Hello. The way I read this section in the Google Play Developer Program Policies (GPDPP):
In general, ads are considered part of your app for purposes of content review and compliance with the Developer Terms. Therefore all of the policies, including those concerning illegal activities, violence, sexually explicit content, and privacy violations, apply. Please take care to use advertising which does not violate these policies. Ads which are inconsistent with the app’s content rating also violate our Developer Terms. In combination with *Sexually Explicit Material:* We don't allow content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. Google has a zero-tolerance policy against child pornography. If we become aware of content with child pornography, we will report it to the appropriate authorities and delete the Google Accounts of those involved with the distribution. Is that should there appear a pornographic ad in the application, the Google Play team will hold the developer responsible up to the point of terminating the entire developer account. Now here is the problem: most of us developers have no control over what ads appear in the apps we create. Sure, we decide which ad networks to include, and may even be able to control ad types to some degree, but given a fairly large application with even a couple hundred thousand ad impressions per day utilizing multiple ad networks through an ad aggregator makes the task of controlling this virtually impossible. I speak (write) from a personal experience. I've had users complain in the past about pornographic ads popping up out of "nowhere" without any user interaction. The thing is, the app in question only shows banner and requires at least a user touch to launch whatever it is the ad is pointing to. Not to mention that all the ads came from respectable networks / aggregators such as AdMob, Millennial, Greystripe, Mobclix and Mopub. They all said the same thing - we don't allow porn on our network(s). And yet there it was. It wasn't happening often enough to just be able to start an app and see it for myself. In fact, I've never seen one! In trying to fight this I wanted to see if I could reproduce this behavior myself. And yes, I can. I won't go into the details as to not give anybody the wrong ideas, but the bottom line is this: It is possible to load a completely innocently looking banner, which will then open any (ANY!) site on its own, without any user interaction. This will avoid detection at the ad network level. And, if it shows porn to specific users / locations / IPs / etc, chances are the developer will never see it as well. So, here is a very important question to Googe. If something like that happens - a malicious ad, that happens to bypass content control at the ad network, makes it into an app and the users start complaining - will you hold the developer responsible and just pull the account or will you work with the developer in trying to identify the offending ads / networks and resolve the situation? Thank you. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
