Security News > 2020 > February > Google Bans 600 Android Apps from Play Store for Serving Disruptive Ads

Google has banned nearly 600 Android apps from the Play Store for bombarding users with disruptive ads and violating its advertising guidelines.

Back in 2018, Cheetah Mobile was accused of turning smartphones into stealthy click farms to engage in ad fraud, leading Google to ban a bunch of its apps from the Play Store.

"We don't allow apps that contain deceptive or disruptive ads. Ads must only be displayed within the app serving them. We consider ads served in your app as part of your app. The ads shown in your app must be compliant with all our policies."

The internet giant has also been leveraging Google Play Protect as a means to secure devices from potentially harmful applications by combining a mix of on-device protections and a cloud-based machine learning infrastructure to routinely scan apps, detect malicious apps faster and at a larger scale without any human supervision.

Although Google Play Protect has "Detected and removed malicious developers faster" - over 790,000 policy-violating app submissions were blocked before they were even published to the Play Store in 2019 alone - it seems powerless against what appears to be a steady pattern of potentially harmful apps bypassing its security checkpoint, highlighting the scope of the problem.

News URL

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackersNews/~3/JkX44KmkY80/android-adware-apps-banned.html