Google Play Store Cracks Down on Gaming Apps That Use Sexually Explicit Images in Ads

There are a lot of free games that you can download from the Google Play Store. However, most of the time when you want to create any kind of app you would need to spend some money in order to develop it, and the companies that do this also need to generate revenue. This is why they often show ads in between levels while you play a game, and they usually don’t have any kind of control over the ads that you will end up being shown.

Most of the time the ads would be related to other apps that you can download, and with all of that having been said and now out of the way it is important to note that some apps on the Google Play Store often use highly explicit ads that are of a sexual nature in order to potentially entice people into downloading them. This is actually against Google Play Store policy, but in spite of that some apps still manage to slip through the cracks and show sexually explicit ads that are often morally ambiguous to say the least as well which further makes them somewhat harmful from a lot of different perspectives.

Recently some users on Twitter shared a screen recording of an ad that involved a very explicit situation. While Google has removed the app from the store and has also delisted the publisher that made the game, this does not change the fact that the app was allowed to advertise like this in the first place. Google really needs to do a better job of figuring things out when it comes to preventing such ads from being shown especially when you consider the fact that a lot of the games that show these ads might just end up getting played by children who would be very negatively impacted by such images.



Read next: Google take further steps and rolls out better transparency options in its ‘Advertiser Verification Program’ which it introduced last year