heroic

We are a FinTech startup in India. We give unserved people a credit card. To ensure recovery we collect user's contacts and use them to remind people of their bill if they don't pay. All of this is covered in our TnC, and we warn users of the actions we will take before we do so.

About two weeks ago, Google Play banned updates to our app from the Play Store citing this section of their Policy, here: https://play.google.com/about/privacy-security-deception/use...

We complied. This is how the screen looked before the change: https://imgur.com/a/o4Cvh7F

Here's how it looked after the change: https://imgur.com/a/gHP8BDR

We were approved after the change. However 3 days later, we were removed from the Play Store. So now no one can download our app, or update their app if they have a buggy outdated version.

Despite regular appeals, Google keeps redirecting us to the policy above.

Today I checked how WhatsApp handled user uploads, as it's the same thing we do; sync contacts on each launch(we don't sync when the app is not being used though). Here's how WhatsApp looks: https://vimeo.com/user112475576/review/406480240/9ca7c4e2c1

Can anyone help us with what should we do? With the COVID crisis our users are unable to depend on us for their daily spends. We're are the primary credit card for a lot of them, and not being able to service them now, is making us look bad.