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Comment by nextmove | Hacker News Reader

What I don't get is how this big company called Google can get so big by scraping everyone's data and then indexing it without paying people. And then they have the balls to lock people out from adsense profits if the user makes the tiniest mistake.

I made a few thousand on YouTube in 2011 I believe and then got heavily into web development. In 2015ish I placed some ugly adsense ads on a site I had and was only a couple dollars away from $100 payout. So... I manually clicked an ad like less then 10 times. Sure enough my account got banned from adsense.

It got me completely demotivated from programming and only last year did I pick back up programming. I was using Node.js and Go back then but I'm now into Rust and Erlang. Not sure how I can profit as I lack work history (giving up on self teaching myself programming also meant I took up dead end jobs), but I'm motivated nonetheless. Google, pick on someone your own size.

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Clicking repeatedly on your own ads to make money from those clicks? That’s fraud. Blaming your whole life situation on Google banning you for stealing from them? That’s ridiculous.

Take a little responsibility for your actions and situation. “I did fraud and got banned because of it and that ban demotivated me from being a programmer.”

You sugarcoat it by calling it a tiniest mistake. Just call it fraud.

Seeing as how Google Ads are being used to spread malware

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-ads-pu...

I think I'll sleep tight knowing I'm not the bad one here, buddy.

This is not a matter of good or bad, or the absence or presence of ethics. It's a matter of defrauding Google at exactly where their profit is, their cash cow.

To phrase it in another way, if Google wasn't very good at detecting fraud, it would not have been making so much money or becoming such a big company. Billionaires are more likely than not to be absolute misers; the same applies to corporations.

Obviously I'm not condoning clicking on your ads a few times to get the payout. My account got banned and I haven't used adsense since. Everyone uses adblockers anyhow now... But to PERMA ban someone for this small offense (compared to actual fraudsters that use malware to get ad clicks) is insane.

Especially when your company basically controls the internet. I'll repeat what I said before, Google pick on someone your own size.

You probably got automatically banned, it wouldn't be that hard for a program to detect what you described. Browser fingerprinting has existed for years. I doubt anyone at Google is picking on you, specifically.

There can be multiple "bad" parties. Small-scale fraud is still fraud and Google was well within their right to ban you.

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