This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way. Real spammers have become very sophisticated, and separating them from good users is very very difficult. Many bots steal real human accounts for their nefarious behaviour. Human review of accounts doesn't help much either - you simply can't allow a human to delve through a users mail/photos to see if they are a bot or not.
Parent poster isn't advocating the "fix it from the inside" route, he's advocating you leave.
>This kind of thing is a seriously hard thing to police in a fair and reasonable way.
It's so "seriously hard" that you had to use a different example that's more favorable to google's position (identifying a bot user without data access) in a thread about a different topic (your distaste for manual, thoughtful app reviews)?
Since then I've noticed HN has an aggressively negative opinion on Google's general affairs, and most of it makes sense on the surface. It almost feels like I dodged a bullet.
But comments like these shine a completely different perspective. The OP's story is extremely frustrating but it doesn't seem to stem from a lack of care, in your eyes.
If someone were really motivated to solve problems in that area, do you really feel they would be given the time to explore it? I get the impression these sort of projects would be underprioritized.
Yes. Beware though - some parts of the issue might be more political rather than technical (eg. Team A wants user accounts banned for violating XYZ policy, while Team B has other data which shows those user accounts aren't bad, but can't share the data with Team A because that violates privacy terms).
For issues that are purely technical (for example, the automated spam detection system has a false positive on an obscure but legit library), any Google employee can send a pull request to fix it, and in general your pull request will be accepted and deployed.