4 ms·

And those rights / obligations are listed in the Terms of Service, where he was explicitly told he didn't have the "right" to an explanation. He may deserve one

• ahoyhere 17y ago
  This is the same argument made for sealed, private laws. Look, closing someone's account and taking their money for unspecified "reasons" is wrong, if not illegal. Banks can't do it. Credit card companies can't do it. Any account where you leave money... can't do it. Maybe this guy was sketchy, but here's how Google has to handle these things: * stop showing ads * close the account for all future ads * give a window of time for him to disburse the money he already earned for clicks, and if he withdraws in that time, great, otherwise, too bad for him * close the account permanently Thomas Fuchs, who wrote Script.aculo.us, had over $2k stolen by Google in this manner. As you can see, http://script.aculo.us/ http://script.aculo.us/ is clearly not domain squatting nor does it tell people to click. It's a bonafide OSS project used by hundreds of thousands of people. So why was his money seized? We'll never know, eh? Google also closed my Checkout account under similar circumstances. Namely, I did nothing wrong. The only reason I got my money back was because my blog post got such incredible traffic that it started a debate on the internal mailing list. Why was my account closed? Well gee, after I got 60,000 reads, they claimed it was a "technical glitch" -- but I know this to be a lie because a little birdie inside told me what was going on. Most other people will not be so lucky.