You make your peace with the fact that you'll have a certain rate of false positives, where you'll intentionally lose also some legitimate business in order to keep most of the "ecosystem" cleaner. Perhaps an unsatifying answer, but that's it.
It's not a situation like putting someone in prison where "beyond all reasonable doubt" is the appropriate mark; you can refuse to do business based on mere suspicion that may be mistaken. There's a limit where extra investigation or appeals is too costly compared to just accepting the lost revenue, and for small-scale customers, that limit is quite low. With fraud detection, you have to balance the tradeoff between false positives and false negatives, but you'll certainly have both.
In Google’s case, this is not enough. They exert too much control over the online advertising industry that it’s simply unfair to ban anyone with no explanation and recourse. It should be illegal. It’s almost impossible to effectively monetize an app or website using ads without including various Google technologies and services, and that’s Google’s own doing; they’re the ones who purchased all of those companies and integrated their own products in a way that makes them inseparable.
We viewed them as a cost of doing business. Some small accounts got nuked. :shrug: If we had to have humans investigate everything, and produce reports / interpretations that nuked customers found satisfactory, we wouldn't have been willing to service accounts under probably $40k/year.
And keep in mind the ecosystem is filthy with fraud, particularly on the low end. There very much are groups of organized thieves actively exploiting adtech.
And as @PeterisP says... look, we're not a court. We're a private business that is refusing to do further business with someone. Our right to do this was very clearly explained before the beginning of any relationship, and agreed to by that someone. If that someone doesn't like it, their recourse is to not do business with us.
> And as @PeterisP says... look, we're not a court. We're a private business that is refusing to do further business with someone. Our right to do this was very clearly explained before the beginning of any relationship, and agreed to by that someone. If that someone doesn't like it, their recourse is to not do business with us.
So you are basically justifying Google behavior. You are not a court, that's right. But every ban process should be easily and quickly prosecutable to settle the issue right in a court.
Obviously real fraudsters will never appeal like that, because they know they would incur in even bigger problems.
> Obviously real fraudsters will never appeal like that
I now know you have no experience at all fighting online fraud. People, um, lie.
On a serious note, if you require a prosecutable ban process -- whatever that means, because prosecuting is something the government does -- where you'll end is my original point. Ad companies will refuse to do business with publishers that aren't above some minimum threshold. My guess is $40k a year. Because remember eg google or whoever keeps about 1/3 of that money, so a $1k/mo minimum to staff humans and deal with arguing feels ballpark reasonable.
Separately, I'm not justifying anything. I'm explaining the economics driving behavior. If you want to be mad at me for behavior I don't control or influence... :shrug:
People have this misconception that ad networks some how get joy from turning people off for no reason. Every ad shown is a penny in their pocket, even if its 100% fraud. When advertisers start asking for money back is when investigations are launched and accounts are terminated.
There are literally no false positives. It may be fraud, it may be the ad is too close to a back button and gets accidently clicked, it could be the ads don't display right. But at the end of the day, it is a revenue decision.
It's not a situation like putting someone in prison where "beyond all reasonable doubt" is the appropriate mark; you can refuse to do business based on mere suspicion that may be mistaken. There's a limit where extra investigation or appeals is too costly compared to just accepting the lost revenue, and for small-scale customers, that limit is quite low. With fraud detection, you have to balance the tradeoff between false positives and false negatives, but you'll certainly have both.