As crazy as this policy is, firing and publicly shaming an employee is not the right response to a poor decision by an employee.

I feel it is. It's an effective platform for (positive) change, in this case.

I think this is a bad decision, but I don't want to live in a world in which people risk their privacy by making poor decisions.

We just need processes to learn and avoid doing mistakes twice, and shaming is a poor way to do it.

If I risked being ashamed when making decisions, I would probably avoid decisions altogether. This would be awful. The discussed decision is not even out of law.

What we can do though, is to tell people we know and love about F-Droid and suggest them to only fall back to the Play Store if they don't find what they want, and that they should be aware that by doing so, they enter the jungle and that this jungle follows Google's arbitrary rules, some of which are not in their own interests.

If you think that's an appropriate and proportional response to an employee making a mistake or misunderstanding an internal policy, I sincerely hope that you're not in charge of anyone at your day job.

I'm pretty sure "whoever came up with this policy and started enforcing it" has significant leeway in their decision making. Having the power to come up with new policies to enforce also means that you should be ready to take responsibility if those policies turn out to be bad.

Sure, but this person was probably given another set of more general policies to work with, and what they came up with was reasonable for the vast majority of cases. It's hard to imagine every single edge case (open source apps with donation links are definitely the minority) and policies will evolve over time to be more comprehensive.

Please share more details about your app and its takedown, it's important to publicly document the issue.

Yes, let’s publicly shame and fire people over business decisions we disagree with. Cancel culture!