How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads (xlii.space)

299 pointsby xlii8 hours ago179 comments

1970-01-01 7 hours ago

Google has forgotten the plot. A quick tangent story follows: I attempted to add a Tesla Supercharger as it went live to Google Maps. I was the very first to pay to recharge at the new location. The process went something like this:

1st time: Uploaded 4 photos, local business info, current charger prices, and GPS coordinates. Google replied this would be sent to human review. It was rejected within 6 minutes.

2nd attempt: Uploaded 6 more photos, including shots of local business hours and info, and current prices. Rejected in 6 minutes.

3rd time: One photo of a new charger, no description. Rejected in 6 minutes.

4th time: Appended all above details to local business info. It went live within a minute.

5 days later: Supercharger location was added by ??? and included no info at all and the pinpoint was off by 100m.

chrisandchris 7 hours ago

I tried to remove a not-anoymore-existing company I had a business profile before from Google Maps. I was close to giving up, it's such a complicated process that is fully intransparent.

Kudos for you for trying 4 times.

nkrisc 7 hours ago

The lesson here is: don’t do free work for corporations.

wat10000 6 hours ago

I don't even fill out surveys anymore for the most part, unless it gets me a discount or something.

Someone1234 7 hours ago

I've found that if you attach any pictures at all: rejected.

So what I've taken to doing is adding the business without photos (almost always accepted), and then trying to attach the photos later after that goes live (mostly works). But I agree, their process is completely broken, and I doubt they have any incentive to fix it.

trainingonme 7 hours ago

Question here then, is when will we see a competitor enter the market who both cares about getting it right and is actually able to compete with google maps

0xbrayo 7 hours ago

Apple Maps maybe?

mfro 6 hours ago

Apple Maps is much better in my experience. I've never had an update rejected.

mig39 5 hours ago

I've sent in corrections to Apple Maps in Portugal (shopping mall is 1km away from the location on Apple Maps) and Canada (speed camera does not exist). Both were taken care of within a couple of days.

tonyedgecombe 4 hours ago

It took them two years to update my address.

wlesieutre 6 hours ago

At least in my personal experience, Apple Maps is much worse at up to date business information than Google is

But when I've submitted updates to road changes a couple of times, they did go through

AlexandrB 5 hours ago

Apple Maps has Apple Ads and Apple Ads are awful.

carlosjobim 4 hours ago

They are absolutely awful and won't accept even a correction of opening hours - when you are the owner of the business and registered as such with Apple.

macintux 32 minutes ago

I just changed the hours on a business nearby, took ~3 days. Your experience is not universal, but definitely frustrating.

kevindamm 6 hours ago

Having seen the abuse vectors that get thrown at this and similar products, I suspect it is less about whether they care and more about finding a suitable threshold for some arbitrary features, or moments of demand exceeding the available moderators. The repetitive 6 minutes make me suspect there are reports timing out in the moderator queue and the automod doesn't like images or something.

Or, perhaps a part of the process that is two or three teams away, like photo attachments being deemed too large (getting passed from Maps UI through internal task queues to some abuse analysis, or even as early as the frontends that take the request). Plausible, especially as phone photos have steadily increased in size while some thresholds remain ossified.

I'm outside that world now so I can't investigate or effect change.. there used to be people there who care about these things. I suspect there still are.

Even more likely is that other priorities exceed the capacity of the headcount on the relevant teams. I don't know if that counts as the company not caring. It's hard to attribute intent on corporate-scale embodiments. Perhaps that's the root of the problem, I wonder if any collective that reaches hundreds of thousands of members can ever exhibit that. Maps is a huge product that a small competitor could hardly compete with but I'd love to be proved wrong (either on the smallness or considerateness aspects).

jerf 5 hours ago

This is the key to the problem that I think people are missing, possibly because they kind of want to miss it. Google and the other companies hiding behind LLMs and primarily doing it because they can't operate at the scale they do, with the dedicated ecosystems to gaming them that they develop, without this hiding. They can't afford humans to review in a minute or two what scammers can generate in fractions of a second, not even at their scale.

Now, I'm enough of a fan of decentralization and the destruction of these massive sites with way too much control to say that I'm perfectly comfortable saying that they should be mandated to handle these things more sensibly and with more humans. That such a plan would have the side effect of breaking them up into vastly, vastly smaller pieces, causing an technological Cambrian explosion of various sites and diversity resulting in the parasites no longer being able to focus all their firepower on a very small set of targets, is for me a bonus, if not the main goal. However, I, and anyone who agrees with me on this, is rather clearly in the minority.

In the meantime, if we're going to have things the size of Google or Facebook, there simply is no solution where we all get human review whenever we ask for it, because instantly every spammer and abuser will ask for the human review. There just isn't a solution. It looks like there is an obvious solution when you consider "how will Google review this one application" but that's not the landscape Google faces. They have to solve the problem of how to deal with the entire landscape of requests they face at once.

NoDodgeQuestion 3 hours ago

simple, pay 1 dollar human review, if not scammer google refund, else google keep and pay for review

butlike 2 hours ago

This gets rid of the scams but makes all surviving reviews unreliable since they'd all be pay-to-play. It'd be better to just remove reviews altogether at that point.

Which doesn't seem like such a bad idea now that I've said it out loud.

pessimizer 3 hours ago

A competitor would be sabotaged by both Apple and Google, the masters of the only two mobile platforms we are allowed, and who collude.

sfn42 5 hours ago

Why would they fix it when you guys find workarounds to get it done anyway?

I bet they'd care if their data started going stale because nobody bothered to update it.

lukan 5 hours ago

Because most people would stop on the first blockage.

Vinnl 7 hours ago

FWIW, editing OpenStreetMap is very straightforward*, and with that, you're actually contributing to an open data set that everyone is allowed to use, rather than just propping up Google.

(To be fair, on a laptop - I'm sure Google Maps is more straightforward on a phone. But for someone already prepared to invest this much effort, editing OSM should be well within range. And if you just enjoy contributing to maps, for a phone I can highly recommend https://streetcomplete.app.)

spwa4 7 hours ago

Wasn't making street plans from satellite pictures ruled transformative? So if you get an AI to make street plans from Google maps, satellite layer, you're not violating copyright are you?

mtmail 6 hours ago

Bing Maps allows the OpenStreetMap community to trace from aerial_imagery https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing_Maps#Aerial_imagery Google doesn't. How much a tool helps somebody to draw the actual roads varies by editor software used, some have plugins. Using AI in bulk isn't allowed afaik.

LoganDark 6 hours ago

If you obtain the satellite images directly from Google Maps, you can still have problems because you might not have permission to use the data. That's not copyright though.

Chris2048 4 hours ago

> you might not have permission to use the data

Isn't it fair use, like training data?

matkoniecz 4 hours ago

OpenStreetMap commmunity, for variety of reasons, avoids questionable or very novel approaches to intellectual property.

I guess that some may be calling it overdoing in direction opposite than Internet Archive did.

It is at least partially caused by fact that OpenStreetMap Foundation budget is laughably small.

leni536 5 minutes ago

Another reason might be that modifications of the map are entangled and can be hard to revert in case of a dispute. It's much easier for the Internet Archive to just drop snapshots of websites/pages (and they do so, AFAIK).

nostrademons 4 hours ago

I think the issue is the ToU violation, not copyright.

spwa4 3 hours ago

Don't terms of use depend entirely on copyright to work? Without copyright ... why would you need to agree to terms of use to use the software/site/data?

And doesn't that mean that terms of use can never impose restrictions stricter than copyright?

nostrademons 2 hours ago

No. ToU is a part of contract law. Basically the website is providing a service for you. In exchange for your use of that service, you agree to be bound by the terms. This implicitly creates a contract between you and the website, with the terms laid out by the ToU. This sort of implicit contract is legally controversial - normally for a contract to be valid there needs to be affirmative signatures from both parties, as well as consideration (money) exchanged. In the U.S. at least, "click-wrap" (where you must affirmatively click "I agree") and "scroll-wrap" (where you must scroll through the whole ToU before the product unlocks) ToUs are generally considered enforceable, but "sign-in wrap" (where creating an account binds you) and "browse-wrap" (where there's a ToU link) are very dubiously enforceable. But we're talking about Google here, and they make you click through the ToU and say you agree whenever you unbox a new Android device or create a Google account, and then have it apply to all usage of Google services.

Enforcement can be quite challenging because typically if you provide a service over the Internet you don't have any idea who is using it beyond their IP address and any registration data they provide, but this also means that when companies do have a known violator and can show significant monetary damages, their legal departments come down like a ton of bricks.

LoganDark 3 hours ago

Google Maps has commercial licenses to some of their data. Reusing that data without your own license can cause problems you might not like. This mostly applies in cases where it's provable that the data you used would've required a license that you do not have.

CamperBob2 2 hours ago

I would worry about trap streets. A collection of facts isn't copyrightable, and arguably the network of existing streets shown in satellite photos falls into that category. But if I were the photo licensor, I'd be tempted to Photoshop in a few fictional features that could be protected as "creative expression," or some such BS.

cube00 4 hours ago

This is what I do now, got jack of Google throwing my contributions back in my face.

They also only email if your contribution is successful. If it's declined you'll only know by looking inside Google Maps.

Contributing to an open dataset also feels really good.

nhecker 4 hours ago

Between the streetcomplete and everydoor apps, it is very very easy to do almost any OSM map editing on a mobile. Osmand (the offline map & nav app) is also useful for some edits when I don't want to leave that app.

Oh, for the simpler days when not everything required an app.

RobRivera 18 minutes ago

You would enjoy the Always Sunny episode 'mental health day'

embedding-shape 7 hours ago

Had similar experience trying to add a restaurant to Google Maps, our own even. First time, rejected because didn't exist, it did. Second time, they say they sent a letter, and they see that someone received it, no one did. We wait a month, they say they sent another letter, we wait another month. Nothing, and now they stopped replying too. Wait another month, suddenly the restauarant magically exists on Google Maps, with the wrong images, wrong address, wrong open times, but the pin is the right place at least, so I guess that's cool. Took another month or two to force through all the corrections too.

This was made 2-3 years ago, probably worse today. Absolutely horrific experience, and they have zero motivation to fix it, because people like us still want to be on Google Maps, especially if you're not in a super good location, so people can actually find you.

nhecker 4 hours ago

Another path may be to add the business to OpenStreetMap first; I get the impression that Google will scrape changes to OSM and add them to it's dataset. (I've seen several small changes I've made only to OSM get propagated to GMaps a few weeks later. Possibly it's a coincidence, but when the features are exactly the same shape as the ones I drew in OSM, I get suspicious.)

saghm 6 hours ago

I've stopped believing in the accuracy of Google maps after my experience at my last apartment. The ground floor of my building was a deli with an address like 123 4th Ave, and the entrance to the deli was basically facing the corner itself rather than either side of the cross street, and my apartment's address (using the placeholder above as a reference) was 123 4th Ave Apt. 2R. All of the apartments had a separate entrance than the deli that was further down the block past the deli on 4th Ave. The problem was that the cross street (let's call it 5th Street) also had an building with the same number two doors down, and for whatever reason, Google Maps put the address marker for the entirety of 123 4th Ave on 5th Street, and even more annoyingly, they showed the way of getting to my apartment as going into the deli's entrance first, which made no sense because there is absolutely no way to get to the apartments from inside the deli without either going outside or I guess teleporting through the ceiling. When trying to get something delivered to my apartment, the delivery people would often look at Google Maps, see the marker on 5th Street, look for the 123 marker, and then go and ring the bell for 123 5th Street instead of actually going onto 4th Ave and ringing our bell. I tried to contact Google Maps to get this addressed (pun intended), but I was told that they did not have a way to have separate entrances for different parts of the same address, and they told me to get a new separate address from the city. I responded that the city of New York would probably not issue a new address for a building I didn't own and that they could solve the problem by just moving the pin over to the 4th Ave side of the corner instead of the 5th Street side since the entrance pointed out diagonally and no one would have trouble finding it still if they did that. I never got a response, and all of my attempts to submit a correction directly got ignored.

madamelic 5 hours ago

When I lived in Jersey City, I committed the crime of living at a 1/2 address.

Literally nothing could get delivered to me if they used a Google Maps address bar. My address just didn't exist at all to that search bar. It could be found on maps, just not on that little search bar widget.

I ended up just putting my neighbors address and either intercepting delivery drivers or putting in the notes that I was at the half address next door.

Moral of the story: check your potential address BEFORE you move in

saghm 3 hours ago

It's pretty messed up that the only way to "solve" this problem is by treating addresses that Google mishandles as uninhabitable, but I'd be lying if I didn't tell my wife I was concerned about living on a corner again when we were looking for houses to buy after that (luckily, the one we liked most and had our offer accepted for wasn't on a corner, and our plan is to never move again!)

mavamaarten 5 hours ago

Another thing they apparently do is let business owners (e.g. hotels) remove negative reviews because they're "defamatory".

I had a very factual 3-star review on a hotel that was supposedly very quiet, but was super noisy and the AC was not working. And there was literally nobody at the reception at the time of check-out and nobody picked up the phone either. All in all, nothing serious, but worth a review. Purely factual stuff, nothing bad-mouthed, just my experience and three stars.

A few months later the review was removed because it was "defamatory". I was able to get it reinstated by sending them proof of payment to the hotel and proof that I was there. A few months later, it was removed again! That same dance was repeated six times..... What a weird system.

cube00 4 hours ago

I'm surprised you knew it was removed. All my negative reviews appear visible to me when logged in and disappear when logged out.

Only sure fire way I've found is to leave a two star review with no body. One star without a body is also shadowbanned for me.

mavamaarten 2 hours ago

Yeah they sent an official looking mail saying that someone took action against my review and that it was therefore removed.

SoftTalker 4 hours ago

Yet another example of how the incentives work when the platform makes its money with ad revenue. The hotel pays Google for ads and gets favorable search results. If Google then hosts a negative review, the hotel might be less inclined to advertise there. So, only positive reviews get published.

The reviewer isn't contributing to Google's revenue at all, so his honest review is only worth something if it makes the advertisers happy.

autoexec 2 hours ago

> The reviewer isn't contributing to Google's revenue at all,

In theory, good reviews drive traffic to Google because people come to trust it as a dependable source of important information. In reality, Google is big enough that they don't have to care. They figure that people will keep using Google no matter how many times Google lies to you. Seems like they're right because their AI overviews lie constantly. https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/04/analysis-finds-google...

qingcharles 4 hours ago

Friend owns a construction company. Been at same address for seven years. Suddenly their Google Business Page not working right. Google says to delete it and reverify, only solution to try.

Four times my friend had to take a video: you have to start by standing on the street on the nearest intersection, film all the street signs around you to prove your location, then he had to walk down the street, show the gate with the business name on it, the vehicles with the business name on them, open the front door with the business name on it, give them a tour of the working office and show them invoices and bank statements laid out on the desk with their logo etc on it. Three times they came back and said it wasn't enough to verify.

At the same time you can go on swapd and buy GBP verification for $500 and have it verified in an hour by someone who fakes the entire thing.

cube00 3 hours ago

You can bet those videos have been fed into their training.

thesuitonym 4 hours ago

I'm surprised you tried so many times to do Google's job for them.

lern_too_spel 4 hours ago

Did you add a website like https://www.tesla.com/findus?location=daegususeongsupercharg...? It's hard to reject an edit if you have confirmation from the owner.

sixtiethutopia 4 hours ago

If we're sharing problems contributing to google maps: I tried submitting a correction to google maps for the first time a few months back. A cafe was listed in the wrong location by about 100m. Very confusingly putting it on the other side of the station it's in front of in a different building.

I submitted the correct location and it said the change required manual review. Then a few days later I got an email that the change has been accepted. But opening google maps it was still in the same wrong location, and it's still wrong now.

doublepg23 4 hours ago

I'm just sad they never sent me the Google Maps socks :-(

SteveGerencser 2 hours ago

And it's still 100x easier than trying to add your own business or set up a Google Business Profile. Shoot a video from outside showing the buildings around you, show the address and permanent signage on the building (they don't always accept door signs), unlock the door to show that you own the space, then show the interior of the space with things like signage, letterhead, business cards, etc. Then hope that the video was 'good enough' to get a listing.

And heaven help you if you choose to get an office on an upper floor where an elevator ride is required, or you get a space in a building that also has/had a co-working space in it.

drew870mitchell 2 hours ago

Yeah, a while back Google Maps sent out a cheerful "here's all you've contributed" email and i clicked through and found my complete history. It was a graveyard of rejected edits for things like closed streets, wrong business hours, and spam listings (IDK the payoff for the spammers but there's an ongoing cluster of fake hotels and businesses near my old apartment). Seeing the total record of incorrect stuff that i had fruitlessly spent my own spare moments to fix convinced me to quit doing any free work for Google.

ornornor 2 hours ago

Same for business reviews. I’ve given up because mine are always rejected. No reason given, no appeal possible. It’s almost as if I was shadowbanned. So I don’t leave reviews anymore and wonder how many reviews are black holed. Or even how useful the reviews are because the fake reviews are rampant.

OptionX 7 hours ago

Google is the worst offender, but a lot of companies are increasingly hiding themselves behind a wall of automated systems to completely neuter users ability to challenge any decision unilaterally taken by the them. The LLM-age has worsen the situation but it started well before it.

At some point it may be necessary to add the requirement for large companies to have a both human contact point and perhaps a requirement for specifics on account terminations and the like, or at least a way to request them, to the letter of the law.

usernametaken29 6 hours ago

It’s a strategy. Ask RyanAir. They systematically shut down any way to communicate with them, except lawsuits. Tried their chatbot, hotline, email, letter, fax, small claims court (I’m not joking they don’t even care about that). Unless you turn up with a court order and confiscate a plane, they simply won’t give a fuck, and I’m sure it’s a tactic to deter 99% of their problems before they start

sscaryterry 6 hours ago

The fact that this has become acceptable is the real problem.

tcfhgj 5 hours ago

You don't want to harm the economy, do you?

sscaryterry 5 hours ago

I'm sure the people who will get hurt have plenty of money.

ShinyLeftPad 6 hours ago

Same with Amazon Japan. It blocked my account with no way to contact them, never used again.

sensanaty 5 hours ago

British Airways is the same. After they wrongfully didn't let me board my flight I had to escalate to the Dutch aviation authority (ILT, they sided in my favor within 3 days of me sending my letter in, that's how blatantly in the right I was) in order to get them to stop ignoring my emails, and even with the letter from ILT I still had to escalate to CEDR and they still took forever to compensate me what I was owed after legally being bound to do so. Along the way they tried every scummy tactic that exists, including sending me an email to close my CEDR case and they pinky promise they'll compensate me if I do that (which should be HIGHLY illegal but apparently isn't). They even went over the legally enforced time limits! They had 2 months after CEDR made their ruling in my favor to pay me back, and I STILL had to hound them after 2 and a half months to get my fucking money!

If I wasn't as idiotically stubborn as I am, I would've given up a month into the 8 month ordeal it eventually turned into. I guarantee you the vast majority of people wouldn't bother escalating to their CAA, or contact the relevant courts or authorities, which is what these scummy tactics are designed for. They would've been ignored like I did, then they would've given up because what's even the point?

The fact that we're allowing companies to get away with bullshit like this is ludicrous to me

cube00 4 hours ago

>The fact that we're allowing companies to get away with bullshit like this is ludicrous to me.

If they decide to not reply it becomes much more resource consuming to go down the legal road.

I had this with DoorDash, even if you call they just say some specialised team needs to look at it and they'll email you back, surprise, they never do.

anjel 4 hours ago

This isn't laissez faire. Along with useless binding arbitration they precisely lobbied for a marketplace devoid of consumer protections or redress channels. We now live in an age of strict Non-liability.

iteria an hour ago

This is why after 2 good faith attempts, I just report them to the government. It turns out when you report a car insurance company to the state regulatory body, you suddenly know how to contact you. Nope, to bad. Deal with the government. Felt sweet to get a check in the mail from the IRS after resolution.

That was the most recent time, but I've done it a couple of times. I do everything digitally, so it's always easy to prove my case.

Retr0id 5 hours ago

> small claims court (I’m not joking they don’t even care about that)

If they don't show up, doesn't that mean you win by default? (And then you can indeed send a bailiff to seize a plane...)

StilesCrisis 5 hours ago

Yes, you can win in small claims if the other party doesn't show. I suspect a plane might exceed the "small claims" limit though!

Retr0id 5 hours ago

€890 is apparently enough https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/13/bailiffs-bo...

joshuaissac 4 hours ago

The limit applies to what you can claim, rather than what you can impound in enforcing the court order.

sscaryterry 5 hours ago

Depending on the jurisdiction, getting a judgement alone doesn't allow you to have a bailiff enforce it.

ryandrake 4 hours ago

These companies have correctly figured out that customers will still give them money, even if they provide no customer support, are actively hostile to their customers, and only respond to lawsuits. Such a weird timeline we are on! People willingly do business with companies who are actively against them.

dam_jackalopes 4 hours ago

Sometimes you don't get a choice, which is even more frustrating.

We got an admittedly very good deal to switch cell carriers. Part of that deal was receiving a debit card with my phone's trade in value loaded. That card turned out to be digital. I put it on my phone without thinking too much of it. However, given my lack of experience with Apple Pay, I didn't realize that I now didn't have access to my own card number. When I try to use the debit card, I am asked for a PIN that I've never been given an option to set up. When I call the card provider, the automated system demands a card number. Which I don't have.

Granted, it was my ignorance as a user that is responsible for some of this but it's pretty clear that the lack of access and support is intentional.

matkoniecz 4 hours ago

Ryanair admittedly wins on price and regulatory setup in EU provides guarantees that planes are safe.

Yes, Ryanair stole 100 euro from me once, but if next flight is 50 to 250 euro cheaper than competition...

I did some big projects motivated entirely by spite (project was overall helpful, but I would not do this if someone would be less nasty). But I still would use Ryanair.

ben_w an hour ago

> Yes, Ryanair stole 100 euro from me once, but if next flight is 50 to 250 euro cheaper than competition...

I swore off them a few years ago.

Plane started boarding around when it was due to land. We got on, seeing about 3cm of snow around. It went to the runway, whereupon the weather wasn't good enough so the plane waited. And waited. And waited. And then the pilot turned off internal power because we were waiting so long. And then the airspace was closed for the night and every Ryanair plane did what we did and taxied back to the airport and deplaned all of us, creating a queue at the help desk that didn't clear until 8am the next morning, or at least that was when I got to the front having stood up all night.

I was supposed to be back in the office and working by this point.

They told us to check online for rebookings: couldn't do that, their website was overloaded, though I could sometimes get as far as the schedule before it failed on me, and the next official opening was about 5 days later at the start of the queue and 7 days later when I reached the end. Other airlines were now charging £1000 for next-day flights.

Got a standby ticket for a few hours later. Went through security again. It was also cancelled.

At this point I went to my brother's place near Portsmouth, slept enough to recover, took the ferry to France, and took the train from Caen to Berlin, and this was still both cheaper than any replacement flight and faster than waiting for Ryanair to offer another flight that would also be subject to the same general climate.

If the plane had landed on time before it got to us, it would've taken off before the weather got so bad.

Had a very understanding boss at the time. I miss working with him.

nellophonic 6 hours ago

Funny you should say that. I'm not a big Instagram user, but have had an account for years. The company I work for has just started an Instagram campaign, and asked anyone who wanted to, to check out their campaign and give it a like. I did so, and a minute later received this email:

"Your Instagram account has been suspended. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn't follow our Community Standards on account integrity.

If you think that we made a mistake, you have until 8 March 2027 to appeal."

I've now uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport and still apparently that's not good enough for them.

My latest rejection says I have only one more chance. No idea what the transgression was, but apparently there is no recourse.

I guess it's a good thing I don't really give a crap about Instagram in the first place, isn't it.

x______________ 6 hours ago

> I've now uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport and still apparently that's not good enough for them.

That's not a good practice to begin with. Your insta account doesn't matter but your privacy and government-issued documents do matter.

kevin_thibedeau 6 hours ago

> uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport

Sounds like its working as designed. This is why you never cross streams between work and personal life.

WarmWash 6 hours ago

Meta knows you work for them, and sees it as boosting or gaming the algo.

There are a gazillion accounts that do this constantly, and all of them appeal.

deltoidmaximus 5 hours ago

> I guess it's a good thing I don't really give a crap about Instagram in the first place, isn't it.

If you were willing to upload your driver's license and passport for a mere chance at getting back an account you don't give a crap about I'd hate to see what you'd do for one you do care about! Facebook demanded my driver's license at one point out of the blue. I simply abandoned the account, I was already pretty over them at that point anyway. About a year later it let me log in just fine and had forgotten all about how badly it had needed a scan of my license for security. In fact I didn't even remember the password, it just auto logged in from an email link.

You kind of confirm what I suspected though, that they'll just keep asking for more stuff leaving you more exposed and they're under no obligation to actually give you the account back no matter what you do.

I don't use discord but IIRC I read that if your account was banned they were asking for a mobile number to get it back. Instead of getting it back if you complied they just added the mobile number to their ban list so you couldn't make a new account with it.

qingcharles 4 hours ago

The sad thing is if you go through that final step you'll probably receive a permanent ban.

But if you go on Swapd right now and pay a Meta employee $500 while it's still in appealable state you'll get your account unlocked in an hour.

Make it make sense.

macintux 27 minutes ago

> I've now uploaded my drivers licence, a photo of my passport and still apparently that's not good enough for them.

After the recent news about >150 million drivers' license photos being stolen from an ID verification service, I'd be very hesitant to do this for anything I didn't absolutely need. ID theft is a lot easier when someone has a photo of your sensitive documents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49561320

Cthulhu_ 6 hours ago

> At some point it may be necessary to add the requirement for large companies to have a both human contact point and perhaps a requirement for specifics on account terminations and the like, or at least a way to request them, to the letter of the law.

This is already implemented, under the EU's Digital Services Act, you can appeal and get specifics about account terminations - see https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/dsa-out-co...

pjc50 5 hours ago

Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49625933 - is it actually enforced?

tryauuum 3 hours ago

The part where they block the customer support and then you can't do anything is so real

autistic retards at microsoft blocked my account on github and if I go to the customer support portal the only option I get there is to... reinstate my account. And I can't use it also, literally the POST is failing

There is no way to delete my github account in this situation. I've lost track of how long have they been holding my email and phone address hostage. For 6 months already? Damn microsoft people, just delete my account, or I'll advocate for building concentration camps for microsoft employees

trashb 2 hours ago

Making the decision is easy, dealing with the consequences is not.

Toutouxc 7 hours ago

That’s surprising, because in my opinion Google doesn’t care about malicious anything. The other day I had to look for something on YouTube on my dad’s computer with a disabled ad-blocker. I saw like 30 ads in 15 minutes, every single one of them was a scam, literally not a single non-fraudulent ad. Google is full cartoon villain evil at this point.

hnlmorg 6 hours ago

I went through a phase of reporting scams and every single time my report was rejected.

I guess I shouldn’t have expected any differently when their income is dependent on displaying those scam ads.

wat10000 6 hours ago

As long as it makes them money, they're incapable of caring.

Make them liable for what they show, and watch them suddenly discover they are able to care a lot.

WarmWash 6 hours ago

The more you ad-block and tracker block, the more scammy the ads when you take down the guards.

People who never do any sort of blocking are the most valuable ad-targets, and hence get the highest bids when their views are auctioned. They get Toyota, Coke, and Downy ads.

Scam advertisers are bottom feeders and the "advertiser of last resort". Google doesn't really care that much about people with blank profiles, and why would they, these people use their services and contribute nothing back. I don't think Google is vindictive, but it just doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing and mostly go to people who temporarily disabled their ad-block.

skyberrys 6 hours ago

That's interesting to note. So the fact that there is less data about someone makes them a preferred target for the bottom of the advertising bucket. Is there an equivalent in the paper world? I remember those old paper magazines that were constantly about aliens or other conspiracies. Maybe the same effect?

WarmWash 5 hours ago

They aren't preferred targets so much as they are the cheapest targets.

These scam ads are trying to play the numbers game that email spammers do. So they just bid on everyone at the minimum bid. For people with fleshed out ad-profiles, the big advertisers that pay decent money will buy those slots. The auctions almost never fall through.

For people with no profile, no one bids, and the auction falls through to the scammer who will pay $0.00001 for their ad to load.

So ironically, the (second?) best way to remove scammy ads from google is to keep loading ads from google.

AlexandrB 5 hours ago

You're missing the fact that all ads are scammy and I don't want to see any of them. There's nothing that makes a Downy ad more honest or relevant to me than an ad for BigCoin Online Casino - it's all worthless trash that conveys zero genuine information about the product. At least the bottom tier ads are honest about what they are.

WarmWash 4 hours ago

That's totally fine, but then the correct action is to not visit sites that have ads then.

The protest of the ad-economy is boycotting ad based services. Not using those services while blocking the ads. That just sends the signal that there is demand for free shit, which is both obvious and meaningless.

butlike 2 hours ago

It's the best time to do this if you're serious. You can stay off the phone, mitigating all those ads, then simply pay for a streaming platform tier that doesn't show ads and the supermarket end caps are essentially the only advertising you get

carlosjobim 3 hours ago

There's nothing scammy about an ad for a Snickers bar. You can purchase it and it will be what they said it would be. As opposed to real scam ads where you try to purchase something and they steal all your money.

Let's be truthful and honest. It's something to not like ads - I don't like ads - but you have no reason to muddle and distort a sensible conversation.

rootusrootus 5 hours ago

> it just doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing and mostly go to people who temporarily disabled their ad-block

I see where you are coming from, but getting burned by a scam Google advertised to me just pushed me to cutting Google out of my life completely. If it were the occasional bad actor slipping through I might have been more forgiving, but the scam that got to me had become well known for at least the last 18 months. If Google doesn't care enough to keep the well known bad actors off their service, then I protect myself & my family by blocking Google.

Low quality ads should be the bottom of the barrel. Actual criminal activity should not be anywhere in the barrel.

Toutouxc 5 hours ago

That might make sense, but to clarify, my dad has disabled his ad blocker a few months ago by accident, so he’s fair game. An older guy too, I guess that’s why there were so many scams.

WarmWash 2 hours ago

That sucks, I'm not sure why that would be without deep diving your fathers computer. I'm sure you agree these corporations are greedy, and definitely don't like leaving money on the table, so it's odd when their automated systems miss creating a profile. Profiles translate straight to revenue.

I can also assure you that scammers don't payout more than Coca-Cola or Proctor and Gamble for ads.

bogwog 5 hours ago

> doesn't make business sense to put a lot of resources into cleaning up ads that pay google nothing

If we lived in a sane world, Google would be held accountable for every scam they advertise. It doesn't matter if you think someone deserved to get scammed for using an ad blocker, because they never would have been scammed if Google didn't choose to put them in danger for the sake of profit.

"But they can't possibly review every ad before publishing" they say. If that's the case, then they should scale down the amount of ads they allow until it reaches a manageable scale (eg every single ad can be reviewed by a human employee). They might make less money, but it's an expectation we have of nearly all industries (eg commercial truck drivers have to follow extra restrictions in addition to regular speed limits)

ryandrake 4 hours ago

Yes. "At our scale, we can't possibly do X" is a reason to not scale. It's not a reason to dodge doing X.

WarmWash 4 hours ago

If we lived in a sane world, people would simply pay for what they use. Then we could avoid all this confusion, and google would have large (monetary) incentive to protect it's customers.

carlosjobim 3 hours ago

Google and Meta are entirely within their rights to make YouTube, Search, Facebook and Instagram into paid services for all users. Nobody is forcing them to advertise or to participate in criminal fraud with scam ads.

They are heading pretty steadfastly into multi billion dollar lawsuits the way they are going.

tomjen3 5 hours ago

Sometimes I am convinced that there are no good products and so all advertising must happen for bad products.

I mean how often do you see an ad for a product, buy it (not even from the ad itself, maybe from a recommendation from a friend) and you are happy with the product and think the ad was truthful?

xlii 6 hours ago

I made an update, but I'll post also here in comments. It seems that either a human read it or it triggered some trigger, but my account has been reinstated. Thank you, also those who made this issue visible.

On one side I'm happy it happened, on the other, it's a shame that it took complaining on the internet amplified by HackerNews to get this problem fixed...

skyberrys 6 hours ago

Congratulations. They must have been worried about your circular graphic at the bottom of your post!

goldmine0147 4 hours ago

Did they address what the fix was?

xlii 4 hours ago

No. Only got "account reactivated" e-mail.

huhtenberg 7 hours ago

We had that, almost a decade ago.

The cause was that the site was in fact compromised and at a certain very discreet URL it hosted a bunch of pages for legit products that linked to external shady sites. They got in through some PHP hole. Got lucky they didn't do more damage. However as per various Google pages and dashboards no issues were present except being tagged as a malware distribution site.

The remedy was to audit the site, clean it up and then re-submit the appeal. Got the tag cleared in a couple hours.

urbandw311er 5 hours ago

I mean sure that makes sense - but the OP isn’t even getting any information to confirm or deny this. If that’s the case Google should explain the issue.

bede 7 hours ago

FYI https://race-term.com is blocked by NCSC's Protective DNS service using my UK University's connection. Are you sure your domain is not blacklisted somewhere?

rozab 7 hours ago

Looking forward to the update where his vibe-coded site has been compromised and is being used as a C&C server

Snoddas 7 hours ago

I hope so.

It's hard finding a good Command & Conquer server nowdays

poody 6 hours ago

Natch!

rkachowski 6 hours ago

According to the article it's a static site served from cloudflare. That would be quite the compromise.

titularcomment 3 hours ago

I recommend you read the authors' other two latest articles.

taco_emoji 7 hours ago

My work web filter is blocking it as well due to "newly registered and observed domains", but I don't think Google should be using that as a heuristic.

charcircuit an hour ago

It is very common for malware to use recently registered addresses. They absolutely should be using it as a heuristic.

bede 5 hours ago

Seems not to be blacklisted, but I see the domain is only 22 days old, so that'll be it I imagine.

2b3a51 4 hours ago

Just a data point: UK Mobile Broadband resolves the product site fine. (I have not registered with my credit card so the 'adult and malicious site' filter is still in place). As other posters have mentioned perhaps the name itself is triggering some kinds of filtering?

andriamanitra 7 hours ago

I'm guessing "race term" got automatically flagged because it can be understood as "word or expression that refers to a racial group or to race/ethnicity" i.e. an euphemism for a slur.

xlii 7 hours ago

Lol. Haven't thought about that. Now I'll have to ponder shouldn't I add another domain to the mix.

tgv 5 hours ago

Probably a regexp. Easiest to implement. Clbuttic.

mcast 6 hours ago

When you search "us passport" or "tsa precheck" on Google, you constantly see promoted ad results impersonating government sites (ie passportvisarush.com or easegov.com) extracting and selling your PII (social security number, etc) from your application.

I've reported the ads multiple times, but new ones still end up being promoted. I'm sure these companies have mined and sold thousands of SSN/address/DOB info from unsuspecting users.

nekusar 5 hours ago

Doesnt help, when official government websites ( usps.com ) are on the commercial suffix, and not .gov

qingcharles 4 hours ago

Yeah, USPS is a weird one.

We need a .QUANGO domain for stuff like that :p

ButlerianJihad an hour ago

I hope you realize that there are legitimate third-party services which assist with passport applications and filing paperwork, generally in the capacity as a courier. Similarly, in my state and others, there are third-party services which operate as storefronts in under-served communities, that provide services as the DMV office would.

So it is unclear how you determine that they are definitely scams, unless you have attempted to trace each one through referrals or official links from the government office they are representing. Some don't have any link, though: the passport assistance services may be operating independently as middlemen. Is it worth paying someone to assist you with paperwork? Do you only speak Laotian?

In general, for any government service, there are usually middlemen who'll assist you in filling out paperwork and getting approved. That includes Medicaid and the IRS and Social Security. Of course, some of those assistors have licenses, or represent a facility. The passport agencies may not need any bona fides like that.

On the other hand, if a service is advertising "TSA PreCheck" services (and not simply intercepting your keywords to advertise unrelated stuff) then there are only three authorized partners: IDEMIA, CLEAR, or Telos. But I bet you that your keywords are simply triggering some adspam.

hermitcrab 3 hours ago

I sympathize. My Google Adwords account (that had been running continuously for 10 years at that point) got suspended for (I shit you not) hyperlinking to another domain. I believe it was due to a very poorly trained contractor. The whole sorry saga is here:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2015/03/04/google-bans-hyperl...

xlii 2 hours ago

Mind-boggling.

A joke comes to my mind:

A man tells his friend "You know, I don't think we can be friends anymore. Some money went missing from our house.." - "What?! Me? I'd never seal money from your house!" - "Yeah, we found that money, so that's not a problem. But you know... the whole thing left a sour taste."

hermitcrab 3 hours ago

We are entering a Kafkaesque world where all powerful companies are the gatekeepers, but there is no chance to talk to a human to appeal their decisions. Your only hope is if a) you have an inside contact or b) you can create enough stink on social media.

skeptic_ai 3 hours ago

We will soon use ChatGPT Astra to talk though shit to get out problem solved.

hermitcrab 3 hours ago

Your faith is touching.

pessimizer 2 hours ago

We reached that years ago. We're entering a world in which there is no chance to talk to a human to appeal their decisions, and if you complain about it your social media account will be suspended, you will be questioned by police, and your child will be expelled from their private school.

de6u99er 7 hours ago

Google doesn't care. They advertise online betting to kids, because those platforms now have some "free" online games.

dakolli 6 hours ago

Uhhh.. They actively particpated in the sluaghter of over 10k children in the last two years and fired all their employeess who spoke up regarding it.

stronglikedan 3 hours ago

oh boy, that's quite the stretch...

WarmWash 6 hours ago

The real question is why you would spend money to advertise to probably the most advertising adverse, and ad-bloc literate, demographic?

lorey 7 hours ago

Had the same issue. In the end, getting pulled into some Google Ads sales funnel and them solving the issue through internal tickets helped. Spent $1000 on useless ads in the process, but have an "unlocked" account now. Really disappointing customer experience.

soltanov 8 hours ago

Google treats its customers so blindly. in short, Google is not user centric company at all.

astrashe2 7 hours ago

Google treats its customers like a monopolist.

thisisauserid 7 hours ago

You should take your ad viewing elsewhere in protest.

someguyiguess 7 hours ago

Yep. Straight to the pie hole.

freediver 7 hours ago

wave

thesuitonym 4 hours ago

Used to be you'd say Google was bad because the users weren't the customers, the advertisers were. Nowadays even the advertisers aren't the customers. They only customers Google has anymore are the shareholders.

GoToRO 3 hours ago

Add facebook too. No problem for them to accept money from websites that were reported as fraud. They pause it a little then they are right back at it.

shevy-java 28 minutes ago

The thing is: I don't see any ads. So I won't see his advertised malicious ad either, nor the software. All gets blocked. All must be blocked. That's why everyone needs hero blockers such as Ublock origin and other solutions here.

By the way - which company removed ublock origin from Chrome? Could it have been a certain adCompany that does daily deeds of Evil?

notatoad 3 hours ago

this is what regulatory failure looks like. There's no downside for google to do this, because nobody is going to hold them accountable. Nobody is telling them they have to explain their actions, and it's easier for them not to, so why would they?

maerF0x0 5 hours ago

I noticed this around homebrew install style key words. People blindly copy and paste a shel script that is given sudo on a fresh install. Seems pretty ideal setup for bad guys.

cbeach 5 hours ago

Yup, I was had by a malicious fake Homebrew site that had the #1 spot in Google thanks to it being an ad (a key fact that was very unclear at the time of browsing Google)

throwawayffffas 7 hours ago

Check if chrome flags your site as malware. If it does, hire a lawyer and sue them for defamation.

faeyanpiraat 7 hours ago

Neat terminal, I've been building the same thing in my free time but haven't reached a point where it is complete / stable enough for being my daily driver.

Have you (anyone) actually sticked to the way of working this enables, or is this just a gimmick?

xlii 7 hours ago

This is my driver since it become usable. I have 140 terminals on 2 workspaces. Grouped by project/task. I know, I'm the author, so I'm biased, but I love working using it.

GrinningFool 4 hours ago

Any chance we'll see this for linux?

xlii 3 hours ago

Yes, and since multiple people expressed interest in Linux it might come much sooner than later.

I kept macOS surface isolated and constrained on purpose (and also have my own rendering engine) so it should be rather easy to make it run on Linux. The biggest obstacle is that it's hard for me to test (I have a gaming rig on Linux, but I don't use it often lately..).

monegator 7 hours ago

Ah yes, i got an account suspended on play console due to inactivity. The new help system has been "improved" in the sense that it is directly inside play console, so of course i can't appeal or request to reinstate or transfer the app ids to a new account, because THE CURRENT ACCOUNT IS CLOSED AND I AM ALWAYS REDIRECTED TO A PAGE THAT TELLS THAT THE ACCOUNT IS CLOSED.

So i tried appealing using another console account. After about a week i got the usual automated response stating that my previous report was auto-translated into english (i wrote it in fucking english of course) and some generic babble about what happened.

To which i replied that i have no problem opening a new account using the old email, but i'd want to know beforehand if i'd keep, or how to retain, the package IDs so it's not going to be a fucking painful mess to tell customers to reinstall.

And of course i got the same autogenerated email, with a couple new lines summarizing the first part.

I feel for the author, it is literally impossible to talk to a human there.

sspiff 6 hours ago

They are begging you to spend your ad budget elsewhere.

qingcharles 4 hours ago

I would too. Google Ads are the absolute quickest way to lose your shirt. You need masses of experience (or a straight scam) to run a profitable ad campaign. Their agents will hound you to the ends of the Earth the moment you start reducing your spend.

skylurk 7 hours ago

> You can position and resize terminals freely instead of squeezing everything into a uniform grid

yes please!

xlii 6 hours ago

If you decided you like it enough to get a license code HNMAGIC will get you 50% off (valid for 24 hours for anyone to pick :))

customguy 7 hours ago

I really wonder about these youtube ads for these (non-existing, AI slop) incel games... it's always the same pattern, a man is exploited and/or rejected by a woman who gets everything for free he has taken from him, is spat on and whatnot, then starts his quest to fight the demoness or whatever. Are there any articles about those and the companies behind them?

fyltr 4 hours ago

non-existing? if we mean the same ads (mainly the cartoonish knight with bluish-black hair, though I've seen a caveman variant from another game) the game does exist. I played it about ten years ago, back when their ads were still the puzzles you supposedly need an IQ of 300 to solve. (kudos for keeping up with the times, I suppose.) /s it's a gacha money-pump, but I don't think the developers are strictly guilty of false advertising: from memory, the game does include one minigame or another reproducing the ad's loop.

classified 2 hours ago

In the good old days, twitter was the replacement helpdesk for the monster corporations. If your issue went viral there, it would suddenly be magically fixed, when the day before it was completely impossible and out of the question. YC should send Google an invoice for services rendered.