Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

This article is big news, because it shows that Google will permanently yank your Android app if your website violates AdSense's secret fraud detector! If you're running Google AdSense ads and you have an Android app that you care about, take down the ads immediately and switch to another vendor.

AdSense is the product where Google pays you for running banner ads; they can and frequently do kick people off of it for secret reasons. When my company was kicked off of AdSense back in 2010, I wrote about it extensively. https://www.choiceofgames.com/2010/08/were-banned-from-googl...

Google will never tell you why they ban people from AdSense, and there's no effective way to appeal. (They have an "appeal" process, but what are you supposed to write in the appeal when the charges against you are secret?!)

At least we can still publish Android apps, right? (We now run Facebook ads instead.)

But Google's email to DroidScript saying that the DroidScript app was removed from Google Play Store for "Ad Fraud" says otherwise.

    Publishing status: Suspended

    Your app has been suspended and removed due to a policy violation.
    Reasons of violation
    APK:206 Ad Fraud
    App violates Ad Fraud policy.

Surely Google could have just revoked DroidScript's access to Google ads, while allowing DroidScript to ship on the store, like they did for us.

If Google ever yanked our Android app over "ad fraud," we'd have no recourse. We've appealed our AdSense rejection a dozen times over the last 10 years and we always get a form letter rejection. We have no idea what they think we did wrong, and we never will, so we can never fix it.

Thank god we don't run AdSense ads anymore. Based on this, I never want to run them again!

Maybe, but in this case they had advertising in the app which Google is claiming may have been fraudulent, and it seems everything ballooned out from there. There’s no indication that this has anything to do with advertising on their website.

Yeah I think claiming Ad Fraud is pretty much on the libel side of things, also I'm not sure why hasn't any developer taken legal action against outlandish Google practices yet.

There was at least one small claims case (exactly about the unexplainedness of the termination), where in the end Google produced logs that showed that the ToS was violated.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...

if you don't interlink your app account and your website's adsense google account, then this _shouldn't_ really be an issue right?

So i say always maintain separate google accounts for individual apps, for individual usages. Separate your personal google account from your business account, from your ad-network account etc. And i would argue that each individual app should own their own account (you pay for this of course, because of the fee per account i guess).

Google are wise to this; they'll hit you with an "associated account" ban. All your company accounts, app accounts, ad accounts, personal accounts, your spouse's, dog's, dentist's account - all banned.

The word `interlink` now always reminds me of:

And blood-black nothingness began to spin... A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem... And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

This looks like the best course of action in the current situation.

Now the different accounts would still be linked to the same entity, and as stories like this make the news, more people would split their services on multiple account. As a response, it doesn't look like a stretch to me if next time Google would go after all account owned by the entity the deem responsible.

I mean, they already crossed the line of banning all services associated with an account. Wouldn't be surprising if they cross a few more lines as long as there is no critical impact for them.

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