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Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
- StreamBright 5y agoI have a better suggestion. Never use Google.
- jaimex2 5y agoIf there's a good alternative never use Google anything. The sole fact that there is no appeal system to account shutdowns and the way they just kill services at random should be enough reason for anyone.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoIt’s definitely not going to help the regulatory scrutiny from various governments.
- bogwog 5y agoStories like this always scare me because they remind me that all of my domain names are on Google domains, including the one I use for my work email address. I gotta migrate out one of these days.
- bb010g 5y agoI've been using NameSilo for a while.
- busymom0 5y agoEpik and Namecheap are pretty good imo. Definitely don't use GoDaddy. EDIT: One can find several instances where users search domain names on GoDaddy and they are available at regular price but when they try to place the order, the domain is no longer available and must be bought at a premium price.
- snotrockets 5y agoEpik is excited to provide services for white supremacists. I'd think thrice if this is a vendor I'd like to have my name associated with.
- busymom0 5y agoHere we go again with the "white supremacist" boogeyman. Not worth discussing this because such discussions never change anyone's minds.
- snotrockets 5y agoIt's only a boogeyman if you're white.
- busymom0 5y agoI don't see how skin color is relevant but since your comment enjoys assigning responsbilities based on skin color - I am a brown immigrant. Divide and conquer has been used for centuries and is what’s being used as usual to get political points. Nothing new about it. Your comment is doing the same racism which you claim to be against. Usually the next response is to call me an Uncle Tom for not falling for the boogeyman and going along with the narrative. Anything which doesn't fit the establishment narrative gets classfied as "white supremacist" and other such labels now a days - just like your comment did. Ps. Won’t be replying further because this discussion is neither relevant nor productive, plus probably borderline breaks HN rules.
- smcl 5y agoWell we are talking about companies with questionable ethical practices. It would be weird to NOT mention the neo-nazi tolerance when suggesting epik in a discussion like this.
- skinkestek 5y agoAs someone who has a lot to lose if nazis ever get back in power: isn't the correct thing to still register their domains and just go to the police with it? Based on my sysadmin background I actively try to know as little about my customers as possible: sure I might become a hero whistleblower but more likely I'll taint myself in various ways.
- phuff 5y agoDreamhost is also great for domain names.
- edoceo 5y agoporkbun is cheap/good too (but some may throw the China boogeyman at them)
- ARandomerDude 5y agoChinese authoritarian state intervention isn't a bogeyman, it's a real threat first and foremost to its own people, and secondarily to those who do (especially tech) business there. Just because a real threat is widely acknowledged doesn't make it a bogeyman. Bogeymen, after all, are mythical. Chinese tyranny isn't.
- FpUser 5y agoSure, that is why all big gorillas are there. Go talk to them and see how receptive they are. Or try to convince you government to cut all ties.
- ARandomerDude 5y agoI didn't understand this comment at all. Could you please rephrase it?
- ImPostingOnHN 5y agoI think he's trying to say that rights abuses are justified by success (the "gorilla" sized companies patronizing them). No, it doesn't make much sense to me, either.
- spacehunt 5y agoWait, isn't Porkbun based out of Portland?
- wizhi 5y agoHow is Porkbun related to China? I thought they were US based.
- cortic 5y ago
- Lammy 5y agoForgive me for piling on yet-another-unsolicited-registrar-recommendation, but I'm a big fan of NFSN due to their terms of service and feel safe that none of my domains will ever get pulled without very good reason. I've never had that trust tested, but it's at least spelled out: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse
- cy_hauser 5y agoThey haven't been easy to get a response from for me. Tried to ask a question that wasn't in the FAQ and got silence. That was a few years ago. Went elsewhere. Same situation different question last year and again no response. YMMV but I got zero mpg.
- Lammy 5y agoI've contacted them a few times over the years to set/change the glue records for my vanity NS and they were always very responsive. It also cost like a dollar each support instance, but I still haven't spent double-digits contacting support in over a decade of membership :)
- chrisandchris 5y agoSeparating your DNS provider from your domain registry is always a good idea.
- zymhan 5y agoHighly agree. I also prefer to host any actual services behind my domain on a third provider, but at the very least being able to redirect your domains is very helpful.
- mdavidn 5y agoDo it today, not “one of these days.”
- benhurmarcel 5y agoAnother unsolicited recommendation: Gandi.net. I've been quite happy with them.
- teddyh 5y agoGandi had a major outage a mere week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26862162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26862162
- benhurmarcel 5y agoEven Google has outages. Also, that doesn't affect you if you're using them as a registrar and not hosting.
- mindslight 5y agoIn case you don't know, when you transfer a domain name you do not lose the remaining registration time at the your current registrar. You pay the new registrar for an additional year, and the domain transfers over good through the original expiration plus that year - just like if you had renewed it for a year at the current registrar. So if you've been putting it off to "get the timing right", don't!
- nn3 5y agoDo other mobile ad networks have a working appeal system? It seems doubtful because of the same dynamic the article describes. Any working appeal system would teach people how to game them. The ironic part here is that Google is essentially gaming themselves here: creating a feedback loop that encourages people to not use their ad products. I guess the ML algorithms are not clever enough yet(?) to figure things like that out.
- black_puppydog 5y agothe point is to decouple getting false-positive-banned on the ad network from getting banned from the playstore.
- themolecularman 5y ago> If there's a good alternative never use Google anything. Brave instead of Chrome. Duck Duck Go instead of Google. Proton Mail instead of Gmail. The only thing I haven't been able to replace is YouTube. That's a tricky one because it's the content creators that keep me locked into it.
- Larrikin 5y agoWhy a chromium browser instead of Firefox?
- 5560675260 5y agoMozilla is funded by Google - it's a questionable alternative at best.
- colanderman 5y agoMany content creators are starting to move to a Patreon+Twitch model, in addition to YouTube.
- nextlevelwizard 5y agoWorks if you are only delivering live videos. I've never been able to get into Twitch because there is so much dead time without anything interesting happening. Patreon only works if you already have established fan base that is willing to pay for your content. It does not help with discoverability at all. Youtube is still the king of video no matter how you slice it.
- skinkestek 5y ago> Youtube is still the king of video no matter how you slice it. For now. Rumble might or might not break through to mainstream. Same with those fediverse solutions for different reasons. Vimeo already works beautifully and is clean in every way AFAIK.
- 5y ago
- KorematsuFred 5y agoGoogle is pretty good at weeding out bad players and all these bad examples are often on margin. Unfortunately the bad guys are getting more and more sophisticated. Google is not entitled to admit every publisher into their program but needs to provide enough assurance to advertisers that their money will be well spent. Hence they are likely to make mistakes on side of caution. This hurts developers like us but it benefits a business like Google. Sadly, there is no clear quality alternative to Google as of today. I have worked for the adnetworks that boast to be second to Google but in reality are pretty disgusting and filled with crappy advertisers and even shady publishers.
- isolli 5y agoThey could alleviate a lot of pain with a proper appeals process.
- rlayton2 5y agoAgree. I've moved my business email off Google because, despite being a paying customer, I had zero confidence in getting a resolution if my account got banned for any reason. I still have an Android, and a personal gmail etc, but if they go away I can still run my business and I'll recover quickly.
- malikNF 5y agoHow on earth does google manage to still be one of the most valuable (in $$$) companies in the world with this kind of behavior. I just can't imagine treating my customers half as bad as the way google does and still continue to be in business. Abruptly dropping support for products[1], violating their user's privacy [2] , working with organizations accused of human rights violations. Each passing year it seems google is trying to unlock all the badges under the "be as evil as possible" campaign mode. Funny bit is how you can replace the words "ads" and "android app" in the title with any two other names of google products and this same situation would still apply. [1]https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ [2]https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/google-sued-u-s-tracking-users-private-internet-browsing-n1222676 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/google-sued-u-s-tracki...
- iagovar 5y agoBecause of scale, and because they own almost the entire ad space. But yeah, IMO the reputational damage in the prosumer POV is already reaching a tipping point. It's too early for them to notice anything but it looks that it has enough momentum. Google was cool, but we shouldn't cling to it too much because of nostalgia. For me, it was most of my internet life with it. But now Google represents values and has behaviors that don't really go with me.
- nextlevelwizard 5y agoAre you serious with your question or is this hyperbole? When you hear about something like this you are seeing the one in a million false positive or more likely there was some fuckery going on. Obviously there is no upside for the banned devs to admit that they tried to abuse click rate on their ads, so unless Google comes forward admitting they made a mistake we will never know whose on right here. This still leaves millions of happy consumers using Google's products without any issue and ban of some Android IDE is hardly going to be moving any needle anywhere.
- antihipocrat 5y agoThat argument could be, and has been, used to justify some terrible actions by governments and corporations. While we may never know the full story in this specific case. What we do know for certain is that Google has a history of pulling the pin on services and products used by customers. Google's lack of customer support is also a well known feature of the company. These two facts suggest that the situation described in the article is likely to happen, and may actually happen fairly often.
- monkeybutton 5y agoSo Google can manage hundreds of feature/experiment flags on accounts to control which shade of blue you see in an A/B test, but silo-ing which products an account has access to just isn't possible?
- CrendKing 5y agoI think it's more like they don't want to do it. If they consider someone a "fraud", why allow this "bad actor" to be still in the system? It's like "if someone steals, put them in the jail altogether, instead of just ban him from grocery stores".
- monkeybutton 5y agoIt still seems overly harsh at the personal/individual level. Should lose your photos because you make a ghastly comment on YouTube, or lose your email access because you app. got pulled? A Google account has incredible breadth. I understand they have to deal with an incredible scale of fraud but surely they can differentiate between a recently created account using a few of their products for fraud vs. an account that has human-looking activity over a longer period of time.
- CrendKing 5y agoI totally agree of differentiating punishment from behaviors. A bad comment shouldn't cause all the pics from Google Photos to be inaccessible. But like you said, Google probably has to deal with these issues in incredible scale, so unless some high up personally deal with the individual cases, almost all of the bans are automated. Also, considering all the intervention would incur some cost, especially with high ups involved, unless unbanning the account has greater benefit to Google, why would they waste time doing it?
- daniellarusso 5y agoI think it is more analogous to “if someone steals, they are no longer allowed to vote.”
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- CGamesPlay 5y agoI'd extend this even further: never use a single account for more than one purpose. Create a separate account at the same company for the other purpose. Some examples: - Every product/project you manage should be on a separate account on Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. - Nothing tied to your consumer accounts should be used for anything business related. - Your Amazon shopping account and your AWS account should definitely not be the same account. - Don't use services where you're required to mix accounts like this. Some examples: - If the issue in this thread is actually an automatic ban, account siloing very likely would have avoided the issue. ([edit] likely, it would not have been possible to silo accounts in this case, as a child comment points out) - Facebook apparently lacks the willingness to block an account from Marketplace, but they will block an account from all Facebook properties. - Paypal has banned businesses because the account was created years ago by someone who at the time the account was created was 17. The point of this isn't that it's impossible to connect the dots that you are the same person. The point is to make it difficult for an automated system to deal too much damage to you, and make it difficult for someone looking at a single account's history from accumulating too many "strikes" against that account.
- genuine_smiles 5y ago> - Every product/project you manage should be on a separate account on Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. I wouldn’t do this with Facebook. Creating a second account is against Facebook policy, and they may ban both accounts.
- ryandrake 5y agoLegit question: is there any other service/company on earth that bans you for having multiple accounts? This seems like an insanely restrictive policy. One of the defining characteristics of internet communication is that you can have a “work persona” and a “home persona” and maybe another one for your hobbies, another one for your porn browsing and gambling, another one for your aunts and uncles. To deny this basic, universal concept is backwards and frankly shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone.
- 5y ago
- GoOnThenDoTell 5y agoGoogle needs a general support line that doesn’t involve a Medium post making the HN front page
- Trias11 5y agoGoogle has huge development team to make sure to isolate themselves from any user and automate any interaction with- and responses to users.
- deadmutex 5y agoFor consumers, there is one for Google One subscribers: https://one.google.com/about/support https://one.google.com/about/support
- tomcam 5y agoWell thanks. I'm a subscriber and didn't know that existed!
- palebluedot 5y agoYeah, but can you access Google One support if your account is banned?
- lattalayta 5y agoI recently implemented AdMob ads in an app and I wanted to contact Google support with a question. However, any time their "contact us" assistant didn't know the answer to my question, it would respond with an Error Page saying the email the support team can't be found.
- teppix 5y agoI've been trying to set up a private google cloud account for some experiments, however anytime i try to add a payment method there is a generic error. Ironically, there is no way to reach their support without an active paying account, so they're basically blocking me from becoming a paying customer. I have no confidence left in google for anything critical.
- Trias11 5y agoI'd say - use any platform for what it's good at. Extract value from platform. Benefit from it, monetise it, let it help you to gather users or following. But NEVER rely on any propriately platform for your business. You're NOT in control. Make sure you have a contingency plan. Have backup (whatever it is for your business). Make sure you have direct, alternative contacts with your users if platform goes nuts.
- busymom0 5y ago> But NEVER rely on any propriately platform for your business. You're NOT in control. While I agree with the premise of your comment, a lot of times, this is pretty much impossible to be done. If a developer gets suspended by Google or other companies like VISA, PayPal etc, it's pretty much impossible to do business then. There needs to be an internet bill of rights which should take care of these things.
- wvenable 5y agoIf your product is literally an Android app I don't see how you take this advice even if it is good.
- tzfld 5y ago> But NEVER rely on any propriately platform for your business. And after so many bans and incidents there are still businesses dependent on google services. The ban threads keep coming to the too, and pretty sure there are many threads like this not reaching the front page. I'm blaming this businesses too, not just google.
- busymom0 5y ago> Google will never tell you why they banned you from AdSense/AdMob. (Honestly, it sort of makes sense that they share no evidence, because Google doesn’t want people to learn how Google detects click fraud.) I disagree with this as I mentioned on a prior post about DroidScript. If a justice system doesn't tell people what crime they committed, what proof they have of such crimes etc, then such systems are exploitative and a lot of innocent people get hurt.
- Trias11 5y agoGoogle doesn't care. Users are just a worthless pawns to extract value through them via advertising.
- CrendKing 5y agoBut justice system works equally for everyone, while this is private sector, where contracts rule. It is apple vs pear. Same to freedom of speech. Anyone can say anything in public, but if someone post a thread in Google Groups, they can ban you for whatever reason, because the user agreed to their ToS first. Of course, DroidScript has the freedom to choose different ad provider altogether, but they didn't.
- busymom0 5y agoHow does one ensure that the contract is even being abided with when such company refuses to even provide any info? Google, Amazon, VISA/Mastercard, Apple etc companies have basically become the railroads of 21st century and they need to be treated the same way the railroads got treated in the 19th century. https://theconversation.com/for-tech-giants-a-cautionary-tale-from-19th-century-railroads-on-the-limits-of-competition-91616 https://theconversation.com/for-tech-giants-a-cautionary-tal...
- mytherin 5y agoThe reason government is treated differently from companies in that regard is because the government has a natural monopoly in many areas. You cannot choose an alternative government, you are forced to deal with the one there is. When companies hold monopoly status (which Google absolutely does), there is also no real, viable alternative to choose from. When publishing on Android, realistically you are forced to deal with Google. They are not any different from a government in that regard. The only difference between Google and the actual government is that (under the current set of laws) Google can get away with levels of abuse without recourse that the government cannot. > Of course, DroidScript has the freedom to choose different ad provider altogether, but they didn't. They could have chosen a different ad provider, but that is clearly not the problem. They could not have chosen a different publisher on Android without sacrificing >95% of their marketshare, and after being banned by Google from the play store it is game over for them.
- nkozyra 5y agoIt really does feel like there's a day of reckoning coming for services that can boot you with one fell swoop. And unfortunately it's unlikely to come from the source or from a general public appeal, but from government intervention. My adsense account was banned years ago. No details, no receptiveness to appeals. It's the kind of thing that's kept me from some personal/professional pursuits because I know there's a big barrier to monetization should it gain traction. Google (or Apple) purgatory really doesn't seem like a sustainable business model. Someday they'll tick off the wrong person and it will turn into a big deal involving the government
- simiones 5y ago> And unfortunately it's unlikely to come from the source or from a general public appeal, but from government intervention. The government IS the ultimate form of general public appeal, right? It would be unfortunate if we had to resort to begging or public demonstrations instead of having our elected representatives enact our will through law.
- daniellarusso 5y agoI am in the opposite situation. AdSense works fine for me, but I have been banned from AdWords for over a decade. Also banned my partner’s account from AdWords, as well (because we used the same internet connection).
- bambax 5y ago> unfortunately it's unlikely to come from the source or from a general public appeal, but from government intervention Not unfortunately. Hopefully. Government doesn't work very well, but still much better than all those huge private companies. There are appeals, for one.
- nkozyra 5y agoI think it's unfortunate not that government is involved but that they'd have to be involved because Google is uninterested in improving this policy and its customers lack the voice to compel them.
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- threatofrain 5y agoThe endgame is a credibility company that keeps a permanent history on everyone. Then once you have bad credit, no companies will want to give you a loan. Landlords will not want to give you space.
- MattGaiser 5y agoIs there a reason Google doesn’t offer a premium support tier for stuff like this? There are millions of dollars flowing through Android to some companies. Paying $100 a month to always get to deal with a human seems like something that would be in demand. I get that moderation can’t scale on the cheap, but with the dollar values involved, it doesn’t need to for the high paying customers.
- DistressedDrone 5y agoJudging solely from the outside, Google seems to believe that anything that can't be automated isn't worth doing. On the one hand I understand that their target markets are composed of billions of people. On the other hand, it's a strong contributor to their "Google is evil" reputation. The fact that you can never speak to a human is probably saving them money, but it seems so consistent and important to them that I'm not convinced it's entirely about the money. There has to be a lot of people very high up who are totally uninterested in the idea of customer service.
- ulrikrasmussen 5y ago> Google will never tell you why they banned you from AdSense/AdMob. (Honestly, it sort of makes sense that they share no evidence, because Google doesn’t want people to learn how Google detects click fraud.) No, I don't think that makes sense. Google is not sharing this information because they want to protect their own business, but in doing so, they are shifting all risk to the app developers. If you have a business model that only works because your process for removing bad actors is kept secure by obscurity, then maybe you should rethink whether your business model is sound?
- cmeacham98 5y agoI'm not aware of any major business that publicizes this kind of information. Try going to your bank and ask them for details on how their anti-fraud system works. The problem here is this imperfect click fraud ban can ricochet into your app getting banned too.
- wombatpm 5y agoBut the bank will point to a specific transaction as the reason or a series of transactions to show a pattern. i.e., You've had 15 $9000 deposits over the last 15 weeks in what appears to be an attempt to avoid reporting to to the federal government.
- koluna 5y agoNo, they won’t. They can close any accounts without a notice or reason. https://www.helpwithmybank.gov/help-topics/bank-accounts/opening-closing-inactive-bank-accounts/closing-a-bank-account/closing-notification.html https://www.helpwithmybank.gov/help-topics/bank-accounts/ope...
- underdeserver 5y agoWhat do they do with the balance in the account when that happens?
- 5y ago
- villgax 5y agoOpens up unnecessary issues which can be easily decoupled.
- correct_horse 5y agoThis article suggests a weird anti-synnergy between Google products. If android app makers knew that an adsense/admob ban led to a play store ban, they would use some other advertising platform on Android, which would lose Google money.
- j_barbossa 5y agoImagine this would be the case for physical stores and only 2 companies in the world could decide what products you are allowed to sell. You start a coffee shop and 1 day later a representative of company X walks in and shuts down your entire store because you "violated our conditions but we won't tell you which one. You can beg us to reopen your store but first you have to tell us why you didn't violate our policies". This sounds like a dystopia. And yet it's already reality in the app world.
- speeder 5y agoI know a board game shop owner that had this issue... He was specialized in a certain card game I won't name, and one of their employees had shares of the biggest shop in the country, and then by "coincidence" all shops that competed with that big shop, but weren't big enough to defend themselves, kept losing access to products, and kept being banned from hosting tournaments, because they violated some policy that there was no explanation, and the only way to get accepted back was convince the manufacturer of the game that they didn't violated the policy... whatever policy it was. It only stopped after a regular couldn't buy his favourite product, got pissed, and threatened to sue the manufacturer, that regular is a star lawyer so the manufacturer finally understood they faced a real threat now.
- twobitshifter 5y agoAmazon and Walmart? If you’re trying to make a mass market product you may have to bend to their will. The reason laundry detergent went from being mostly water to “super concentrated” is actually Walmart. They said jump and manufacturers said how high? https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2008/05/29/wal-mart-completes-goal-to-sell-only-concentrated-liquid-laundry-detergent https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2008/05/29/wal-mart-c...
- cwkoss 5y agoWhat sort of legislation could be put into place that would effectively prevent these sorts of situations without having horrible side effects?
- GeekyBear 5y agoI believe the GDPR requires that companies be able to explain the decisions of black box algorithms when they have the potential to cause harm personally or financially.
- tdrp 5y agoI'm curious if anyone on here ever used GDPR (or some other legal framework) to get this kind of ban overturned or at least explained.
- PeterisP 5y agoGDPR does have a clause (Art. 22) referencing "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing[..]" , however: 1. the scope of GDPR is about rights of natural persons so anything about a company or organization Google Ads account is out of scope. A non-profit organization (AFAIK DroidScript is one?) is not a "data subject" to which that article can refer. 2. even if it would apply, it does not require "that companies be able to explain the decisions of black box algorithms", it requires "at least the right to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller, to express his or her point of view and to contest the decision" so if you complain, express your opinion, and then the company has a human review the automatically gathered data and respond "yep, we looked at it and our decision stands" then that's compliant, that GDPR article does not require them to provide you with an explanation, only with a human intervention.
- ImPostingOnHN 5y ago1. Mandate that each accused has the right to view the evidence against them - this means no bans without specific evidence that the user can view and defend against. 2. Mandate that each accused has the right to face their accuser - this means each ban must provide a way to speak to a person via phone and email to appeal it. 3. Mandate that each accused has a right to a fair trial - this means that, at some point in the appeals process, the banned must have the option of, with minimal investment of time and effort, being judged by a neutral party, which has the power to ultimately overturn judgements by the non-neutral party (Facebook) The problem isn't that there are no solutions - each of these three totally reasonable rights was conceived of centuries ago. The problem is that Google doesn't want to do them because it is at least 1 cent cheaper to _not_ do then.
- renewiltord 5y agoAh interesting. That is actually actionable advice. Using non-Google ads with Android devices seems safer. Good tip.
- jraph 5y agoAlso teach people to use and prefer F-Droid over Google Play when possible, and make your open source app available on it: - no obscure ban for application vendors - no mandatory account for installing apps and from which you can be banned - no user tracking If you don't like vendor lock-ins and its consequences, push for the alternatives.
- cy_hauser 5y agoWould F-Droid have accepted them with an ad bundle included? I seem to remember that as an anti-feature for them.
- pferde 5y agoIt is an anti-feature, and they seem to only be allowing apps with ads implemented using free software: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/#Ads https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/#Ads
- matkoniecz 5y agoIs it feasible for anyone attempting to make an app paid in some form? Would they accept any form of ads or requiring login into a paid account? Note that F-Droid often has build issues, with app version on F-Droid lagging months behind actually released version.
- jraph 5y agoRequiring a paid login is certainly fine as long as the client application is entirely free software. Ads are probably fine if they are shown using free software but will be marked as an anti-feature. Same for tracking. In app payment is probably fine too, and will not be subject to a 30% fee or something.
- bambax 5y agoMaybe. How many users are on F-Droid though? I think the alternative is a simple web app. For many many apps it would work just fine. If it works in a browser on a PC, it really should work on a browser on a phone.
- tdrp 5y agoWe removed ads from our app a few years ago after having read a similar story. In our case we were worried that any script kiddie or bad actor could very easily sabotage us and cause us to go bankrupt without any recourse.
- mathrawka 5y agoGoogle's support has really taken a turn for the worse. We had our Google Pay (not Play, Pay) account suspended following the instructions that Google Play Support gave us to add our new bank account. Long story, still dealing with it, but here is a summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26918013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26918013
- Digit-Al 5y agoI just don't see how this can be legal. How can they be allowed to completely destroy a business with no evidence and no appeal process? This surely must class as abuse of a monopoly position. I guess the fact that they haven't been sued yet must be evidence that their terms are fairly tight but it feels like I've seen something that states that terms are only enforceable if they can be shown to be "reasonable" and it sure can't be "reasonable" to say "we think you have committed fraud but we will show you no evidence that you have done so and will give you no way to appeal your innocence". Right now it seems like they literally have the power to completely destroy any business hosted on their platform at a whim.
- nmfisher 5y agoI agree, I think it's totally insane that we are allowing this to happen (and I'm most the liberal/free-market person I know). Google is literally one of the most profitable companies in the world. It could easily implement a fair, open and transparent appeals process if it wanted. It's choosing not to. That is a massive "fuck you" to everybody who has invested huge amounts of time and money to build businesses that basically now operate at the whim and mercy of an unaccountable giant. Suing also isn't at good solution. If your business suddenly get cut off from 100% of its customers, do you think you're going to have enough cash sitting around to pay employees and lawyers for the next 3 years waiting for your case to be heard? There needs to be a mandated appeals process that is audited by an independent government agency.
- Majromax 5y ago> Google is literally one of the most profitable companies in the world. It could easily implement a fair, open and transparent appeals process if it wanted. I'm not so sure. Google's business model is to take a slice of billions of small-value transactions, usually in ad-serving space, while using every bit of automation to minimize its employee-effort per transaction. I suspect that implementing meaningful human review at the necessary scale would kill those operating margins. Fairly handling an appeal from an app with $10/month in ad revenue would take about the same amount of human time as one from an app with $10k/month in ad revenue. This doesn't excuse the business model, but I think it goes a long way towards explaining it. As you note, the tail risk here is regulatory -- if a sufficiently powerful government cracks down, it could impose an even more onerous review process than Google would choose for itself, or legislatively rewrite terms-of-use to impose a fairness or good faith standard. > Suing also isn't at good solution. Leaving aside the access to justice issue, suing isn't currently a good solution because it's not obvious what right the victim has in tort. Google's terms of service will allow its behaviour, so you'd be left with more speculative actions like unlawful restraint of trade that might require explicit evidence of bad-faith intent.
- squaredisk 5y agoRichard Stallman was right. Richard Stallman was right. Richard Stallman was hell right.
- moooo99 5y agoI've been thinking about how to monetize the game I'm building and AdMob seemed like the obvious candidate. I checked a bunch of sources including Youtube videos, blog articles and reddit posts, and stumbled across a whole bunch of apps that got their ad serving limited because of "suspected click fraud". Most of those apps have in common that they are relatively new and had massive download spikes thanks to ad campaigns. Obviously that was a massive red flag for me, but the search for alternatives gave me a good impression on how massive Google actually is. Many developers don't even seem to consider any alternatives for AdMob/AdSense. So far the best alternative I was able to find seems to be MoPub and to use their mediation capabilities. I really don't want to go all in on Google, but especially when working on mobile, it often seems like there are not too many choices.
- BMorearty 5y agoFour months ago a friend of mine had his Google account suspended with a vague message about a terms of service violation. He escalated and appealed it with my help. It was no use. He lost everything. Files. Photos. Email. Calendar. Even his business domain registrations. He was paying for Google services like YouTube and storage. He couldn’t even get a download of his data. This is why I never used Google Cloud. I’ve heard these stories for years. You can lose everything and have no recourse. It’s not worth it.
- IshKebab 5y agoI don't understand why they don't at least allow Google Takeout for banned accounts. They've already done all the hard work of implementing it!
- BMorearty 5y agoSeriously!
- skinkestek 5y agoAlso takeout is kind of underwhelming: It was probably one of the last things Google announced that I was enthusiastic about: The rest here is my personal feeling. It might be wrong. I might have missed something. ... only when trying to use it it is dark patterns in layers to prevent you from actually using it: - getting links to download stuff takes more than enough time to get you to forget it. - and they only last for a very limited time - archives are unwieldy
- londons_explore 5y ago> getting links to download stuff takes more than enough time to get you to forget it. Building takeout archives is incredibly expensive for Google. Do that just a few times and you might have wiped out years of profit Google made off you. Thats because most data in your Google account (eg. a random email or a photo you took in 2013) is only accessed once and then never again. Storage systems are designed for that. Yet when you go and try and access every single piece of data ever, you're putting more load on their storage systems than years of regular use. Thats part of why it takes so long to build the archive - they do it at low priority and slowly so as not to overload the service for other users.
- Rastonbury 5y agoIf anyone doesn't think Google and FB are advertising monopolies imagine getting both or either of your ad account banned. Say you have a small Shopify store selling a niche product and competitor reported your ads, no one will answer your support tickets. This actually happens
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 12ian34 5y agoI find it strange that it's so normalised to consider something as invasive and manipulative as advertising as the standard method of monetisation. How about trying to make a product so good that it has some intrinsic value that a user wants to pay for?
- franga2000 5y agoBecause people won't pay, especially not on Google Play. Even if people do buy it and it's mildly successful, a company from a country where work costs less will clone it and offer it for free with ads - and no price can compete with free.
- TrianguloY 5y agoAnd even if your app is free, clones with ads will still be made and receive downloads.
- matkoniecz 5y agoAnd in turn people are unwilling to pay for fairly good reasons. I decided to pay for one of app with premium features (my the first payment in Google Play). What happened? App was "redesigned" two weeks later with features that I paid for removed. What caused me to not pay for anything else, why I will gladly pay for software which I can download and keep running even if new version is crippled. For example yesterday I bought LibgtBurn for controlling laser cutter, at 80$ price. While I am unwilling to pay 1$ for an app.
- lupire 5y agoSo you'd prefer I pay a subscription fee, so you can stop paying when the product goes bad?
- matkoniecz 5y agoI am also really unwilling to pay that, "forever" disappeared in two weeks, "yearly" would disappear in the same way. Maybe if it would really, relay low (below 1$) but that in turn is not sustainable at all. In short, I really see no good way right now to deal with paid apps. Both as an user and as a potential author.
- kwdc 5y agoI dread doing business with these mega-companies. Its like dealing with a fickle god of chaos. Completely dystopian even if you follow the rules. Even worse if one of the daemons decides you broke a commandment and pits you into purgatory or hell with no hope of a meaningful appeal.
- Tepix 5y agoEveryone is bashing Google, and rightfully so. I avoid using their services. However, I've also experienced the other side. I've run an online gaming business and we had to ban players that created multiple accounts to cheat. I remember an infamous player whom we kicked out after he created a bunch of accounts and used them to brazenly cheat. He created yet another account and posted on our forums complaining about his locked main account. It contained a statement, written in all caps "ICH BIN MIR KEINER MANIPULATION BEWUSST" ("I'm not aware of any manipulation") that turned into a meme in our company because it was so brazen. Google has no interest in locking out its users and customers. I'm sure there are many accounts that got locked erroneously and it's appaling that it's almost impossible to reach a human to appeal the decision. But i'm convinced that there are far more accounts that were rightfully locked.
- nlitened 5y agoGoogle could at least treat differently two kinds of “customers”: anonymous zero-effort freshly registered accounts and actual paying clients who have undergone extensive KYC and have years of history. I think the main issue is not automated bans, but playing by all rules, jumping through all hoops, and still getting an unappealable ban on a whim.
- ImPostingOnHN 5y agoThe issue is that it's better for society that a thousand guilty people go unpunished than that a single innocent one is. "The end justifies the means" is how atrocities are justified.
- Tepix 5y agoWhat i was getting at was that some of these reports may be from people or organisations whose account closures were not in error. I do think they should give people the opportunity to download the data from the account even after it was locked.
- ImPostingOnHN 5y agoWhat I was getting at was that some of these reports may be from people or organisations whose account closures WERE in error, and that is much worse than the possibility that they were not. Any sufficient system of meting out justice requires a sufficient level of assurance that it won't get it wrong and punish an innocent person. Perfection is obviously not possible here, but increasing that level of assurance is.
- franga2000 5y agoI keep reading about all of these people who got their Google accounts nuked, both business and personal, and keep wondering how there hasn't been a class-action lawsuit yet. Their marketing says "your data in the cloud, safe", but then uploading a single copyrighted movie to GDrive (even if you don't share it) can result in not only losing access to all your other unrelated files, but also emails, app purchases, etc. And if you're really unlucky and administer a company's GApps, the entire company might get dragged down alongs with your personal account, despite there being no other connection than "administered by the same person". This is so unreasonable that even if it's in their ToS, that wouldn't be enough in court, and surely there's some law that's breaking somewhere...
- cube00 5y agoIf they're banning a free account and you haven't suffered any monetary loss I doubt if the court will take kindly to its time being wasted with a case like this. Any argument about data loss would be put back on you with "back up better next time"
- franga2000 5y agoMany people have spent money with Google: Google Play purchases, Google One, Youtube Premium, whatever music service they're pushing these days, Google Domains, AdSense, a linked GApps account for your business... Some dude is already suing Apple for deleting his iCloud account that had a bunch of app purchases on it. But monetary loss is far from the only thing you can sue someone over. If you can sue a store that you never even went into because you walked past it an slipped on ice that was technically on their property, twisting your ankle (and in many places, you can), I see no reason why you shouldn't be a able to sue Google for deleting your entire digital life (keep in mind that basically everything is tied to your email), even if you were using their services for free. I know I'd much rather break my leg than have to deal with the disaster that would ensue if my Gmail were deleted, and I've been slowly migrating off of it for years now. Edit: I guess a better analogy would be a company providing free warehose space (maybe for a temporary opening promo). They market it as a safe warehouse so you put your stuff in there, then they take it and shred it. In response they say that their parent company also owns a convenience store chain and one time, you looked at a cashier there funny. They point you to the ToS that is printed on the roof of the warehouse in 12pt Comic Sans.
- TrianguloY 5y agoI'll repeat what I said in the other discussion: What I find interesting is the little information they give you after a ban. Apparently if they explained the reasons of the banning then other people could use that information to find flaws and 'game the system'. This means that, if you deliberately made something against the rules and were banned, you can then 'explain your mistake and the measures to not do it again'. But if you don't do anything unusual and simply break one of the crazy rules they have by mistake, it's game over. P.S. If you have a blog and practically all of your visits come from a single source (perhaps a link in something popular) don't EVER use admob on that blog. You will be banned too.
- smsm42 5y agoReading the email exchanges there, I got a clear understanding that Google process is built in a way that makes impossible for a common person (without side channels to somebody important at Google or ability to cause massive bad press to them) to get any resolution. Moreover, support people (if those are people and not scripts?) don't even know what it is about, they just repeat "you violated policy X, see document Y, okthxbye" until you give up. They don't know how one violates policy X or what can be done about it, they just see some record "violated policy X" and have to compose (likely copy-paste) email to the complainer about it, so they shut up and go away. I am still amazed people invest so much time and effort into Android apps that can be squashed like a bug for no reason at all, just because nobody cares enough to fix the utterly broken syustem.
- bitreality 5y agoAnother example on how tech giants control the livelihoods of millions of people. They can press one button and put thousands of people out of a job at any time. Workers rights? How about an automated reply and no specific reason for the death of your company/application/income. These companies need to be regulated ASAP. Especially when it comes to terminating users.
- avipars 5y agoAs a small-time indie app developer, enabling ads was more trouble than it's worth... Because I have so little traffic, I'm exposed to more ad-fraud and false clicks from competitors. I shut off all ads on my apps for now, and my goal changed form making money to acquiring users
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- advait1911 5y agoIs it possible to create a decentralised ad exchange on ethereum?
- baxuz 5y agoThe biggest issue isn't Google ads. It's these automated App Store monopolies. Not only App stores, but services provided by any of these FAANG mega-corps. You, as a customer, should have a right to speak with an actual person, to find out what the issue is, and to appeal. If you suffered damages due to a mistake on their end, they should be found liable. This shit shouldn't even be legal in the EU.
- GuB-42 5y agoI winder if stories like that will ultimately be Google and other tech giants downfall. The idea is that you can get banned, you will never know why, there is no way to appeal, they won't give you a chance to fix things, and the only contact you will have will be robots, or if you are lucky, people completely dehumanized by the corporate structure. So simply, they are unreliable. Just like files stored in a hard drive. With the hard drive, you can lose data because of a power surge or a random bug, with Google, you can lose data because you ticked the algorithm the wrong way. The solution: backups. But that's the problem. These tech giants value proposition is that they do everything for you, including keeping your things safe, and they charge a premium for it. But if they can kill your account any moment, they are no better than your unreliable hard drive, so why pay the premium? If they don't change, I can see them slowly losing market share, companies start to understand that putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea. They may be attacked by smaller companies that, while also unreliable, are cheaper and more agile because of their size. Or companies that offer you real, competent people you can talk to. By tech giants, I mostly mean Amazon, Google and Facebook, I think (without being sure) that Microsoft knows better, and Apple is mostly a hardware company.
- cyborgx7 5y agoAnother underappreciated danger is nationalization or regulation if google et all continue on the trajectory they are on now. As they strive to become more and more essential to participate in modern society, these opaque bans will become more and more devastating. There is a reason there is a justice system in place to create some kind of accountability and appeal process when cutting into the rights of people. If being able to interact with google service approaches being as essential as finding employment, they can't handle limiting access to their services in the way they have been doing forever.
- lbriner 5y agoI guess the $10B question is whether if someone could set up a competing app store that was available on all Android phones and could present some form of assurance that it wasn't full of malware, would Google lose the entire market or do they have special access to Android OS to prevent this happening?
- jeroenhd 5y agoWith the way the system is designed, it's trivial to game the system in such a way that your ad-supported competitors get purged from the play store. Just extract the AdMob ID and submit it to click farms all around the world, and within a few days your competitor should be dropped from AdSense forever. Like any Google product, partnering with them is a major risk for your business continuity. I'd never combine Google Ads and Google Play, just like I wouldn't combine a Google-hosted email domain with a Play account. Hell, even a Youtube account that's shared with your personal email is a data risk. I do wonder what happened to get the app flagged. Maybe someone found a way to use the app to automate their ad fraud (it's an IDE after all), and Google determined this app to be the culprit? Maybe one of the app's dependencies had a piece of malware added? Who knows at this point. Google's lack of transparency makes it impossible to build any sort of business on their products. I don't get why people still try to do so.
- sva_ 5y ago> With the way the system is designed, it's trivial to game the system in such a way that your ad-supported competitors get purged from the play store. Its only a matter of time until people start abusing this heavily, if they don't already do so. But then Google will probably have to do something about it, if it gets out of hand.
- matsemann 5y agoIt happened with SEO. People found a way to game their rankings by buying backlinks to their pages from spam sites. Google started punishing that behavior, so some have instead started buying backlinks for their competition to de-rank them.
- oefrha 5y agoUnfortunately, - Unscrupulous players gather inorganic points/votes/followers/whatever to get ahead in a ranking system; - Ranking system starts to detect inorganic stats and punish perpetrators; - Unscrupulous players target inorganic stats at competitors instead; is an all too common progression in any ranking system that can be gamed with input from third parties.
- dkarras 5y agoI have a very old app in iOS that serves AdMob ads. I don't even have it installed in my devices. So I myself never launch it, and it hasn't been updated in years. On the computers I use, I have ad blockers. I don't think I have clicked on an actual ad in a decade. This is a small time app that manages to send around $20 every 3 months or so (through ads). Still, about every 2 weeks, Google sends me an e-mail saying "my ad serving is limited" due to "suspicious activity". I do nothing. After a couple weeks, Google notifies me that my ad serving is "restored". Then after a couple weeks, again, I am informed that my ad serving is limited due to suspicious activity. Then they restore it back themselves. This goes in a loop. Whatever they are using to detect this stuff, I believe it is (intentionally or not) broken.
- SergeAx 5y agoThere is an ongoing meme series with that guy with stone face who mocks stupid social media lifehacks. Let me be that guy for a moment: Always create new Google account for your new project. Use that account for related Google Cloud, GMail, Google Play and all the SSOs into third-party services like Github/Gitlab, cloud CI/CD, hosting and so on. Just add your personal account as a collaborator to those services for convenience. It will take one minute and protect you from a ton of problems later. Compartmentalize, people, compartmentalize!
- inull 5y agoGoogle is a joke! Title should of said, NEVER use Gogle at all. They will ban you from AdSense even for menu or search design/style not looking how they like it. There automated system is horrible, they make money and don't care about there customers. So don't use google at all everyone!
- ElectricMind 5y agoYou create a monster (Google, Facebook etc..) then you cry for help when it comes bite your own hand? This one is on America and "American dream" Sorry I meant "American greed". Maybe both are same? Unfortunately whole world suffer as always -_-
- umrashrf 5y agoApple/Google has too much power over these app stores. They need to be decentralized.
- Nwil 5y agoI sympathize with the developers. Is it possible for a judicial review of the problem, for the "strong" side to present evidence of manipulation of the ad network?
- donatj 5y agoWhat’s a good Adsense alternative? They’ve temporarily disabled my Adsense a couple times in the previous year for “invalid traffic” and this is making it sound like a huge liability.
- ape4 5y agoEach month I get paid a bit for my Adsense ads minus a small amount for "invalid traffic". I don't click on my own ads and its only a few dollars.
- donatj 5y agoI've had my ads completely shut down twice for months at a time "for investigation" due to invalid traffic. I don't click on my own ads. I don't know, it's a little worrying.
- williesleg 5y agoI love money laundering schemes!
- varispeed 5y agoIf they know you clicked your own ads, then why can't they simply filter these signals out? To me it seems like they are trying to find every avenue to wiggle themselves out of paying. Such a nasty company.
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- sli 5y agoI got banned from Google Ads at age 16 because Google was convinced I was doing this. I'm 35 now. Never figured out how that happened, but it doesn't matter because I wouldn't choose Google's ads anymore, anyway.
- viro 5y agoSame-ish but to be honest my ban was legit. My goofy ass clicked my own YouTube AD one too many times as a kid. I'm pretty sure that ban is permanent.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y agoI would assume that part of the testing process (or part of the checklist after going live) would involve clicking user interface elements, including ads? You want to know that it works.
- kevincox 5y agoTo be more clear: Google can ban your Android app for any reason. One of the many reasons for this is if they think you've clicked on your own ads.
- bogwog 5y ago> One of the many reasons for this is if they think you've clicked on your own ads. Or if their shitty and clearly demonstrably broken AI thinks you've clicked on your own ads.
- atum47 5y agoWell, I know someone who wrote a bot to play his game and watch the ad at the end. This person made about 4 dollars in one or two nights letting the bot run. When pay day came, Google marked half of the revenue as invalid, and only paid 1,75 dollars. This person knew the risks of being caught and let it go. My point is, I think Google warns you first about doing that.
- atum47 5y agoMy friend just shared with me Google marking part of his payment as invalid: https://imgur.com/x8mtQ5S https://imgur.com/x8mtQ5S "Invalid Trafic"