I got banned from Google Ads at age 16 because Google was convinced I was doing this. I'm 35 now. Never figured out how that happened, but it doesn't matter because I wouldn't choose Google's ads anymore, anyway.
Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
331–340 of 406 posts
Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's why I pulled out all of my projects from Google index. Interestingly despite I disallow robots from parsing anything, I can still see residual data in search results over a year after I disabled crawling in robots.txt.
Now my traffic is truly organic, because the only way of knowing about these is the good old word of mouth.
Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh hey it's the "you should leave him" guy. As with abusive spouses, there are usually circumstances trapping people there. Not least the unequal power relationship. This is a circumstance where society, in the form of government, needs to weigh in to force tech giants to behave more sanely, because only society as a whole is a bigger fish than Google, Facebook, etc.
No one is forced to do business with Google.
It is absolutely possible to make an app that doesn't support iOS or Android and runs on weird unpopular Linux smartphones, and thereby bow down to nobody.
Except your landlord when rent comes due.
Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to sell Android apps, you are. Yes, I know Android allows installs from sources other than Play Store, but if you want to be popular, you have to be in Play Store. I'm actually surprised/impressed with how successful that strategy has been for Google. I've always considered sideloading and alternate app stores to be an advantage for Android, but Google's store is effectively a monopoly anyway.
> If you want to sell Android apps, you are. No one is forced to sell Android apps, therefore, no one is forced to do business with Google.
Well sure, they could go flip burgers instead.
Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why they don't at least allow Google Takeout for banned accounts. They've already done all the hard work of implementing it!
Two reasons: * Some account bans are for illegal content - Child porn, bans so an account state can be investigated, copyright claims etc. In that case, letting a user download their data could violate the law/ethics. * Technically implementing this in Googles infrastructure is hard. The login session used by takeout has to have access to all data (so that takeout itself can get your data from each service and build…
If it is "hard" to let user download their data, then they shouldn't be in this business in the first place. It's like they want their cake and eat it too.
> very expensive EU fine when someone with power in the EU gets impacted by this...
Given how EU works, more likely scenario is money under the table after a period of sabre waving.
Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
#336I would assume that part of the testing process (or part of the checklist after going live) would involve clicking user interface elements, including ads?
You want to know that it works.
Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
#337I got banned from Google Ads at age 16 because Google was convinced I was doing this. I'm 35 now. Never figured out how that happened, but it doesn't matter because I wouldn't choose Google's ads anymore, anyway.
Same-ish but to be honest my ban was legit. My goofy ass clicked my own YouTube AD one too many times as a kid. I'm pretty sure that ban is permanent.
Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once the archive is generated it isn't hard to download it I don't think... Click the link in the email and it starts downloading... They even have an option to split into multiple files for ease of download if you have slow or unreliable internet, and their download links do support "download managers" which can resume failed downloads. Giving you 7 days to download it seems fine... Remember they are effectively giv…
You defend Google better than any of their official spokespersons IMO :-) I still dislike Google intensely for a number of things but not for this anymore. (In case you are interested: - serving me insulting ads and not giving me good ones whenever I didn't have adblock activated for over a decade. (edit: I've lost count of how many times I've clicked "not interested" on semi nude pictures advertising for scammy dati…
The greatest of sins was killing off Orkut.
Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
#339I'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…
Isn't that textbook ban evasion?
The company is for sure tracking your IP's and if they see two account with the same IP chances are they could ban both accounts.
I would use a VPN with your other account to be careful, or just in general.
And then they could also be fingerprinting your browser.
I don't know of any safe way to have multiple accounts, other than separate computers and one of the computers is on a VPN.
Re: Google can ban your Android app if they think you’ve clicked on your own ads
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
HAL was envisioned based on an early approach to AI. Modern AI techniques really don’t fit that model.