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Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

danfabulich.medium.com

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Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

#301

Post by fauigerzigerk »

bambax wrote: post #229
nkozyra wrote: post #28

It really does feel like there's a day of reckoning coming for services that can boot you with one fell swoop. And unfortunately it's unlikely to come from the source or from a general public appeal, but from government intervention. My adsense account was banned years ago. No details, no receptiveness to appeals. It's the kind of thing that's kept me from some personal/professional pursuits because I know there's a…

> unfortunately it's unlikely to come from the source or from a general public appeal, but from government intervention Not unfortunately. Hopefully. Government doesn't work very well, but still much better than all those huge private companies. There are appeals, for one.

Government is not one thing though. There's the rule making branch of government and then there's the executive branch of government, the various agencies and government owned companies that often make people just as helpless as these tech behemoths, in some cases even more so.

It's simply very hard to go up against monopolies, regardless of whether they are private or public. It all depends on your ability to pay for good lawyers and survive the time until you get justice (both physically and financially).

What we need here is government in its role as a rule maker. This is a function that only government can play. It's not a question of being better or worse than private enterprise. It's a categorically different role.

Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

#302

Post by jraph »

bambax wrote: post #234
jraph wrote: post #96

Also teach people to use and prefer F-Droid over Google Play when possible, and make your open source app available on it: - no obscure ban for application vendors - no mandatory account for installing apps and from which you can be banned - no user tracking If you don't like vendor lock-ins and its consequences, push for the alternatives.

Maybe. How many users are on F-Droid though? I think the alternative is a simple web app. For many many apps it would work just fine. If it works in a browser on a PC, it really should work on a browser on a phone.

> How many users are on F-Droid though?

Few, but this might be a chicken-and-egg problem, if we want to have more power and get rid of the Play Store governance, this might be worth a try.

Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

#303

Post by arkitaip »

xmprt wrote: post #12
busymom0 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epik and Namecheap are pretty good imo. Definitely don't use GoDaddy. EDIT: One can find several instances where users search domain names on GoDaddy and they are available at regular price but when they try to place the order, the domain is no longer available and must be bought at a premium price.

Thoughts on Hover? I've been using them without issue for a while but I also never hear about them in the conversation. Is there something I'm missing?

Hover has the best search interface IMO (it's GETified so you can create a custom search engine in Firefox) but it's expensive, especially if you are constantly buying domains.

Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

#304

Post by matsemann »

sva_ wrote: post #295
jeroenhd wrote: post #205

With the way the system is designed, it's trivial to game the system in such a way that your ad-supported competitors get purged from the play store. Just extract the AdMob ID and submit it to click farms all around the world, and within a few days your competitor should be dropped from AdSense forever. Like any Google product, partnering with them is a major risk for your business continuity. I'd never combine Googl…

> With the way the system is designed, it's trivial to game the system in such a way that your ad-supported competitors get purged from the play store. Its only a matter of time until people start abusing this heavily, if they don't already do so. But then Google will probably have to do something about it, if it gets out of hand.

It happened with SEO. People found a way to game their rankings by buying backlinks to their pages from spam sites. Google started punishing that behavior, so some have instead started buying backlinks for their competition to de-rank them.

Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

#305

Post by jraph »

Strom wrote: post #262
jraph wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing I haven't been able to replace is YouTube. That's a tricky one because it's the content creators that keep me locked into it. Yes, this is a pain. At least YouTube does not require an account and you can use it through Invidious (or NewPipe on Android, or mpv/youtube-dl on Linux if you already have the YouTube link). > Brave instead of Chrome. Brave is Chrome repackaged. This a bit feels like "I avoi…

> Brave is Chrome repackaged. This a bit feels like "I avoid [brand] but I'll take this white-label product (produced by [brand]") > Avoid anything Chromium. Yes but this whole discussion is taking place because of the policies Google has for running things, not for building things. It's the operations that suck, not the underlying product.

Chrome and its derivatives gives Google power to run things their own way... by providing the runtime.

Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

#306

Post by twobitshifter »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #54
ryandrake wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd extend this even further: never use a single account for more than one purpose. Create a separate account at the same company for the other purpose. This should really go without saying. I’m sometimes shocked at the extent to which it has become normalized to mix up one’s personal accounts with work. I can’t count the number of times a colleague accidentally sent me an email using their personal account, or tex…

> Don’t even get me started on how entrenched “Sign In With [Company]” schemes have gained traction. Why deliberately have such a single point of failure? To save what? An additional password? Well, no, it doesn't save a password. People use the same password across all their independent accounts. Sign in with [Company] doesn't improve that, obviously, but there is the idea out there that [Company] might be doing a b…

It’s pretty helpful for online shopping to be able to use Apple Pay. On your phone, you just click the button, use FaceID, and confirm shipping address. It can be done in 2 seconds compared to regular checkouts which step you through 4 or 5 screens.

Sign in with GitHub has also been nice for me on gitter. I don’t need a separate gitter account for any reason, and sharing my GitHub account on gitter is reasonable.

Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

#307

Post by benhurmarcel »

teddyh wrote: post #260
benhurmarcel wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another unsolicited recommendation: Gandi.net. I've been quite happy with them.

Gandi had a major outage a mere week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26862162

Even Google has outages.

Also, that doesn't affect you if you're using them as a registrar and not hosting.

Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

#308

Post by MomoXenosaga »

z3t4 wrote: post #91
dfabulich wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Author here.) This is excellent advice for consumer apps/products, (it's especially important to keep enterprise accounts fully separate from your individual consumer accounts), but it wouldn't have helped DroidScript in this case. DroidScript is a non-profit organization; when they signed up for Google AdMob and Google Play Store, they provided the same tax ID (their EIN) in both cases. Creating separate Google acc…

If you wonder if a computer system can think logically or if its very stupid, its always the latter.

Computers don't think they just follow programming. The fault always lies at the humans who wrote the code. See HAL in 2010.

Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

#309

Post by for_i_in_range »

cookiengineer wrote: post #66
CGamesPlay wrote: post #7

I'd extend this even further: never use a single account for more than one purpose. Create a separate account at the same company for the other purpose. Some examples: - Every product/project you manage should be on a separate account on Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. - Nothing tied to your consumer accounts should be used for anything business related. - Your Amazon shopping account and your AWS account should defin…

Can confirm this solid advice. Even at a mega-scale social games publisher like Zynga, we had to deal with automated bans all the time. That's why at one point we used an avatar for each game that was separately managed and was basically a separate identity with a separate bank account with a holding company etc. - Invent an avatar that has their own profile, residence, birth date, gender etc. - Use separate email ad…

I find it hard to believe Zynga had to use such techniques unless you’re referring to very early days. I, too, have used the techniques you’ve mentioned and went way down the rabbit hole. Among the things you’ve mentioned also found myself shipping friends and family laptops and Teamviewering into them to use alias accounts. Not fun to have to resort to such tactics. If Zynga still employs such, I shall make a mental note to stay the heck away from their stock.

Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads

#310

Post by ape4 »

donatj wrote: post #298

What’s a good Adsense alternative? They’ve temporarily disabled my Adsense a couple times in the previous year for “invalid traffic” and this is making it sound like a huge liability.

Each month I get paid a bit for my Adsense ads minus a small amount for "invalid traffic". I don't click on my own ads and its only a few dollars.
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