Keeping in mind my perspective is as someone who helps clients with these—and I also have a tech company background, so I understand how anti-spam systems are built. I don’t have any inside knowledge.

Google likely uses privacy cards as one signal of whether an account is spammy. If you’re a customer who spends $1M a month with Google and you add a Brex card, it’s going to be far less likely to trigger an account suspension.

If, on the other hand, you’re this guy, with a brand new account and you start off with a privacy card, that puts their internal systems over the threshold for what they consider “spam” - bam, instant suspension.

I don’t think this is personally fair to new customers. Unfortunately, Google is always going to be geared to large customers and not to smaller ones. Most smaller companies will never encounter this situation anyway since they will use hard cards.

It doesn't sound like they are new though. They use other Google services and have a history with Google, it's just the Ads service relationship that is new.

The Ads service has a different, and much more thorough and aggressive, anti-spam algorithm than most Google services.

If 50 ad impressions in half a day on an account they helped somenoe create a moment before ban is considered SPAM, then their SPAM detection systems are a bit lol, I guess.

Google has an internal policy of not talking about anything related to enforcement. They've banned and ghosted their own business partners, not to mention their own employees' husbands, with zero explanation. This isn't anything new either; you can find examples of it going all the way back to the company's founding.

The underlying logic seems to be to lay traps and pitfalls for bad actors to fall into rather than having a transparent and evenly-enforced set of rules. i.e. if we tell scammers they can't use privacy cards, instead of just silently banning anyone who uses them, then how can we tell scams apart from real users?

That's a pretty cynical outlook on their part.

All of this is just a further reminder to me to avoid doing business with Google.

There is nothing inherently dishonest about coming to a conclusion which is adverse to Google. Google's interests are not coextensive with honesty.

Because any card they banned would probably go out of business as such a policy spreads.

The goal is to capture as much revenue as possible. A company would never intentionally limit their revenue intake unless it was absolutely detrimental to the business. Inconveniencing the few customers who use these cards most likely doesn't show up on their radar.

> The goal is to capture as much revenue as possible. A company would never intentionally limit their revenue intake unless it was absolutely detrimental to the business.

Yes they would. Their goal is POWER and NOT dollars, which are worth less and less every day.

Just like corporate controlled mass media, the goal is POWER and NOT dollars. Dollars are the plausible deniability -- "it's just for the money!" is a mis-direction.

Using a privacy card is not an acceptable indicator of fraud or anything in a country with due process and a supposed presumption of innocence.

This is about enforcing approved behaviors in the Corporate Nanny state.

Money equals power in our society, so your theory is not cogent.

Google is constantly politically defeated by random old people in Mountain View with lots of free time. There is no amount of money you can spent to build an apartment building that might cast a shadow on their house one day a year.

Yes but in that situation Google must act transparently in an open political forum rather than backstab people behind closed doors.

That would be a surprise to the old people, who think anyone who disagrees with them is a developer shill.

Money is tradeable for power and vice versa.

The exchange rate depends on power and lack of ethics.

Power is the goal.

Whether or not they lose revenue by doing this is hard to measure though. They're not just losing the business of the people they ban. They also lose the business of people who consider Google to be unreliable and risky.

In areas where they benefit from their monopoly, such as search advertising, it may not matter much in the short term, because people don't have a choice. But in areas where people do have a choice, such as cloud services or Workspace, it does matter.

It seems like a risky strategy to keep damaging your own brand while relying on monopoly rent to cover up any short term financial impact.