3 ms·
I'm going to make a guess here from my own unrelated experience trying to debug problems in live systems. It is often much easier to detect that there is _some_
by JangoSteve 7y ago
I'm going to make a guess here from my own unrelated experience trying to debug problems in live systems. It is often much easier to detect that there is _some_ unusual activity present than it is to categorically define exactly which activity is legitimate versus which isn't.
Usually, this is because you can easily detect some of the anomalous behavior but not all of it. So you'll have some activity which is obviously anomalous, some which is obviously legitimate, and some which could be either. And sometimes when you've detected some that are obviously anomalous, most of the rest of the activity ends up being in the category of "could be either" with almost none left in the obviously legitimate.
So from Google's point of view, I'm sure they ban the account so that they 1) don't end up paying a lot of money to users for the "could be either" activity, and 2) don't need to keep expending server resources continuously categorizing and serving the obviously anomalous traffic.
- DFHippie 7y agoI'm sure this is right. You don't have enough statistical mass with any click by itself, but in the aggregate you can detect fraudulent activity with a high degree of certainty. Google's plan is to make it sufficiently expensive to avoid detection in the aggregate that selling fake clicks isn't a viable business proposition. The fraudsters have inverted the game: they can't beat Google's detection algorithms, so they can't sell you fake clicks, but they can sell you protection from their fake clicks. Google's move at this point seems to be lessening the punishment for fake clicks so it's still not economically viable to sell them but also not economically viable to use them as a threat.