Live data from Hacker News

Google users locked out after 15 years' use

businessinsider.com

521–530 of 720 posts

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#521
post #497
post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past, the advertiser would likely to tell that to the people selling ad space. Then, they’d suffer political blowback for being anti-LGBT. It sounds like Google is laundering third party behavior that is further dividing our society. Perhaps advertisers should be forced (by the government, on all algorithmic platforms) to publish their targeting criteria.

Should it also be a requirement for the government to posts what preferences you look for in a partner on dating websites, what gender you prefer when searching for doctors, what race you prefer when looking for cleaning or child care assistance?

This is a ghastly and inhumane comparison.

Companies aren't people.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a great blog that started getting me over $2000 per month from Google Ads (several million views), then suddenly after 3 months it dropped to $300 with the same amount of views and never gone up. No matter how much promo I did I would never get past $300. It seems like Google somehow put restriction on my account without any explanation. Eventually my blog died (also because Facebook capped organic reach of my…

I used to work on adsense. There is no facility for an "earnings cap". Your revenue is the literal sum of earnings from every click on your property. While ads are showing and being clicked on, you will always be earning more. If I were to guess, you failed to implement ads.txt and/or your content didn't meet the standards required by some big advertisers, so auction pressure was very low for your site.

Did you have access to the entire source code and understanding of all services running the system? Capping could have been done by a service created by a team you wouldn't have access to and without knowledge something like that even exist (and rightfully so, as it would take one whistleblower to harm the business). So I am not surprised you would write that there was no such facility.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a great blog that started getting me over $2000 per month from Google Ads (several million views), then suddenly after 3 months it dropped to $300 with the same amount of views and never gone up. No matter how much promo I did I would never get past $300. It seems like Google somehow put restriction on my account without any explanation. Eventually my blog died (also because Facebook capped organic reach of my…

I used to work on adsense. There is no facility for an "earnings cap". Your revenue is the literal sum of earnings from every click on your property. While ads are showing and being clicked on, you will always be earning more. If I were to guess, you failed to implement ads.txt and/or your content didn't meet the standards required by some big advertisers, so auction pressure was very low for your site.

I've had similar issues with AdSense. Running a site for 10 years, and it was earning $250/day for years, then suddenly it dropped. For a while I had the same traffic and instead of 500 clicks a day Google would say I had 3 or 4 clicks. I contacted them, waited a month, and they said to label them "Advertisements" so users are not confused.

Well, my site is mostly text based and I have at least 50px of space around any advertisement, so they stick out like a sore thumb and are not confusing. Eventually the daily clicks returned, but then in the last year Google started taking back 80% of my revenue at the end of the month saying it's "Invalid Traffic". This is after years of it being around 5%. I've made no changes to the site, all the traffic is organic from Google search or direct visitors. I've never once in my life paid for traffic.

I contacted Google again, but they refused to give any information because they can't share specifics for security reasons. So, I'm left losing 80% of my revenue this year and instead of making about 50k after my bills, I'll break even or make a loss.

Since then I tried switching to another company that's an AdSense partner. Of course they take a commission, but apparently they can actually show me the daily earnings with "Invalid Traffic" removed, and not give me a monthly heart attack and remove all my revenue as a surprise at once.

So, I can see how little I'm making on a daily basis now, but I'm no closer to resolving the issue because Google refuses to give any answers, so I'm completely on my own and taking shots in the dark.

The other week I tried building a database of 800 million IP addresses using lists of all IP addresses from datacenters, VPNs, proxies, TOR exit nodes, and IPs flagged as abusive. This obviously took some time to setup and I stopped showing ads to these IPs because maybe they're bad sources of traffic? That didn't seem to help.

Then I tried setting up some Javascript to not load ads until the mouse moved or a user scrolled. Maybe that would help to prevent any traffic where a user is not at the computer? Nope, didn't work.

So, I'm out of ideas. Yes, I have ads.txt configured. Yes, I have a consent manager configured.

> Your revenue is the literal sum of earnings from every click on your property. While ads are showing and being clicked on, you will always be earning more.

What you said sounds simple. However, like I said, Google can randomly drop my clicks from a consistent 500 a day to 3 and give no answers. Or, they can tell me I'm earning $250/day and then when it comes time to pay a month later, they say they can only pay $50/day and the traffic didn't meet their standards. That's a big problem when they just spent the entire month outbidding all my other advertisers.

Lastly, the site I run is filled with great people. It's a community based website with tens of millions of comments. Users on average spend 10 minutes per session, the bounce rate is incredibly low, the average user loads 30 pages a day. People like it, it's full of quality content and posts, and users are writing new comments every few seconds.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#524
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have it. They can delete your data.

An interesting perspective, but GDPR also requires them to delete data according to policy. If, by their policies, the data should still be held, then you have the right to access it. If they deleted it contrary to policy, that would itself be a breach of GDPR, and you would likely have strong grounds to sue and seek relief. If the data was to be held pending court action and they deleted it, that could get even more…

I don't think that's correct. The GDPR retention policy sets out maximum retention time.

The guiding principle is that data should only be retained as long as is required to serve the purposes for which it was collected. So if your account is permanently terminated, there is probably an argument that GDPR requires the deletion of all data as soon as possible.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#525
I may not be the greatest advice for the general public, but for readers of this website, if you’re not owning the domain for your email and hosting it with a customer-oriented service provider (fastmail, protonmail etc), you’re not only exposing yourself to the whims of Google et al, you’re also contributing to email monoculture, which is bad all around.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#526
post #362

Happened to me too after 10 years of Gmail use. Exactly the same story. No explanation. As I remember at that time I checked Google servers data as to uptime—the data was public, not sure about now—and it appeared that there was a serious problem with servers right before I was blocked. It looked like Google just completely lost data in some server cluster. Anyway, there was no way to get any response from Google or…

My wife and I each have "partner sharing" setup in our Google Photos accounts so that we both have all of the photos in our own accounts. One could probably make a second account just for backups and setup partner sharing for this purpose. You can only have one account configured this way though, so choose your real partner or a backup account.

We also back up to Amazon Photos as well, just for extra peace of mind.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work on adsense. There is no facility for an "earnings cap". Your revenue is the literal sum of earnings from every click on your property. While ads are showing and being clicked on, you will always be earning more. If I were to guess, you failed to implement ads.txt and/or your content didn't meet the standards required by some big advertisers, so auction pressure was very low for your site.

Did you have access to the entire source code and understanding of all services running the system? Capping could have been done by a service created by a team you wouldn't have access to and without knowledge something like that even exist (and rightfully so, as it would take one whistleblower to harm the business). So I am not surprised you would write that there was no such facility.

> Did you have access to the entire source code and understanding of all services running the system?

Near enough, yes. Sure, there are millions of lines of code, and I did not read every one, but I debugged enough issues that I'm sure I would have come across this capping effect if it existed and affected more than some dormant/test accounts.

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#528
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue seems to me that it's a global ban. Global bans "seem" to be new. I've read many stories of shell scripts randomly permanently banning android developers for life from their platform, but those stories always involved being banned from the play console and so forth, not being banned from search / maps / gmail / youtube / etc. It seems to be news that if you tell people in public youtube comments that you…

I used to work at Google on stuff related to account bans. Global bans are not new. They were standard a decade ago. The reason is due to the structure of the various spam/abuse industries that plague any service that allows user generated content. What happens is this: 1. Accounts get harder to create as signup security improves 2. Black/grey-market account sellers come in and start creating accounts that get bought…

There are a couple of things that I don't get.

Why are accounts suspected of TOS violations not simply put into read-only mode instead of shutting out users completely? If the identity/authorisation of the user is not in doubt it makes zero sense to not let people download their data before closing the account.

This simple change would fix all the consumer related horror stories with zero cost to Google. In fact it would become cheaper for Google because people would stop pleading with them.

Also, why is there no one-off paid support option that covers the cost of a human checking evidence and is expensive enough to deter mass abuse by fraudsters? Why is there no option to provide a photo ID upfront so that there is always a last resort to check whether a user is who they say they are?

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#529
post #60

This is genuinely scary. Photos, Yale locks, Fi, WiFi and Nest thermostat can all be poof gone because I made a silly YouTube comment? How is this not regulated? Google photos also 'helpfully' offers to delete your uploaded photos with 'some guarantee'!!! If this isn't an indication of a giant shitty monopoly that doesn't care about its customers at all, I don't what is. They have some AI ML fucking crap but can't fi…

> How is this not regulated? Cue the "businesses can choose who they do business with!" and "if you don't like it, build your own!" people. We signed up for many of those things individually and they've connected them more and more. Now we have a single point of failure that can take down everything across all your sytems. And it's not just those. Don't forget about Google Voice, Android, and every service where you…

Business should be allowed to choose who they do business with, they already choose to do business with these people. The problem here is they want to unilaterally have the power to termination the business relationship

This is a problem with one sided none negotiable terms of service being considered valid contracts under the law

They should not be.

We need to change data ownership laws, and force companies to do vetting on Account Creation, and put in provisions on how accounts can be terminated once a company accepts a user owned data. i.e Accounts must have a human reviewed appeal process, with full and articulated reporting as to exactly which rules were violated, and exactly what activity was the violation. And have a View Only data Take-Out period

At a minimum

Re: Google users locked out after 15 years' use

#530
post #359

Not completely related to personal accounts being banned, but something that happened to me recently: I started a side business with some friends during lockdown. We created an online store selling some hard-to-get long tail items, and almost instantly got some traction and growth thanks to Google Shopping. A month ago we received one of these generic automated mails that our account is banned and we were misrepresen…

This, I think, is one of the most important things legislators need to look at going forward as they dig into the practices of companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

The massive paradigm shift that occurred once these companies grabbed prominence in commerce is to go from a system where humans interacted with humans in business-to-business commerce to solve problems to a cold, hard, heartless and decidedly dangerous totalitarian algo-driven relationship.

In "the old days", if a publisher had a problem with an ad from advertiser they would contact them to discuss, let them know what the issue might have been and seek resolution for mutual benefit. I other words, adults doing business with adults.

Not so with these companies. They are brutal and cold and have no problem destroying any business at any time for any reason. I have seen this happen to acquaintances enough times on these platforms to be absolutely astounded that we haven't yet seen the mother of all class-action lawsuits. And it would be a big one.

I know people who have gone from having nice lifestyle businesses to loosing virtually all due to one of these platforms suspending their account with no explanation, no conversation and no recourse whatsoever. One day you are putting food on your table and taking care of your kids and the next Monday at 7:00 AM you are on your way to losing it all.

I've said this many times, I am definitely not for the government having their hands on everything. No way. However, this, to me, has become a situation where government needs to become involved ASAP. It isn't getting any better. We need legislators to exercise judicious control over some of these practices. These company have such command of the marketplace that if they suspend or ban someone they might as well not exist. That kind of power should not be allowed to be wielded as capriciously as these companies seem to have been doing for years.

I do understand that fraud and other issue are a reality of these businesses. Well, they need to figure out how to deal with that while, at the same time, being human and human in their treatment of those who depend on the access they provide for legitimate work.

Post reply on HN