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

155 points by pwned1 4 years ago | 46 comments

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 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago | |

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

Scoundreller 4 years ago | | |

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.

IshKebab 4 years ago | | |

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 4 years ago | | |

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.)

helloguillecl 4 years ago | | |

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 4 years ago | |

>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 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago | |

Could you explain the email part? Thanks!

inglor_cz 4 years ago | | |

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.

throwaway146384 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago | |

> 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 4 years ago | |

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

missedthecue 4 years ago | |

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

oneplane 4 years ago | | |

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.

tluyben2 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago | |

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 4 years ago | |

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 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago | |

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 4 years ago | |

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 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago | |

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 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago | |

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 4 years ago | | |

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 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago |

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 4 years ago |

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

slig 4 years ago | |

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

pixl97 4 years ago | | |

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

fireflymetavrse 4 years ago |

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

acd10j 4 years ago | |

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

fireflymetavrse 4 years ago | | |

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