I actually just got my Google Ads account suspended because I forgot to update my billing address before adding a new card.
The suspension was for "suspicious billing activity", tried appealing twice with the correct billing address, and was told the suspension is final (some automated email) both times.
They won't take my calls because the account is suspended, which leaves me not being able to advertise on the #1 service to do so.
It's completely unacceptable, especially for a business in their position. One tiny mistake leads you to a lifetime of suspension to a service vital to almost any business.
- Having friends inside google does not help (I suppose at some level they can, but L5/L6 engineers aren't enough)
- Creating a new account with a different credit card does not help. Subsequent accounts they can link back to you will also be banned
- I haven't found a solution yet, except for keeping all of my new projects outside of google (no google analytics, no google search console (which obviously still allows your site to be indexed) no gsuite. That way if I never need google advertising, a co founder can pick it up and google has no way to trace the company back to me.
no gsuite is probably key - I'm thinking of terminating all my gsuite accounts simply due to no desire of having my business basically be terminated due to some stupid algorithms maintained by google's idiots.
Keep G Suite, but buy your own domain (whatever.com) so you are in total control. If they ban you, just change DNS records to point to zoho or some other provider.
Which is good practice anyway, just in case of an outage, or someone hacking your account, or whatever.
But I agree, too risky. Just stay away from Google. Cons outweigh the pros, for me personally. The only thing I used it for was sheets, docs and gmail. LibreOffice is more than adequate for me, and far better than the Google alternatives.
On the plus side, they are helping you remove your dependencies on Google! If you ever decide you’re done with them it’ll be easier to cut them out of your life.
When I was in college I ran a forum that got some decent traffic. I put Google Ads on my site and after a few months had enough money to pay for school books. I went to cash out and they suspended my account claiming click fraud and stole the money.
This is how google has always operated, and it's one of the reasons why their near monopoly on advertising is horrible for everyone.
Exact same situation here. I don't need Google Ads so it doesn't really affect me, but I'm terrified that some day in the future it will come back and kick me in the ass somehow when some algorithm (sorry, "AI") decides that it has some significance so I get kicked out of email, YouTube, Maps, Google docs, etc
I also had my account suspended due to a failed payment method.
I was just exploring Google Places API to see if I could integrate it with a side project. The signup process claimed that it only needed a credit card to "prove that you're a financially capable human," which makes sense (and it also said that it would not charge your account until you gave it express permission), so I happily agreed. Despite this claim, Google apparently requires an active, chargeable card at all times, from account inception until you die. Failure to do so will result in terminating your account.
Whatever, let them terminate the account. Google's public favor is in a tailspin, and I can get the data I need from FourSquare at a fraction of the cost.
Don't hold your breath, you're not the only one. They claimed I clicked on my own ads which was never the case, of course there is no way to appeal. They stole my money because yes, they still owe me money, these punks sent me a 25€ voucher to buy ads, like it solves anything.... I will never ever trust them or rely on any of their services like the Google Cloud Platform.
Google settled a case like yours for $11m on the grounds that it would be too expensive, after four years of fighting, to prove they didn't steal your money lol.
My wife's paypal account has been suspended for 10 years now, for some utterly ridiculous reason I've long forgotten. After a year of trying to persuade them to un-suspend it, we gave up.
They're regulated. The problem is that our threshold for bad monopolistic behavior is that customers suffer, and it can be damn hard to prove when it's indirect, like in this case - how much do customers suffer from not having access to the app in question? But even then, when you aggregate all that across the entire store, I'd say that there's that aspect as well.
Back when our anti-monopoly legislation was first introduced, that wasn't the case - monopolies were busted just as well because they did something anti-competitive, even if that was presented as benefiting their customers (and even if it really did, short term).
Regulation isn't a silver bullet. Maybe a little bit for certain things. But, You'll never be able to develop enough rules to make sure everyone is treated fairly.
the best way out of this is to educate users and start getting them to use other search products. we need more diversity of choice.
Google Play is not a monopoly! It takes one checkbox in Settings to open the floodgates to any app (or app store) you want, and device manufacturers (such as Amazon) can ship their own app stores pre-enabled if they want.
Actually, alternative app stores can make use of that as well. The installer app needs to be installed as a system app with proper permissions, and it will them be able to background install apps on demand just like Google play does. The F-Droid Privileged Extension[0] does just that. While you need to be rooted to add/register such apps, that's not a problem for device manufacturers.
If you open an APK it prompts you to go right to Settings and enable it. Actually easier than installing Firefox on a brand new Windows Surface, which requires an MS account to enable unknown app sources.
> One tiny mistake leads you to a lifetime of suspension to a service vital to almost any business.
This really is where Google might be too big...
Since Google is such a force, and they don't have time to support or help people/companies lost in the algorithms, maybe competition is the only thing that can solve this because most companies are too small/medium for them to care.
Lots of these systems are probably well intentioned and risk averse by default, but in the end have too much influence on the market as a single point of failure.
Highly concentrated systems with single points of failure that fail on a large scale are bad, but even worse is highly concentrated systems that randomly get in an error loop but too small to correct, only here it is small/medium companies stuck in that algorithm purgatory vortex.
Why not open a new account, or release a new copy your app using a different namespace? I mean it is an inconvenience, but we aren't exactly as powerless as is described in the article.
Unfortunately not, because it could succeed long enough for their business to get some success, hire people, have assets, debts, responsibilities, customers, and then Google cuts off their oxygen.
Of course, Google could do the same to ANY of us who end up depending on them. The only real solution is whatever makes you not significantly reliant on Google.
It's worth mentioning that GDPR gives people rights to allow them to appeal automated decisions, and receive a clear explanation of how the decision was made:
I'm not sure if it'll help for the author of the article, as Google's decision is clear, just their logic in unfair, and I assume they are talking about a business, not a personal, account.
>One tiny mistake leads you to a lifetime of suspension to a service vital to almost any business.
One sometimes needs a lawyer to deal with the complexity of government laws. It seems like soon there will be a small thriving job market for "googlawyers" -- people who will earn they bread and butter by getting through the Google's bureaucracy.
The suspension was for "suspicious billing activity", tried appealing twice with the correct billing address, and was told the suspension is final (some automated email) both times.
They won't take my calls because the account is suspended, which leaves me not being able to advertise on the #1 service to do so.
It's completely unacceptable, especially for a business in their position. One tiny mistake leads you to a lifetime of suspension to a service vital to almost any business.