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I think Google's sh*tty ways came to light long ago. And they are still doing it. I'm one of the many, many people that got screwed by Google in a similar way

I think Google's sh*tty ways came to light long ago. And they are still doing it. I'm one of the many, many people that got screwed by Google in a similar way with their Adsense program. A long time ago it was. Back then there were actually people who communicated with you about it, at least that was my experience. But it was still stupid. I was running Adsense on a website and got a message that I was not in compliance with their policies. I emailed and got a reply that it was because I need to make sure the ads are clearly separated from the content. I replied with a link to their own guide on how to "blend" ads, which I thought I had followed pretty closely. A person replied and said "That's not what we meant". WTF. Another time on a food blog I had an article with a title that included the words "Chocolate Fetish" and a photo of two fully clothed women pouring chocolate on each other. I got an email that I was in violation of their policies with a link to that page. I emailed back and asked why. A person replied and said it was adult content. Double WTF. So yeah, it's been stupid for a long time. And now days it's just all automated stupidity. It's pretty obvious - don't trust your business or anything else to Google.

aduitsis 7y ago
Wow, the "chocolate fetish" case really kicks it out of the park. Half-serious question, did all those replies come from actual human beings? Reading the original blog post of this story and other comments here, including yours, I get a vague feeling that the communications on google's part are being done either by some kind of a machine, or by humans that can act like a machine, albeit of rather limited capabilities.
- geomark 7y ago
  I am quite sure the email replies I received were from actual humans. It's been a while, about 10 years ago I think. If those were machine generated responses they were way more advanced than anything I thought existed at that time. I weaned myself off of Adsense so I am not close to it anymore. But from what I can tell now days you don't get any response at all. With that chocolate fetish thing my thought was that the people they were using for compliance monitoring must be teenage boys with overactive hormones who see adult content in just about everything. But maybe it was actually an algorithm that matched the word "fetish" with some skin tones in a photo (there were faces afterall) and flagged it. Who knows. Who cares.

aduitsis 7y ago

Wow, the "chocolate fetish" case really kicks it out of the park. Half-serious question, did all those replies come from actual human beings? Reading the original blog post of this story and other comments here, including yours, I get a vague feeling that the communications on google's part are being done either by some kind of a machine, or by humans that can act like a machine, albeit of rather limited capabilities.

geomark 7y ago
I am quite sure the email replies I received were from actual humans. It's been a while, about 10 years ago I think. If those were machine generated responses they were way more advanced than anything I thought existed at that time. I weaned myself off of Adsense so I am not close to it anymore. But from what I can tell now days you don't get any response at all. With that chocolate fetish thing my thought was that the people they were using for compliance monitoring must be teenage boys with overactive hormones who see adult content in just about everything. But maybe it was actually an algorithm that matched the word "fetish" with some skin tones in a photo (there were faces afterall) and flagged it. Who knows. Who cares.