Sorry, are you saying that it is common for people to bribe insiders to bypass policy and hurt their competitors? This is the first time I've heard a story like this.
Thats apart of the world behind the world. What people say and what people do are entirely different things. Do you know the kind of things Google execs had to do to get into the china market? It sure wasn't all in good fun. Business by human nature operates by drama, lies, deceit, and leverage.
The lies and dishonesty come from the highest authority in Google. The only real solution is to force the dissolution of big tech and create competition once again. The only thing that can change business behavior is effects to profit.
To the persons voting my comment into the dirt, I was being sincere.
If you really have never heard of this type of thing occurring, then you are either willfully ignorant, or completely separated from the reality of how business is conducted with Google. I don't say this with malice, but with plain honesty. This is a fundamental part of how the interaction with Google works. To deny this so plainly can only make any sort of sense through sarcasm.
> This is a fundamental part of how the interaction with Google works
Working in Ads at Google, this isn't something I've ever seen. If you're able to share details of cases where bribing insiders has happened (either here or to my email) I can look into them?
This hardly seems like a productive sentiment. A system is only as corrupt as the people in it, and this person is openly trying to address a specific problem the best way they know how. Why would you try to dissuade them? I don't understand what your end game is except to make Google more corrupt.
Paying off an insider to get something done that actually needed to be done seems a hell of a lot less problematic than capriciously destroying someones livelihood with no justification at all as the parent indicates that Google did to them.
There's nothing wrong with taking gobs of money to work at a huge corporation but at least be honest that they are terrible.
"Just get you issue to the front page of hacker news, if you can't make it fuck off" is not a valid support strategy for one of the biggest corporations in the worls
Would you prefer nothing to happen? In the real world, we have two bad choices: either google ignores it completely, which I’m certainly not defending, or some of its employees try to make good. Why punish people for doing the right thing?
Of course I think their support is generally reprehensible. But we don’t have a third choice right now, so these employees taking initiative seems like a win.
Or maybe it's part of their strategy? Remember, Google is an advertising agency.
They are sending a message out that their support is maybe not 100% adequate, but if you do have an issue, just raise your voice on social media and it will be fixed. In the end everything will turn out allright, not?
The message they are sending out is downright misleading. Maybe we should even say no to that.
It would be better if that googler or google itself recognized that having lots of automatic switches that destroy businesses, or people's email access or other things with no recourse is unacceptable and worked on that. Google should have an ombudsman or office that deals with these issues. I'm sure there would be lots of fraudulent claims. But there would be lots that were not. Please google let people pay to speak to a human for help when there is a problem.
That would be even better. Google search email and docs are almost public utilities at this point. But at least, we need to regulate on Google shuts down accounts, because it can really screw people's lives and companies. That reminds me I need to copy everything out of my own Gmail and docs again Just in case Google one day says I'm a persona non grata.
This would fall under anti-corruption laws, it's a legal matter and Google is obligated to show due diligence in investigating any disclosures, in any form they may appear.
Until there's a legally mandated dispute process that requires disclosure as to why an individual/org is blocked and whom or what system ordered it, and how to challenge it; your individual efforts will fall on deaf ears. Hell, until there's accountability, you might as well join in on the racket and take payola for hellbanning.
Most systems these days are automated blackboxes of hellbanning, whether you pay or not. It is the 1950's parodies of the USSR "You know what you did, and we cant tell you what you did because you already know". And here it is. Google is only one such.
I sincerely appreciate the offer. This problem is too “cold” to resurrect today, and far too late for our business. I would be glad to know that Google is taking steps to ensure this cannot happen in the future.
Specifically:
* When an Ads account is suspended it can be devastating to the business or the Google partner. We should have the opportunity to speak with human beings, to bring forth evidence to the contrary, and to escalate within Google instead of with attorneys.
* The vast majority of businesses and agencies simply want to follow Google policies to the letter. Unfortunately the letter of policy is often ambiguous or unclear. When a policy violation is alleged, particularly against long standing and high dollar Ads accounts, there should be a presumption of innocence. Google should explain clearly and directly what is needed to remedy policy violations instead of playing security through obscurity and “guess what I want” games.
* At the end of our time as a Google partner, the automation had become unbearable. We spent 90% of our time resubmitting Ads and campaigns that were suspended or halted for no apparent or clear reason, analogous to advertisement “whack a mole”. Imagine literally any other outlet treating advertisers this way. For example, imagine Viacom suspending a nationwide ad campaign without a word of explanation. Imagine The New York Times pulling an ad without so much as a call or email. It’s patently absurd.
> * When an Ads account is suspended it can be devastating to the business or the Google partner. We should have the opportunity to speak with human beings, to bring forth evidence to the contrary, and to escalate within Google instead of with attorneys.
Let's start with this! I too had a Google Ads randomly get nuked and had no way to talk to any customer service agent, after thousands of $ of spending a month.
You seem to be the closest person on this thread who can answer questions about Google. Can you please tell us why Google summarily suspends accounts? Why is there absolutely no way to talk to a human being?
I can't speak for Google, and I don't work in that part of ads, but my understanding is it's primarily because of how adversarial fraud detection is. If you give people who violate policy detailed information about what they did wrong and how you know then it is much easier for them to figure out how to abuse the system without getting caught. I don't like it, but I also don't know how to fix it.
>If you give people who violate policy detailed information about what they did wrong and how you know then it is much easier for them to figure out how to abuse the system without getting caught.
I don't really buy this.
The most effective adversaries already have a deep understanding of detection mechanisms and are typically just tweaking parameters to find thresholds of detection. Other companies mitigate this by delaying bans and doing "ban waves", or even randomizing the thresholds (I have done both for certain types of automated bans for attacks on my systems).
More to the point, adversaries already know what they did wrong so telling them isn't going to make much difference. False positives do not know what they did wrong and telling them will make a tremendous difference.
Full disclosure: I have been the victim of a false positive flag in that my app with over 50M downloads on google play was removed and then reinstated when my reddit complaint post got human attention (thank g̶o̶d Google).
> adversaries already know what they did wrong so telling them isn't going to make much difference
I'm not sure that's true. Adversaries know they are intentionally trying to game Google's system, but that is not the same as knowing all of the internal parameters of Google's system. Telling them what they did wrong in specific cases might well give them useful additional information about those internal parameters that Google does not want to give them.
> False positives do not know what they did wrong and telling them will make a tremendous difference.
While this is true, it is also not actionable, since the whole point is that Google does not know which positives are false positives and has no cost-effective way of finding out (since finding out would require actual humans and the scale of its ad business is too large to make the number of humans that would be required affordable).
Not the number of humans it would take to replace their automated fraud detection algorithms to dramatically reduce false positives at scale, no. The whole point of their business model is that all of those processes have to be automated, otherwise they aren't profitable.
Thank you for the response. Please read this comment.
This does make sense, but why the atrocious support? I mean at least reply to emails even if we have to wait for a month to get a response, just give us something real not the canned, automated email.
I've never ever clicked on any of my own ads EVER and I got suspended for "click fraud" and I'm sure there are many people like me... Why do I have to be terminated without any recourse? This feels, for the lack of a better word, pure evil and cruel. This makes people deeply hurt and hate the brand.
I'm a developer and a business owner and because of my experience with Adsense and Adwords there is NO WAY I'll ever use Google Cloud, no matter how much discount Google is willing to give me and I'm definitely not alone in this. This behaviour is going to destroy Google in the long term. Right now you guys make money on advertising, but as soon as you need to sell something, I'm not sure people who have been hurt are willing to pay for it.
Agreed, I have been burned in the past (2015) by a ban on google play store and adsense on one of my business. It was impossible to talk to a human or get any details and this killed the company.
I'm now a Google hater, I'll never do any business with them like EVER even if they pay me to use their products.
Also I'm the opposite of an ambassador for Google brand. I managed to turn several huge customers in EU and US to AWS or Azure solutions instead of Google cloud... Several times and I'll continue to recommend companies to not do anything with Google.
Yes in the long run their attitude and people's like me will continue to destroy their brand.
I work with a lot of fraud teams at a FinTech company, and we have the same exact problem. If you give out too much information around what caused the enforcement action, people are able to figure out the exact formula used to trigger a risk check, and will float right under it.
> I don't like it, but I also don't know how to fix it.
Google does not know how to fix this because they don't think outside of the tech box. This is very much an issue with their way of doing things.
You build relations with advertisers. If someone is spending 20k per day on your system (for months or even years), you better have someone to talk to and actually look at the issues they have.
In case you work in the relevant part of ads, could you say why advertisers are allowed to buy their competitors' literal trademarked business names on Adwords? This seems like a protection racket: "nice business you got here; it'd be a shame if that knockoff down the street paid me enough to bury it..."
Absolutely agree. The company I worked from had a persistent problem with someone stealing customer details by buying AdWords targeting our brandname with a fake phishing site. We would report it, 2-3 days later Google would take it down. Then the next day, they'd be back with a different phishing site. At what point is Google just complicit?
I saw it when a business for which I did some work would have customers calling from their competitor's lobby saying, "This stupid receptionist doesn't know about my appointment, what do you mean I'm in the wrong place, I put your name in the phone google?! Screw you I'm going to just get the work done here!" Google/Maps/Android had customers driving past the business for which they had searched by literal business name to some other business that was spending more on Adwords for that literal business name.
By the complete lack of response from the Google representative above, one may infer that he works in exactly this relevant part of ads, and has nothing to say in his defense.
> my understanding is it's primarily because of how adversarial fraud detection is.
Let me rephrase this to make it clearer what the actual issue is: it's primarily because the cost to Google of false negatives on fraud detection (failing to detect actual frauds) is much higher than the cost to Google of false positives on fraud detection (flagging users as fraudulent that actually aren't). So Google is willing to accept a large number of false positives in order to avoid false negatives.
Or, to put it more simply: the incentive structure of what Google has chosen as its core business model means it is in Google's interest to randomly penalize a large number of bona fide users simply because a much smaller number of users are fraudulent.
In other words, this is basically unfixable unless Google changes its core business model.
I actually wish some Congress critter would propose a law that would require companies to "give people who violate policy detailed information about what they did wrong and how you know" and require a registered human agent for communications in these situations.
So the policy can't be found in the TOS and the reason is really a lie? Obfuscation is complicity--part of the problem. Get it all out in the open and the problem will resolve itself. The bedrock of our most hallowed institutions, and principles of democracy and free markets, supposedly refute your reasoning...if you believe in any of that. Listen to yourself as you apologize for the master scammers.
That's extremely serious. If you wanted to share details with me I can raise the issue internally; my email is in my profile.
(Speaking only for myself)