My site was disallowed from advertising on Google when using Matomo analytics
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You spoke with a support agent who is checking the status of your AdSense campaign. That system has flagged links on your website as 'malicious'. The agent is simply telling you the links are 'not allowed' because the system has flagged them. Ie. you're not allowed to run AdSense on a site with flagged links.
I'm 99% sure this has nothing do with you using a GA alternative.
As mentioned in the thread, this is a pre-existing issue going back to 2019. Google had previously claimed to have 'fixed it'.
When did software companies become able to routinely explain away their mistakes (or obfuscate their skullduggery) as unintentional mishaps made by their computerized checklists?
Of course the support agent has no agency, but it's not like Adam can appeal to a higher authority. Thus, for him, he truly cannot advertise on Google while using Matomo. The effect is real, regardless of whether it was intentional.
If you're going to make a claim about there being a pattern, like the OP very confidently did in the title, you can't just generalize from one example. There needs to be at least some token effort put into establishing that the pattern is real. Otherwise it's dishonest click-bait.
There are dozens, probably hundreds, of different web analytics tools. Are users of those having similar problems, preferably at a meaningful scale? No? Then maybe you shouldn't be implying that there is some kind of a policy against non-GA web analytics software.
1: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
The guy is trying to run AdSense campaigns. AdSense runs on what, millions, billions of websites. It has presumably very complicated system for detecting malicious links. An alternative Analytics solution has, at least for OP, been caught in this filter.
I don't think it's likely that Google is scheming to sabotage analytics competitors by blocking their customers AdSense campaigns.
Firefox is (depending how you measure it) 3-7% of the total browser market...if you have a bug that impacts Chrome and a bug that impacts Firefox and have to pick one, it's pretty obvious which one you're going for.
What am I missing here? To me this seems like precisely what is happening. The OP cannot use AdSense because his Matomo integration was flagged as "malicious" (even though presumably using GA to achieve similar functionality would be allowed).
Sure, this may not be an official public move by Google to try and stamp out competition, but to the creators and users of stuff like Matomo, that makes little different since the outcome is still the same. The problem is made even worse in this case since you would expect that an (apparent) false-positive in their auto-scan could be cleared up by contacting support. When support's answer is "this is not allowed" it seems like an appropriate time to start talking to lawyers....
This is a support person with no agency, the real problem is this can't really be escalated and fixed - that's the big downfall Google doesn't want to fix because it would be too much work.
Sure, this is definitely a systemic issue when it comes to these mega-tech-corps. Agreed.
But it seems like you are insinuating that Google's AI blocking Matomo is not a "real problem". For the creators/users of Matomo (or whatever the next service is that is "accidentally" flagged) it seems to make little difference if this is an "error with their flagging system". To the AI, a false positive and a true positive are exactly the same. Any AI mistake is a problem. Sometimes it is a small problem that falls within a margin of error. But, when your website is blocked from the literal online ad monopoly that is AdSense for a "false-positive" and support will not help you, that is a real problem. Google does not get a pass here becuase "the [AI] gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it." (Gen 3:12)
See also the case of Archibald Buttle vs. Archibald Tuttle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
Though to be clear the "not allowed" was a response to the reply that it was links to a Google Analystics Competitor. That may well be down to further training being required but the opportunity was given to clarify and not taken.
In the general sense, the intent may not have been malign but the system needs fixing regardless of Google's intent.
Support people are busy, dealing with all kinds of bullshit, with very little time.
Frankly I think it's a bit of dick move that you censored your website but didn't bother censoring the guys name.
Since I imagine what happened is that some heuristics identified the analytics code as malicious and it got blocked, do we also have an example of Google misidentifying their own tracking technology and marking it the same way?
If not, I would say that's where the anti-competitive behaviour lies, anything Google automatically becomes whitelisted by their systems while competitors have to be careful and keep checking that they are not incorrectly flagged.
PS. I don't actually think the behaviour here is inherently malicious, it's likely a mistake that will be quickly corrected, but it highlights the problems of one company owning the entire ecosystem and the hurdles competitors have to jump through.
What's stopping Google from flagging the links of their competitors?
I was thinking, yeah Google, why not turn the knobs a tiny bit - people will hardly notice and it's win-win for both of us anyway.
"The problem of fake references in Google Analytics has changed significantly over the past few years. In 2014, we had some bots from semalt and buttons-for-website that visited your website and left fake referrals in your analytics. In December 2014, the attacks began taking advantage of a weakness in Google’s new Measurement Protocol that allowed direct attacks on the Google Analytics tracking servers without having to actually visit your website. This is a lot easier than crawling the web looking for new websites. "
[0]: https://help.analyticsedge.com/article/definitive-guide-to-r...
However these stories involving some mega corp as an evil actor always raise the question: what's to be gained, and what's the risk.
As soon as some manager instructs someone beneath them to do bad stuff, some kind of trail exists. The downside to mega corp is enormous if that comes to light.
Imagine if Google is caught in the act of pulling some shady shit like that. The law suits, loss of trust and prestige. The personal exposure to the individuals involved.
All it takes is for some underling to pop up with a smoking gun email, a recorded conversation on their IPhone, a receipt from a shady transaction. Then it's immense risk and a big cover up needed to try and save things.
I don't doubt that shady shit happens, passed down the chain Mafia boss style so there's no paper trail, even at Google.
But does that lead to actual dodgy acts like prioritizing AdSense customers in search results?
How many engineers would need to be brought along for the ride for that to happen? How many of them are potential whistle blowers?
For all of these reasons (and perhaps naively) I like to think that corporate corruption is not this overt.
Tldr; I hope you were mistaken and it was purely a coincidence.
Step 2: Design and implement sufficiently complex algorithm that behavior isn't easily reasoned from changes
Step 3: Iterate through random walk of changes to optimize KVMs
Step 4: Land on parent's behavior, without any attributable decision or paper trail
Easily brushed away, quickly forgotten.
> The personal exposure to the individuals involved.
Virtually nonexistent.
To pick an example, Google colluded with other tech companies to limit the salaries of its engineers, yet here you are claiming it couldn’t possibly happen.
Do a search for “corporate malfeasance” and see the truly monstrous acts committed by companies that continue to do business quite successfully.
Risk is too high for such things to be decided, but maybe someone buried a change in the second decimal place in an to "ad-fraud" prevention subsystem, which required a minimum amount of traffic or some other non-voluntary things like that.
Even more: impenetrable deep learning models trained to maximize ad revenue - imagine pagerank and availability of ads on the site are two of the N features, what would the optimizer suggest you do?
This is the issue I have with Twitter - there is no room for discussion.
Literally part of my job trouble is troubleshooting creative disapprovals from vendors like google, Microsoft, at&t, etc.
Errors like this happen all the time. I very regularly get errors that I can just resubmit to resolve, or reach out to the vendor and have them resolved. My employer runs ads for thousands of businesses, many of whom are using GA competitors, and we’ve /never/ had this issue. If I had a way to crawl client sites and identify the vendors they use, I would provide a huge list of counter examples.
(I work at a dsp)
I can hear you.
https://forum.matomo.org/t/adwords-campaign-rejected-for-goo...
(Only tweeted 4 minutes before your post, easily missed)
Whether through incompetence or malice, the end result is still the same.
I picture the setting in my mind and it's the best explanation. Someone sitting in a cubicle or a farm, answering thousand of messages like that per day. He's not reading the chat, he's scanning it for words like "ok", "thanks you", "fixed", "working now", "bye", etc.
Matomo doesn't register on their radar.
The user doesn't explain what Matomo is. His message looks like a copy/paste from matomo's website. It's even put into quote.
This conversation was not around Matomo being an alternative to GA.
Doesn't mean Google doesn't actively classify matomo as malware though.
Now a lot of people have said this poor drone could not possibly understand the situation well enough to not make statements that are flagrantly anti-competitive. Well, that is Google's problem. Both their automated system and their customer service are behaving in a way that hinders competitors. If they don't fix this, they are liable.
And by the looks of it, it has happened before, so there is a pattern.
The Google Rep was clear it was not allowed also (though perhaps misinformed).
With Google Analytics, they offer a free service. Obviously, competitors can’t do that if their business is solely analytics and they don’t have other ways to monetise the service. That’s not the problem. The problem is how Google then use that free service to gain an advantage with their core money-making business - AdWords and DV360:
As anyone in the industry knows, due to many factors (including different attribution methodologies), ad platforms show significantly different results from analytics platforms. The discrepancies easily reach into the double-digit percentages. Any discrepancy of such magnitude is concerning to an advertiser running paid ads. The same discrepancy exists between Google AdWords and Google Analytics too. Except when you integrate the two. Then, Google AdWords data are plugged directly into Google Analytics, eliminating the discrepancy rate and making it seem to any advertiser as if Google AdWords is a far more reliable traffic source then any of their competitors.
It would be very difficult to extrapolate the monetary value of what Google have earned doing this. It is a much more sophisticated and hard to detect example of dominance abuse.
(Of course in this specific case it does seem likely this is a false positive from the AI and not a deliberate strategy, so probably not something to build your anti-trust case on.)
Is it that clear? What if these links were flagged for other reasons, or erroneously? Or are we just taking headlines at face-value?
We need to start making faceless multinational corporations responsible for the choices that their AI makes for them.
I cannot build a bridge and let AI decide how strong it should be and if it crashes, be like „welp sorry it was the AIs fault, we didnt spent on actual engineers to save money, I promise the next bridge will be stronger“.
I'm quite sure it does from an anti-trust perspective.
>I cannot build a bridge and let AI decide how strong it should be and if it crashes, be like „welp sorry it was the AIs fault, we didnt spent on actual engineers to save money, I promise the next bridge will be stronger“.
Under some circumstances this will be fine. Using AI doesn't change negligence rules into strict liability rules, it just changes the criteria through which negligence will be determined. It seems likely that most jurors would not be as cantankerous in their outlook towards AI as you are, though.
You are incorrect. mistakes, or incompetence, or lack of intent do not excuse behavior that results in harm to consumers or prevents competition, which is generally a significant test for a determination on this sort of thing:
In the US in particular, anti-trust law requires courts to evaluate a situation on the basis of 3 benchmarks to determine if one of them is met for an anti-competitive situation: 1) The Per-Se Rule. 2) The Rule of Reason. 3) The Quick Look.
Number 3 in particular makes it easy to view this situation as anti competitive because here the single most important question under this for of review is whether or not there is injury in the market. The formal test is will a person "with even a rudimentary understanding of economics could conclude that the arrangements in question have an anticompetitive effect on customers and markets" In this case, a customer cannot use their product of choice and a competitor is prevented from competing.
Of course an actual court case could go a variety of different ways, but you say you're quite sure that the anti-trust perspective makes a distinction as the GP comment indicated, you are incorrect.
That being said, in an anti-trust case it seems like the actual outcome for the consumer is what is most important. Anti-trust laws come into play when monopoly's business practices are not illegal, per se, but ultimately harm the marketplace because of their scale and eventual negative consumer outcomes.
Anyway, INAL, so maybe (certainly) I don't have the full picture here....
Wait, the faceless multinational corporations promise to improve their AIs? Isnt it mostly a shrug, if they react at all?
If so, why not (ask the vendor to) rename the files?
The person wants to include JS from a company that shipped malware. Concludes that you can't use Google Analytics competitors.
Matomo points out the original source that was errantly marked as malware here: https://forum.matomo.org/t/adwords-campaign-rejected-for-goo...