My question, is there some statistical support for this? I scummy company employees tend to trend towards scummy stuff? No doubt lots of false positives, but folks keep on seeing this as a "mistake" google is making, and google may not think this type of associative banning is actually a mistake.
I think the problem is the only solid connection google has are developer accounts / that's the only club they have to swing. So bad actors may jump from account to account and Google's method of whack a mole is to just associate accounts.
Way back in the day I worked on an old forum where we used to try to do that for spammers and such. But we didn't automate it. We just had a checking mechanism that would indicate if some accounts might be from the same person ... maybe.
But beyond anecdotes and the above story I've no idea how widespread this is.
But Google is not open about the reason and if you can get the attention of their internal support people (if you have the right kind of account) they don’t seem to know why this was done either. If Google were explicit about the nature of the problem and were to provide an open process to contest and address the accusation that would help a lot. As it is, they are opaque and non-responsive. It’s an abusive relationship.
