain mannerisms in his writing. I also had reason to suspect this user was mildly suicidal.

A troll began to mimic these mannerisms as a way to make fun of that user, and talk about how horrible their life was. The troll wasn't overt about it, but if you knew the history between these two, you could tell what was going on. The troll of course feigned innocence, but as he'd been given warnings before, I made the call to ban him.

I firmly believe I was acting within the forum's stated policies—but I am not 100% confident a judge would agree. If these types of actions could lead to lawsuits, I don't know what I would have done.

---

> There is a significant difference between a forum and a business critical software distribution platform.

Great—but where's the line? Is Youtube critical, for example?

There isn't. Take a quick look at stupid popular apps on the Play Store, almost all of them require completely unnecessary permissions literally in conflict with the bullet points that Google listed in their email to PushBullet.

Also note that almost all of them have 10-50x the amount of downloads compared to PushBullet.

The odds just spell bullshit.

Their "automated scanning process" didn't just happen to pick the popular app that gives users more control and platform independence from Google.

Because really that's what it's about, PushBullet is dangerous to a closed ecosystem like Google wants.

(also, I believe that given the permission system, and if an automated scanning system was in fact in place, it should be super easy to exactly point out what is wrong, like compiler errors. and being granular permissions, there's no "gaming the system" about it, you either get the permission or you don't)

> If you're going to run a platform like this and capriciously threaten to kick people off of it, it's pretty antisocial to hide the reasons why.

I don't believe Google gets to be "antisocial", they're not a person. They exist since ~20 years and are made of shifting people, none of whom really control it. As far as it can be "antisocial", I wonder if it even vaguely "realises" that its interchangeable parts are the same entities as its consumables.

(I get various compliance spam and ignore it and among things with small numbers of users and/or owners who lost interest a small percentage a year fall out of the stores. The only differences are that we don't care enough to forward the threats Google sends us and no one would bother to amplify them.)

Unless it's a black box machine learning model that just says yes/no but can't tell you why

Telling people that they are going to be severely punished within days by a very powerful global entity, without telling them which specific rules they are in breach of or what they have to change is a dystopian nightmare.

Well, if the reason is the "https://*/*" permission or something like that, and it is flagged and reported automatically, and everyone learns not to use it, it's a win-win. Benign extensions will have smaller targets on their backs, and malicious extensions will become less malicious OR will have to jump through hoops to achieve what they're trying to achieve (and will become easier to detect).

It's a finite list of app permissions.

Unless it's a random number generator that just says yes/no but can't tell you why -- is just as valid of a non-excuse for using the entirely wrong solution to a problem, and surprise the solution doesn't work very well.

Recently there's been some interest in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) which addresses the problem of "black box" machines. There are techniques such as SHAP and LIME that can help the ML designers provide explanations for why any specific observation has been "rejected". That said, I'm not sure if that's what Google uses here.

I think it's a very interesting question. Who is more deserving of a good experience - uninformed users who might get taken advantage of by malicious extensions, or developers for the platform, who definitely do get taken advantage of by virtue of running afoul of rules they can't read?

Even if the average damage to a user is very low, the ratio of users to developers is massive.

Security through obscurity is no security at all. Google is not doing its user a favor by hiding the criteria it uses to determine whether an extension is malicious or not. Also, just because Google won't publish the criteria, it does not mean that it can't be discovered by someone with enough determination. I think that a malicious actor is more likely to spend the necessary time and effort to do so than a developer who is more interested in creating an extension that will serve its users well. If anything, these types of policies drive away developers who act in good faith and leave the marketplace with more developers who are looking to exploit the users.

A reputable developer has a reputation to maintain (by definition), which makes Google's threat to permaban them a threat indeed.

A disreputable developer doesn't care about their reputation (again, by definition). They can create a new throwaway account every day and apply using the same (or slightly, easily, altered) code with different permissions every hour until they get permabanned, and start again tomorrow.

So the "obscurity" can be discovered easily through experimentation by the bad guys, but is still obscure for the good guys. This is not a good outcome.

Reputation can be bought too btw.

Malicious actors don't care about expenses nearly as much as benign ones do. So the point ought to be, if you want me to fix something, tell me what's broken.

1. age < 180 days

2. dau < 1000

3. some rule around user reports of malice on uninstall?

and this gets a bright warning banner on the top of the page, and it can't be discovered through the chrome store until crossing these thresholds.

Sure, but if that bug gets fixed, why reject the fix?

Also, if that's the bug that was the concern, it would certainly be nice to have something in the email along the lines of "We don't want extensions to ask for access to every website anywhere on the Internet, so please narrow your http and https permission request."

> they're too busy to explain to everyone what they're doing wrong

If a human flagged this, how much longer would it have taken to add the sentence above to the email? Or even write that instead of the useless generic boilerplate that's in the email?

If, OTOH, an automated bot flagged this (which is what I suspect, and what others seem to suspect too), why didn't whoever wrote the automated bot put at least some kind of clue in the script that writes the email? Something like "if bad thing #6 is found, add text XYZ to the email".

Well therein lies the problem. We don't even know that's what they had a problem with in the first place. It's not clear that it IS "the bug".

It is TOTALLY not OK to have a ten person team (and I have no way to know if they even have that).

Considering the fact that the browser platform is now a real service required by billions of people, they should be responsible to have enough staff to handle extensions properly.

Aside from the amount of money the Chrome extensions make them, the amount of influence it buys them, and the amount of damage it can do, it should be required of them to have a real team to handle it.

Imagine if the I ran a private airlines that provided service for 4 billion people around the world, and the entire team that inspects, approves, and monitors the pilots and co-pilots had ten people. Would you think that is acceptable, or would you expect multiple governments to intervene?

Extentions don't have to exist at all. At least for a very long time, there were no extensions for Chrome on Android (not sure about now but that may still be the case).

I suspect google would love to just deprecate all extensions entirely, they're probably a massive headache for them (as this thread shows).

A lot of things Google used to do that attracted geeks like us are really a problematic thing when the average masses of people are using them. Google is learning that the hard way, and the process of fixing that pisses off us geeks.

Apple took a different path of locking things down more aggressively earlier, and a lot of geeks (myself included) hated them for it. Now, after we're seeing how the modern world is so incredibly tech illiterate and how security issues are affecting the world, I think Apple got this right and Google got it wrong, and Google knows it and is trying to fix it, which is pissing us off in the same way Apple used to piss us off (but we apparently got over it).

This feels like an empty statement. Browsers don't have to exist at all. Computers don't either.

If Chrome dropped all extension support, I would drop Chrome. It's a valuable feature for me and millions of users.

That may not have been the bug, your guess is as good as literally anyone's right now. That's the issue at hand.

I have some trouble following this. These are real, exploited capabilities. How are they theoretical and also hypothetical?

As for the redundancy, I blame my lack of coffee for that, apologies.

I think the communication is worse than the potential problem

In that I think the communication is really bad but the 'potential' problem is more than potential and also really bad.

Yeah, but with 100 people it would take only a few months and after that it would take far less people to maintain everything. Also, they could just have their algorithm do the flagging and then have a team of 10/20 people to handle users. It's just that they don't care (enough) Not all 200.000 extensions are being killed in the next 14 days. Also if this is done for security reasons then put this responsibility with your security team and make that team bigger.

Also, from 200k extensions probably most have less than five users, so they could prioritize those that have traction.

In general, Safari's extension system is more restricted than Chrome's, and changes that Chrome is attempting to make to be more similar to Safari's approach result in fierce backlash exactly like this thread (e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/google-chrome-ad-blockers-extens...).

Why not give the information to the user? There is no need to use any manual labor here.

I'm of the opinion that a company with revenues > 30 billion dollars per quarter could afford to increase the ten person team ten-fold to get the response time to a reasonable number.

The fact that it took four years in your example implies that permission shaving isn't hugely risky for devs.

It's the honest developers that get their meaningful accounts banned.

- automate this with a message that tells you what thing is dangerous

or at least:

- automatically push to a human that will spend 30 real minutes on it for extensions that have many users/popular (that sounds like the basic thing any business would do!)

This is not a given at all.

Google's communication was and is absolutely unclear on what is their problem.

And if you'd take their communication on their word (dumb idea), they have been pretty clear that this was in fact not, "the bug", and that is has in fact not "been fixed".

Regardless of your (and my) opinion about apps requiring access to every site on the www -- Google did exactly the opposite of indicating that this was the problem why PushBullet is threatened to get kicked off the Play Store.

Except they didn't and the extension was sitting at the store for a long time now.

> And while I don't like Chrome's position that they're too busy to explain to everyone what they're doing wrong

Maybe not, but after a couple of instances of back and forth they should take 1 minute to write a couple of sentences. There are limits to automation.