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

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.

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..

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."

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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

Cowards.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I had this issue one year after Adsense had been announced

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.

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.

Utter bullsh1t. Google needs to be broken up.

Seems like a business opportunity to me

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

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

On the other hand, The kid did lie.

From the Google Security Department perspective, this person is a threat actor.

Probably best not to do that then.

"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.