“While these AI models are very, very important to us and have delivered a series of impressive improvements, we still have humans involved throughout the process,” said Alex Rodriguez, a general manager for Ads Safety at Google, in a virtual media roundtable.
This is either corporate doublespeak or an outright lie. I've seen local small businesses attempt to sign up for adwords and merchant center only to have the account auto-banned instantly and they specifically say the decision is final, non-appealable and applies to any other attempt to create an account.
Same with MSFT Ads and Facebook. If the AI flags you, even if a false positive, there is no human capable of reviewing or overriding that decision - by design.
> Importantly, large-scale suspensions sometimes spark concerns over how fairly a company applies its rules. Google said it offers an appeal process that includes human reviews to ensure it took “appropriate action.”
> “Oftentimes, some of our message wasn’t as clear and transparent about specifics, about what the rationale was, or reasoning, and sometimes that left the advertiser a little more confused. We ended up updating a bunch of our policies as it related to that, a bunch of our transparency capabilities in terms of the messaging around what and why to help the advertiser…It’s been a big focus for the team as part of 2024 and into 2025,” Rodriguez said.
That was the most relevant part to me. I'm glad they at least have a process, though I'm skeptical about how usable it really is for the suspended party. I'm also a little skeptical about how long it will last as they gain more confidence in their models.
This is also a misleading statement imo. They will give a reason but that reason is structured as "appear to be in violation of our policies regarding X"
Where X has 18 different sub-policies, with each sub-policy having multiple conditions that if any one is violated result in a ban.
This is done purposefully (and has always been the case on Ads since near the beginning) because they do not want to reveal the exact violation to allow for those gaming the system to work around the specific issue.
Good approach for stopping arbitrage / cloaking etc.. but bad if you're a legitimate business and aren't up to date on all 1,500 Ads policies which can and do change regularly.
Sure hope there's demonstrable "human in the loop" than just words, and those falsely suspended try their way through data protection authorities.
It feels like too many companies do this in spite of GDPR rules around automated decision making
> The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
“While these AI models are very, very important to us and have delivered a series of impressive improvements, we still have humans involved throughout the process,” said Alex Rodriguez, a general manager for Ads Safety at Google, in a virtual media roundtable.
This is either corporate doublespeak or an outright lie. I've seen local small businesses attempt to sign up for adwords and merchant center only to have the account auto-banned instantly and they specifically say the decision is final, non-appealable and applies to any other attempt to create an account.
Same with MSFT Ads and Facebook. If the AI flags you, even if a false positive, there is no human capable of reviewing or overriding that decision - by design.
> Importantly, large-scale suspensions sometimes spark concerns over how fairly a company applies its rules. Google said it offers an appeal process that includes human reviews to ensure it took “appropriate action.”
> “Oftentimes, some of our message wasn’t as clear and transparent about specifics, about what the rationale was, or reasoning, and sometimes that left the advertiser a little more confused. We ended up updating a bunch of our policies as it related to that, a bunch of our transparency capabilities in terms of the messaging around what and why to help the advertiser…It’s been a big focus for the team as part of 2024 and into 2025,” Rodriguez said.
That was the most relevant part to me. I'm glad they at least have a process, though I'm skeptical about how usable it really is for the suspended party. I'm also a little skeptical about how long it will last as they gain more confidence in their models.
This is also a misleading statement imo. They will give a reason but that reason is structured as "appear to be in violation of our policies regarding X"
Where X has 18 different sub-policies, with each sub-policy having multiple conditions that if any one is violated result in a ban.
This is done purposefully (and has always been the case on Ads since near the beginning) because they do not want to reveal the exact violation to allow for those gaming the system to work around the specific issue.
Good approach for stopping arbitrage / cloaking etc.. but bad if you're a legitimate business and aren't up to date on all 1,500 Ads policies which can and do change regularly.
One more reason not to use Google. Once your account is inappropriately blocked, no chance to get it back. Fuck gogole
Some related (lists of) horror stories:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35134299
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24254484
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41615447
Sure hope there's demonstrable "human in the loop" than just words, and those falsely suspended try their way through data protection authorities.
It feels like too many companies do this in spite of GDPR rules around automated decision making
> The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
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