Do you know Aaron Greenspan ? Perhaps, not. He is the guy who claimed recently that he invented Facebook and his batch mate Mark Zukerberg, the so called inventor of Facebook (current CEO of Facebook) stole his idea while being at Harvard. Greenspan claims that he was apparently hit by the idea while doing a project called Housing System – a set of online resources for Harvard students.
Greenspan also wrote a book titled Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era.
This blog post by me, is not on the topic what Greenspan claims or not, rather it is on an act by Google coming hand-in-hand along with Facebook to suppress the guy. Greenspan also sued Google at the United States jurisdiction and actually ended up winning $761 in the case. It is surely not a life changing amount of money but a quixotic endeavour.
Coming to Greenspan’s recent tryst with the giant Google – the story is far more interesting.
It all began when Greenspan decided to subscribe to Google Adwords service in the hope of popularizing his book via Google search ads. He wanted his ad to be thrown up anytime if someone ran a search that included the word ‘Facebook’.
Google couldn’t allow this because Facebook is a trademark registered to Facebook. So, Greenspan filed a petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office claiming prior use of the word and even going back to the old slug match of accusing Zukerberg of fraud. The plea is still pending, but Greenspan believes that Facebook lobbied Google to implement the ban.
The story doesn’t end here. Greenspan in the meantime signed up for AdSense, to be able to post ads on his own website. When people click on such ads Google works its series of arcane algorithms and deposits a sum into the AdSense holder’s account. Greenspan was able to use this service for his website for a while when until Google arbitrarily discontinued his account.
He was given a standard automated response on his account page which said his membership in the program “posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers.” (Holy Mother of God.!!! Google plays with everyone. They banned my account as well. But, I can’t file any petition at the US jurisdiction.)
Now, this treatment is usually meted out to miscreants indulging in clicking fraud – which involves installing AdSense on an empty site that gets lot of traffic for some reason. The result is that the website gets a very high click- through rate from people with not much interest in the topics but just clicking the ads to exit the site.
Whether he was involved in click fraud is not clear but Google didn’t offer Greenspan any explanations for axing his account and besides all of his communication with the search company went unanswered. I should mention that Google has a clause in its terms of service by which it reserves a right to cancel AdSense members account for “any reason”. When Greenspan was after all able to reach the real person at Google in one of his attempts he was told “there is no one I’d be able to transfer you to.”… ,says Greenspan on Huffingtonpost.com.
Finally, fully frustrated Greenspan filed a civil small claims case at the Santa Clara County courthouse for $721 – the amount accrued to his AdSense account before it got canned. At the hearing, Google apparently sent over a paralegal, who refused to divulge the reason for the termination of his account and rested its entire claim on the fact that “Google’s terms of service specified that the company could terminate accounts for any reason” .
According to Greenspan, the judge wasn’t impressed and even went so far as to ask the paralegal “But you could not terminate my account because of the color of my eyes, could you? I have brown eyes. You couldn’t terminate my account because of that.”
The judge eventually threw the case out and according to Greenspan, asked Google to pay his $721 plus another $40 in court fees.
The few points that are important are the underlying issues that this description throws up.
Firstly, that Google’s terms of service are arbitrary.
Secondly, if Greenspan’s website was thrown up automatically (same as mine), as possible fraud by the application of an investigative algorithm, Google’s detection system is flawed because moral intentions cannot be understood by mathematical analysis.
Third, as Greenspan argues - “terminating accounts for ‘posing significant risk’ just when they started to earn significant amount of money seemed like a great way for Google to cut accounting liabilities in a difficult economic climate”. (Recession effect, you know)
And lastly, none of this can be put under the scanner as AdWords and AdSense have limited reporting capabilities.
The gathering belief the world over is that Google and its affiliated companies are becoming some sort of an unapproachable shadowy cartel.
But apart from that, this incident even has the undertones of the two biggies Facebook and Google, coming together to quash the little guy.
