I have programmed an app for the purpose of advising and supporting students using Thunkable and intended to upload it to Google Play. After going through all the steps of moderation, I was given permission to publish the app publicly, but not long after a few days, my account was disabled for High Risk Behavior.
I appealed once but it was rejected, the detailed reason was not provided by Google. They only sent me emails like this, is there any way to solve this problem?, I am just a normal user and have no bad intentions when uploading my app.
Besides me, there is a friend of mine who also has access to my Google Play Console account, but they have never registered for a Google Play Console dev account before and have never had their account disabled.
I have never uploaded any other apps
Yes my app is using ChatGPT API. I’m not sure how to protect against misuse (If possible can you guide me?). The main use of ChatGPT in my app is: the app collects different scores and ratings of the tests the user has taken, and then gives advice based on them. There is also a function to give advice based on the answers entered by the user. The answers are only viewed once and are not saved.
Here is my app, this issue has actually been going on for about 20 days and I have made some minor tweaks to the app from the previous version that I submitted to Google for review.
The only thing I can think of is that while ChatGPT has filters in place for certain things, a user could potentially get it to respond in a way that was racist, sexist, threatening, etc.
What is the name of the screen where the user can type in a prompt for ChatGPT?
It is a function that asks about how the user feels that day. After pressing the “next” button, a pop up will appear allowing the user to share more about what makes them feel that way (optional). The content the user shares will be saved and transferred to a screen where ChatGPT gives advice based on the feelings and content they share.
This pop up will show up when user press “next” button:
Users can enter content here and press “next” to receive advice or choose to skip and be redirected to the home page.
If the user presses “next”, they will be redirected to this screen which has the ChatGPT API:
same thing happened to my account.
My app gathers absolutely no info from the user.
Does not send any data over the internet. (it uses bluetooth)
They flagged my account when I added an in-app release notes page to the app.
Took two months and multiple emails to support for them to reinstate my account
So your account is restored?. Can you help me with the details of the steps to make the recovery process as fast as possible? Since you have experience, thank you very much.
It’s been a while since you started analyzing my project, do you have any solutions or suggestions for me, if I send an appeal to Google Play, what should I send them so they can review and restore my account?
I didn’t find anything else that might trigger the violations they mentioned. In order to know what you should send them, I’d think you would need to know what exactly violated their policies.
It is quite difficult to know the detailed reason why they disabled my account because in my first appeal I told them they could tell me the details of the violation but they refused to give me the detailed reason and only said the following in their reply gmail:
“We can confirm that we have identified a pattern of high risk or abuse associated with your Developer Account and have taken this action pursuant to Section 8.3 or 10.3 of Google Play’s Developer Distribution Agreement. As we previously explained, in order to prevent bad-faith developers from gaming our systems and putting our users at risk in the process, we can’t share the reasons we’ve concluded that your account is at high risk.
Your Developer account remains terminated due to prior violations of the Developer Program Policies and Developer Distribution Agreement by this or associated, previously terminated Google Play Developer accounts.”
Something caused that. So I assume someone with access to your account did something to violate their policies. It seems like a pretty severe violation. It’s a good reminder to not give anyone else access to your accounts.
Okay, thank you for taking the time to analyze and give me advice, I really appreciate it, I will continue to research the problem and if I have a solution I will share it with the community.
