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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

https://www.cannonade.net/blog/why-i-turned-off-google-adsen...

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

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.

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

yes please!

Google is not great but we all can’t have nice things because of thieves and criminals.

it used to be common but more of an exception, but now it feels like everything is a scam

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

I'm now a huge supporter of any initiative or law that attempts to break Google's stranglehold on online advertising. They have placed too much responsibility in their broken automation, and they are a bad faith actor in the space.

Also why use Google Ads in the first place? Given that HNers and technical users are extremely allergic to that?

People are people, life happens, job happens, but unfortunately some of these roles have real external impacts on other people. One demotivated employee at a Google* can radiate their unhappiness onto great number of others because of the circumstantial power they have at their disposal.

At the very least they could copy & paste the exact reason for the ban, but no, they'll drag people through mud and automated replies, etc.