Google announced on Thursday that it had removed from its Play Store nearly 600 applications that did not comply with the company's policy on annoying ads. All of the apps totaled 4.5 billion downloads, reports BuzzFeed News.
"We describe annoying ads that appear unexpectedly and that alter the handling of the features [...] or that interfere with them," says Google on his blog.
Losses for certain brands
Per Bjorke, responsible for the quality of advertising traffic at Google, did not wish to mention the products affected. He simply said that the majority were games or utility programs, which were aimed at English speakers and had been developed in China, Hong Kong, India or Singapore.
Google accused them of disrupting "the fluidity of use of telephone calls and GPS", causing "unwanted clicks and loss of money for advertisers," according to Per Bjorke. Google has identified the brands whose advertisements have suffered from these practices and indicates that it has started to compensate them.
At the end of 2019, Google deployed a new technology capable of automatically detecting if the apps offer advertisements when they are not being used. This device made it possible to identify some of the 600 programs removed by Google. "We will continue to invest in means of detection and prevention concerning emerging threats likely to generate erroneous traffic", concludes the company.
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