18 ms·

Google Adsense/Admob blocks you for life if you use it before you're 18

337 points by code51 4y ago

agilob 4y ago
I have like 6 or 7 active adsense accounts that I created before Google required to verify ID for accounts. I made all of them before I was 15
shadowgovt 4y ago
Probably best not to do that then.
- Hizonner 4y ago
  Yes, it is very unwise to use any Google product or service for any business purpose.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    It's very unwise to lie to a service provider when they explicitly ask, especially when setting up an account where money will change hands. That is technically actual fraud. Google's not gating out under-18-year-olds for fun: they're a business, they'd love to make more money. Contract law in the US forbids people under 18 from entering into broad categories of contract, and Adsense use operates under electronic contract between user and Google where money changes hands in both directions. Google opens themselves up to huge liability if they inadvertently do business with a minor, which is why they're so paranoid about the lock-out.
    - eastbound 4y ago
      All minors set up a Youtube channel at one point and a lot of them use Adsense.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        Do you mean use Adsense as per policy (by linking the account of someone over 18) or do you mean lie to Google? The latter might be true, but every time Google becomes aware of it they will cancel that account as quickly as they can.
    - Falling3 4y ago
      > Google opens themselves up to huge liability if they inadvertently do business with a minor, which is why they're so paranoid about the lock-out. What liability is that? Genuinely asking because I've never heard that concern.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        The "under-18-year-olds can't enter into contracts" laws are, broadly speaking, derived historically from child labor protection concerns, and tend to be state-level law. There's very real risk that legitimizing a contract with a child opens Google up to expensive-to-litigate criminal liability.
        wnoise 4y ago
        Children technically can enter into contracts. But they're voidable contracts, so it's essentially no upside and only downside for those that would contract with them.
    - Hizonner 4y ago
      > That is technically actual fraud. That would depend on whose laws you were applying. In a lot of places, fraud requires a misrepresentation that's actually material to the transaction, and a court could come down on either side of the question of whether the user's age was material in the necessary way. > Google opens themselves up to huge liability if they inadvertently do business with a minor, which is why they're so paranoid about the lock-out. No, they really don't. They might open themselves up to limited liability if they let a minor do something that lost said minor money. They also might not be able to enforce some of the "take it or leave it" provisions of their terms against minors (of course, in a sane legal system they wouldn't be able to enforce those terms against anybody, but you don't see many if any sane legal systems). But they do not open themselves up to "huge liability". Nonetheless, they don't choose to take even those small risks. Mostly, I suspect, because the response wouldn't be automatable. Google hates anything that's not automatable, and vehemently resists manually fixing anything. That applies to interacting with adults, too, and to cases where you haven't even actually violated their policies, but the automation happens to be wrong, which happens all the time. Which is why nobody of any age should be depending on Google.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        At Google's scale, these aren't small risks. How expensive would it be to defend these cases in court N times per day in different of jurisdictions? It to have them aggregated into class action?
    - code51 4y ago
      If Google was so worried about this, their AI and behavior analytics can %99.9 know you are underage. They could show a BIG RED alert multiple times about this. Plus, I don't see heavy upload traffic from these young people becoming a liability on their end which is basically free work.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        "Free work" of children is "child labor."
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      > especially when setting up an account where money will change hands. That is technically actual fraud no, that's not fraud. It might be an element of fraud if it was a loophole you were exploiting to use the account for some fraudulent purpose, but fraud requires theft or similar, not just technical violations of terms.
pazimzadeh 4y ago
I received a lifelong ban on using Google Ad products when I was 16 after experimenting with clicking my own ads (and asking my high school friends to click on them). I remember the account accumulated almost $80 before Google detected the suspicious activity and banned me. Given that this was 16 years ago, it would be nice to get second chance..
- jeffbee 4y ago
  - testfoobar 4y ago
    Perhaps you did not note that the banned person was 16 years old. There should be very few actions with life long consequences for any 16 year old. Their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed. They experiment and engage with the world to learn its boundaries and limits. Click fraud for $80 when 16yo does not warrant a lifetime ban.
    - doodlesdev 4y ago
      I beg do differ. When I was a kid I used to have a YouTube channel with AdSense. Difference being I actually read the ToS and decided that it would be my parents channel, only I would be recording. Never clicked on my channels ads (in fact that's when I started using AdBlockers, for the sole purpose of not generating fraudulent ad revenue). Reading at 16 years old is not that hard. I created that YouTube channel much earlier than that. I also don't believe that as I aged I have magically understood better the worlds boundaries and limits. Mind you, 16 years old is enough to drive in some places. Enough to work in others. And also enough to drink in some others. It's just not that young and people should take responsibilities for their actions. Principles and values are something that's established early on in someone's life. If someone doesn't care for defrauding a company of $80 when they are 16 years old, I don't honestly believe they deserve a second chance.
      - xboxnolifes 4y ago
bell-cot 4y ago
IANAL, but... - Is the '18' adjusted when the local age of legal majority is not 18? - Are there jurisdictions where this policy is in clear conflict with local law or case law?
- Kye 4y ago
  Google is ultimately subject to the laws of the US where it's 18 at the federal level. It also doesn't really matter: if the policy says 18, it's 18.
  - Hizonner 4y ago
    Google is subject to the laws of every jurisdiction in which Google operates. Furthermore US law doesn't actually require Google to refuse to do business with minors. So if a jurisdiction had some rule that was contradictory to Google's policy (which I doubt), then Google would have to comply.
    - jacques_chester 4y ago
      I suspect the difficulty is that it's legally difficult to enforce contracts with minors. Easier to just refuse to deal with them.
- cmeacham98 4y ago
  - Is the '18' adjusted when the local age of legal majority is not 18? I believe it will be increased if the age of majority is above 18, but has a lower limit of 18 even if the local age of majority is below that. - Are there jurisdictions where this policy is in clear conflict with local law or case law? I'm not sure how it could be, generally companies are allowed to ban a customer for almost any reason (with certain rare exceptions). I'm not aware of any jurisdiction where "I lied about my age when I was a kid" is a protected class.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > Are there jurisdictions where this policy is in clear conflict with local law or case law? Brazilian here. I just found one case where a judge legitimized a contract after a 16 year old misrepresented her age in order to contract a service and then tried to nullify the contract by claiming she was a minor at the time. Essentially the Google situation but reversed.
jeffbee 4y ago
"By submitting an application to use the Services, if you are an individual, you represent that you are at least 18 years of age... Google may at any time terminate your Account because of ... your failure to otherwise fully comply with the AdSense Policies... If ... Google suspends or terminates your Account, you (i) are prohibited from creating a new Account, and (ii) may not be permitted to monetize content on other Google products." Seems pretty clear.
- Johnny555 4y ago
  But it's not clear how someone under the age of 18 can agree to a contract.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- code51 4y ago
  a) Imagine you are 13 years old and actually reading Terms of Services. Just imagine you are under 18. b) It's legal speak mentioning "you cannot create a new account" but it doesn't say you can't try to fix the problems about your existing account. The problem is there is nobody to reach for mistakes or downright violations from Google's side. It doesn't work to help people with good intentions realizing their errors. c) It's not mentioning that you will forever be blocked because you misrepresented your age for whatever the reason (just an unaware click is enough). If Google was actually serious in enforcing the policy, they would just check any detail that could trigger this user could be below 18 years of age. As you read here, they don't spend much of an effort to avoid this scenario. AI works just to block you, not to avoid your downfall. d) I wonder Google informs kids this much before making money on free content they upload on Youtube. It's not hard to see this is one-sided exploitation in business sense. So... pretty clear, yeah.
  - doodlesdev 4y ago
    > a) Imagine you are 13 years old and actually reading Terms of Services. Just imagine you are under 18. No need to imagine because I did exactly that (read my other comment). Let's get into this: > c) It's not mentioning that you will forever be blocked because you misrepresented your age for whatever the reason (just an unaware click is enough). It is mentioning SPECIFICALLY that. And an unaware click is not enough, you have to go through the trouble of reading the contract (or scrolling past it), checking a lot of boxes, saying you agree to the contract, and that's only after you in your own will and power decided to search for this. You also get to change your birthday once in your Google account if you made any mistakes during singup. > If Google was actually serious in enforcing the policy, they would just check any detail that could trigger this user could be below 18 years of age. As you read here, they don't spend much of an effort to avoid this scenario. AI works just to block you, not to avoid your downfall. Then people will complain that they require documentation, privacy this, privacy that. Mind you that I would never submit an ID to Google to verify my identity, but honestly that's the only way they can actually verify your age. I'm not a fan of Google and it's autobanning processes with no recourse, but this is a special case where I think it's completely justified looking from their side and all the liabilities they have if they decide to backtrack on something like this. For them someone is going to criticize them either way they take, so they choose the easier and simpler path of permabanning.
Shank 4y ago
As someone who operated on the "adult internet" with payment processors and related infrastructure without being 18, I still carry forward the constant fear that I'll be banned for retroactive Terms of Service violations incurred when I was a kid. It really sucks when it's services like AdSense because you're just screwed forever. I really really wish the internet was more supportive of "early hackers" who want to experiment. I get that there are tons of implications around contract law and child labor here, but there really needs to be an escape hatch if a parent agrees to whatever activity is being done. Ostensibly, this is a young creator getting discouraged from their hobby, even though they've shown that they're good enough at it to deserve some form of compensation. This'll leave a bad taste in the kid's mouth for a long time.
- Swizec 4y ago
  > if a parent agrees to whatever activity is being done My mom definitely wouldn’t be able to provide informed consent to half the stuff I was doing on the internet in high school and middle school even if I told her about it. She worried, I’m sure, but between speaking next to zero english and the novelty of www in the early 00’s, best she could do was threaten to take the computer if things got too weird.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    When I was a kid, i hosted WC3 beta cracks, patches, and servers on our ISP Webspace. Blizzard had some call our ISP, who called my dad, who told me to stop doing whatever it was that got people mad It feel like nowadays, it'd have resulted in a lawsuit, but at least threatening lawyer letters. edit: Archive.org link to the site. With a visitor counter and cringy teeny-sounding English ;) https://web.archive.org/web/20020522193227/http://home.foni.net/~wagners/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020522193227/http://home.foni.... For anyone interested, this was strictly beta, by a group of crackers who said they’d stop releasing anything as soon as the game was done. I was one of 4 or 5 people who’d get advanced notification in IRC to upload the newest patches etc. so there’d be multiple mirrors available for the announcement.
    - 4y ago
duxup 4y ago
It's sad but because of stuff like this I setup accounts for my kids to register for games or whatever and always set them up as adults. I don't have time to deal with their accounts getting locked and so on, even if there are other issues. Granted they also don't get free reign on the internet / outside parental view anyhow.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Note that the responses are responses by a community member and not by a Google employee. As such, those responses should be taken with a grain of salt.
- adoxyz 4y ago
  Came to say this. This person knows even less than actual Google support (which may or may not exist in the first place). Google not having real human support is unbelievable.
- code51 4y ago
  Google Adsense/Admob offers no support for most of its users. Only users that generate large revenue can access Chat option. For the rest, the only option is to write to support community. It's deliberate: feels like there is support but there is none.
chickenpotpie 4y ago
Worth noting that this is the statement of a "product expert" which is just some random person not an employee of the company our the actual policy. This might be true but this isn't a reliable source.
- romwell 4y ago
  As if you ever get actual people from Google responding to peons like that. That's as reliable as it gets.
- winkeltripel 4y ago
  Note that Google chooses to rely on these product experts instead of helping, or providing sources of information itself.
kweingar 4y ago
I've been banned-for-life from a handful of services after I lied about my age as a kid. I can see both (all?) sides of this: - As a society we ought to be forgiving of harmless youthful indiscretions - As a business you shouldn't have to give second chances to people who blatantly defraud you - There is a big can of worms when it comes to doing business with minors on the internet. I don't think there's a solution as easy as "well when they're 18, let them log into their account and update their age to acknowledge that they were using the service as a minor" or "just let people open multiple accounts (with wildly different ages) under their name."
- romwell 4y ago
  I think the solution is "the right to fucking delete your account forver". Google keeping "limbo" accounts is dystopian, and seems like a GDPR violation to me.
  - pb7 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - LegitShady 4y ago
      dystopia does not require the government - in fact some popular fictional dystopias are when corporations can control/etc without the government intervening. So maybe just don't word police other people because you don't like their words.
      - pb7 4y ago
        labster 4y ago
        The word dystopia comes from analysis of fiction.
mynegation 4y ago
I’ve never used AdSense, so might be a stupid question, but how do they identify you? Are you supposed to give them some lifetime identifying information like SSN? Everything else like email, name, address can be changed.
tsrand0m 4y ago
I wanted to comment on the parent thread but it’s already locked. “Cannot the boy withhold payment until he turns 18 years? He will lose it to inflation and all but at least he will get some due, right?” It’s a little weird not being able to suggest a solution when my whole life runs on Adsense money.
- jgilias 4y ago
  Apparently this is not possible. Because it's not possible to verify the account, as the person doing the verification has a different birthdate than what's associated with the account.
ianbutler 4y ago
I’ve been banned on google ads for circumventing systems for about 2 years now. This is apparently their highest offense and to be perfectly honest I still have no idea what I did. I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than a couple hundred bucks on google ads and one day I was just banned and my ads were stopped. So as far as I can tell there’s plenty of not so clear things that will get you banned from google ads, don’t build your life and business around that advertising stream is what I learned. That and that there are better advertising avenues for the niches I tend to care about.
beached_whale 4y ago
Interesting how Google has no issue with selling these people to their advertisers
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
codexon 4y ago
I know this is going to be hard to prove, but I was banned forever because they detected "click fraud" which did not come from me. It was likely initiated by a competitor. Now I still use adsense, but now it is through a 3rd party which takes a hefty cut of the profits. If adsense is your sole income, you should probably diversify. Anyone can get you permanently banned unless you are a well known youtuber.
khazhoux 4y ago
Can’t he create a new gmail account? Not the end of the world.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  It'll just get banned too. Google basically has a panopticon; there's no way they wouldn't know it's you.
ShowalkKama 4y ago
Can't you ask google to delete all your data and sign up again? (thank god GDPR exists)
- MVorlm 4y ago
  GDPR does not fix this situation. There are cut-outs in GDPR that allows companies to store data for longer. Financial/billing/taxes fall under that category.
- code51 4y ago
  I think for this to work, Google actually has to delete any information about you completely from its systems. I'm curious if anyone tried this with success as well.
- pb7 4y ago
  GDPR doesn't prevent a company from retaining records of individuals who defrauded them.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  No, they'll claim they have a "legitimate interest" to keep some of it, and then use what they kept as justification to ban your new account too.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  https://gdpr.eu/recital-47-overriding-legitimate-interest/ https://gdpr.eu/recital-47-overriding-legitimate-interest/ > The processing of personal data strictly necessary for the purposes of preventing fraud also constitutes a legitimate interest of the data controller concerned.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nerdawson 4y ago
Issues like this wouldn't exist if verification was required upfront. If you need to be at least 18 to use a particular service, and they're going to verify at some point, that point should be at the very start.
- f1shy 4y ago
  I wonder if it is clearly specified in the TOS that you may face a life ban...
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    On every terms of service document there is a clause that says "we can terminate our service to you unilaterally with no warning for any reason including no reason". It's basically the catch all exception handler of the legal world these corporations live in.
- romwell 4y ago
  This sounds like exploitation of minors: let them create an account that generates revenue, but only kickban them when it suits the company
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Right, how about this is 100% Google's fault for not figuring out how to avoid offering contracts to children. Seems more reasonable than anyone else getting any amount of blame or punishment whatsoever, including and especially the minor involved.
tbbfjotllf 4y ago
I tried starting a blog as a kid, I tried monetizing it using Adsense, my application never got accepted, but somehow my account ended up active for 5 minutes before my application got rejected again. I abandoned the blog, and on visiting it after two years, I found out it's showing ads with an adsense account that shouldn't be showing ads, and then I was banned. I would never know if it was because I was still a minor or because Google bots didn't do a very good job.
system2 4y ago
I love how Microsoft and Google threads ending with "This question is locked and replying has been disabled." Cowards.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  A very strong rule of thumb is that whenever a conversation gets locked, whichever side did the locking is in the wrong. The other big place this applies is GitHub issues and PR's.
m00dy 4y ago
I had this issue one year after Adsense had been announced
c7b 4y ago
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
If you're under 18, then you cannot legally consent to the TOS, therefore you can't be in violation of them. They can kick you off of then of course, but banning you later on as an adult I wouldn't think would be justified because, as above, you can't violate TOS that you can't consent to when under 18.
topynate 4y ago
What right does Google have to store the data about this kid necessary to enforce a lifetime ban against him? The click-through contract that he was legally unable to enter into? "he has already earned over £300" implies he's in the UK, so UK GDPR applies.
sbf501 4y ago
Lawsuits work. Around 2003 I purchased a CPU from eBay with PayPal. It never shipped because it was a scam. My credit card company refunded my money, but PayPal demanded I pay them. I refused and they banned my account. It took almost a decade before a class-action lawsuit forced amnesty at PayPal. I use it now because it is convenient to have everything go through one service that I can control. But if they did this again I wouldn't use them again. Hopefully a class-action lawsuit can still work against a giant like Google. If the US would get its head out of its arse and pass legislation like GDRP, we might actually have a chance at the right to be forgotten.
MikeYasnev007 4y ago
tremon 4y ago
Wow, that's a great feature. Too bad I'm too old to qualify.
djhworld 4y ago
My friend ran into this recently, he signed up to Paypal in like 2003, probably to sell games or something on eBay for a bit of cash. He's in his mid thirties now, and Paypal banned his account without warning, when he phoned them up they said it was because he was under 18 when he signed up.....19 years ago.
- andromeduck 4y ago
  Wow... I know like 10-20 people who did that too for getting used parts and collectables in highschool.
- f1shy 4y ago
  Sometimes the "justice" can be slow... In e-bay I assume you can sing up again with a different mail and second name or so.
tssva 4y ago
Google does allow you to change the birthdate for your Google account. They could try letting the account sit in limbo unverified until the kid is 18, change the birthdate and then verify the account.
bornfreddy 4y ago
Ah, Google. It baffles me that some companies even consider using GCP - it is still the same company that kills products and has abysmal customer support. AWS and Azure feel like a safer bet to me. I wonder if Google will ever get their act together, or will they go the IBM way?
ohgodplsno 4y ago
PayPal locked my account after receiving 800 €, asked for my ID, got it, unlocked my account (gave me about 3 hours to withdraw) and then banned me permanently for having created the account before 18. At this point, I consider most American companies as an active threat to me, especially if I used them before 18.
nkozyra 4y ago
I was banned from Adsense for reasons unknown, permanently. Even if you play by the rules you're at risk.
Chinjut 4y ago
Why should anything of this sort ever deserve a LIFETIME ban?
anigbrowl 4y ago
I don't think the title follows. Nobody in that exchange seems to have considered the possibility that the 13yo could just keep the account going for 5 years until they're able to verify it at age 18, or alternatively just create a new Google ID on their 18th birthday and use that. Seems like a nontroversy.
- jgilias 4y ago
  Did you actually read the accepted answer there? Neither of the options you mention are possible.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Of course I read it, that's why I wrote 'nobody seems to have considered the possibility.' How is Google gonna ban a person for life whose identity they never verified in the first place?
honestduane 4y ago
On the other hand, The kid did lie. From the Google Security Department perspective, this person is a threat actor.
- croes 4y ago
  You mean Google didn't really check and punishes a minor for his lifetime.
  - honestduane 4y ago
    I agree, the crime does not fit the punishment. But if your a kid then you cant legally accept the terms of use, ether.
pacetherace 4y ago
What happens to these bans if I setup a LLC and use that for future Adsense business?
- missedthecue 4y ago
  Don't they ask you to upload your government ID?
  - genewitch 4y ago
    that would be articles of incorporation or whatever the functional equivalent is for LLC (or a 501.c3, ...)
- f1shy 4y ago
  Should be no problem, except for the problem of setting up an LLC "just for that". I've no idea how it works in the states, but setting up a firm, in many countries I know, is no easy task, and comes with associated costs, both one-time and recurrent ones.
fudgefactorfive 4y ago
I remember at 21 getting an email from Paypal that the account I'd used my entire online life was banned because I started it when I was 12. They noticed this after I reached out to support... Switched email addresses and used that instead. Although I've not used PayPal in a good while because it just randomly rejected transactions for no clear reason.
Animats 4y ago
Incorporate. As a corporation, you can get a Google Adsense business account.
pmarreck 4y ago
Seems like a business opportunity to me
dheera 4y ago
Just get a new life? Change your legal name, address, get a new passport, ...
logicalmonster 4y ago
Is it uncharitable to say that Google has intentionally stolen millions of dollars from kids? They seem to have engineered a set of rules where they work around having to ever pay a bunch of people for content that was produced and had ads displayed on it. Maybe the kids can't legally sign a contract, but Google still made money from them. Has Google forfeited this money or are they profiting off of child labor?
- njsubedi 4y ago
  AFAIK all the incomes from invalid traffic are refunded to the advertisers. That might also be the procedure in case of invalid accounts.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    It would be good to get a clear citation of this, if available. Not that this matters as much, but I'd like to point out that even if this is the case that the money is returned to advertisers, Google may still reap non-trivial benefits from this chain of events in at least these ways. > Depending on the amount and length of time the money is held, this might add up to a substantial dollar value in interest payments they're making by holding onto the cash. The interest generated by temporarily holding $80 here and $400 there times thousands and thousands of users, held for a while, could be a non-trivial amount of cash in a long timeframe. > Google simultaneously screws over advertisers (garbage and/or fraud clicks) at the same time as they sometimes give away these freebie clicks (unpaid kids' clicks) back to their advertisers. Now think about advertisers' perceptions of Google for their business. It can be argued that Google is essentially banking on the goodwill from the kids' ad clicks being returned (giving the advertisers a freebie) to makeup for however much they piss off advertisers for the garbage fraud clicks that they receive. If Google can bank on "stealing" some percentage of clicks constantly, that might be enough for them to partially make up just enough for the bad clicks they send their advertisers. That could arguably materially impact their business prospects.
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    I'm not sure that makes much of a difference economically, because you would expect that to become priced in.
pocketsand 4y ago
Even if Google were to change their policies to allow this youngster back on in five years, he'd be helpless to actually get Google to respond to a support request.
- judge2020 4y ago
  As far as I can tell the 13 year old isn't even locked out, they just can't verify the AdSense account (and the verification name must match the name on the account), so they will indeed be able to cash out in 5 years.
xg15 4y ago
> Your son's account is now in limbo - it can't be verified, closed or paid out. It can only be abandoned but it will still technically be active as AdSense think he is over 18 - he declared that to be the case. Of course it can't be verified now, but what would prevent the son from completing the verification in a few years when he is actually 18?
- butterguns 4y ago
  Presumably because the Date of Birth on the account is immutable, and the son's ID (even when he becomes 18) will never match it?
  - xg15 4y ago
    Ah, that would make sense. Thanks!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
hilyen 4y ago
Utter bullsh1t. Google needs to be broken up.
naet 4y ago
I worked in financial services for a while and I think Adsense qualifies as a similar financial service, though it might be different since we were working in a sector directly related to trading stocks and brokerage. To comply with US legal regulations my company had to: verify the legitimate identity of account holders via SSN or other means, confirm they are over 18, confirm they aren't on a specific list of financial fraudsters or entities blacklisted by the US government, etc. If we didn't do this properly for every single user we could have been liable for all kinds of nasty legal ramifications, including losing various legal operating licenses we worked very hard to obtain. A kid claiming they are older than they are is relatively low on the scale of identity fraud, but it is still a form of direct identity fraud and would have direct legal consequences if we allowed it through. To open the account, they had to have put in a false statement about their age. Verification isn't instant, it takes time to process, so you can easily open an unverifiable account on many services including Adsense, but it will forever remain unverified if you cannot provide legitimate verification info. I am sympathetic that someone of that age might not understand the consequences of their actions, but they claimed to be someone they are not (specifically an older person). Once you do that, you can't go back and claim to be another individual. They can find an adult and have an adult open an account, which would have various legal ramifications for that adult individual who owns the account, but it would be a new account for a new individual just as with Google Adsense. Also some of the comments about data and GDPR are a bit absurd. You cannot commit fraud, spam, or otherwise violate terms of service, then demand all your data be erased under "GDPR" so you can open a new account and do it over again without recourse. We had constant repeat violators trying to game our onboarding and sign back up after being banned or denied an account. Showing any form of "grace" around previously closed or banned accounts was taking a big risk. We were able to do so on occasion, but only because we operated at a small scale, so an admin could look deeply into individual circumstances and make exceptions. Google Adsense likely faces orders of magnitude higher levels of abuse, and it makes sense for them to not reopen accounts for any reason to minimize their risk exposure. Yes it is unfortunate for those who were banned for a "minor" reason but there isn't much else they can sensibly do.
donatj 4y ago
I had a similar thing happen to my Yahoo account in ~1998-1999. After I'd been using it for a couple months they decided to ask everyone "Are you over 13?" and being a foolish honest child I selected "No". Permanently locked out. Tried to get back in after I turned 13, no luck. Well crap. That's literally how I ended up `donatj` instead of `jdonat` basically everywhere - got permanently locked out of jdonat@yahoo.com I have a fair number of active accounts to this day that I've had since before I was 13 cough ebay cough in the late 90s. I'm scared one day they're going to cross reference the creation date with my current age and be jerks about it.
nearmuse 4y ago
It would be understandable if it were for scams or using ads for illicit goods, but I can't imagine it being a tenable business practice for a corporation to keep a negative permanent record over a minor transgression where no-one is hurt. Are they being pushed by some regulations? Were those rules "written in blood" somehow? Not to mention all the sketchy or pointless webpages and apps which are there exclusively for the ad revenue and are really abusing the platform.
jdlyga 4y ago
I started buying on eBay before I was 18. I think my birthday is still wrong on that site, even though I'm almost 40.
omniglottal 4y ago
Why must we continually revisit the pragma for why to treat people as innocent until proven guilty?? Yes, it takes more effort and, yes, there is more apparent/immediate risk, but the rationale is sound, given dynamics of any system needing generalized governance. It doesn't matter that it's lawful for these corporations to circumvent and entirely go against the patriotic creed of the country where they're founded and operate - the matter is still relevant - the principle exists for very good reason, and is applicable to more than just government. What happened to "doing the right thing" regardless of shortsighted, incomplete rationale being applied and (unfathomably) acceptable to people whose very livelihood hinges on this ongoing presumption of innocence?
sva_ 4y ago
I think since he never verified his account, and has a different birth date than the one stated, he'll probably have no problems making a new account when he's 18.
damidekronik 4y ago
Ì
smsm42 4y ago
Yet another step sleepwalking into the dystopian future. Sure, it's some ad account, who cares. But imagine one of the digital ID projects going mainstream, and the government adopting it, and you doing something as a kid banning you from every payroll system supporting this particular digital ID scheme. And there's nobody to talk to. It's just the way it is.
lrvick 4y ago
This just makes me want to create AdSense accounts for every kid possible to ensure they are protected from being exploited by Google adtech products for life.
explodingcamera 4y ago
There's an easy fix, say you moved to the eu and request that they delete all data about you (you could also try to do a data correction request to change your age).
code51 4y ago
A 13-year-old boy sets up Adsense for his Youtube channel and his father is told that his son is now banned from Adsense/Admob for a lifetime. This is what you get when you have no humans in the loop.
- pcai 4y ago
  What would having a human in the loop accomplish in this case? Doesn't strike me as the poster child of a massive injustice
  - blondin 4y ago
    they wouldn't have banned the kid for life?
  - sct202 4y ago
    Human in the loop could redirect payments to their parent without a lifetime ban. Children do unwise things all the time. Google's growth rates are starting to plateau, and they might want to revisit the legion of people they've robobanned from spending on their platforms.
    - TylerE 4y ago
      The problem is minors can’t legally enter into binding contracts (with a very small number of exceptions, none of which this even approaches)
      - josephcsible 4y ago
        That'd be a reasonable argument to ban minors until they turn 18, but not after that.
      - romwell 4y ago
        No, the problem is that Google doesn't have a human being to tell the kid "have your parents contact us".
    - 4y ago
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
I tried advertising a startup website I had, setup the payments wrong on adsense. Something with an old invalid card being linked or something, and google banned me for life through an automated system. The system thinks I tried to commit some sort of payments fraud.

337 points by code51 4y ago

I have like 6 or 7 active adsense accounts that I created before Google required to verify ID for accounts. I made all of them before I was 15

shadowgovt 4y ago

Probably best not to do that then.

Hizonner 4y ago
Yes, it is very unwise to use any Google product or service for any business purpose.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  It's very unwise to lie to a service provider when they explicitly ask, especially when setting up an account where money will change hands. That is technically actual fraud. Google's not gating out under-18-year-olds for fun: they're a business, they'd love to make more money. Contract law in the US forbids people under 18 from entering into broad categories of contract, and Adsense use operates under electronic contract between user and Google where money changes hands in both directions. Google opens themselves up to huge liability if they inadvertently do business with a minor, which is why they're so paranoid about the lock-out.
  - eastbound 4y ago
    All minors set up a Youtube channel at one point and a lot of them use Adsense.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Do you mean use Adsense as per policy (by linking the account of someone over 18) or do you mean lie to Google? The latter might be true, but every time Google becomes aware of it they will cancel that account as quickly as they can.
  - Falling3 4y ago
    > Google opens themselves up to huge liability if they inadvertently do business with a minor, which is why they're so paranoid about the lock-out. What liability is that? Genuinely asking because I've never heard that concern.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      The "under-18-year-olds can't enter into contracts" laws are, broadly speaking, derived historically from child labor protection concerns, and tend to be state-level law. There's very real risk that legitimizing a contract with a child opens Google up to expensive-to-litigate criminal liability.
      - wnoise 4y ago
        Children technically can enter into contracts. But they're voidable contracts, so it's essentially no upside and only downside for those that would contract with them.
  - Hizonner 4y ago
    > That is technically actual fraud. That would depend on whose laws you were applying. In a lot of places, fraud requires a misrepresentation that's actually material to the transaction, and a court could come down on either side of the question of whether the user's age was material in the necessary way. > Google opens themselves up to huge liability if they inadvertently do business with a minor, which is why they're so paranoid about the lock-out. No, they really don't. They might open themselves up to limited liability if they let a minor do something that lost said minor money. They also might not be able to enforce some of the "take it or leave it" provisions of their terms against minors (of course, in a sane legal system they wouldn't be able to enforce those terms against anybody, but you don't see many if any sane legal systems). But they do not open themselves up to "huge liability". Nonetheless, they don't choose to take even those small risks. Mostly, I suspect, because the response wouldn't be automatable. Google hates anything that's not automatable, and vehemently resists manually fixing anything. That applies to interacting with adults, too, and to cases where you haven't even actually violated their policies, but the automation happens to be wrong, which happens all the time. Which is why nobody of any age should be depending on Google.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      At Google's scale, these aren't small risks. How expensive would it be to defend these cases in court N times per day in different of jurisdictions? It to have them aggregated into class action?
  - code51 4y ago
    If Google was so worried about this, their AI and behavior analytics can %99.9 know you are underage. They could show a BIG RED alert multiple times about this. Plus, I don't see heavy upload traffic from these young people becoming a liability on their end which is basically free work.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      "Free work" of children is "child labor."
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    > especially when setting up an account where money will change hands. That is technically actual fraud no, that's not fraud. It might be an element of fraud if it was a loophole you were exploiting to use the account for some fraudulent purpose, but fraud requires theft or similar, not just technical violations of terms.

pazimzadeh 4y ago

I received a lifelong ban on using Google Ad products when I was 16 after experimenting with clicking my own ads (and asking my high school friends to click on them). I remember the account accumulated almost $80 before Google detected the suspicious activity and banned me. Given that this was 16 years ago, it would be nice to get second chance..

jeffbee 4y ago
- testfoobar 4y ago
  Perhaps you did not note that the banned person was 16 years old. There should be very few actions with life long consequences for any 16 year old. Their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed. They experiment and engage with the world to learn its boundaries and limits. Click fraud for $80 when 16yo does not warrant a lifetime ban.
  - doodlesdev 4y ago
    I beg do differ. When I was a kid I used to have a YouTube channel with AdSense. Difference being I actually read the ToS and decided that it would be my parents channel, only I would be recording. Never clicked on my channels ads (in fact that's when I started using AdBlockers, for the sole purpose of not generating fraudulent ad revenue). Reading at 16 years old is not that hard. I created that YouTube channel much earlier than that. I also don't believe that as I aged I have magically understood better the worlds boundaries and limits. Mind you, 16 years old is enough to drive in some places. Enough to work in others. And also enough to drink in some others. It's just not that young and people should take responsibilities for their actions. Principles and values are something that's established early on in someone's life. If someone doesn't care for defrauding a company of $80 when they are 16 years old, I don't honestly believe they deserve a second chance.
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago

bell-cot 4y ago

IANAL, but... - Is the '18' adjusted when the local age of legal majority is not 18? - Are there jurisdictions where this policy is in clear conflict with local law or case law?

Kye 4y ago
Google is ultimately subject to the laws of the US where it's 18 at the federal level. It also doesn't really matter: if the policy says 18, it's 18.
- Hizonner 4y ago
  Google is subject to the laws of every jurisdiction in which Google operates. Furthermore US law doesn't actually require Google to refuse to do business with minors. So if a jurisdiction had some rule that was contradictory to Google's policy (which I doubt), then Google would have to comply.
  - jacques_chester 4y ago
    I suspect the difficulty is that it's legally difficult to enforce contracts with minors. Easier to just refuse to deal with them.
cmeacham98 4y ago
- Is the '18' adjusted when the local age of legal majority is not 18? I believe it will be increased if the age of majority is above 18, but has a lower limit of 18 even if the local age of majority is below that. - Are there jurisdictions where this policy is in clear conflict with local law or case law? I'm not sure how it could be, generally companies are allowed to ban a customer for almost any reason (with certain rare exceptions). I'm not aware of any jurisdiction where "I lied about my age when I was a kid" is a protected class.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> Are there jurisdictions where this policy is in clear conflict with local law or case law? Brazilian here. I just found one case where a judge legitimized a contract after a 16 year old misrepresented her age in order to contract a service and then tried to nullify the contract by claiming she was a minor at the time. Essentially the Google situation but reversed.

jeffbee 4y ago

"By submitting an application to use the Services, if you are an individual, you represent that you are at least 18 years of age... Google may at any time terminate your Account because of ... your failure to otherwise fully comply with the AdSense Policies... If ... Google suspends or terminates your Account, you (i) are prohibited from creating a new Account, and (ii) may not be permitted to monetize content on other Google products." Seems pretty clear.

Johnny555 4y ago
But it's not clear how someone under the age of 18 can agree to a contract.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
code51 4y ago
a) Imagine you are 13 years old and actually reading Terms of Services. Just imagine you are under 18. b) It's legal speak mentioning "you cannot create a new account" but it doesn't say you can't try to fix the problems about your existing account. The problem is there is nobody to reach for mistakes or downright violations from Google's side. It doesn't work to help people with good intentions realizing their errors. c) It's not mentioning that you will forever be blocked because you misrepresented your age for whatever the reason (just an unaware click is enough). If Google was actually serious in enforcing the policy, they would just check any detail that could trigger this user could be below 18 years of age. As you read here, they don't spend much of an effort to avoid this scenario. AI works just to block you, not to avoid your downfall. d) I wonder Google informs kids this much before making money on free content they upload on Youtube. It's not hard to see this is one-sided exploitation in business sense. So... pretty clear, yeah.
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  > a) Imagine you are 13 years old and actually reading Terms of Services. Just imagine you are under 18. No need to imagine because I did exactly that (read my other comment). Let's get into this: > c) It's not mentioning that you will forever be blocked because you misrepresented your age for whatever the reason (just an unaware click is enough). It is mentioning SPECIFICALLY that. And an unaware click is not enough, you have to go through the trouble of reading the contract (or scrolling past it), checking a lot of boxes, saying you agree to the contract, and that's only after you in your own will and power decided to search for this. You also get to change your birthday once in your Google account if you made any mistakes during singup. > If Google was actually serious in enforcing the policy, they would just check any detail that could trigger this user could be below 18 years of age. As you read here, they don't spend much of an effort to avoid this scenario. AI works just to block you, not to avoid your downfall. Then people will complain that they require documentation, privacy this, privacy that. Mind you that I would never submit an ID to Google to verify my identity, but honestly that's the only way they can actually verify your age. I'm not a fan of Google and it's autobanning processes with no recourse, but this is a special case where I think it's completely justified looking from their side and all the liabilities they have if they decide to backtrack on something like this. For them someone is going to criticize them either way they take, so they choose the easier and simpler path of permabanning.

Shank 4y ago

As someone who operated on the "adult internet" with payment processors and related infrastructure without being 18, I still carry forward the constant fear that I'll be banned for retroactive Terms of Service violations incurred when I was a kid. It really sucks when it's services like AdSense because you're just screwed forever. I really really wish the internet was more supportive of "early hackers" who want to experiment. I get that there are tons of implications around contract law and child labor here, but there really needs to be an escape hatch if a parent agrees to whatever activity is being done. Ostensibly, this is a young creator getting discouraged from their hobby, even though they've shown that they're good enough at it to deserve some form of compensation. This'll leave a bad taste in the kid's mouth for a long time.

Swizec 4y ago
> if a parent agrees to whatever activity is being done My mom definitely wouldn’t be able to provide informed consent to half the stuff I was doing on the internet in high school and middle school even if I told her about it. She worried, I’m sure, but between speaking next to zero english and the novelty of www in the early 00’s, best she could do was threaten to take the computer if things got too weird.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  When I was a kid, i hosted WC3 beta cracks, patches, and servers on our ISP Webspace. Blizzard had some call our ISP, who called my dad, who told me to stop doing whatever it was that got people mad It feel like nowadays, it'd have resulted in a lawsuit, but at least threatening lawyer letters. edit: Archive.org link to the site. With a visitor counter and cringy teeny-sounding English ;) https://web.archive.org/web/20020522193227/http://home.foni.net/~wagners/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020522193227/http://home.foni.... For anyone interested, this was strictly beta, by a group of crackers who said they’d stop releasing anything as soon as the game was done. I was one of 4 or 5 people who’d get advanced notification in IRC to upload the newest patches etc. so there’d be multiple mirrors available for the announcement.
  - 4y ago

duxup 4y ago

It's sad but because of stuff like this I setup accounts for my kids to register for games or whatever and always set them up as adults. I don't have time to deal with their accounts getting locked and so on, even if there are other issues. Granted they also don't get free reign on the internet / outside parental view anyhow.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

Note that the responses are responses by a community member and not by a Google employee. As such, those responses should be taken with a grain of salt.

adoxyz 4y ago
Came to say this. This person knows even less than actual Google support (which may or may not exist in the first place). Google not having real human support is unbelievable.
code51 4y ago
Google Adsense/Admob offers no support for most of its users. Only users that generate large revenue can access Chat option. For the rest, the only option is to write to support community. It's deliberate: feels like there is support but there is none.

chickenpotpie 4y ago

Worth noting that this is the statement of a "product expert" which is just some random person not an employee of the company our the actual policy. This might be true but this isn't a reliable source.

romwell 4y ago
As if you ever get actual people from Google responding to peons like that. That's as reliable as it gets.
winkeltripel 4y ago
Note that Google chooses to rely on these product experts instead of helping, or providing sources of information itself.

kweingar 4y ago

I've been banned-for-life from a handful of services after I lied about my age as a kid. I can see both (all?) sides of this: - As a society we ought to be forgiving of harmless youthful indiscretions - As a business you shouldn't have to give second chances to people who blatantly defraud you - There is a big can of worms when it comes to doing business with minors on the internet. I don't think there's a solution as easy as "well when they're 18, let them log into their account and update their age to acknowledge that they were using the service as a minor" or "just let people open multiple accounts (with wildly different ages) under their name."

romwell 4y ago
I think the solution is "the right to fucking delete your account forver". Google keeping "limbo" accounts is dystopian, and seems like a GDPR violation to me.
- pb7 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    dystopia does not require the government - in fact some popular fictional dystopias are when corporations can control/etc without the government intervening. So maybe just don't word police other people because you don't like their words.
    - pb7 4y ago
      - labster 4y ago
        The word dystopia comes from analysis of fiction.

mynegation 4y ago

I’ve never used AdSense, so might be a stupid question, but how do they identify you? Are you supposed to give them some lifetime identifying information like SSN? Everything else like email, name, address can be changed.

tsrand0m 4y ago

I wanted to comment on the parent thread but it’s already locked. “Cannot the boy withhold payment until he turns 18 years? He will lose it to inflation and all but at least he will get some due, right?” It’s a little weird not being able to suggest a solution when my whole life runs on Adsense money.

jgilias 4y ago
Apparently this is not possible. Because it's not possible to verify the account, as the person doing the verification has a different birthdate than what's associated with the account.

ianbutler 4y ago

I’ve been banned on google ads for circumventing systems for about 2 years now. This is apparently their highest offense and to be perfectly honest I still have no idea what I did. I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than a couple hundred bucks on google ads and one day I was just banned and my ads were stopped. So as far as I can tell there’s plenty of not so clear things that will get you banned from google ads, don’t build your life and business around that advertising stream is what I learned. That and that there are better advertising avenues for the niches I tend to care about.

beached_whale 4y ago

Interesting how Google has no issue with selling these people to their advertisers

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

codexon 4y ago

I know this is going to be hard to prove, but I was banned forever because they detected "click fraud" which did not come from me. It was likely initiated by a competitor. Now I still use adsense, but now it is through a 3rd party which takes a hefty cut of the profits. If adsense is your sole income, you should probably diversify. Anyone can get you permanently banned unless you are a well known youtuber.

khazhoux 4y ago

Can’t he create a new gmail account? Not the end of the world.

josephcsible 4y ago
It'll just get banned too. Google basically has a panopticon; there's no way they wouldn't know it's you.

ShowalkKama 4y ago

Can't you ask google to delete all your data and sign up again? (thank god GDPR exists)

MVorlm 4y ago
GDPR does not fix this situation. There are cut-outs in GDPR that allows companies to store data for longer. Financial/billing/taxes fall under that category.
code51 4y ago
I think for this to work, Google actually has to delete any information about you completely from its systems. I'm curious if anyone tried this with success as well.
pb7 4y ago
GDPR doesn't prevent a company from retaining records of individuals who defrauded them.
josephcsible 4y ago
No, they'll claim they have a "legitimate interest" to keep some of it, and then use what they kept as justification to ban your new account too.
ceejayoz 4y ago
https://gdpr.eu/recital-47-overriding-legitimate-interest/ https://gdpr.eu/recital-47-overriding-legitimate-interest/ > The processing of personal data strictly necessary for the purposes of preventing fraud also constitutes a legitimate interest of the data controller concerned.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

nerdawson 4y ago

Issues like this wouldn't exist if verification was required upfront. If you need to be at least 18 to use a particular service, and they're going to verify at some point, that point should be at the very start.

f1shy 4y ago
I wonder if it is clearly specified in the TOS that you may face a life ban...
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  On every terms of service document there is a clause that says "we can terminate our service to you unilaterally with no warning for any reason including no reason". It's basically the catch all exception handler of the legal world these corporations live in.
romwell 4y ago
This sounds like exploitation of minors: let them create an account that generates revenue, but only kickban them when it suits the company
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Right, how about this is 100% Google's fault for not figuring out how to avoid offering contracts to children. Seems more reasonable than anyone else getting any amount of blame or punishment whatsoever, including and especially the minor involved.

tbbfjotllf 4y ago

I tried starting a blog as a kid, I tried monetizing it using Adsense, my application never got accepted, but somehow my account ended up active for 5 minutes before my application got rejected again. I abandoned the blog, and on visiting it after two years, I found out it's showing ads with an adsense account that shouldn't be showing ads, and then I was banned. I would never know if it was because I was still a minor or because Google bots didn't do a very good job.

system2 4y ago

I love how Microsoft and Google threads ending with "This question is locked and replying has been disabled." Cowards.

josephcsible 4y ago
A very strong rule of thumb is that whenever a conversation gets locked, whichever side did the locking is in the wrong. The other big place this applies is GitHub issues and PR's.

m00dy 4y ago

I had this issue one year after Adsense had been announced

c7b 4y ago

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

If you're under 18, then you cannot legally consent to the TOS, therefore you can't be in violation of them. They can kick you off of then of course, but banning you later on as an adult I wouldn't think would be justified because, as above, you can't violate TOS that you can't consent to when under 18.

topynate 4y ago

What right does Google have to store the data about this kid necessary to enforce a lifetime ban against him? The click-through contract that he was legally unable to enter into? "he has already earned over £300" implies he's in the UK, so UK GDPR applies.

sbf501 4y ago

Lawsuits work. Around 2003 I purchased a CPU from eBay with PayPal. It never shipped because it was a scam. My credit card company refunded my money, but PayPal demanded I pay them. I refused and they banned my account. It took almost a decade before a class-action lawsuit forced amnesty at PayPal. I use it now because it is convenient to have everything go through one service that I can control. But if they did this again I wouldn't use them again. Hopefully a class-action lawsuit can still work against a giant like Google. If the US would get its head out of its arse and pass legislation like GDRP, we might actually have a chance at the right to be forgotten.

MikeYasnev007 4y ago

tremon 4y ago

Wow, that's a great feature. Too bad I'm too old to qualify.

djhworld 4y ago

My friend ran into this recently, he signed up to Paypal in like 2003, probably to sell games or something on eBay for a bit of cash. He's in his mid thirties now, and Paypal banned his account without warning, when he phoned them up they said it was because he was under 18 when he signed up.....19 years ago.

andromeduck 4y ago
Wow... I know like 10-20 people who did that too for getting used parts and collectables in highschool.
f1shy 4y ago
Sometimes the "justice" can be slow... In e-bay I assume you can sing up again with a different mail and second name or so.

tssva 4y ago

Google does allow you to change the birthdate for your Google account. They could try letting the account sit in limbo unverified until the kid is 18, change the birthdate and then verify the account.

bornfreddy 4y ago

Ah, Google. It baffles me that some companies even consider using GCP - it is still the same company that kills products and has abysmal customer support. AWS and Azure feel like a safer bet to me. I wonder if Google will ever get their act together, or will they go the IBM way?

ohgodplsno 4y ago

PayPal locked my account after receiving 800 €, asked for my ID, got it, unlocked my account (gave me about 3 hours to withdraw) and then banned me permanently for having created the account before 18. At this point, I consider most American companies as an active threat to me, especially if I used them before 18.

nkozyra 4y ago

I was banned from Adsense for reasons unknown, permanently. Even if you play by the rules you're at risk.

Chinjut 4y ago

Why should anything of this sort ever deserve a LIFETIME ban?

anigbrowl 4y ago

I don't think the title follows. Nobody in that exchange seems to have considered the possibility that the 13yo could just keep the account going for 5 years until they're able to verify it at age 18, or alternatively just create a new Google ID on their 18th birthday and use that. Seems like a nontroversy.

jgilias 4y ago
Did you actually read the accepted answer there? Neither of the options you mention are possible.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Of course I read it, that's why I wrote 'nobody seems to have considered the possibility.' How is Google gonna ban a person for life whose identity they never verified in the first place?

honestduane 4y ago

On the other hand, The kid did lie. From the Google Security Department perspective, this person is a threat actor.

croes 4y ago
You mean Google didn't really check and punishes a minor for his lifetime.
- honestduane 4y ago
  I agree, the crime does not fit the punishment. But if your a kid then you cant legally accept the terms of use, ether.

pacetherace 4y ago

What happens to these bans if I setup a LLC and use that for future Adsense business?

missedthecue 4y ago
Don't they ask you to upload your government ID?
- genewitch 4y ago
  that would be articles of incorporation or whatever the functional equivalent is for LLC (or a 501.c3, ...)
f1shy 4y ago
Should be no problem, except for the problem of setting up an LLC "just for that". I've no idea how it works in the states, but setting up a firm, in many countries I know, is no easy task, and comes with associated costs, both one-time and recurrent ones.

fudgefactorfive 4y ago

I remember at 21 getting an email from Paypal that the account I'd used my entire online life was banned because I started it when I was 12. They noticed this after I reached out to support... Switched email addresses and used that instead. Although I've not used PayPal in a good while because it just randomly rejected transactions for no clear reason.

Animats 4y ago

Incorporate. As a corporation, you can get a Google Adsense business account.

pmarreck 4y ago

Seems like a business opportunity to me

dheera 4y ago

Just get a new life? Change your legal name, address, get a new passport, ...

logicalmonster 4y ago

Is it uncharitable to say that Google has intentionally stolen millions of dollars from kids? They seem to have engineered a set of rules where they work around having to ever pay a bunch of people for content that was produced and had ads displayed on it. Maybe the kids can't legally sign a contract, but Google still made money from them. Has Google forfeited this money or are they profiting off of child labor?

njsubedi 4y ago
AFAIK all the incomes from invalid traffic are refunded to the advertisers. That might also be the procedure in case of invalid accounts.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  It would be good to get a clear citation of this, if available. Not that this matters as much, but I'd like to point out that even if this is the case that the money is returned to advertisers, Google may still reap non-trivial benefits from this chain of events in at least these ways. > Depending on the amount and length of time the money is held, this might add up to a substantial dollar value in interest payments they're making by holding onto the cash. The interest generated by temporarily holding $80 here and $400 there times thousands and thousands of users, held for a while, could be a non-trivial amount of cash in a long timeframe. > Google simultaneously screws over advertisers (garbage and/or fraud clicks) at the same time as they sometimes give away these freebie clicks (unpaid kids' clicks) back to their advertisers. Now think about advertisers' perceptions of Google for their business. It can be argued that Google is essentially banking on the goodwill from the kids' ad clicks being returned (giving the advertisers a freebie) to makeup for however much they piss off advertisers for the garbage fraud clicks that they receive. If Google can bank on "stealing" some percentage of clicks constantly, that might be enough for them to partially make up just enough for the bad clicks they send their advertisers. That could arguably materially impact their business prospects.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  I'm not sure that makes much of a difference economically, because you would expect that to become priced in.

pocketsand 4y ago

Even if Google were to change their policies to allow this youngster back on in five years, he'd be helpless to actually get Google to respond to a support request.

judge2020 4y ago
As far as I can tell the 13 year old isn't even locked out, they just can't verify the AdSense account (and the verification name must match the name on the account), so they will indeed be able to cash out in 5 years.

xg15 4y ago

> Your son's account is now in limbo - it can't be verified, closed or paid out. It can only be abandoned but it will still technically be active as AdSense think he is over 18 - he declared that to be the case. Of course it can't be verified now, but what would prevent the son from completing the verification in a few years when he is actually 18?

butterguns 4y ago
Presumably because the Date of Birth on the account is immutable, and the son's ID (even when he becomes 18) will never match it?
- xg15 4y ago
  Ah, that would make sense. Thanks!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

hilyen 4y ago

Utter bullsh1t. Google needs to be broken up.

naet 4y ago

I worked in financial services for a while and I think Adsense qualifies as a similar financial service, though it might be different since we were working in a sector directly related to trading stocks and brokerage. To comply with US legal regulations my company had to: verify the legitimate identity of account holders via SSN or other means, confirm they are over 18, confirm they aren't on a specific list of financial fraudsters or entities blacklisted by the US government, etc. If we didn't do this properly for every single user we could have been liable for all kinds of nasty legal ramifications, including losing various legal operating licenses we worked very hard to obtain. A kid claiming they are older than they are is relatively low on the scale of identity fraud, but it is still a form of direct identity fraud and would have direct legal consequences if we allowed it through. To open the account, they had to have put in a false statement about their age. Verification isn't instant, it takes time to process, so you can easily open an unverifiable account on many services including Adsense, but it will forever remain unverified if you cannot provide legitimate verification info. I am sympathetic that someone of that age might not understand the consequences of their actions, but they claimed to be someone they are not (specifically an older person). Once you do that, you can't go back and claim to be another individual. They can find an adult and have an adult open an account, which would have various legal ramifications for that adult individual who owns the account, but it would be a new account for a new individual just as with Google Adsense. Also some of the comments about data and GDPR are a bit absurd. You cannot commit fraud, spam, or otherwise violate terms of service, then demand all your data be erased under "GDPR" so you can open a new account and do it over again without recourse. We had constant repeat violators trying to game our onboarding and sign back up after being banned or denied an account. Showing any form of "grace" around previously closed or banned accounts was taking a big risk. We were able to do so on occasion, but only because we operated at a small scale, so an admin could look deeply into individual circumstances and make exceptions. Google Adsense likely faces orders of magnitude higher levels of abuse, and it makes sense for them to not reopen accounts for any reason to minimize their risk exposure. Yes it is unfortunate for those who were banned for a "minor" reason but there isn't much else they can sensibly do.

donatj 4y ago

I had a similar thing happen to my Yahoo account in ~1998-1999. After I'd been using it for a couple months they decided to ask everyone "Are you over 13?" and being a foolish honest child I selected "No". Permanently locked out. Tried to get back in after I turned 13, no luck. Well crap. That's literally how I ended up `donatj` instead of `jdonat` basically everywhere - got permanently locked out of jdonat@yahoo.com I have a fair number of active accounts to this day that I've had since before I was 13 cough ebay cough in the late 90s. I'm scared one day they're going to cross reference the creation date with my current age and be jerks about it.

nearmuse 4y ago

It would be understandable if it were for scams or using ads for illicit goods, but I can't imagine it being a tenable business practice for a corporation to keep a negative permanent record over a minor transgression where no-one is hurt. Are they being pushed by some regulations? Were those rules "written in blood" somehow? Not to mention all the sketchy or pointless webpages and apps which are there exclusively for the ad revenue and are really abusing the platform.

jdlyga 4y ago

I started buying on eBay before I was 18. I think my birthday is still wrong on that site, even though I'm almost 40.

omniglottal 4y ago

Why must we continually revisit the pragma for why to treat people as innocent until proven guilty?? Yes, it takes more effort and, yes, there is more apparent/immediate risk, but the rationale is sound, given dynamics of any system needing generalized governance. It doesn't matter that it's lawful for these corporations to circumvent and entirely go against the patriotic creed of the country where they're founded and operate - the matter is still relevant - the principle exists for very good reason, and is applicable to more than just government. What happened to "doing the right thing" regardless of shortsighted, incomplete rationale being applied and (unfathomably) acceptable to people whose very livelihood hinges on this ongoing presumption of innocence?

sva_ 4y ago

I think since he never verified his account, and has a different birth date than the one stated, he'll probably have no problems making a new account when he's 18.

damidekronik 4y ago

smsm42 4y ago

Yet another step sleepwalking into the dystopian future. Sure, it's some ad account, who cares. But imagine one of the digital ID projects going mainstream, and the government adopting it, and you doing something as a kid banning you from every payroll system supporting this particular digital ID scheme. And there's nobody to talk to. It's just the way it is.

lrvick 4y ago

This just makes me want to create AdSense accounts for every kid possible to ensure they are protected from being exploited by Google adtech products for life.

explodingcamera 4y ago

There's an easy fix, say you moved to the eu and request that they delete all data about you (you could also try to do a data correction request to change your age).

code51 4y ago

A 13-year-old boy sets up Adsense for his Youtube channel and his father is told that his son is now banned from Adsense/Admob for a lifetime. This is what you get when you have no humans in the loop.

pcai 4y ago
What would having a human in the loop accomplish in this case? Doesn't strike me as the poster child of a massive injustice
- blondin 4y ago
  they wouldn't have banned the kid for life?
- sct202 4y ago
  Human in the loop could redirect payments to their parent without a lifetime ban. Children do unwise things all the time. Google's growth rates are starting to plateau, and they might want to revisit the legion of people they've robobanned from spending on their platforms.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    The problem is minors can’t legally enter into binding contracts (with a very small number of exceptions, none of which this even approaches)
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      That'd be a reasonable argument to ban minors until they turn 18, but not after that.
    - romwell 4y ago
      No, the problem is that Google doesn't have a human being to tell the kid "have your parents contact us".
  - 4y ago

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

I tried advertising a startup website I had, setup the payments wrong on adsense. Something with an old invalid card being linked or something, and google banned me for life through an automated system. The system thinks I tried to commit some sort of payments fraud.