[marshallbananas]

Similar thing happened to me. I built an online Japanese - English dictionary and used AdSense to monetize it. One day I got an email saying that my domain has been permabanned because my website appears to be promoting rape and pedophilia. As an example of one of the many offending pages on my domain they sent me urls to the definition and translation of words "pedophilia" and "rape" in Japanese.

Of course none of my competitors using the exact same data set had any such problems.

I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails.

Edit: Actually, I did get a response a couple times but it was obviously automated. They just said to remove the ads from the pages where such words are displayed. So I added a simple rule and a column in the database to hide ads for those keywords. That just triggered the bot to move down the list of their "obscene" language. Next it was the names of various sexual positions, acts and fetishes (Japanese does have a very rich vocabulary in that topic), then manga slang, even silly sounding onomatopoeias that when explained in plain English are "vulgar", etc.. It seems once your website is flagged there is simply no way get clean.

[jfoster]

The crazy thing is that Google even took this action despite it also being against their interests. Sure, your business specifically is relatively inconsequential to them, but they must've made hundreds of thousands of similar mistakes. That's a fair amount of ad inventory to miss out on, surely?

Google accounts have enough worth & history associated with them that they should be able to create some kind of appeal process whereby if you jump through the right hoops proving identity and such, you could eventually reach a human who can intervene?

It feels like they're religious about the idea of having an algorithm decide everything. Works pretty well for some things, but they sure do burn some customers/clients pretty badly along the way for other things.

[ALittleLight]

One possible problem is that there are always more people willing to step in. I assume that I can still find a Japanese to English dictionary by searching Google. If one, or N, such websites get taken out by algorithmic flaws or bad actors reporting competitors, then others will simply rise up and take their place (or Google will subsume their content into the instant answers section). In this way, Google may not really be losing anything even if they are constantly burning their partners - there are always new partners coming up.

[marshallbananas]

Yup. And since almost everyone is using AdSense it doesn't make much difference to them. The funny thing is that my AdSense ban didn't affect the SERP position at all. I was still the second result for "japanese dictionary" on Google and had a steady million pageviews a month for years.

[CPLX]

> since almost everyone is using AdSense it doesn't make much difference to them

You’ve hit on the actual problem. This is why so many believe the real fundamental problems the culture is facing with tech companies start with antitrust enforcement.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, see how in the article, the guy is planning to 'spend his next 1-2 weeks fighting this case' instead of giving Amazon the ultimatum that if they don't fix this quickly, he's going to take his business elsewhere !

[xnx]

This is good evidence of the strict separation of algorithmic and advertising systems.

[mysterydip]

Were there any other ad networks you used in place of adsense? That seems like a lot of pageviews to leave on the table.

[jfoster]

They are still losing impressions, though? We're talking about getting delisted from Adsense, not Google search.

[tinus_hn]

Googles interest is block and move on. It is not in their interest to have a person look at a case like this.

[jfoster]

But then they have fewer ad impressions to sell. That said, since their system is an auction, some level of scarcity does potentially increase their revenue. Maybe they've done that calculation and figured out that they wanted to dump some of their inventory.

[tinus_hn]

To pay for the 15 minutes it would take a person to look at this issue and fix it they’d need a lot of impressions. Far more than they lose by just blocking the site.

[sideshowb]

It begs the question seeing as they've written a bot to determine what's offensive why don't they hook it directly to the ad servers and auto disable ads on the offending pages only?

[NullPrefix]

It's kind of like the tax thing. IRS knows what you owe, but you need to come up with the same or greater number on your own.

[syshum]

That would be Pro-Consumer. Google is Anti-Consumer so that would be against their core principle

[some_random]

I detest Google, so I absolutely have to say this is an absurd way to look at the world. Google doesn't care if it's actions are pro or anti consumer, they care about money and power and go about pursuing it in a way that tends to be anti-consumer.

[cwkoss]

I think that google doesn't care is precisely the point

[merpnderp]

Google won't even let you know the app privacy on their iOS apps, how could they possibly be pro-consumer?

Maybe the downvoters mean "pro-consumer" in that they're pro manipulating people into consuming their advertisements and incredibly invasive tracking?

[sn_master]

Most websites aren't static (e.g. forums).

[sideshowb]

Neither are the ads they serve; furthermore the amount of profanity detection required scales linearly with the number of pages on which ads are served, so this really shouldn't be a barrier.

[Judgmentality]

> I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails.

:(

I realize it's complicated, but there are things that make me worry the future of the internet might not be so great.

[zwaps]

My worry about AI isn't Skynet and Terminators.

It's that Data Scientists don't realize most of their models still simply fit a conditional expectation - and given all their power, it's going to be us, not Amazon or Google, who has to adapt to the distribution as not to repeatedly get hit as some sort of outlier.

It's a dystopia where AI works because of us trying to conform to it, because otherwise we are out of luck. At some point, we self select into Amazon-humans, Google-humans etc.

[317070]

> It's a dystopia where AI works because of us trying to conform to it, because otherwise we are out of luck

But all technology is like that. Cars work, because we conformed our environment to it. Email works, because we conform to checking our mailboxes regularly. Telephones work, because we pick them up when they ring.

If you are interested in knowing more, the whole work of the french philosopher Jacques Ellul is based around this idea.

AI is not going to be any different in this respect. It is going to be us meeting it halfway. And that is going to be dystopic in the same way as it has been with other types of technology.

[alistairSH]

Wow, not sure why you're getting all the down-votes. I don't necessarily agree with you, but it's an interesting perspective regardless.

You also touch on the Amish approach to new technology. Each new thing is assessed for impact on life/tradition/etc and adoption is limited accordingly. For example, phones might be considered useful enough to have one per town, but distracting enough to be kept out of individual homes. Or, a computer might be allowed in the back-office of a wood shop for purposes for managing online sales, but nowhere else in the community.

[andrewzah]

The difference is we have a choice in those matters. I.e. my telephone does not work in that sense, because I will not pick up for an unknown number in most cases. A communicable human is on the other end.

With "AI" (machine learning / neural nets), we're letting opaque boxes arbitrarily control and ban accounts at will. It's like forcing people to use cars that randomly decide that it won't drive that day for no good reason.

"AI is not going to be any different in this respect"

The other examples all include accountable humans, "AI" here does not. We're already seeing issues of machine learning applying sexist biases for example because of datasets and poor training. What are you going to do, hold google, or any other faceless corporation, accountable for its bad translations? Good luck.

It's only going to get worse in the future as other stratified aspects of society get cemented by "AI".

[317070]

So, I think I explained myself badly. I fully agree on the problems of AI you point out. I agree with you on the reduction of freedom AI will bring. But then again, every relevant piece of technology took away such a piece of freedom.

I think one might underestimate the freedom that have been let go when other technologies came in, even though those technologies feel established already. You can choose not to pick up on the unknown number when the phone rings, but the moment of connection with a real human being you might have had at that point was interrupted by the phone ringing.

Society expects us to be reachable at any time, but that came with trading in the freedom to not be arbitrarily disrupted by default.

The point I am trying to make is this: all technology requires and has required humans to adapt to it, and consequently handing in a bit of freedom. I want to point out that AI is no different in the fact that it does so, even though like every other piece of technology it will do so in a unique way.

Is that dystopian? Perhaps. Many philosophers on technology have thought so, and many have disagreed.

> The other examples all include accountable humans

But when those faceless corporations were being sexist because of bureaucratic reasons in the sixties, how were they being held accountable? Did anything really change?

Widely adopted technology is something that lies outside of the humans that make it up, like an ant colony is different from the ants it is made off. You cannot hold any individual ant accountable to the way the hive is organised. Technology is an entity that lies outside of those ants, and that has its own desires and goals.

[technofiend]

>At some point, we self select into Amazon-humans, Google-humans etc.

That's one worst case scenario. I've been thinking once humans start deselecting Google (no more gmail, youtube red, etc) then there's more room to also start blocking google's ad network. I know Google's dark pattern to force compliance is to pretend they don't know you and put you on a captcha treadmill, but that too will crumble if their adsense network yields less and less value as users and website operators move on from being plugged into the googleverse.

At least today you can operate outside the googleverse but you're punished for it. We should be holding on to that and trying to expand it rather than end up in the future you described where we can do nothing but comply.

[throwaway316943]

Ha! I’m sorry but it’s already screwed. Compared to where we stood when people were actually arguing for a free and open internet and against centralization and corporatization we have arrived at almost all of their dire predictions and the last few seem to be well on their way. No one is fighting it anymore, they’re just trying to grab the scraps that fall off the table that the big five sit at and hoping they don’t get stomped into oblivion by the giants.

[TheOtherHobbes]

A lot of the free and open Internet arguments were about copyright and open source, both of which turn out to be almost irrelevant in the face of automated Kafka-esque monopolistic bureaucracies.

Turns out being able to pirate MP3s is a poor consolation prize when you can have your startup permabanned from AdSense or Amazon for no good reason, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Wrong goal on the wrong sports field.

[tremon]

copyright and open source, both of which turn out to be almost irrelevant in the face of automated Kafka-esque monopolistic bureaucracies.

What do you think the free software movement was all about, if it wasn't about avoiding Kafka-esque monopolistic bureaucracies? Read Stallman's "The Right To Read", from 1997.

[wizzwizz4]

Open source, on the other hand, has been embraced by those automated Kafkaesque monopolistic bureaucracies.

[skeeter2020]

Do you mean the consumption of open source software has been embraced, i.e. they love using free software but are not big fans of the backside of the model?

[leppr]

There's a reason for the hype around web3. The more time passes the more pressing the demand for it, and the better the UX becomes.

[rlayton2]

Do you have a good resource for how web 3 would work? All I read is hyperbole and "could be"s but I am looking for actual concepts of how it would work. Any ideas?

[vertis]

Web3 means a lot of things to a lot of people. In this context the decentralization enabled by blockchain or federation is probably what the GP is talking about. With a decentralized app you can't be banned in the same way (though this presents other problems).

While blockchain based technologies are often cited as an example of Web3, and some of the worst hype offenders are pushing this. It's not exclusively blockchain.

In some ways Web3 is a return to earlier internet where there were open protocols rather than everything being controlled by companies. Redecentralize[0] has a great set of founder interviews talking about some of the projects and challenges.

To be clear it's not necessarily anti-company, just a recognition that a handful of companies controlling everything is problematic. Coupled with a recognition that running at the scale of the Big 5 is prohibitive (e.g. server costs, preventing malicious actors, people to handle problems).

The UX around these things is hard, though getting better. Mastodon[1] is a reasonable alternative to twitter now (doubly so if you cross-post).

Gitcoin[2] is a good example of a Web3 app (all the core functions are smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain).

There are plenty of example of Web3 apps(dapps) on Webby[3] and DApp.com[4] (though the latter you have to wade through all the Decentralized Finance stuff).

[0]: https://redecentralize.org/interviews/ [1]: https://mastodon.social [2]: https://gitcoin.co/ [3]: https://heywebby.app/webby [4]: https://www.dapp.com/topics

[imagine99]

That's actually very interesting. One problem I have started to run into recently however, is that you can't mention the word "blockchain" any more without being laughed out of the room (in some circles), and in many cases rightly so. The word has just been to much vaporware-ified and misused because VCs and other decision-makers were eating it up like crazy.

However, it seems like blockchain-based technologies are to be an integral part of web3, or are there alternatives to it? Is there a way to talk about the concept without mentioning blockchain?

[vertis]

Blockchain(s) are certainly one of the building blocks, but it should be possible to talk about what you're building without mentioning the underlying technology. Indeed, it should be somewhat irrelevant unless people want to dig into the detail.

That's why efforts like redecentralize are so important. It's more talking about objectives like privacy, censorship resistance, etc.

There are a subset of people that go, let's build with "the blockchain" for the hype and another subset that recognizes that blockchains are one of a number of tools in the arsenal of solving a problem.

Efforts like Matrix, SSB, OpenBazaar, and IPFS are all 'Web3' technologies without being on the blockchain.

If you do need to talk blockchains, two terms that likely aren't so loaded are 'smart contracts' and 'dapps' (distributed apps).

[TomSwirly]

Cryptography is not blockchain.

Blockchain is a very heavy technology that solves the Consensus Problem. That's amazing, but almost no real world problems except cryptocurrency has a Consensus Problem.

For almost everything else, there are much simpler, easier-to-understand and _far_ computationally lighter cryptographic solutions that aren't blockchain.

[kangnkodos]

The real problem is this. How do we determine which speech to punish in 2021? The algorithm is if one person in a non dominant group reports that the words made them feel bad, after the fact, then the words caused actual harm and must be punished. How do we know ahead of time? I don't know. But I do know that it leads us to strange situations where certain words cannot even be quoted, and the even the banning itself cannot be discussed. And the outlawing of discussing the ban cannot be discussed. And so on.

[diggan]

web3 as a whole is very early and still being built and developed, that's why there is not one definition of web3. The biggest commonality is that the solutions are focused on decentralization and censorship-resistance, as those are two of the main issues plaguing the web today.

Imagine the web in the 90s, some people saw promise while others asked themselves what it actually is. Fast forward 5/10/20 years and what web3 is will be a lot more clear as we'll have mainstream web3 applications deployed and used then.

[8note]

Are those the main issues plaguing the web? I would lean that the foremost problem is radicalization, and that decentralization and censorship resistance will make the internet an even better tool for radicalization than it is today

[jk7tarYZAQNpTQa]

> I realize it's complicated, but there are things that make me worry the future of the internet might not be so great.

The solution isn't easy, but it's simple: stop using Amazon (specially AWS), Google (specially AdSense), etc. Once they lose half their annual revenue, they'll start taking things seriously.

[ctvo]

Asking for sacrifice from others is often hard, simple, and ineffective.

> Stop eating calories and you'll lose weight

As America approaches 50% obesity

> Stop using AWS, Microsoft Office, AdSense, and Instagram (If we want to talk about domineering monopolies)

Sure. Let me count the ways you've inconvenienced me.

A better approach would be to provide a viable alternative to change the underlying systems that put us in this state. That's never simple though.

[wly_cdgr]

You will never, ever get a critical mass until your freedom-based burger tastes better than a real Google burger. It's not "not easy". It's Impossible

[angry_octet]

God damn, now I want to eat a burger.

[Brian_K_White]

It's like they didn't hear you say "the solution isn't easy", and so they had to say what you already said, and probably feel like they are saying something smart and worth hearing as they do.

[TomSwirly]

Now, you know these things aren't going to happen, not in any quantity to make the slightest difference.

So why even suggest it?

Strong regulation is the only solution. The Magic Invisible Hand just is not working.

[KingOfCoders]

Happened to me for Amazon. Customer for 20+ years, wanted to sell something, account closed. No appeal, no explanation, last mail said "DONT SEND US MORE MAILS".

No humans, just AI (ML) decisions.

[ben_w]

I’m no lawyer, but as I read it, fully automated decisions with no possibility of human appeal is a violation of GDPR (and, IIRC, its UK predecessor the Data Protection Act): https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

[imagine99]

The question is: How do you enforce that or even complain about it? Say your Amazon account gets locked for whatever reason due to an automated decision (probably all of these decisions are automated). There is no way to contact Amazon without an account. It's not like they have a link on their website that says "Request human appeal under GDPR" (I haven't checkt tbh, but I'm 99.9% sure they haven't).

I wonder what happens if you file e.g. in small claims court against a company like Amazon? They'd probably never get the message, and even if you win due to them not showing up and making their case, good luck enforcing the judgement.

Short of hiring a major law firm whose letterhead might get someone's attention and/or making major waves, I don't see how Joe Sixpack can force a human appeal without major monetary outlay.

I think their strategy of burying their head in the sand and just ghosting you works probably pretty well for the large majority of cases where people simply won't bother (or be able to bother). The cost for the one or two cases that have the energy and commitment to fight is comparably minor and quickly resolved once it hits the front pages somewhere.

[Teever]

> I wonder what happens if you file e.g. in small claims court against a company like Amazon? They'd probably never get the message, and even if you win due to them not showing up and making their case, good luck enforcing the judgement.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bank-america-florida-foreclo...

This is ultimately their weakness. Whether it's the binding arbitration exploit that Uber had to deal with or small claims court default judgments these organizations are highly susceptible to coordinated and distributed actions in the real world.

You need to view this as asymmetric warfare where you're using your opponents advantages against them. If they're bigger then you swarm them with small entities. If they can avoid dealing with the public by using AI intermediaries find venues where they simply can't and repeatedly pressure them there.

"Don't struggle only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down."

[muttled]

It's amazing how much quicker a company responds when they hear something from their legal department rather than some form that they're dumping into the void.

To that last quote, you can often intuit when someone has taken this strategy as the Goliath in the situation will start using terms like "proper channels" and "cowards".

[tal8d]

BoA had it happen a couple of times after they screwed over home owners and tried to ignore the courts. It seems like there should be a significant consequence to forcing the aggrieved party to form a posse with the sheriff in order to collect the local branch's office furniture.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111210150756/http://www.naples...

[zaarn]

A court letter, even from small claims, is something you don't ignore. Last I checked, FANG do show up to small claims court, because loosing there is enforceable by law which can get expensive to ignore, if the accuser is willing to let things escalate.

In GDPR cases, you don't go to court, you go to your local data protection agency (pray you don't live in ireland). They will contact Amazon and ask for a statement. Ignoring them isn't something you can do if you value your revenue, because unlike single customers, the agency's task is to go after you with a problem for years, ghosting doesn't work, and they can issue legally binding fines you can't ignore.

Enforcement of either a court order or fines is easy if you got the title on them. If they continue to ignore you can probably get an attachment order, ie, you plus a court official plus some police officers arrive at the nearest amazon HQ and will demand the fine to be paid or they start taking company property to be auctioned off to pay for the fine.

Alternatively you can have a letter delivered by court service, which also is hard to ignore because the court service will require someone at amazon to be read a cover letter, followed by a signature and rather official stamp. After that your letter is considered to be proven in content and delivered. That is something that raises a lot of red flags in legal departments.

[McDyver]

> The question is: How do you enforce that or even complain about it?

The company "should" have a DPO, whou you can complain to. If that fails you can complain to the DPA [0]

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

[davelondon]

Re: small claims court: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26087997

[KingOfCoders]

With no human I've meant a human proxy relaying the AI decisions.

[zwaps]

You go to your local GDPR / privacy office and possibly hire a lawyer I would say.

Small claims court seems to be a US thing so that doesn't apply in most areas where GDPR is available anyway.

I doubt amazon would just ignore a lawyer's letter. If they do, enjoy your free income I guess

[pjc50]

UK has a small claims court. Many jurisdictions do. However, GDPR isn't directly actionable, you have to go through the ICO who will take a long time.

[toss1]

Seems we need an automated way to do the filings, like the apps that automatically file against your bogus parking tickets, etc.

Both enables the aggrieved small biz, and by making it easy, creates a potentially massive problem for the Amazons & Googles who make ignoring the toxic effects of their system a way of doing business

[sam_goody]

Isn't GDPR a Europe only thing.

Won't help for a US small business selling on Amazon, I imagine

[ben_w]

There may be other local laws; GDPR itself was a unification of existing local laws.

[jbrownbridge]

I’m not a lawyer, but as far as I know GDPR only applies between a private individual and a company, not between two companies.

[tcpekin]

Happened to me in the exact same way with eBay. User (relatively inactive) for 13+ years, go to sell something (boots lol) with original pics, full description, everything set up correctly, and banned within 5 minutes. No way to appeal, and last email after they said they'd refund my $1 ad post charge, was that my account was being deleted.

[KingOfCoders]

Yes, I wrote a book and wanted to sell it on Amazon, a book (!).

[3np]

I was using the Youtube API for personal access, only related to my personal account and information.

Had my API key revoked because it hadn't been used for 90 days. They provided a link to reclaim it, yielding a LONG form where most questions were only applicable to businesses and service providers.

I answered to the best of my abilities, requesting them to give me access again,also exhausting other available communication options on the matter.

That was about 6 months ago, all I got so far was automated emails telling me it's in review.

[brigandish]

Sadly ironic when you think about how a large part of Google's data collating effort comes from reading virtually everyone's email.

[tzfld]

I recently got policy violation notices citing shocking content for articles about land usage in West Virginia and uneven distribution of GDP around the world. Their AI is definitely not good.

[ithkuil]

> There are simply no humans working

Skynet's greatest achievement was to make you think it's not real.

Some folks here are in touch with it though. Perhaps you'll have a better luck using HN as the google support channel.

[ecommerceguy]

Instead of attempting to contact google perhaps your time is better spent contacting the anti-trust folks at the doj.

[airhead969]

Dystopian like the movie Brazil isn't it? Arbitrary, automatous machinations lacking in human supervision, with anonymous accusations believed automatically, convicted instantly, and banishment forever.

[narrator]

This is the AI tyranny they warned you about. Let's say the future is fully automated AI locking you out of things for social credit score violations. There's no due process or appeals, there's no one working in customer service. They don't really care about you individually because you're just taking up space and not generating much revenue anyway.

One of the problems with very large corporations like Google is the marginal benefit of each additional customer is negligible. They have so much money that they don't really need extra business and would rather pursue other objectives. Look at all the stuff getting cancelled lately for whatever reason. The whole thing takes place extra-judicially and is not in the monetary interest of these companies. Stakeholder capitalism if you will. I think the old profit driven system was better because at least you knew what the rules were. Now, the way these big companies make decisions is largely opaque and based on secret rules and arbitrary decisions often based on nothing but whim, or worse, a "good enough" algorithm.

[dognotdog]

Arguably, this has nothing to do with AI, but an imbalance of power. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense to do whatever is just good enough to turn a profit with minimal effort.

As long as there is healthy competition, there is enough incentive to do better, and a customer can switch services without experiencing significant hardship. However, with a lot of the big tech companies, that is no longer the case, and once you run into a problem there is neither free-market nor regulatory mechanisms that can help any individual solve their problem.

Currently, the big tech companies can eschew responsibility by claiming the rights of private business -- having very strong autonomy over how and with whom they do business -- and despite them being de-facto public utilities at this point, the claims are made that regulation is not necessary / not allowed / not productive / harmful. Why this is accepted is puzzling to me, as it is very commonly known macro-economic theory that the usually claimed self-regulating free-market mechanisms no longer work for when large imbalances, eg. monopolies, exist. We have the government explicitly for this reason, to create a counter-balance against forces so large that any individual cannot deal with on their own.

And while it is true that we can expect regulatory intervention to be difficult, especially as the political process cannot possibly keep pace with technology, it is indeed very strongly preferable to giving free reign to private entities with explicitly anti-consumer interests (eg. a corporation has to make their shareholders money, not protect their customers or the environment).

So what's the solution? Maybe regulatory agencies need to be given more teeth, including funding and updated charters. Yesterday's Cartel is today's Big Tech.

[tremon]

this has nothing to do with AI, but an imbalance of power

An imbalance of power because of employing AI with suboptimal results, but not caring about the negative externalities because, well, they're external.

[dognotdog]

Is this AI, really? And isn't it immaterial if it is in the first place? If it's a dumb algorithm or a smart one (or a random one, at that) locking out people without recourse, the result seems much the same.

[AaronM]

I feel like I've read this before several time on HN. Just curious if you've posted this on other comment threads

[airhead969]

This is the next logical step in inverted totalitarianism: society ran and policed by commercial AI, without recourse or due-process because it "isn't government." This occurs as corporations take over the functions of previously public commons and forums, commonwealth/community infrastructure, and manage public-private "partnerships" (PPP's), effectively cannibalizing, ruining, and gaming government and public goods for profit.

1984 wasn't conceived from a vantage-point that exists now; the future from here has the potential to be far, far worse. These threads needs to be made into a novel and a movie to infotain people what dystopian concerns are tangible through unrestrained or under-regulated deployment of technologies on the horizon. China is already doing pre-crime and panopticon surveillance.

[speedgoose]

Maybe a dictionary shouldn't have ads and tracking.

[junon]

That's a ridiculous jump to conclusion.

[pessimizer]

No, it's a question about why we're tracking what people are reading, and whether that's a good thing. It's why librarians were the only significant contemporary dissenters to the Patriot Act. They've created ethical standards around what they do, unlike tech professionals (outside of the FSF.).

[junon]

Generalizations wrapped with misconceptions.

I hate ads and am a privacy advocate. However, I'm not going to stretch the facts. Yes it's technically possible to hand back the searched words to ad providers. But as of writing, you have no proof that OP did that. Using adsense doesn't mean you're plugging in that data back into Google. What reason does the app developer have to do that, unless they were paid or something to do so?

"Why would a dictionary need ads" well, because someone made the app. And maintains it. And provides it for free in exchange for a tracking cookie. Since the datasets are most likely free, they not possess the ability to even sell it. Who knows, you certainly don't unless you're the author or did the research.

Privacy and security are not absolute. It's a model. It's a series of tradeoffs. To parrot "but m'privacy!" is only doing harm and isn't solving privacy related problems.

[speedgoose]

Why? Why would every website's business model be based on ads and tracking?

Why should Google know that I'm looking at the translation of sexual words in Japanese? Actually, even Google does not want it.

[kalleboo]

> Why would every website's business model be based on ads and tracking?

Certainly there are for-pay services as well, but the absolute vast majority of people prefer to pay with their privacy than with their cash, to the point where starting a for-pay service of that type today without a known brand name behind it is not going to pay your hosting bills let alone put food on your table.

[pessimizer]

Also, there would be absolutely no economic motivation to not exploit the data of the users of a for-pay service.

[Dma54rhs]

Adsense is Google and Google is an American company, you have to be very careful about the words in use. Usually it means a massive blocklist of words, when finding them don't display the ads on that page.

Even bigger newspapers sometimes don't have ads on the more morbid type of news pages.

[Griffinsauce]

I appreciate you're trying to help but this is infuriating.

That puritanical, prudish attitude has done so much damage already, we should stop accepting it as "Americans gonna American".

[Houyhnhnms]

I think Google's problem is that they aren't moral enough. They have no dedication to an ideal of actually caring about people or empathy, or any number of other things. They are greedy, mechanistic, and arrogant. Moral people aren't like that. They don't even uphold American values of liberty, free market, or freedom of speech. If they _were_ moral, a lot of those things would be solved.

[leppr]

What we should accept is that platorms which are not designed to be neutral, won't be.

Is the problem that Google caries with it the puritan American culture, or that too many people which might not share that culture rely on Google?

[fwn]

I think that, in this specific case, this is pretty clear: If there's a culture that does not allow a dictionary to define rape, there's something wrong with this culture.

I'm certain most Americans agree with me here which makes me assume that this specific problem is not one of culture, but probably scale and an absence of responsiblity at Google.

The more general question is interesting though, because it could go several ways. For example:

You could argue that people should anticipate that the platforms they rely on are not under their control (and should maybe act on that).

Or one could argue that the platforms should anticipate the diversity of cultural standards they are catering to by easing their moral rigidity. (For example through a more diverse/decentral company structure, etc.)

Here in Europe, some approach a somewhat similar question with some form of data nationalism, for better or worse. It plays into the same realization that there is an unresolved cultural difference between global platforms and local standards and intends to politically support local initiatives, corporations, etc. That, I think, doesn't solve the problem, but shifts the level of granularity.

Great problem, many angles.

[Zanni]

But that's not the case at all. The dictionary that defines rape is still up and still ranking in Google search results. There's just no advertising allowed on that page. And you could argue that Google is being overly-puritanical, but you could also argue that most of their advertisers don't want to be associated with such words, even in a neutral context.

[fwn]

I think this is two arguments. The first one goes along the lines of: Defunding isn't problematic since it is not literally the only way to earn money.

For me that's equivalent to the idea that deplatforming isn't problematic, because people can still publish elsewhere or, worst case, still talk to other people.

Key to both ideas is to reject the social significance of operational scale as well as the power dimension of gradual influence.

Practically there is quite a lot of power hidden in the leeway and the bigger a company gets the more problematic their influence is for society as a whole.

The second argument, I think, is that there is nothing problematic about content demonetization because we always can trivially construct a plausible advertising interest against any unfashionable content, hence it's not primarily seen as a chilling effect but something innocent that just, by accident, ends up continuously narrowing the conversation towards the presentable and trivial.

I think this argument isn't great. Just because there's innocent intentions at play it does neither show that there are only innocent intentions at play nor that the overall venture does not, in the end, have bad consequences for society.

If our ad-ecosystem would allow advertisers to nudge a TV station towards what news they show, it would be a bad ecosystem for society, even if it's understandable that someone does not want to show their brand next to real talk.

[leppr]

Going from OP's story, his whole website was blacklisted from using Google Ads.

[toshk]

I get you have pages for those words since you are running a dictionary, but do I understand you were running ads for pages with those words specific?

[techdragon]

Why should it matter? It’s a dictionary, words are in it. What will they find objectionable is utterly random and should not be a factor... what people find objectionable enough to hardcode exceptions for can be rather idiosyncratic https://twitter.com/techdrgn/status/1359221506165805060?s=21 for example.

More importantly, the issue is that there’s no recourse in these cases. It’s downright stupid that you can report a dictionary for this and get them permanently banned. If the issue is don’t run ads on naught word pages then google should make this list public and stop ruining businesses by practicing “I’ll know it when I see it” style moderation by algorithmic bots without human oversight.

[toshk]

If you are trying to sell a dictionary I see no reason why a company should allow you to advertise on the word "rape" to do so.

[ajford]

That's like saying Oxford Dictionary shouldn't be able to make money off their dictionary because it contains the word rape.

It's a damn definition, not an article or essay on rape. Facts shouldn't be censored because someone feels it might offend their delicate senses.

[ben_w]

15 or so years ago, eBay appeared to be buying adverts for all noun searches on Google. Certainly when I searched for “plutonium” and “antimatter” and a few other ridiculous keywords, I saw ads telling me I could “buy it cheap on eBay”. I tried this experiment in response to news stories criticising eBay for the same with the nouns “women” and “slaves”.

[Griffinsauce]

Did you think they were actually selling plutonium?

This is the same problem in a different skin: words to not equal intent. When we only judge by words we restrict good faith information and promote bad faith euphimisms that do real harm.

[pelliphant]

I would guess they didn't put different adds on different words, so, those words had the exact same adds as every other word.

[lostlogin]

This is very dystopian. Don’t say the bad word, the machines are listening.

[sofixa]

It's not the machines, it's the advertisers. If you're paying for publicity, you don't want it next to things anyone might find unsavoury. You don't want your products to be associated with X.

[leppr]

In that case the ad networks themselves should provide tools that automatically detect forbidden words and disable ads, instead of arbitrarily enforcing their policy on random small players.

[adpcm]

There are completely legitimate reasons which still cause trouble [0] like description of Broadcast TV episodes with (gasp) murders and killers..

Why am I seeing the words "Hugging" and "Cuddled" in summaries? The TV Calendar is monetised using Google Adsense. As part of Googles drive to be more advertiser friendly (you may know this as the Adpocalyse - it didn't just affect Youtubers) their system is now telling me the Calendar has SHOCKING CONTENT on it, and that ads will be removed from such pages.

[0] https://www.pogdesign.co.uk/cat/frequently-asked-questions.p...

[mrweasel]

I'm sure you're right, but that means that ad money is valued above everything else. That's kinda dystopian.

In the long run, it has to make ad financed content less viable. We'll end up with advertiser friendly content, with no consumers.

[wernercd]

Associated with words defined in a dictionary? How pedantic do you have to be to say "I don't want to advertise with Britannica because their dictionary has the word rape"?

[christophilus]

I think it’s more that you don’t want your ad to show up on a page about rape, but you’re fine with it showing up on a page about joy. Coca-Cola works hard to associate their brand with happy experiences. They’d probably take out ads on the positive words in a dictionary but not the negative ones. If this site was making no distinction, it would lose Coca-Cola as a sponsor. Not really defending Google, but the puritanical explanation isn’t the best one.

[wernercd]

I mean in some aspect I agree in spirit with your point but your point is off topic.

It may be questionable to have your stuff advertised on a page about the history of Germany...

But lets be honest... that's not why these things are being taken down. They aren't being removed because advertisers are complaining. Please show me where anything of that sort is mentioned - either in the OP of this thread or specifically in the article about "buckle-less belts"...

In the example of this thread... they are being removed because someone (presumably a competitor) reported their app for SUPPORTING "rape and pedos". A dictionary with a definition of rape getting removed for "supporting" rape by defining it - while competing dictionaries aren't removed for also defining the same words? Why aren't they getting removed for having a definition of rape that advertisers don't want to be listed on?

Please... show me where I'm wrong that the dictionary application was removed for 'advertiser complaints'... or the original article has its stuff removed for advertisers complaining.

[levosmetalo]

Isn't it obvious that the same people who are actually looking for a translation of some word would not have any issue* seeing that some word in an ad?

* - at least not bigger issue than seeing any ads at all, but those would run ad-blocker anyway.

[411111111111111]

I disagree that his given example is dystopian.

He is specifically taking about pages with Ads on them. Corporations don't want to be associated with said terms, so they wouldn't want to be advertised in that context.

[imagine99]

No, you're missing the point completely. His competitors were using the same data source. The problem here is not ads appearing next to "bad" words, or what and who gets to decide what "bad" words even are, that's a whole other discussion.

The issue here is that Google, Amazon or $bigcorp allows its "blocking" algorithm to be misused, to be weaponized by competitors and that it allows no possibility of human review, that you can't get any human via phone or email to review a completely arbitrary (and often enough plain wrong) decision a random algo has committed (through human instigation or on its own rampage, as it happens often enough). That nobody has to account for and take responsibility for algorithmic decisions ("Sorry, computer says no. Good bye).

I have become so frustrated with this issue (we seem to discuss it every other day on HN) that I've come to think that you should not be allowed to offer services using automation without a clear and working process of escalation to a human in case of trouble. If we allow this behavior to continue and to spread (and look, I get it, doing business this way is very attractive and scales beautifully), things will only get worse.

We'll get to the point where it's "sorry, your car was deactivated because $passenger reported that you used a bad word in his presence. Do not contact us again". Maybe this will wake people up and show them that this way of offering services is broken.

Or "sorry, our algorithm decided you get the death penalty based on 100 reports of people that you did $badthing. chops head off Sorry, don't contact us again." Too much hyperbole? We'll see. Algorithmic determination of prison sentences already exists.

[411111111111111]

You're addressing the example of the opener, not the given example that was called dystopian. So if anyone is missing the point, it's you.

we only know what the opener said about his story, so i dont feel comfortable saying wherever what happened to him was dystopian or not.

[onion2k]

This doesn't explain the fact it was only applied to one business. If it was a simple keyword matcher banning sites that use words on the naughty list then at least it would be fair and equitable stupidity. Google applying it seemingly at random so whether or not you can make an ad-driven living is mostly down to luck makes it much worse.

[lrem]

And this is a passed down requirement, coming from the major advertisers. Google is simply enacting their will to never advertise on anything remotely related to a laundry list of taboos. I have a vague memory of something about this being in ToS (which I read ages ago, before joining the company) and I think we got smarter about this (preventing display on particular content; think like demonetising particular videos on YT).

Source: I work in Google. Not in Ads, but this topic has been discussed in TGIF at some point.