Ask HN: Banned from adsense for simply logging in to another account

[pwned1]

I had a google adsense account that was producing a nice amount of income for years. I logged in to another google account that didn't have an adsense account and suddenly I got an email that my adsense account was flagged as a duplicate and I was banned. I tried their "appeal" but of course some robot made a decision to keep the ban. Looking for some help -- any help at all, to try and get my adsense account back. My email address is in my profile. I'm hoping some benevolent googler can help out.

[ilamont]

How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or denied access to an important service, either through no fault of their own or by an innocent action, such as the OP logging into a second Google account that doesn't even use Adsense?

No warning.

No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy."

No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative.

No recourse.

There needs to be a technology bill of rights, not just for people dealing with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, but also the myriad other technology operators which can disrupt our lives in an instant with some poorly programmed process or unanticipated edge case. Ultimately, the OP or my non-tech savvy employee or my mother should be able to get real answers and/or help from a human being when wronged by Google, a telco, or the local bank.

[axiosgunnar]

How long until people get the message not to use Google products?

[Scoundreller]

Main issue is that they control a lot (most? 99%?) of the video and webpage ad market. Dunno why nobody else is getting into those markets.

If you're not running a multi-million $ site, you're especially screwed for alternatives unless you're selling something and can get affiliate revenue.

If Bob wants to put up a video fixing vintage washing machines, he'll have to do it out of 100% altruism, because Google is going to take all the ad revenue.

[tarboreus]

If by some miracle you managed to start a successful business in that area, they would just buy you. Even with the new anti-trust scrutiny, they have no trouble buying small companies and startups.

[IshKebab]

Yes I'm sure you will make a lot of money releasing Android games on the Amazon app store and advertising them on Bing and Vimeo.

Google have a fair number of monopolies. Just not using Google products is obviously not a viable option in many situations.

[pas]

Why not? Probably the cost of these occasional bans are nothing compared to the reach of the ad network.

(Not that I recommend using it. I recommend the old fashioned ways of knowing where your banner ends up. And make sure it doesn't become one of 344 on some random site. So build partnerships, etc. Yeah, it sucks, it's work.)

[black_puppydog]

You're arguing with an "average return" but as a single person you only play once, or in any case a small number of times if you're willing to sign up for new accounts. So the variance of your results, paired with the impact of an unfavourable outcome, should probably figure into that decision...

[helloguillecl]

I think you'll see similar problem in other similar growing or already big tech companies. It is important in that case to have the user's rights protected at a general -national- level.

[vasili111]

>Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook

Does the Amazon belongs to that list? All I have heard about Amazon support was only positive. Did you had different experience with Amazon?

[inglor_cz]

This really sounds like some ancient Forbidden City where you had no recourse against the emperor's decrees unless you bribed some court eunuch to get you a hearing.

Google et al. are feudalism reborn. Including the pressure to turn surviving yeomen into vassals (see, e.g. e-mail deliverability).

[pas]

Could you explain the email part? Thanks!

[inglor_cz]

If e-mail from your domain cannot be delivered to Gmail mailboxes, your domain isn't worth much. Many people, including e-shop owners etc., "solve" this by taking up a Gmail account.

But that means that you become their subject in a certain sense. Lose the account, and your livelihood is threatened.

[seanw444]

I despise it. At this point, I don't care if my email doesn't get seen. I'll tell people to whitelist my domain if they care to see my emails. For really really urgent stuff I'll maybe use a throwaway Gmail account on the off chance.

[pas]

Thanks!

In my experience running a small hosting provider (we had a client that sent every month a newsletter to a few tens of thousands of addresses), gmail was not the problem, fucking outlook.com and hotmail and other Microsoft domains were.

[throwaway146384]

Google should hire someone to fix their automatic account blocking system. It doesn't seem like their current engineers are able to prevent such false positives or create a working system for appeal. They can even use Adsense to advertise for such a position.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

> It doesn't seem like their current engineers are able to prevent such false positives

Perhaps we should advertise to Google that this costs them money.

I for one do not use or participate in most Google things because I don't want the one service I use messed up.

The whole "tie everything together" approach they took back in 2010 or so is wrong from the get-go. If I'm in Gmail and use the same browser to go to to YouTube, I'm forced to use the Gmail id, and if I "log-out" in YouTube, my email session is also closed ... say what?

[ffhhj]

Google noticed humans make mistakes, why employ error-prone humans when Google can automate mistakes. Google wise, pats itself beep beep

[missedthecue]

or simply hire a hundred customer support reps to monitor an email. That would cost like 10 engineers.

[oneplane]

They would have to handle over a million customers each. At Google scale this becomes very costly, and they are after all a data mining company, not a company that supports people.

[missedthecue]

I work a customer support job for a tech company and on my team we handle about 2 million customers each. The key is that not every customer needs live human support, and among those who do, they don't all need it at the same time.

Of course, you could say they could hire 200 or 300 or 500, the point is that it would be a relatively inexpensive way to solve the problem and increase customer satisfaction.

[logicalmonster]

> At Google scale this becomes very costly

At Google scale, it’s not just very costly, but basically impossible to provide traditional customer service. You’d have every wackjob or confused user needing help with any conceivable tech issue calling them even when it doesn’t have anything to do with google products. I run a couple of businesses having nothing to do with computers and I get confused people all of the time leaving messages asking about some yahoo email or android issue they’re dealing with. I have no doubt that Google itself would be flooded with a billion calls within about a month if they actually had a human phone number for free support.

Luckily the solution for this has already been suggested: charge some fee for premium human support. Charge whatever is necessary to make this feasible and reduce calls to a manageable volume.

Doing so has its own set of problems of course, but I believe that desperate people would rather deal with paying some fee rather than risk losing their business or digital life over a legitimate issue.

There are literally businesses that shut down because of Google’s inability to provide human support. Lives are severely impacted by google’s refusal to provide this.

Unfortunately we’re probably never going to get this from Google because their engineers huff their own farts and think that their algorithms are close to perfect. They don’t really get that the insignificant false positives they think they get are actual human beings.

[big_youth]

>At Google scale this becomes very costly

They made $24 billion in profit in Q4 alone.[0]

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/technology/google-alphabe...

[djbusby]

Oh no! Costs! Won't somebody think of the innocent Capital!

Also, not 1MM customers each - only folks having issues - that's a small subset of all users.

[rad_gruchalski]

> They would have to handle over a million customers each.

Pretty good incentive to minimise false positives.

[jjulius]

And how do you mine, and profit from, data that someone stopped giving you after the lack of customer support pushed them away from your service? Improved support = improved customer retention = more data to mine.

[tluyben2]

I had mine banned after years of revenue; I still do not know why; I just got an email saying ‘suspicious activity’. I emailed with a polite text asking why this was and I received, of course a nice ‘this is final’ email. This ended that startup attempt. People can say ‘do not depend on Google’ but no one pays anywhere close to the same amounts; the income allowed us to grow and build towards a paid SaaS offering while others were paying just enough to maybe buy a coffee every few days. The difference was that big. So we closed that company and moved on.

Still no idea why though. At the time people online kept going for all kinds of conspiracy theories. Like there were over 20 people I spoke with who got their account banned for ‘suspicious activity’ when they reached 15k$/mo. Mine was exactly cut off at that point as well. I don’t know; it did teach however me I will never do anything ad based; it was a long time ago and ads weren’t considered evil, although after this I definitely considered them as such.

[smsm42]

You were picking coins in front of a steamroller, and you ended up run over. Sad to say, but that's an expected outcome of such an activity. I wish more people realized it before, not after.

[bcrl]

At some point we need a content producer bill of rights to handle this. I guess treating people decently is no longer of value for any of the big tech firms. We're just costs to be minimized.

[gtsop]

How many years away are we from GARaaS (google account recovery as a service)? "You pay, we scream on social media to get some googler to respond"

[filmgirlcw]

This probably already exists but is bundled in as some sort of managed service offering.

The hardest part of offering something like this, I would think, would be that if you were to be the one offering the service, you would likely need to be very selective about who you brought on, because trying to appeal on behalf of too many scammers (the vast majority of complaints -- though not OP) would get you ignored and ruin the whole thing. That, of course, is assuming that someone running a GARaaS service wasn't a scammer to begin with.

[sli]

For all practical purposes, paid Google accounts getting access to real support is already that. You get some other things for that money, but I doubt people that are paying for their Google account are unaware that they may need that access to support to save their livelihood some day when a Googlebot drops the hammer for an unknown reason.

[smsm42]

OK I have a startup idea. A matchmaking service between people working for FAANG and people whose accounts have been banned by bots with no recourse. Of course FAANG workers would be anonymous, for obvious reason, and the matter of compensation arrangement would have to be taken offline, because you know... But otherwise it seems to be an area ripe for disruption. Like Uber for bans, you know. Who's with me to apply in the next round of YC startups?

[ffhhj]

At least they got their account banned after performing some action, I got mine blocked after 3 years of no use, it was just standing there without money or ads.

[yucky]

I started receiving warnings about mine, which has been unused as far as I know for maybe 10 years. Out of curiosity I tried to login to that account to see what site was using my old adsense code and was unable to login without adding a phone number, despite verifying through my backup email account.

No thanks Google.

[Scoundreller]

Get an llc and an Adsense account with that, followed by a big find and replace for your Adsense ID?

Seems like google thinks you have another Adsense account, so remove the “you” from the equation if you cannot find which other google account that might be.

[ganeshkrishnan]

They will ban the LLC and any/all employees in it. Google follows the "connected account" policy where they will ban any related accounts.

One of my colleague got his account banned when he lent his laptop to his acquaintance who had a banned play dev account.

[Scoundreller]

I can’t tell if op has been globally banned, or if they shutoff the (supposed) duplicates and they can’t find the (supposed) original account.

[wgj]

Can someone describe what it means to have a "duplicate" adsense account? I would have thought if you had a second account, there would just be two accounts and no problem.

[phendrenad2]

The good news is, all of these false positive bans are diluting Google's ability to sell ad spots to advertisers. It opens the door to disruption by a leaner ad network.

[conradfr]

I'd really like to see the appeal source code :)

[slig]

    @app.route("/appeal")
    def appeal():
        return "<p>Computer says no.</p>"

[pixl97]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue

[fireflymetavrse]

I have multiple google accounts with one of them having adsense and never had problems.

[acd10j]

How will this comment help OP, If you have not faced issue does not means OP is not facing same issue.

[fireflymetavrse]

Not many you can do by commenting here anyway. Just wanted to point out that something else may be the reason of the ban.

[terrycody]

I am wondering why people downvote you, because use multiple google account is normal, why ban? I guess OP didn't provide the whole story? Maybe.