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Comment by _rrnv | Hacker News Reader

Happened to me too when i was a student, earned $300, tried withdrawing and they just froze my account, for "fraud clicks". It's Google's long tail business model to not filter fraud out on the go and instead just lead small site owner on. On a global scale I expect billions in additional revenue, but no global court to challenge Google with a class-action. Maybe someday...

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They got me on a hobby site for about $5k. No real reason given, just rejected my ID verification with no appeal possible. hundreds of similar stories out there

There was an era when Google’s slogan was ”Don’t do evil.”

It was so long time ago that most of have not even heard about it today.

Don't be evil.

Funny how even you don't really remember it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

Don't be [caught doing] evil.

Someone just paraphrased that in the company memo.

Yeah it's not been a thing a google for at least a decade. When I went to work for them the onboarding did not have that phrase anywhere in any of the documents (onboarding, training, or orientation) - and I explicitly searched for it.

They didn't ask you to read the Code of Conduct? It's been in there from the beginning.

https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/

They were noticed publicly removing it in 2018 (which was reported on), so I'm guessing I came on during a period it was gone, and they have since re-added it.

Most of the public reporting was incorrect. The phrase never left the Google code of conduct, but it did move to a less prominent position, and the closest thing that has ever been in the code of conduct of the parent company Alphabet since its creation in 2015 is “Do the right thing”.

“Less prominent position” does not mean “zero prominence”. A mention in the final sentence is not anywhere near as prominent as it was before the change, but that’s still more prominent than something like hiding it in the middle.

Now, their adherence to the phrase has certainly decreased over time and was never perfect. That’s a separate matter.

Disclosure: I used to work for Google, but not since before Alphabet was created (which was some years before this Google code of conduct change). I never had any involvement in the decisions over this motto or the changes to where it shows up, beyond of course trying my best to adhere to it in my own work.

It's listed in both January 2018[1] and December 2018[2]. They moved it from the opening line to the closing line, but they did not remove it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180117100018/https://abc.xyz/i...

https://web.archive.org/web/20181225060308/https://abc.xyz/i...

Nonsense. It’s been in the employee handbook (which you had to sign) and in the “10 things we know are true” for like 20 years

I do not recall seeing it, and I do recall looking for it explicitly. Which means even if it were there - which given this was the era in which they were removing stuff like this in order to win pentagon contracts seems completely plausible - it was not considered important enough to highlight or to put at the forefront of employee information.

Except it isn't true and likely never was. Good PR though!

That is unfair. The engineer who suggested the phrase and the others around at the time were being honest.

But organizations change as they grow.

Engineers don't set policy.

At the time they (Larry and Sergey) did.

Yes, and look what happened. It's not as if they have disappeared, they handed the reins to a guy who walked all over that and got away with it. If they really cared they would have put a stop to that and the uncountable other privacy and tracking issues that Google has been up to over the years.

I'd go to small claims over $5k.

I earned a couple hundred with them too when I was young. Never claimed it. They eventually released it to my states unclaimed property system and a decade later I got it from that.

> It's Google's long tail business model to not filter fraud out on the go

Well the honest answer is that it's harder for clickfraud farms to hyperoptimize against detection algorithms on-the-fly this way. This makes it harder for them to figure out exactly what pattern is flagging the algorithm.

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