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Jskewel 11 hours ago [-]
Adsense has been a nightmare for us.
They have been putting thousands of scam adverts on our website for some time. Think "you have been looking at xxx and must pay a $100 fine" type popup nonsense. Hosted on the following websites:
azurestaticapps.net
azurewebsites.net
herokuapp.com
ondigitalocean.app
digitaloceanspaces.com
netlify.app
Google doesn't allow you to block these domains, because they consider them "TLDs" (the scammers use a new subdomain every day eg abcdefg.herokuapp.com). The scammers get banned and return the next day with a new account and subdomain (repeat every day). Therefore we cannot stop them. It's bizarre and baffling. But Google Adsense had to go.
I created a tool that automatically follows ads to try to find scams.
But that was usually reserved to typosquat domain ads or ads on porn websites.
I didn't know scammers used normal page ads too.
I know tech support scams used to use google search ads, but I don't think they do that as much anymore, so maybe they have moved onto things like adsense.
These scammers usually do IP address checks to check for residential IP before showing the scam, and some also do some basic fingerprinting checks, so that is how they get past detection. That said, it shouldn't be too difficult for google to do some better checks if they actually cared.
redbluething 4 hours ago [-]
Yep. I Agree. I believe it's a question of economics, not technical challenges.
Google is absolutely smart enough to make these attacks un-economical. IMO they are unwilling to incur the loss in revenue this would involve (false positives, banned resellers etc).
j027 4 hours ago [-]
Another major issue is google safe browsing whitelists many of these subdomains that the attackers like to host their scam pages on.
As a result, even though "Enhanced" safe browsing can use Gemini Nano to do client side detection of scams and then flag it in google safe browsing for everyone, the entire domain and all subdomains are whitelisted, so that detection never seems to actually fire.
https://blog.google/security/using-ai-to-stop-tech-support-s...
I'm not sure which domains this applies to, but it seems to apply to most of the domains that these scammers actually like to use.
Scoundreller 3 hours ago [-]
> These scammers usually do IP address checks to check for residential IP before showing the scam, and some also do some basic fingerprinting checks, so that is how they get past detection.
Same issue with spam sms in my country: I think they geo-locate it so submitting the link to safe browsing project takes way too long
BatteryMountain 2 hours ago [-]
A friend of mine runs a web agency company (you know, the oldskool wordpress dev shop). Clients from almost all industries, some very high traffic & publicly visible (think magazines). About two years ago they recommended all their clients remove random ads (primarily via Adsense) as they were injecting crypto-scams and porny/gaming ads for trashy site/apps on sites where they really shouldn't be. Some clients completely dropped it just fine (meaning, no replacement ad engine), while the bigger clients are using purely targeted/specified ads where they know the brand being advertised, typically from within in their own industries, and no more random ads being shown. People are fed up with ads/Adsense. Just the the stuff kids see while playing mobile games are atrocious.
1over137 3 hours ago [-]
>They have been putting thousands of scam adverts on our website…
Is it your website or
theirs? YOU are the one putting such ads there as YOU have chosen a sketchy ad company (google).
HlessClaudesman 44 minutes ago [-]
The problem is that Google has enshittified their service, destroyed their reputation for quality control, and that information is very slow to disseminate.
Brands work as a trust heuristic, so a fallen brand continues to trade on its old reputation for a while.
crossroadsguy 2 hours ago [-]
Even reddit bans any netlify.app url in messages or posts (at least for me). Never checked for comments.
guelo 10 hours ago [-]
The problem is the scummy adsense ads don't hurt Google's reputation. Outside the techie crowd people don't know the ads are from Google.
hansvm 10 hours ago [-]
That seems fixable. When people include this JS garbage, have a header/title/etc stating that this is Google's professional opinion. Bake it into a library offering enough other features that a large number of people are inclined to use it.
WD-42 5 hours ago [-]
The only people that would care are already using adblockers and not seeing these ads anyway.
sysguest 10 hours ago [-]
hmm could you explain more?
hansvm 9 hours ago [-]
- The big problem is that malicious ads are being displayed without appropriate attribution
- Add that attribution -- blame Google (or, supposing the ads are good, credit Google; a good header goes a long way toward swaying people's opinions)
- But it doesn't matter if a single website appropriately attributes Google's highest/lowest-quality ads. The last step (speculative and hand-wavy) is to incorporate that behaviour in some sort of software more people want to use. If you're fighting alone then you'll lose. If you can convince more people that appropriately crediting Google's advertising successes and blaming their malicious failures is advantageous, you'll (by definition) have more traction in the anti-megacorp-endorsed scams and other life-altering consequences.
Den_VR 1 hours ago [-]
Ad viewers are about as empowered as the cow the goes into your cheeseburger. No agency, and no communication mechanism to the rancher’s actual customer.
These companies that abstain from adsense and it’s revenue are WWW vegans.
sysguest 4 hours ago [-]
hmm thought this was about adwords JS 'intelligently' reading page contents, and when it finds such attribution with some special tags, filters out certain ads...
well thought I was getting some actual useful tip
_carbyau_ 7 hours ago [-]
Couldn't this be a browser extension?
fn-mote 7 hours ago [-]
Probably, but then only the people with that extension would see the note.
If people are going to learn to install an extension, it should be UBlock Origin. That will solve more problems than attributing scam ads.
eek2121 8 hours ago [-]
The second you load JS onto your page, you lose that ability, you know that, right? the scammy ads aren't limited to that tiny little box you designate for ads. Advertisers work around that limitation pretty easily, and you should also probably read AdSense terms of service before doing too much to blame google. Some of the language will surprise you.
dwattttt 4 hours ago [-]
When you put it like that, it seems like it's too dangerous to offer that kind of access! Maybe Google shouldn't sell it.
ftchd 8 hours ago [-]
Such as? Provide the relevant context that you're referring to as suprising.
bmandale 9 hours ago [-]
It doesn't practically matter whether the ads are from google. They're shown on a third party site, not using google won't get rid of them, only not using that site will (or installing an adblocker...). Users very reasonably blame the site, who have direct agency to remove the ads.
bobthepanda 9 hours ago [-]
IIRC this dilemma was one of the things that was driving the Google antitrust case that unfortunately will not result in divorcing search from ads.
redbluething 7 hours ago [-]
Agree it's reasonable. I removed the ads :P
MASNeo 9 hours ago [-]
Calls from law enforcement is laud and clear: BigTech is not doing enough to fight fraud, war and other crimes, they make money from criminals.
Nobody’s yet cared enough to sue them, or their managers at ICC yet. However, eventually an ambitious lawyer will try to make the case, especially if fraud and human trafficking continues to grow like it is.
justinclift 5 hours ago [-]
> at ICC yet.
Want to take bets on whether the US gov wades in if that happens?
The US gov is directly antagonistic to the ICC and will undermine them whenever possible. This would present them another chance.
MikeNotThePope 5 hours ago [-]
It does in the sense that they're losing business, as people describe in this thread. But I get your point, Google seems to be enjoying the profits more than the harm to their reputation. If it gets bad enough, maybe they'll rethink.
benatkin 5 hours ago [-]
They're losing business that they don't want. Silicon Valley culture has embraced saying no, firing clients and customers, choosing the right audience, etc. This even fits into finding product-market fit. You don't try to please everyone, and find a well-defined segment. So to Google it might not seem like it's getting bad at all. To them, maybe the trash took itself out, they got rid of that annoying customer who complains about their marketplace, whereas they appreciate the quiet reporting of an ad that's against the ToS...
10 hours ago [-]
10 hours ago [-]
gerdesj 8 hours ago [-]
I suppose the obvious question is: Are you actively profiting from Adsense?
If yes, then ... you are profiting from ... that shite. You must be OK with that and it does sound like you are actively complicit with it, despite your protestations.
If you really think that Adsense is awful and might damage your brand then dump it and don't whine on HN!
OK, that's probably a bit unfair because you are dealing with a monopoly with no recourse to arbitration. That's your real problem.
_carbyau_ 7 hours ago [-]
Read their last sentence again.
kulahan 7 hours ago [-]
“AdSense has got to go” should include OP’s use if they truly believe that. That’s what the person you’re responding to is saying.
applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago [-]
"Had to go". Past tense. It's not ambiguous. The only correct interpretation of that sentence is they did get rid of it.
6 hours ago [-]
CookieCrisp 7 hours ago [-]
Classic example of victim blaming. Not the company generating the ad, not the company approving it, but the person who is trying to block it, and then ACTUALLY did stop using Adsense.
jacobgold 12 hours ago [-]
Someone who has spent $100M+ on Google Ads explained to me that Google is doing everything possible to juice their revenue right now, in ways they've never seen before.
Seems like two things 1) Google is losing at AI and Sundar wants to mask this 2) AI is going to destroy their ad business and they want to get while the getting is good.
conception 12 hours ago [-]
I think the 3.8 Flash release shows they are doing just fine at AI. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropomorphic, Google doesn’t have to release new models to capture VC sentiment every three months. They have the hardware, data and money. And when they release a model it’s very good.
Now their product strategy however…
jjallen 11 hours ago [-]
They can be doing fine at AI models but not so well with AI revenue.
Although I am curious if they are not worried and playing the long game confident that their distribution will eventually help them catch up (and worst case they own some of Anthropic). But obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have their own distribution now too.
dspillett 11 hours ago [-]
> but not so well with AI revenue
Nobody is doing well enough with AI revenue ATM (https://isaiprofitable.com/). At the moment it is probably more about market share of users, that is where the investment capital will need to be clawed back from when it starts to be called back (or replacement money will need to come from if the investment cycle simply stops giving generously).
mastermage 60 seconds ago [-]
except for NVIDIA
Gareth321 28 minutes ago [-]
While true, Google is particularly vulnerable to AI disrupting the traditional internet ad model. They have to figure out how to make AI profitable or Google will suffer catastrophic revenue, profit, and stock price declines in short order.
3 hours ago [-]
karim79 6 hours ago [-]
Love this. Can we also have an environmental cost calculator somehow?
xnx 4 hours ago [-]
Dollars are a very good first estimate of environmental cost.
jjallen 11 hours ago [-]
I do wonder if the more they goose their ad business the faster it eventually falls. I know I am more and more reluctant to view many normal Web page ads at all and usually immediately click away the second a site gets annoying
ungreased0675 11 hours ago [-]
I block ads because I don’t want my family exposed to scams, clickbait, and offensive content. If ads weren’t so annoying, I wouldn’t put too much effort into blocking them.
Terr_ 6 hours ago [-]
Also: Creepy surveillance, and a delivery mechanism for malware/viruses.
Online advertising has completely broken from anything resembling the traditional social-contract of magazine ads, billboard, signs, etc. They're preying on your safety and privacy, not just your attention.
jjallen 8 hours ago [-]
I don’t see many these days thankfully. I Use happily YouTube premium and mostly AI for web browsing-equivalent activities.
Spooky23 4 hours ago [-]
The other companies are stealing people's work for headlines and sabotaging each other. Google is offering a whole bunch of Gemini APIs that do real shit, with the same terms and contracts and the existing products for most of them.
soundworlds 10 hours ago [-]
A large chunk of the population don't use Google to search anymore. They go straight for the GenAIs. That's got to be scaring a lot of managerial folks at Google.
charmd 9 hours ago [-]
Slide 65 of this (very nice) set of slides [1] broke down search vs genAI use to get information. "Mostly genAI was not breaking 25% in all age brackets... Curious to see how that will evolve
25% market share after a few years is insane. If this growth continues, Google’s entire business model is under existential threat.
chrischen 2 hours ago [-]
The Gen AIs are doing the search for people. So hopefully this forces google to switch their business model from manipulative ads against human users to just charging for API access for Gen AI models.
myko 5 hours ago [-]
truly Google's on fault. Their results have been shit for at least 2 years now
tomrod 7 hours ago [-]
I think Google's big bet (and Microsoft's before them) is in centralization of AI services, hosted using their model, and that AI at the edge will always be a bit player.
But what I see and hear from technical consumers, businesses, and govts is that they would prefer their data stay local, and like the idea of edge compute being used for AI.
Claude/OpenAI's direction with their Apps enabling deeper integration is a good direction, but the trust with data is still a growing concern. OpenAI's math actions on the NS problem degrades their reputation a lot.
6 hours ago [-]
kamma4434 2 hours ago [-]
They also invented the whole big data Ai industry, and managed to become a second tier company there. So…
conception 2 hours ago [-]
By what measure? Alphabet just reported another blowout quarter for Google Cloud — revenue jumped 82% year-over-year to $24.8 billion.
paganel 40 minutes ago [-]
Generated via ChatGPT, as google-ing it would have taken too much time:
Rank Cloud Approx. annual revenue Growth My assessment
1 AWS ~$129B ~20% Clear leader
2 Microsoft Azure ~$90B ~40%+ Strong #2, rapidly closing
3 Google Cloud ~$59B 36% Fastest-growing historically, but smaller
which is to say that Google is still way behind AWS and Azure. Also, lots and lots of people have switched to using AI-interfaces now, I'm not hearing "I've googled that and that's what I found" anymore, it's all "I've chatgpt-ed and this is what it told me".
rawgabbit 8 hours ago [-]
Google’s cash cow is ads. I think the writing on the wall is ChatGPT and other AI search engines will dominate. It is to be seen how Google will respond. But in the end, their monopoly on web search is coming to an end.
franczesko 8 hours ago [-]
It's not about releasing models. Consumer market share of chatgpt is still >60%, if not more. Their search engine was hit and as soon as product search starts declining on Google this will be a code red. They're in an extreme nicle and dime mode.
enraged_camel 2 hours ago [-]
>> I think the 3.8 Flash release shows they are doing just fine at AI.
If you use it for even 15 minutes you will see this is not true. At all.
hadlock 5 hours ago [-]
open router isn't the whole market, but open router shows google is struggling for market share in the limited window we can see
dakolli 4 hours ago [-]
Openrouter isn't even 00.01% of tokens used on a daily basis. China alone uses 500 Trillion tokens a day and they're only 1/8th of the world. Much of the world has a google account, use your brain.
csomar 6 hours ago [-]
How are they going to generate revenue if their old model is Ads on search and the new model is yet to show how revenue can be generated. ChatGPT (on free) is showing ads now but they are not targeted and I highly doubt they are worth anything.
conception 2 hours ago [-]
Alphabet just reported another blowout quarter for Google Cloud — revenue jumped 82% year-over-year to $24.8 billion
fsh 2 hours ago [-]
So after chasing AWS for two decades, they are still dwarved by them.
alfalfasprout 11 hours ago [-]
very HN take. Reality is 3.8 flash is good at what it does (being fast + cheap)... but that market is becoming very saturated and google is not competing at all at the frontier where major spend lies.
Citizen_Lame 11 hours ago [-]
So just ignore the reality, that Gemini (and yes even 3.8 Flash) is worst of all major LLMs across most metrics? But that's fine, because reasons?
econ 10 hours ago [-]
Today search results are a page full of ads. They can't get away with that unless they completely corner down the LLM market.
I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called.
If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.
reddalo 10 hours ago [-]
>Google is doing everything possible to juice their revenue right now, in ways they've never seen before
My experience confirms this: many years ago I had a website banned from serving Google Ads. They said my pages didn't have enough content.
Then a competitor started showing ads on the exact same type of pages where I had previously been able to serve them. So I tried getting my website approved again and -- surprise -- now I can serve ads again.
danamit 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah they accept websites without content nowadays, which I think should be the case either way.
What is not okay is them pushing a huge amount of ads into website, constantly asking you to enable auto-ads and vignette ads and what-not.
JoeOfTexas 3 hours ago [-]
I am having this issue getting approved, and Google denies me every time. I last tried back in August.
keeda 8 hours ago [-]
I think the reality is more a twist on 2): "AI is going to destroy their ad business and they want to goose their revenues while they can, hoping their AI business can compensate, but they know the AI business will never be as lucrative as the ad business."
Firstly, try to imagine stuffing as many ads as there are on a SERP into a chatbot conversation. Good way to lose users.
Secondly, Google spent decades hyper-optimizing their ad business monopoly for maximum profit, including going to extents that were recently found unlawful. People should really look into the findings of the last two Antitrust cases against Google, both of which it lost but for which it suffered only slaps on wrists. The details are eye-opening, including the bits about how Google, leveraging its prime position as the middle-man playing all sides against each other, manipulated ad auctions to make itself more money at the expense of its customers.
Even Microsoft was dinged for screwing over just their competitors, not their customers.
But now because of the paradigm shift in how people discover information, very little of the Google ad monoploy advantage transfers over. I think their AI business will keep growing, even if they don't have the best models, and it will be an exceptional source of revenue.
But it will still be no match to their ad business -- a cash cow of incomprehensible proportions -- and that is the fundamental problem they face today.
qaq 1 hours ago [-]
Google Cloud revenue grew 82% year-over-year I am guessing they gonna survive fine
kamma4434 2 hours ago [-]
While this says nothing about Google as a company, I am sure AdSense is feeling the same pain as everybody else which livelihood depends on page views - just n orders of magnitudes bigger. So it would not surprise me if they were scraping the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, for any revenue opportunity.
Semaphor 3 hours ago [-]
This behavior predates modern AI. Maybe it’s getting worse, but without high limits (which lower revenue) adsense will result in a lot of scams.
somewhereoutth 10 hours ago [-]
everyone (on all sides!) is losing at AI and we'll see increasingly frantic attempts from all players to paper over the cracks as this extreme resource misallocation bites.
bbor 11 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's related to AI, at least not originally. To me this is about the slow death of display advertising. The arms race of ad blockers and ad blocker blockers and such has created a world where people hate display ads, especially because they require so much creepy data to even work in the first place.
AI probably would help their display ad business overall -- they finally just launched a "have Gemini create your ad!" feature, and I imagine having to hire a designer was a common blocker for SMBs.
xpct 5 hours ago [-]
My understanding was that the Ad business was starting to suffer because of how much bot activity there's been both in social media and indexed search (Google).
But I wouldn't write off ads yet. It seems plausible to me that LLMs will be able to slightly alter their output to casually mention paying brands and to profile users better than we could before.
shevy-java 9 hours ago [-]
> To me this is about the slow death of display advertising.
That's good. I hate ads. I will fight them down until they are gone.
But I don't think this is the case here. Ads are still pushed down
onto the people willy-nilly style.
ihsw 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dakolli 4 hours ago [-]
Why would Google be losing at AI, they're SOTA. They have all the users.
There's zero chance that AI destroys their ad business. I get served ads from Amazon in podcast RSS feeds that were directly derived from things I said in Gemini chats. It's definitely not destroying ads lol
I'm surprised by the weird levels of incompetence on this website, use your brain or have you already hawked that off to your favorite AI lab.
Telaneo 11 hours ago [-]
We need strict liability on this front. Google is complicit. No newspaper or equivalent publication in the days before web ads would allow ads that are down at the level of scam that seemingly make up the modus operandi of Google today (and even the ads back then that did bend the truth a bit, overpromised, or showed products that didn't actually have any legitimate use, shouldn't really have been legal back then either. They just weren't big enough of a problem to worry about).
cortesoft 6 hours ago [-]
There were so many scam ads in magazines and newspapers back in the day. Same with all the made for tv stuff and infomercials.
The difference for the newspaper and magazine ads is you couldn't just click on it in an instant. You had to spend a lot more effort and had more chances to realize it is a scam.
abustamam 5 hours ago [-]
In a way, ads like that can be a bit scarier. We recently bought a house and through the next 3 months I got so many scary warnings in the mail, most of which looked legit and official, saying that if I dont visit sign up for X then I will be billed Y, or my house will be at risk of Z, and other such tactics. I was not expecting this inondation but I can see someone falling for this.
Not trying to justify either, BTW. Its just scary how many different ways there are to defraud people.
patrakov 10 hours ago [-]
We need strict liability on this front. Companies behind websites that embed ads that they didn't verify (and don't control) are complicit.
eek2121 8 hours ago [-]
You are looking at this backwards. The average user DOES hold the site complicit. The issue is that there are many hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of sites serving Google ads. 1 user avoiding/blacklisting 1 site due to scam/spam ad won't even be a rounding error to most sites, and it is nothing at all to Google. Given that the internet has evolved to be ad-driven, of which Google is a major player, you also aren't going to convince sites to stop serving Google ads.
The change has to start with Google, and they can't be bothered to do so, thus far.
antonymoose 10 hours ago [-]
Liability is kind of wild and the fact that “the internet” washes it all away is wilder still.
In my state, which perhaps takes liability too far in the other direction, if I serve sober you a single beer, you proceed to visit a second bar, have ten shots of tequila in an hour, and kill a man driving home - I share equal liability as the tequila bar.
Perhaps there is a middle ground in this world where a firm that makes billions has to have some basic “Know Your Customer” systems to prevent abuse?
Fnoord 9 hours ago [-]
(Premise: it isn't 'alcohol and drugs'; it is 'drugs'. Alcohol is a drug, and while we are at it: a powerful one.)
The reason for that is that you've been serving a hard drug to a customer. Don't do that if you cannot bear the responsibility (liability). In order to bear the liability, the price has to go up, including perhaps a safe escort home of the drug user, but of course that would be too expensive/socialist/authoritarian (blimey they want us to take responsible action regarding our customers! I knew a club here for young people where it was very normal to have them taxi'd home. Son, wanna go out? The taxi is part of the price), and lead to 'off the record' drug usage. Which is how we ended up in opioid crisis.
If alcohol would only be invented today, there's no chance it would be legal in the current umbrella of drugs. And, for good reason: it is too addictive, too harmful for self and their environment. Compare with the various empathogens or harmfulness of psychedelic drugs. These cause, normalized, far less damage to both user and their environment.
I abstain from drinking (I am sensitive to addiction which is how I ended up to that conclusion), and this weekend I had a tiramisu (it was on sale, wife bought it). Did I notice that? Oh hell, yes. Would you serve a child tiramisu? No, we should not.
II2II 7 hours ago [-]
I agree with most of what you are saying. That said: alcohol is also a controlled substance, rather than an illegal one. It is perfectly legal for the original person to serve it within the legal limit. They're saying that the liability goes too far when they are held accountable for another server at another establishment that serves beyond the legal limit afterwards. On that part, I will agree with them.
Like you, I abstain. Yet I do have to deal with bartenders, and I will say that some are responsible and some are not. (I have pissed off some fairly powerful people along with people who commerially produce alcohol, and ought to know better, that they cannot serve alcohol because they are unlicensed, uncertified, or uninsured.)
thfuran 7 hours ago [-]
Unless you’re making an especially boozy recipe, there’s not much alcohol in a reasonable portion size of tiramisu. I wouldn’t give it to someone strictly avoiding alcohol, but I’d have no concerns with a kid having some.
5 hours ago [-]
cindyllm 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Telaneo 10 hours ago [-]
I have a feeling this is supposed to be mocking and showing that the liability might extend too far.
Either way, I agree with the literal interpretation. They should vet the ads they serve and are complicit in this mess if they serve ads through Google et al.
mikestew 11 hours ago [-]
The water-injection system for your carburetor that the oil companies don't want you to know about!
-- paraphrase of an actual Popular Mechanics ad circa 1978
Scoundreller 3 hours ago [-]
I later in life learned that the “test cards - all channels” ads I saw in the back of the library’s Popular Science in the 90s probably weren’t scams.
Oh, it's been proven to work, even in a limited number of production vehicles. Just not with what you buy out of the back of a magazine. :-)
Gigachad 8 hours ago [-]
We are in a golden age of scams and fraud. I don't like the chances of Google seeing any liability for this stuff any time soon.
sshussain270 6 minutes ago [-]
Surprisingly, it hasn't changed much on the ad front after AI/LLM boom. I don't know if its because advertising is a "non-sexy" market and no one really wants to do it but better is expected.
HomeDeLaPot 11 hours ago [-]
Every YouTube ad I see now is an AI-generated scam ad hawking everything from free electricity to anti-aging products to birdhouses hand-carved by an AI-generated senior citizen. I've seen some multiple times, days or weeks apart. Their advertising standards are a complete joke.
icoder 11 hours ago [-]
I've flagged an AI-generated add once that promoted a small device that could cool a hot room (many degrees celcius lower, very quickly, for very little energy and very little money and without external components), defying the laws of thermodynamics.
They said they investigated it and concluded it did not break any rules and no actions where taken.
autuni 29 minutes ago [-]
I flagged an AI-generated ad for an online casino that is not legal where I live. They run weird filters over the logo, never say what they actually do in the audio and also don't mention the company name just "look at our logo and find us online", it seems like they try to dodge some auto detection. They also replied they investigated and concluded it did not break any rules.
notimetorelax 17 minutes ago [-]
I guess they missed the rules of physics in their evaluation.
Borealid 10 hours ago [-]
There do exist "evaporative coolers", sometimes called "swamp coolers". The trick is that they require water and raise the humidity of their surroundings. But they tick all the boxes you listed - plenty of delta-t, extremely low power, no external tubes or parts.
It's not magic because it relies on the "fuel" of cool water to evaporate.
Spare_account 9 hours ago [-]
I'm not the same guy but I can verify that the advert for the impossible micro-evaporative cooler quoted impossible performance capabilities.
YouTube adverts frequently contain fraudulent, misleading information. It appears that no law is being broken.
Borealid 9 hours ago [-]
I can believe that, I'm just here to point out that some of the laws being not-broken are the laws of thermodnamics. You can cool a room cheaply with dry ice, for instance. There are tricks.
Dylan16807 5 hours ago [-]
I get what you're saying, that it's "thermodynamics violation OR trick". But if you're checking whether the ad is lying at face value, you exclude tricks like dry ice or precooling.
less_less 10 hours ago [-]
I've seen similar ads. For the ones I've seen the device isn't necessarily fake: it's just a swamp cooler. They're cheap and efficient if you're suffering in a dry heat.
ETA: the ads I've seen are still deceptive because they're claiming this is revolutionary new technology, which of course it isn't.
MaxBarraclough 9 hours ago [-]
In July there was a BBC article on this, and how they were advertised on Facebook and YouTube.
The whole idea behind scam sites marketing is to present an ad that knowledgeable people will find unattractive but gullible people will be lured into. Self selection keeps the based demographic from investigating the scam.
xdavidliu 8 hours ago [-]
ah yes, like the Nigerian prince scam
sundvor 5 hours ago [-]
And they still try to gaslight us into removing our adblockers. No thanks.
Pxtl 11 hours ago [-]
"Lisa, get in here... in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
that's because the only rule they are investigating is if it makes them more money leaving it there and paying an eventual fine or removing it
nkrisc 9 hours ago [-]
The AI-generated video ads are getting really bizarre on YouTube. There's class of them that feature some AI-generated song with AI-generated animated characters. One song began with lyrics about having sex with a Jewish billionaire's wife and learning some secret (at which point I was able to skip the ad) and another is some grotesque looking creature singing about foamy urine.
Normally I have an ad-blocker and don't see any ads, but I happened to be using the YouTube app recently on my iPad so I was subjected to this insanity.
I guess scammer money is as green as anyone else's.
pants2 8 hours ago [-]
FYI, using YouTube through Brave browser on iPhone/iPad will block ads. Same with Instagram!
godwinson__4-8 6 hours ago [-]
I'm so happy someone else has seen the Jewish billionaire's wife ad it's so weird and no one I know IRL has seen it and if you try to describe to someone in person you sound insane.
torginus 10 hours ago [-]
These ads are uncanny valley right now. But imagine, in a year or two, they'll dial it in, and it'll be indistinguishable from actual TV ads.
nkrisc 9 hours ago [-]
Apart for the fact they'll be hawking obvious scam bullshit.
harvey9 9 hours ago [-]
Not obvious to everyone.
numpad0 11 hours ago [-]
There's no standards. AdSense is sort of a paid social media of its own. You sign up and post a tweet, then those tweets get embedded to sites if AI clears it. The key difference between Twitter and AdSense is that you're supposed to be using the latter for your own financial gain.
And it just so happens that someone doing something for their personalized financial gain is a super strong negative indicator of everything.
johng 11 hours ago [-]
This senior citizen doing stuff got me. I bought a pair of cow slippers because I thought he was making them from his farm in Australia. Turns out they use that same "character" to hawk multiple products.
nkrisc 9 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately at this point I assume that everything I see online is fake until I have a good reason to think otherwise.
mbirth 10 hours ago [-]
YouTuber Pleasant Green has several videos about all those fake ads making rounds. The one about fake old people is this one:
Every risk the early AI researchers warned us about came true, the companies released it anyway and here we are.
unethical_ban 11 hours ago [-]
I use adblock and on my TV, Youtube Premium.
I loaded a stock web browser on VPN and checked Youtube looking for ads. Holy shit, it's all scams. Sample size of three, but not a single ad was a known company or a decent product.
Fnoord 9 hours ago [-]
Only my kids use the TV to watch YouTube, and in order to protect them from ads (it is illegal to advertise to children in my country), I block the ads using SmartTube which includes SponsorBlock. Since such is also advertising. Google is a rotten to the core company who's purpose is whitewashing scams and spying on private eyes. Whenever Google talks about 'security' I need to keep in mind their snake tongue definition of 'security' does not align with mine. Such as: combining security updates with (unwanted) new features, play 'integrity' (hurting non-Android devices), DRM not owning my devices (hello?! The pirated content is already available!), something such as manifest V3 which has a different purpose than the one they mention, and hard-coded DNS servers with device (Google Chromecast) refusing to work without.
anon48293 3 hours ago [-]
In case you weren’t aware:
“ My development environment was infected by unknown malicious software, as a result of which a few builds may have been affected. Once the issue was detected, I secured everything with a full disk wipe, restored a clean setup, and now all builds are scanned with VirusTotal. The F-Droid version will also be verified before release.
Public keys may have been compromised, which is why I am sharing this issue.”
dspillett 11 hours ago [-]
> Youtube Premium.
I use other means when I must have access to content that is only on youtube. I'm not paying money into a company so happy to allow as much scammy crap as the adverts on there are full off.
chadgpt2 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
LooseMarmoset 11 hours ago [-]
every time I use the Internet on a computer without some sort of ad blocking, I am astounded to learn that there are still people who use the Internet without an ad blocker.
The Internet is unusable these days without ublock origin or a pihole.
BLKNSLVR 7 hours ago [-]
I treat Youtube Premium as a reward for Google making non-Premium such a horribly uninviting, anti-social place; ie. I would never pay to stop the bully punching me in the face, I would stop putting my face in the bully's window.
princevegeta89 10 hours ago [-]
Youtube Premium is so dodgy. It's already expense and even if you get it, they will default to a miserable 480p on Mobile, while you have 1080p60fps available.
You can change it manually, but it's a defeat of the entire purpose..they intentionally removed the setting to apply the max. quality available to all videos you watch, while already charging you a monthly subscription for the goddamn premium.
What a bunch of goo(gl)ns
CqtGLRGcukpy 13 hours ago [-]
I have two guesses why Google does this:
1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.
2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.
As to why Google doesn't use AI to review them? Google would rather use the AI in a way that makes them more money, than review ads and if AI decides to take them down then that's less money for Google.
(To be clear: I don't work for Google in any way, these are just my guesses)
martin_a 12 hours ago [-]
> so they would rather have people report them
I have reported so many of those dodgy, scammy, sexualized ads on YouTube, that YouTube/Google has removed the option to report advertisements from my account.
They don't care as long as they're getting paid and there's no immediate liability for them.
torginus 9 hours ago [-]
The funny thing is it used to be that people warned you not to go to dodgy sites as they were full of ads that were trying to steal your money or online identity.
It was mostly just scaremongering, but it never hurt to be careful.
Nowadays, Google will serve you those exact ads if you go to any major news outlet.
razster 11 hours ago [-]
I've been on the same crusade, reporting all the scam/fake-ai/misinformation ads as possible, when a couple weeks ago they changed how you report. The ad will still play through as you're reporting it, and once finished reporting it still remains and you may see it again after a few swipes (YTShorts). It feels like they did this so they could get the money before removing it.
wnc3141 12 hours ago [-]
The brooklinen ads are mortifying when I'm online in public
codygman 12 hours ago [-]
Use an adblocker?
That's what I do and why I don't even know what brooklinen is.
tanepiper 12 hours ago [-]
The web is becoming very hostile to ad blockers. I use a VPN and I've noticed more and more sites just being obnoxious with their popups and even just crashing the site completely in a loop (looking at you EuroNews)
walrus01 12 hours ago [-]
It doesn't solve everything but the 'full' desktop version of the ublock origin plugin runs just fine in Android on Firefox. I can't even imagine using any other mobile browser now. I don't know what the situation is for iphone platform stuff these days.
fl0id 10 hours ago [-]
and f.e. brave on ios
loloquwowndueo 11 hours ago [-]
If a site doesn’t let me see it with my ad blocking enabled, I just go elsewhere.
bell-cot 7 hours ago [-]
This Even skimming the web could take up 1000X the hours I have in a day, and I really should spend more time exercising, and reading books, and with friends and family, and volunteering, and ...
manyatoms 11 hours ago [-]
Try firefox, as chrome puts restrictions on what adblockers can do
Marsymars 7 hours ago [-]
I suspect it's not a real crash you're seeing, but rather a deceptive anti-adblocking script that redirects to a page that fraudulently claims to be a crash.
wnc3141 2 hours ago [-]
They sell bedsheets, with sort of a raunchy ad campaign.
I had a adblocker but wound up uninstalling it when it became more of a hassle than it was worth.
mischief6 12 hours ago [-]
abp in firefox doesn't really remove them. I've seen and reported multiple scummy popup-like looking ads like tfn and saw it again for weeks...
zelphirkalt 11 hours ago [-]
There may be gaps every now and then in block lists of ad blocking solutions, but besides that, you are using the wrong ad blocker. abp is not to be trusted to reliably block all ads it could. It has a different mission than uBlock Origin.
techjamie 11 hours ago [-]
Use ublock origin rather than ABP. ABP was dead the moment they sold out to "responsible" ads.
Telaneo 11 hours ago [-]
ABP as in adblock plus?
Don't use that. Use Ublock Origin.
benoau 13 hours ago [-]
I think section 230 immunity shielding from from any liability is also very motivating. Google was born into a world where companies had 10,000s of support personnel, today there are companies with over a million employees, they could easily human-review every single ad and they probably would if they weren't able to divert that cost into profits without consequence. AI makes it even easier and cheaper but... why bother?
Then there's the profits from scams, Meta is the only one with the stones to admit they like scam ads because they make up 10% of their revenue. I doubt it's a massive coincidence all the other big platforms are overrun with scams they do as little as possible to police.
luckylion 11 hours ago [-]
Does section 230 shield them from ads they select for display? Ads are not randomly hosted by random people and if you visit a random page those people uploaded, you see them. Google selects the ads they want to show you on search results, before youtube videos, or on third party websites. There's no "we don't know what that might be" going on at all -- they are running sophisticated algorithms to optimize the impact of those ads. Is that still be covered under section 230?
benoau 9 hours ago [-]
It's being challenged in court (at least for Meta) but historically it has been upheld including for Google.
As someone who advertised with them, they do seem to have an AI reviewer, and it also has false positives that no number of appeals seem to resolve. So in these cases you want to pay them money for good ads, but you can't because AI says no.
tgsovlerkhgsel 10 hours ago [-]
Google gets paid to show the ads.
Adding friction to the process (on the advertiser side) means less money for Google: 1) due to the cost of implementing the checking, 2) because some legitimate advertisers will be falsely denied, 3) because the scam ads were still paying money.
Not adding the friction doesn't seem to come with any serious downside. One would expect that it would, e.g. due to publishers removing the most profitable properties from the ad network or governments legislating this out of existence, but that doesn't seem to happen.
So, given these incentives, the outcome is inevitable.
If Google had to pay a massive fine for every scam ad that gets through, or was liable for the damages the ads cause, etc. - or otherwise had a strong incentive - suddenly there would be enough resources to make sure every ad is reviewed, advertisers that push scam ads get fully banned on the first offense rather than being given second, third, and fourth chances, etc.
pampas 8 hours ago [-]
All the friction goes down to the publishers fighting malvertising.
walrus01 12 hours ago [-]
> 2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed
The "more than can be reviewed" might have been a logical conclusion in a purely human based workflow, even if you have the lowest cost per head click workers in like, an external contractor call centre type environment in Bangladesh.
As the author points out, the ordinary consumer class version of publicly available Gemini very accurately classifies the ad as malicious. I really doubt that there are THAT MANY unique new ads being submitted per day that they can't afford the compute to run them through a similar classifier.
MBCook 12 hours ago [-]
How about I rephrase it.
More than can be reviewed for the time and money they’re willing to spend.
Even before AI, they absolutely could’ve done it.
kiicia 12 hours ago [-]
this argument still adds nothing to discussion because companies clearly want to spend zero but earn everything, the only amount they are willing to spend is on lawyers working on shielding companies from any responsibility including obvious cases of negligence
walrus01 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, and I've also seen the absolute shitflood of horrible ads. Every time I see somebody else's system that isn't running ublock origin or similar... They clearly are prioritizing the ad revenue over any actual "don't take a steaming dump on the Internet" ethical priorities.
conductr 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t think they want the most money. If they did, they’d have done this long ago. The trend we’re seeing is about them just struggling to meet their quarter over quarter and year over year numbers. It’s a short term driven change to strategy, they’re trying to fill the hole with something else (we all know what) before admitting it exists. If they said their golden goose was dying, the stock would crash.
torginus 9 hours ago [-]
> 1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.
They have literally destroyed their own reputation, and all the reputations of legitimate products that might appear along these scams. Do you think anyone would want their car, smartphone, or tax software appear next to actual credit card scams?
TV has standards for decency, and factuality, and might ban entire categories of ads (financial services) altogether.
StilesCrisis 12 hours ago [-]
It's not like they'll run out of ads to show anyway. If they take this ad down, they'll just show a different one?
blargey 11 hours ago [-]
Ad slots are auctioned. Scams getting shown means scammers are bidding more for those same slots than legitimate advertisers.
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
using AI to review ads costs basically nothing for Google
I would say it's just because there's no incentive to do anything unless a huge media storm breaks out or something.
turning a blind eye to this stuff probably makes them good money
IsTom 13 hours ago [-]
If they reject more ads they get less money.
12 hours ago [-]
motbus3 12 hours ago [-]
1 and 2 I believe
But also when you see what sort of information you can get from putting ads alone, even when people dont click, is quite amazing.
bbor 11 hours ago [-]
As someone who has worked for Google Ads, I should say that they do review ads with both AI and humans, and do spend quite a bit of money and energy on finding and stopping both bad-faith advertisers ("buy side", what we see) and bad-faith publishers ("sell side", more of a scam on the advertisers/google itself).
Is it enough? Probably not, based on this article. Are their policies strict enough? IMHO no way, considering Youtube left an ad up for "Ukranian women" in the early years of the war which wtf. But they certainly do try.
Like most businesses, the actual people involved are also well-intentioned, at least in the abstract; they wanted to make ads that sell products without annoying people. Obviously there's material conditions beneath and around all that, but we don't need to explain that part here ;)
vintermann 12 hours ago [-]
> There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.
If only there was a technology which could automate this... But we all know, AI is only used on users, not customers - and users get the two line perl script "AI" which says "We have reviewed your claim and decided to ignore it".
stogot 13 hours ago [-]
Someone should ask them: if Gemini can’t evaluate this at scale then why should I use it for my enterprise?
itopaloglu83 12 hours ago [-]
Since they're not liable for damages, they simply don't care enough to check the ads.
kiicia 12 hours ago [-]
because that makes them even more money for equally nonexistent amount of liability, this is actual answer, unfortunately
Fnoord 9 hours ago [-]
In underregulated capitalism, the reason is very simple: because they get away with it. This is why they despise regulation; it enforces accountability. Want to advertise? Ensure the ads are legit. It doesn't work when you say 'we didn't know beforehand' when a significant percentage is scams. That is when you start to curate the content beforehand.
In any other normal market, the middleman would be held accountable. Big tech? Not so much. We seen the slap on the wrist regarding Microsoft at the start of the century/millennium. We can also witness the same with regards to the garbage coming from China, where China doesn't take responsibility. Learned from the best.
13 hours ago [-]
ksajadi 1 hours ago [-]
My girlfriend just got scammed by a super convincing ad for UK Visa which looks identical to the real thing.
I have no idea how you can get that wording and that landing page get passed the google review.
I’ve done a lot of ads on google and every time my ad was just a little off (use of trademark word or competitor’s name with a reserved keyword) it will be blocked.
disillusioned 9 minutes ago [-]
My wife was searching for an Our Place rice cooker, because we had just bought one for $149 and she wanted to show my dad. Up popped an insanely authentic looking branded OurPlace ad highlighting the exact same rice cooker, but for only $49! Insane deal!
She clicked it, it was basically ourplacce.it, but like, not an easy thing to flag on her phone. Made it all the way through the purchase process until I got this from Citi:
Please use only to complete your purchase with Grand Egypti for 9000.00 EGP using card ending 3551
I'm like "what the hell are you buying?" and sure enough, it's all scams the whole way down.
There's simply no excuse for Google to not use their advanced AI to block this sort of copycat/lookalike/impersonation scam every day of the week, at scale. The excuse, obviously, is revenue, but it's really upsetting how many people it's hurting.
beloch 12 hours ago [-]
This is one major reason why blocking ads is now a safety issue. If you have a family member who, for whatever reason, might be fooled by this sort of ad, install an effective adblocker on all their browsers and uninstall/disable browsers that don't support an effective adblocker.
If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.
snailmailman 12 hours ago [-]
When Google broke the original uBlock origin and made people switch to uBlock Lite, I found out about the change because my grandmother called me in a panic. She saw an ad like the one in this article on her Facebook page and clicked it, then it was telling her to call Microsoft support because her computer was infected.
Like, Google removing Adblock directly caused that. Facebook allowing the ad caused that.
The ad led to malicious page that was also hosted on a Microsoft thing, and I ended up reporting it to them too. Microsoft at least promptly took it down within a half hour after I reported it. But these big companies have almost no incentive to stop this, and some of them directly profit off of these scams happening.
worik 11 hours ago [-]
> When Google broke the original uBlock origin and made people switch to uBlock Lite
Not me.
Is that because I stuck with Firefox?
Telaneo 11 hours ago [-]
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nvme0n1p1 11 hours ago [-]
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stephen_cagle 11 hours ago [-]
My mother has:
* Got me a "BearSkin" jacket from youtube's incessant advertisement.
* Signed up for a $250 subscription to "The Daily Beast" when she was watching youtube tv right before bed and probably subscribed when she meant to just view.
* Signed up for Norton Antivirus when she got a gif that looks like a popup that tells you have a virus and it opens to a Subscription Plan on her phone.
None of these things were things she particularly wanted, some she didn't even consent to, but a combination of paid promotion / advertisement / confusion about the UI is basically doing things against her will.
I literally got her Youtube Premium just so she stops seeing all the ads that are feeding on her. It is a problem.
qwerpy 10 hours ago [-]
> got her Youtube Premium just so she stops seeing all the ads that are feeding on her
I don't blame you for your solution but it is so sad that we have to basically pay protection money to Google now so that our loved ones don't get scammed and robbed while they are consuming addictive/slop content.
stephen_cagle 9 hours ago [-]
If you think that is bad... Recently I discovered that even a tiny website with moderate textual content basically forces adoption of cloudflare due to incredible (~2k request per second at times) scraping by bots.
It isn't even a shakedown, they are genuinely protecting you from others. But how did we get to the point on the web that this is needed?
FireBeyond 9 hours ago [-]
that is served by Google to users using oftentimes Google platforms.
snailmailman 13 hours ago [-]
Google can reply and confirm whether or not a report did anything?
I’ve never seen that. I report ads on YouTube all the time. I’ve reported ads for illegal drugs, illegal firearms, pornography, and all sorts of various scams. I’ve seen similar advertising to the example in this article, mimicking the phone’s UI. Ive reported them. I’ve never once seen Google reply to any of my reports to confirm what happened. I’ve always wondered, and since I continue to see the ads I just assume my reports go straight into a trash bin.
The illegal firearm ad I saw (more than a year ago, now) I was so shocked that I took screenshots and reported it multiple times. The ad advertised that the weapon was “easy to sneak through security” and “didn’t require an id to purchase” I saw the ad several times across multiple weeks. I reported it every time. I don’t think Google ever did anything about it. If they did, it took them weeks
repeekad 12 hours ago [-]
There is am extremely pervasive trick where bots repost trending comments rewritten in AI very early in videos and boost their bot comments above the original, then if a bot lands a top comment the profile is suddenly switched to porn/scam links with a female model as the profile picture.
It's so common and so clearly reported by many people that I'm left to assume Google likes the engagement the profiles bring and chooses to leave them up.
stevage 9 hours ago [-]
Why do you keep reporting them, when clearly that does nothing?
And since, as this article points out, Google does not need reports if they actually wanted to block such ads, it seems completely pointless.
nubinetwork 1 hours ago [-]
> Why do you keep reporting them, when clearly that does nothing?
Because some of us don't want to give in to the dead internet theory yet.
vintermann 12 hours ago [-]
I can recall one time I got feedback from Google that an ad had indeed been taken down, that was an Ukrainian women dating ad in Gmail which was not subtle at all about offering trafficked women. But that's some time ago.
sippingabonedry 13 hours ago [-]
Because serving dodgy ads pays them a lot of money. The pivot is complete.
90% of the ads I see on YouTube are obvious scams. Many from untraceable shady overseas organizations.
You can see the data if you report them. It's always some unheard of outfit out of Hong Kong or Brazil. I want to know who is funding this.
You don't need to be Kreskin to figure this one out.
inknight 12 hours ago [-]
> I want to know who is funding this
It's a network made by snake-oil salesman. People on Brazil yearns for passive-income, and they get told by a lot of influencers that dropshipping is what will give them their freedom.
Then you have thousands of people dumping fake ads about borderline fake products on Meta and Google. It's actually a hive-mind.
vintermann 12 hours ago [-]
> You can see the data if you report them.
That's at least something. Last I was on a streaming service, they were very fastidious about not revealing who was behind a spammer's rotating "music labels", despite them by law having some kind of payment details for them.
gdulli 12 hours ago [-]
A lot of questions being raised today can be answered by the recently inverted power balance between users/customers and corporations. People have not yet internalized that old assumptions about how corporations fear losing customers are no longer valid. Consumers have become entirely docile and passive. Open hostility to consumers is now a norm. (Obviously regulation is also less powerful and less feared as well.)
smugglerFlynn 12 hours ago [-]
Many large modern corporations are third-hand cars. The original owner had a purpose and an emotional investment in owning the car; for the second-hand owner, it became a practical thing; for the third-hand owner, it is often a liability.
If you are lucky, your third-hand owner still checks the oil and puts quality tires on it. If you are not, your third-hand owner pours customer relationships down the drain and doubles down on indiscriminate cost-cutting, alienating good people from the organization.
chneu 9 hours ago [-]
This is ultimately on the consumer. Critical thinking is long gone for like half the general population. It's wild. The excuses are endless.
gdulli 3 hours ago [-]
You're right. It's in their power to kneecap the businesses they sit on Twitter and whine about. Twitter, incidentally, being another one of those businesses.
celestialcheese 11 hours ago [-]
We had to hire a full time person to monitor and block click-trick "Continue" / "Download" scam ads on Google Ad Manager. With the amount of human training we did blocking these ads, google could absolutely solve this problem instantly. The ad creatives are nearly identical. We were seeing new ad accounts targeting our specific domain daily (ad account names like {sitename}339, {sitename}340, etc)
When we asked our reps, they dance around the question by saying they would "escalate to engineering" or some bs like that.
Google just makes far too much money to stop. My guess is that its >40% of AdX display revenue, based on the % of scam ads that come through ad manager.
Context: our site did ~$5m AdX revenue annually, mostly US audience. High CPM niche. This was ~7 years ago till 2 years ago when we sold the business, I would guess it's still happening based on ads I see browsing the internet.
erros 11 hours ago [-]
Money. They make so much money from malvertisement that it doesn't make sense to remediate them. It's corporate greed and they've known about this since the 2010s, various campaigns have sprung up and have caused untold X amount of dollars in damages in breaches, and nothing changes. I've heard at least one FBI agent who had investigated cases related to malvertisement put Google up there with some of the worst ad networks.
ocdtrekkie 11 hours ago [-]
This is it. The truth is Google's largest revenue sources are scams, fraud, and malware, and they wouldn't be in business without them. They're not going to remove all of their highest pay per click customers because it might harm society or something.
Just try to convince Google to remove "MapsQuest Driving Directions", a browser hijacking extension advertiser who clearly impersonates one of Google's competitors: It's an extremely high value scam targeting seniors (the folks who mostly look for MapQuest on... Google) and it makes them way too much money for them to stop it.
stillpointlab 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think it is fair to pin this on Google - I get the worst ads on X. But something about how the X ad network works means that even when I report the ad, block the ad poster, etc. there is this army of alternate ad accounts that all show the same ad.
I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low quality were grating on me. I thought: being rich is never having to watch another ad. Why am I letting these ads own spaced repetition slots in my brain that could be filled with knowledge? Instead of learning, my mental energy is being taken up by psychological manipulation to purchase? The relentless repetition of the mind-numbing ad interspersed throughout otherwise educational content.
Being rich is owning the real-estate of my own mind. I sometimes feel like a digital serf in my own head.
akersten 12 hours ago [-]
Why are you subjecting yourself to that instead of downloading Firefox + uBlock origin?
See the headline of this article for Exhibit (I've actually run out of letters in the alphabet) why adblocking is a moral imperative.
stillpointlab 12 hours ago [-]
As much I love a good old "Why don't you just ..." response that terrifically misses the point - in this particular case I was watching YouTube through their Apple TV app.
Now, there may be another "why don't you just ..." or "well, actually ..." response you have queued up, maybe some ramblings about a pi hole, or some anti-Apple hate, or some other solutioneering. Go ahead, tell me.
But it is the structure of incentive that forces this. The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid. And Google offers an option: Youtube Premium. That give both me and the creator what we want and (for the time being) removes the ads.
So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.
phyzome 11 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you've made a choice to watch ads. Which is fine, but then maybe don't complain about it.
stillpointlab 11 hours ago [-]
That is wrong on both accounts. I have little choice other than to watch ads since the structure of incentive that creates a marketplace like YouTube forces it on me.
I think about libraries and how the world would be if instead of a free public resource, you had to watch ads before you were allowed to take out a book.
It is just the case that in this modern social media world, if you want your ideas to spread you have to put them onto social media. And if I want access to those ideas I have to consume them through social media. There is nothing about that environment that is my choice, it is the environment that I find myself in.
And I have few choices to get around it. I can twist up into a pretzel trying to block the onslaught with more "why don't you just..." advice. Or I could pay to make it go away. Or I could just go off-grid and forego access.
And when you look close at the options, it becomes clear that sovereignty of my own mind has a price. Freedom of mind is not free in this modern world, if it ever really was.
phyzome 10 hours ago [-]
You made the choice to use Apple TV, whatever that is. I just use... YouTube. In my browser. Do you not have a browser? It doesn't cost money.
You also have no obligation to watch ads for creators to get paid. They can also set up things like Patreon if they would like. The ads are very lucrative, and that's their choice. But you are free to make choices too, if you would like to.
BLKNSLVR 7 hours ago [-]
They wanted a whinge, and not a solution. A position that I truly do not understand, but is not uncommon.
protocolture 1 hours ago [-]
>The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid.
The world would honestly be better if they didnt.
BLKNSLVR 7 hours ago [-]
> The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid
Nope.
They may get paid, they may not. That's the risk they've chosen. They may also get their Google account banned with no recourse for something minor or even non-existent.
> So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.
That's what they want you to think, you've been watching too many ads.
worik 11 hours ago [-]
> I was watching YouTube through their Apple TV app.
That is an active choice, not forced in any way.
> The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid.
There are better ways, and we would all be better off except for the small group of greedheads benefiting from the chaos
The ad supported internet is dying. Good riddance
11 hours ago [-]
BLKNSLVR 7 hours ago [-]
I think it is fair to pin this on Google, Meta, X, and any other ad networks that seem to have no control over their own platforms.
They're like Dr. Frankenstein, creating a monster and then just letting it roam the countryside. But worse, because they profit (immensely) from the chaos their monster wreaks.
dpkirchner 6 hours ago [-]
Pin it on Google, Meta, X, etc, and also on the sites that display malware ads to clients. They're all culpable.
stefan_ 10 hours ago [-]
X has been the most shameless, after all brand name advertisers left. Here is one state-level actor campaign that has been going on for months:
It's not advertising anything, it's just a straight up scam exploit site. It uses exclusively stolen or fake accounts. The links are shown as "amazon.de" or similar but of course do not go there, no doubt just a bug X haven't gotten around to fixing just yet.
This is on the kind of level where if we had actual law enforcement for tech companies, the next time some X executive lands in Europe they would be in cuffs.
hsuduebc2 12 hours ago [-]
Somehow I would never assume that X would act "moral". Google on the other hands even few years back was generally acknowledged as a good actor which was once again corporate charade people would fall for. Including myself.
CamperBob2 8 hours ago [-]
I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low quality were grating on me. I thought: being rich is never having to watch another ad
You don't have to be rich to avoid getting those ads. You can make them go away for ~$15 a month. If you can't afford that, you have bigger problems in your life than YouTube ads, and your first step towards fixing them is to spend less time watching YouTube.
BLKNSLVR 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but that also says to Google that their methods are successful. That makes my skin crawl.
CamperBob2 6 hours ago [-]
(Shrug) The creators need to get paid one way or another. Do you want them to start running their own commercials, as if sponsored segments aren't bad enough?
BLKNSLVR 5 hours ago [-]
Would that be worse than what we've got now?
CamperBob2 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, because I couldn't pay $15 to make those commercials go away.
vannevar 12 hours ago [-]
I assume it is the same reason Facebook serves dodgy ads: it makes them money and they have had no liability for the material they choose to serve to users. There are a handful of types of content that could generate bad press (some sexual or racist content, for example), so they police those. But ordinary scams generate engagement and make them money, and since they are generally immune from liability for content under Section 230, there's no downside for them. I've always thought there might be an end-run around Section 230 where the algorithm is tuned to preferentially present fraudulent content, thereby implicating the company in the advertiser's fraud. But as far as I know, no one has tested that approach.
ricardobeat 10 hours ago [-]
There is a well known problem in the Netherlands where scammers will set up fake museum websites, like “vangoghtickets.co”. They don’t even collect the money - your card details are instantly stolen and used for some odd looking purchases in south east asia or something.
I’ve reported these multiple times. They always get to the top of search results via paid placement, and Google always responds to the reports saying they found nothing wrong with them, even when provided with detailed evidence of the fraud.
leoc 10 hours ago [-]
As usual, "Google" here means the two individual human beings who together have a controlling interest in Google, Page and Brin. It may also mean some other people, but it certainly means them. To be clear, that's not to suggest that everything dubious about Google can be put on their shoulders. Some Google issues are genuinely hard to solve; some are deep enough in the weeds that they may plausibly never have heard of them or not have time for them. AdSense being a sewer doesn't seem to be one of those.
collabs 7 hours ago [-]
My opinion is that someone somewhere is paying for those ads and Google needs to get positive identification of a human being for any ad. Google has a near monopoly so there is no reason Google can't force this requirement arbitrarily. Once you have positive identification, suspend them pending further investigation if they serve any dodgy ad. I will be genuinely surprised if Google makes any money off of these dodgy ads. How? Like how does this money flow? Where does it come from?
There has to be a way to enforce positive identification, right?
Google already does this for Google play developers. I can't use a US credit card to pay for the USD 25 fee for a student on Bangladesh for example because I understand the payment method is one of the signals they use to make sure the student developer is a real person.
Is this something Google won't do on its own without being forced to act?
vikarti 5 hours ago [-]
Potential issues:
- There are some well-known ways around developer verification (peopl in some countries _need_ them for one reason or another so - they use non-local cards,etc)
- it's very basic verification and people who pay for ads likely arleady do it (payment have to come from somewhere).
- Proof of address is also spoofable and there are some situations were people making/providing fakes when they don't mean ill intent towards anybody else (example: Russia, some of ways to make non-Russian-only Visa/MC require making fake proof) but such methods could also be abused for doing actual harm.
- ID verification sometimes complicated if a lot of countries are involved. Example: I'm not at all sure at least one person in Google actually knew what Abhazian passport is and how to verify it ?
literallywho 2 hours ago [-]
These are pathetic excuses for a company with 400 billion in revenue. If they can't afford to hire people and develop systems, that means they don't have a viable business model that doesn't rely on scamming. Simple as that. I'm so tired of such excuses used for companies that make insane profits. What, they get to do that because alternatives are too complicated? I'm too stupid to get a phd in [insert field here], so I should be able to make a living running scams? These are the people who are claiming to work on AI and potentially AGI. Utterly ridiculous.
wraptile 2 hours ago [-]
Ha we use AI to detect dodgy ads with great success for our customers but the bottleneck is still the takedown. The dodgy ads always hit at least some amount of traffic just because google doesn't offer sufficient auditing tools for detecting these fast enough. So this has to be a problem google solves before the ad actually launches for best effectiveness.
andynrkri 13 hours ago [-]
My father saw a similar ad and got worried. The ad said you need to update your pdf version immediately. He uninstalled the YouTube because he knew it was irregular and thought his phone was hacked.
LollipopYakuza 13 hours ago [-]
If everyone was as cautious as your father, Google would have no choice but to improve the quality of their service.
itopaloglu83 12 hours ago [-]
Or they would start accepting money for remotely installing apps, just like the bloatware most phones and computers come with.
cube00 3 hours ago [-]
It's interesting that in the beginning Google would prominently display "Ads by Google" [1] which they've since hidden behind the "info" icon because they don't want their name associated with these scam ads.
Not just dodgy but downright malware links. It's insane. had one with a full screen mcafee level scam. Dropping the ball Google.
dpkirchner 12 hours ago [-]
I think the obvious answer is they aren't held to account by regulators. If a few execs were sent to prison for defrauding their users (and investors for taking on so much risk) things would change overnight.
hn_submit 12 hours ago [-]
These days almost all Google search results return nothing but links to stuff that you can buy instead of useful information you were looking for. They do this because they think they can get away with it, they're the only game in town.
To me this signals a huge opportunity for other companies to dive into. If a new internet search company appeared that returned actual useful search results and clearly delineated ads (like Google used to) I would switch to it almost immediately.
The only way these companies are ever going to change their game is when people vote with their feet!
cmoski 12 hours ago [-]
Kagi is better. You might want to try it.
hn_submit 11 hours ago [-]
Kagi will never make it. Asking people money for search is a non-starter.
Also, I type in something in the search bar and...nothing happens. There's a pop-up below the search bar which tells me nothing is saved with a "Dismiss" button. When I press it I'm being directed to the homepage telling me to pay-up.
bbor 11 hours ago [-]
Kagi is such an amazing team, building a truly next-level product. It's hard to realize what you're missing until you experience a real search engine for the first time in decades. It's wonderful.
bashtoni 7 hours ago [-]
Don't be evil -> What does "evil" really mean, anyway? -> Judgements about good and evil don't belong in business -> Evil is pretty profitable, actually
flerchin 12 hours ago [-]
They don't have liability for dodgy ads, but they are paid to run them. POSIWID.
ArcHound 13 hours ago [-]
Man, Google is catching strays from all directions. I recently posted an article about their bot behaviour [0], only to be drowned in other more pressing issues.
To comment on this one: as long as there is no backlash from their real customers (those that buy ads) nothing will change.
This one isn't a stray. This is multiple sources actively and accurately directing their shots.
VinnyBarreca 7 hours ago [-]
Facebook too. There are so many scams being promoted on FB, which is strange because both Facebook and Google ads used to be really strict about what they approved.
Now, it seems like they just approve anything.
conradfr 13 hours ago [-]
I have a website with some adsense ads (that pay for the server).
I try blocking the most obvious scams by blocking the announcers but it's basically impossible because the same dodgy ones keep coming back with a new name.
Also hard because they're not always in a language you understand.
I don't think I should do all this work instead of the biggest ad company in the world just to earn 5€ per day, but I'm also not aware of any better alternative.
dpkirchner 12 hours ago [-]
Have you tried reaching out to companies offering relevant products? Sometimes they have referral plans and don't require the same level of tracking.
corranh 13 hours ago [-]
This one is not complicated…Because dodgy companies spend a lot of money on ads.
noir_lord 9 hours ago [-]
More specifically a very large number of dodgy companies spend a relatively small amount each but in aggregate it's a lot of money.
Google has no interest in policing that because money and won't until they are forced to and since they are a transnational that's difficult since it requires multiple countries to do it with the added wrinkle that if you even hint at the possibility that just maybe you might consider doing something about US big tech you get immediate screaming from across the Atlantic.
zbentley 10 hours ago [-]
Yep.
And I suspect (would love some real data from scammy advertisers) that this is a bigger factor than most folks appreciate.
If you're a regular business that sells clothes or food or SaaS or insurance or whatever, online ads are a) not your whole customer acquisition system (you have regular marketing, word of mouth, maybe sales people, maybe brick-and-mortar brand presence, physical advertising, etc.) and b) not part of your expense sheet that you want to spend tons of time on.
The "b)" there leads companies to either overspend on stupid (but unlikely to be flagged) ads, or to try to keep their ad spend as low as possible for the highest reward, because they think of it like opex. After all, they have all the normal expenses of a normal business to worry about in addition to ad spend. Sure, there are outliers here who spend almost all their non-product money on online ads, but not most ordinary companies from Verizon to Dave's Local Auto Insurance to Safeway.
So "good"/ordinary advertisers aren't generating super high flag rates, but they're probably either a) spending lots of money without churn/support-needs risk or b) aren't spending that much ... compared to scam-ads-only businesses. Sure, google would prefer more upstanding customers in category "a)", but they're a near-monopoly and some of that growth is expensive to chase, while the scammers are beating a path to their door.
If you're a scam-ad business that produces malware or LLM-written gacha games or whatever, your product expenses are minimal and, if your business is lucrative, you can spend very large amounts of your balance sheet on ads for scam delivery channels. Tiny businesses in this area are likely to have whale-sized ad spends and a strong likelihood of growth (vertical as they get bigger/greedier, or horizontal as they keep spinning up new businesses to keep ahead of the law and bad press). I bet they punch above their weight ad-spend-wise, in other words.
You thought the unit economics of a SaaS business were good? Well, wait until you see the unit economics of a Play Store whitelabeled gacha game app with a credential stealer inside!
calny 7 hours ago [-]
I was irritated by this exact same misleading ad a few weeks ago and tweeted about it into the void. Kudos for the author for trying to do something about it.
drchaim 12 hours ago [-]
I’d love to know how much Google has made from accidental clicks since it started. I used to see my mum make a couple of mistaken clicks here and there on her computer; now on mobile it’s easily 10x worse. Sometimes because she doesn’t realize they’re ads, other times she tries to tap the X and it opens… It’s insane
rinconrex 9 hours ago [-]
Well, as others have said money. As far as I know ads are the domain of the FTC and FCC. Who's going to stop them from serving scammy ads? Not Carr, not the FTC commissioners.
As much as I personally disliked Susan Wojcicki, she kinda sort kept Youtube shenanigans in check. Yes, there were baity, inappropriate ads, but after she left it has gotten out of control.
Google signaled with "Lake America" they are playing along, and I don't think any real consquences will come of it as long as they keep pulling in billions and the QoQ keeps going.
cwillu 6 hours ago [-]
Google itself serves similar ads for its own services in all its properties. I've been “critically low” on google storage space for several years now, and every google app prompts and notifies and nags about it on every launch.
genrader 6 hours ago [-]
This is untrue and you have to be at least 80%
acomjean 5 hours ago [-]
I get those. To be fair they're asking for you to pay for some of the storage you are using for free. They have some tools to help clean up, but not enough... They'll keep nagging.
I mean apple music/tv/icloud are always pinging me with "free 3 month subscriptions".
MS is no better with the "lets finish setting up your pc with one drive..."
to which the options are [yes/ remind me again later]
I've moved mostly to linux and its refresing.
-A
maitola 6 hours ago [-]
Because that’s how they make money. Same reason Meta doesn’t flag fake news/information and actually even amplifies and serves it in echo chambers. It’s a business model. They do it because they can. No one is stopping them. Why would they leave the money on the table?
wwind123 10 hours ago [-]
My understanding is, it's a multi-party cat-and-mouse game that never stops evolving.
The publishers (websites or apps owners) that provide free content to users need a way to support the free content, and typically it's either donation (like wikimedia) or ads. To most publishers, ads revenue is far more predictable. By right most publishers also would like the ads to be reliable and relevant to the users consuming their content, but that's usually a secondary concern, compared to the revenue.
The users viewing the content are often annoyed by the ads, but as long as the ads are not too intrusive, they usually tolerate the ads. If the users occasionally find ads are actually useful, that's great, but most of the time in my experience, when I click into an ad it's usually a mis-click, not because I'm genuinely interested in this ad.
The advertisers need a way to reach more potential customers. Most advertisers are honest players in the game with real products or services to offer to users, trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc. But there are always scammers that try to cheat the game, showing dodgy ads to rip off users whenever possible.
Google as an ad-tech platform sits between these 3 parties, trying to show the most relevant ad from advertisers in a publisher's ad-slot to the user. But the system has evolved into a complex maze over the years that likely nobody knows the full picture any more. New legal requirements and regulatory policies and industry landscape shifts keep pushing the system to extremes. There are teams to fight ad spams, but there are also business goals to make more money to fund the AI initiatives. The scammers keep finding new loopholes in the system, and the teams fighting the scammers are often steps behind, due to limited resource and budget. End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters.
In an ideal world, ad-tech platforms should optimize for satisfying all 3 parties at the same time: publishers, advertisers, and end users, in addition to making money for themselves. But that's probably hard to achieve, given the dynamic nature of the world. AI can help fight scams, but AI can also help finding loopholes in the scam-fighting system. It's a sad state of the world.
BLKNSLVR 6 hours ago [-]
> Most advertisers are honest players in the game with real products or services to offer to users
Yeah, but
> trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc
Rapidly turns them malicious and anti-human, preying on psychological bugs.
> End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters.
Therefore their platform / process is not fit for purpose, no advertising platform has effectively solved scaling.
ChaoStatiX 5 hours ago [-]
I believe Google already has systems in place to block malicious ads and is actively running them. In fact, according to last year's 'Ads Safety Report 2025,' Google blocked over 8.3 billion bad ads in a single year. Of course, despite these efforts, the sheer volume of ads being uploaded makes it practically impossible to catch every single one of them. Therefore, rather than simply criticizing the issue in a negative light, we should recognize and appreciate the platform's ongoing efforts to clean up its ecosystem.
karim79 5 hours ago [-]
I think the answer is, that's always been Google's business and not much has really changed. Advertising accounts for about 78% of their total revenue.
NKosmatos 10 hours ago [-]
LOL because they're greedy and they want the maximum profits for their shareholders and the board.
The same explanation applies to every big (greedy) corporation :-(
Have you seen what is happeing with Facebook marketplace? with Twitter ads? (no, it's not called X, it's still Twitter for some of us) have you seen apps on Play store and Apple?
All soulless, big, greedy companies do this and they don't care about us anymore :-(
LeoPanthera 8 hours ago [-]
Apple News does this too. In some ways it's actually worse. It's a real problem, and those who are less technologically ept are inevitably going to be scammed. I expect a lot more from Apple than I do from Google, so it's surprising that it's been going on for so long.
al_borland 6 hours ago [-]
I find Apple News to be so frustrating. Even way I paid for the premium service, so much of the content was behind paywalls, and the ads are so pervasive that it was a truly awful experience.
I have to believe Tim Cook never actually tried to use it. I don’t know how any executive using that app could allow it out the door… not at a company that claims to pride themselves on providing a good user experience.
ezoe 10 hours ago [-]
Because nobody is prosecuted for scam and malicious ads.
People at Alphabet and all website owners which use AdSense and showed scam and malicious ads must be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced jail time in order to stop this mess.
But it looks like all the countries are busy age restricting Internet instead. By age restricting, it means private information gathering which fuel ad companies more.
slopblast 6 hours ago [-]
Google's abandoning of 'do no evil' has hastened their becoming dodgy themselves, not just the ads they serve up, but the way they serve you and your data up.
torginus 13 hours ago [-]
Do platform holders have a say in this?
I'm sure if I submitted an app that on the iOS app store that mimicked a system warning that tried to scare people into giving me access, it would not pass the review process.
If instead I decided to embed a WebView and later changed the html to do the same I would likely get booted from the app store (afair Apple's very particular about serving remote content in PWAs, and changing said content, even under benign circumstances).
iOS seems to have less scareware and shady apps than Android anyways.
tough 11 hours ago [-]
the app store is filled with scammy apps, its just a different flavour
I once got a crypto-wallet PK leaked by a fake wallet app impersonating another very known brand. Found out on reddit it was a fake... After a few months the real app came out but yeah...
didip 7 hours ago [-]
Spam/Scam filtering should have been the perfect place to show case SOTA AI. Why Google & Meta have not been able to do so?
Relatedly, DMCA should be expanded to harmful ads content.
dotcoma 13 hours ago [-]
Because they are a dodgy company?
rhaff 12 hours ago [-]
My father installed an adware through one of the google ads. Just straight out of nowhere displays fullscreen ads whatever you're doing.
driverdan 11 hours ago [-]
Until they are held legally liable they will do the minimum necessary to keep the money flowing and avoid litigation.
kentonv 10 hours ago [-]
Here's another one for you. If you search for any popular book on Google Play Books, you get a whole bunch of fake knock-offs alongside the real book. Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to tell which one is real.
And they, apparently, won't do anything about it.
A couple months ago I went searching for the book "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, an NYT bestseller. The top search result at the time used the exact official cover art and author names, and was otherwise in every way indistinguishable from the real book.
I foolishly bought it and started reading. I quickly noticed that the text seemed like more of a mediocre college paper than a bestselling book. After a few pages I was like... wtf is this. Jumped to the end of the book and found an "Abort the author" section naming a fellow named Marcus Whitfield as the author.
I dutifully opened a ticket with Google suggesting that they should really remove this book. They refunded me, but told me they couldn't remove the book because their policy states that only the true copyright holder could request a take down, and I am not that.
WTF? I wasn't even claiming a copyright issue. I was claiming false advertising and fraud. I was claiming that Google Play's store was listing an obviously, maliciously fake book, selling it for real money, and that they should stop doing that. They take a 30% cut! How are they not doing even the most basic vetting of these listings? A human could trivially identify it as fake in 30 seconds and an AI even faster.
It appears that since then, the actual real book has risen to #1 in the search results (I think; it's hard to tell), and the exact listing that got me is gone, but there are still a whole lot of obvious fakes after it:
And if you search for any other popular book, you get the same thing.
(Of course, no real publisher actually cares about Google Play Books, because nobody uses it, so nobody files takedown requests, presumably. Also presumably no engineers work on it, and that's why it's a wasteland. What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down?)
BLKNSLVR 7 hours ago [-]
> "Abort the author"
Shame that was untrue.
> What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down
Likely just because it's profitable enough. If nothing else, that seems to be the #1 guiding principle.
kentonv 6 hours ago [-]
Doh, too late to edit the typo.
BLKNSLVR 5 hours ago [-]
I actually thought that you were quoting from the book, as example of how it was not genuine. LOL.
kazinator 11 hours ago [-]
Extension to Hanlon's: never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to apathy and greed.
pampas 6 hours ago [-]
This. When it's a person the original quote applies. But big companies have millions of data points on everything and are competent in areas they care about like their own profit. So you can assume it's not ignorance. They don't care if a publisher has to spend loads of time resolving issues rogue ads and malvertising because it doesn't affect them and the end user just blames the publisher.
BLKNSLVR 8 hours ago [-]
Based on prior FBI recommendations to use ad blockers to keep yourself safe from scams[0], it seems that the various methods of blocking/avoiding Youtube ads should also be recommended. Use as many of the tools as possible to escape the suck of the scam-hole that Google has made the Internet:
I've said this before, elsewhere, with this kind of thing plus the LG / Smart TV surveillance, it feels as if we're living in the paperclip maximiser world, except it's "advertising" instead of paperclips.
Edited to add: Remember when 'piracy funds terrorism' was a thing? Surely Google is providing material assistance in funding organised crime and / or terrorism in their reckless indifference to what they allow their platform to promote?
CM30 8 hours ago [-]
Frankly speaking, because no-one is forcing them to stop serving them.
That's the biggest 'trick' companies like Google have pulled here. They've somehow tricked the regulators into thinking that because they're big companies serving a lot of customers over the internet, that any sort of fraud or product liability laws are irrelevant to them.
Because any other company doing this would get sued into oblivion, shut down and the executives criminally charged. If a brick and mortar business let blatant scammers and criminals advertise in their physical stores, that would be seen as a serious crime.
Same with a retailer that sold dangerous or counterfeit products, or one that turned their stores into surveillance panopticons where customer data was collected illegally and sold to the highest bidder.
Google, Amazon, Meta etc are doing things that would get a normal business owner sent to prison.
The solution isn't just technical, it's about being willing to enforce the law for internet businesses the same way we do for offline ones. If Sundar Pichai and the board were looking at 10-20 years in prison for fraud or cyber offences, then Google would fix those dodgy ads real quick...
makeitdouble 8 hours ago [-]
> because they're big companies serving a lot of customers over the internet, that any sort of fraud or product liability laws are irrelevant to them.
Is it false ?
As much as we can lament the current state of affair, we must acknowledge everything that has been thrown at any of the bigger companies has resulted in slap on the wrists at most.
At this exact moment in the US money is straight power, in it's rawest form.
CM30 7 hours ago [-]
Well no and that's the problem. Many governments (especially the United States one) are complicit in this. They don't do nearly enough to keep corporate power in check.
If they really wanted to fix these issues, antitrust could be a real thing again, and companies like Google would be forcefully broken up and barred from remerging later down the line. If Google doesn't have Gmail, Chrome, Android or YouTube and all these things are separate businesses, then their power is severely curtailed.
They could also arrest CEOs, board members and other people with a large amount of power at these organisations and charge them for the actions of the business.
Or levvy percentage based fines that obliterate the company's ability to function. Could Google function if it was charged 50-60% of a year's worldwide revenue until an issue was fixed? It'd probably have to cut way back on everything in that scenario.
The issue is that the government has been so thoroughly captured by corporate interests that noone faces meaningful consequences if they earn more than a billion dollars a year.
mococa 10 hours ago [-]
Gezus… If you see my mother-in-law cellphone. It is impossible to use <period>. Full of ads crap that she probably installed by following ads… Remember IE toolbars?
gdevenyi 9 hours ago [-]
People still see ads?
codingjoe 12 hours ago [-]
Same with Meta. The latter knowingly makes a substantial revenue from those ads. Unless a government steps it to make advertising platforms liable, there will be zero incentive for change
Waterluvian 12 hours ago [-]
I don’t think they want to nor is it good for them to long term. But I bet they’re institutionally incapable of avoiding it given the KPIs that drive the entire employment ambitions of many managers.
rectang 13 hours ago [-]
Ohhh, has anybody used AI to generate delicious statistics about how many ads served by various ad networks will get you hacked / violate the ad networks own policies?
mike_bob 10 hours ago [-]
No surprise under a republican controlled government, the FCC considers this type of behavior "good for business".
prettyblocks 10 hours ago [-]
strange assertion as this has been an ongoing problem from day one.
It's more than that. The 10% is the scam ads that "won" the ad auctions. It doesn't include the effect of scam ads bidding up the market and increasing the price of non-scam ad wins.
(Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent... but if every ad is 1 cent more...)
Same problem when you want to buy a home in a place where real estate became a means for money laundering or uninhabited store of value
vintermann 12 hours ago [-]
> Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent.
They're probably taking that into account in their 10% of profit coming from ads estimate.
Marol 6 hours ago [-]
Cloaking.
Google bans people, but mostly the innocent ones. If you're running blackhat, you've built a setup that gives you very good avoidance, and the bans are calculated into your sheets. The reviewer and the system sees something else than the customer clicking the ad. And even if they get banned, they will just burn a cc and domain and then get back to printing after a few hours.
While a legitimate business never suspects it can get banned, and when it does, the process is Kafkaesque.
Our case: a month of back and forth on the appeal, no success. The best we got was a suggestion to read the TOS and check whether we had any "brand affiliations" we don't have in real life. Previous replies were pasted slop. We don't have any affiliations, and we still have no clue what they were talking about. Meanwhile our conversion rate on other ad platforms was decimated by us constantly changing stuff to please the Google reviewer.
MiroslavPokorny 4 hours ago [-]
Because they get paid ?
8cvor6j844qw_d6 12 hours ago [-]
I've seen suspiciously more malicious ads on older users phone (e.g., click to update Chrome ads) especially in-app ads.
hsuduebc2 12 hours ago [-]
You can target by specific system or even a version. This is simply google tolerated malicious behavior because it brings them revenue.
CHB0403085482 7 hours ago [-]
This is one reason why you have adblock...
eranation 9 hours ago [-]
This is include ads that impersonate google services, e.g. "your google translate has expired, upgrade to a new version". Reporting it to google is like yelling at a wall. Or worse, yelling at a wall after a few million years will slowly erode it due to the air friction.
razorbeamz 7 hours ago [-]
Simple: They don't care.
thewhitetulip 3 hours ago [-]
Funny how AI is AGI and yet ad companies don't use AI to scan for scam ads but they might lock you out of your account via automated review
tomxor 13 hours ago [-]
> I’m a big fan of Hanlon’s razor.
There is a 3rd option: malicious stupidity / aka wilful ignorance.
Google is a collection of individuals, so it's very likely both sides of Hanlon's razor are true: a little malice from those in control, persisting a state of stupidity for those executing the process.
As others have pointed out, there will be resistance to improving a process that negatively impacts their bottom line. Incentives, dictate long term behaviour of organisations; whereas Hanlon's razor works better at an individual level IME.
tcfhgj 11 hours ago [-]
Still some people don't block ads and people pay for it.
Simple as that.
jrm4 4 hours ago [-]
This strikes me as a very silly question?
Because they can. There's no meaningful way to prevent them from doing so.
saaaaaam 12 hours ago [-]
How weird. I reported this exact ad earlier today.
alpineman 12 hours ago [-]
Same for Facebook posts and comments inciting hatred
HarHarVeryFunny 12 hours ago [-]
Google's ad-serving is dumb as a rock. It seems to be based just on things it thinks you may be interested in, even when it should be 100% obvious that they are not things you are going to buy.
They should let people have more control over what ads they do and don't see.
If Google served me ads on stuff I was interested in (I'd be happy to tell them) rather than women's clothing, they I might buy it. I'm a guy - show me as many skimpily dressed women as you like, but I have no need for women's clothes! Try it once or a hundred times it you must, but maybe after the millionth non-purchase you'd think they might figure it out and use that screen real-estate to serve an ad for something that my purchase history or what they know about me indicates I might have some interest in!
Dumb as a rock.
pbhjpbhj 11 hours ago [-]
They've got ads to shift, they need eyeballs, they don't really care about conversion beyond if it hits the bottom line.
It's like the whole purpose of ads, they're not trying to sell you stuff you need - they want your money.
HarHarVeryFunny 10 hours ago [-]
Well, the advertizers want my money, which they are not getting - wrong ads.
Google wants the advertizers' money, who are really being scammed by Google if they pay every time Google serves an ad to me that Google presumably knows is not going to result in a purchase. I guess Google don't care - if they get paid for click-thrus and I occasionally do that, but never buy, then Google still gets their money.
muyuu 11 hours ago [-]
They have always been spivs. Their entire business model is dishonest and predatory.
paulsutter 12 hours ago [-]
The answer is in Google's Capex trends:
2023: $32B
2025: $91B
2027: $300B (projected)
2029: $400B (projected)
“I’m happy to go bankrupt rather than lose this race” -Larry Page
maxlin 6 hours ago [-]
Because they get paid and can always wait before banning them without fingers pointing at them too hard.
pschastain 12 hours ago [-]
Money
11 hours ago [-]
jeffybefffy519 10 hours ago [-]
Money is the answer
einpoklum 12 hours ago [-]
> Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
Because you're using an application which presents those ads to you.
Avoid Google/Alphabet application as much as is possible, and you'll see a lot less / none of this kind of ads.
It looks like you're using their YouTube client. Try NewPipe:
I suspect this boils down to a cost/benefit tradeoff.
The cost of strictly enforcing stated rules for ads is felt immediately and fully by Google. It is concrete, measurable, and probably non-insignificant; the benefit is essentially goodwill from the narrow sliver of the web that is verbal about this. That is intangible, difficult to measure, even harder to assign a reasonable dollar value to (meaning the ROI could look negative), and the benefit would accrue to parties other than Google who might not even notice.
edd2 9 hours ago [-]
Sigh.
I reported months ago that Google's continual growth rate in revenues from Ads should be heeded with caution - its not from AI/LLMs.
They are juicing and juicing and juicing their existing assets for all the cash flows they can generate! That's why the revenues keep growing. They did not go to such extremities in the past - and they probably strategically held back.
Meta is facing the same predicament btw - both entities claim the growth is coming from new AI investments. The amount of impersination/Scam ad's I've seen on IG is hilarious. That is a flat out lie its from investments they made pre-LLM hype + efficiency gains.
alex1138 1 hours ago [-]
Ah, yes. The standard pipeline scammy ad/post -> report -> This Does Not Violate Our ...
Bonus points if you can get banned for any reason, by contrast, on sites like Facebook
Fuck all of you. Shut them all down, jail time for execs
qwerty_clicks 13 hours ago [-]
Keep up these efforts to name and shame. If Google won’t act on these things because it doesn’t make them money, because they are unregulated, or because they are lazy, they might because it still cuts their credibility and reputation. Especially here on HN where Google is no longer considered such a darling by developers and thinkers.
gherkinnn 11 hours ago [-]
> However, if you were being uncharitable, you do have to question whether it’s in Google’s interest to remove adverts that get lots of clicks.
That is it. They don't do it because it goes against their interests. Google is a scummy company doing scummy things. There is very little else to it.
krttherealest 12 hours ago [-]
yall better ba carefull with that ads and shi
boredatoms 12 hours ago [-]
Google gave up, they know they’ve lost Search to ChatGPT
diogenescynic 9 hours ago [-]
I previously noted that the top search result for Claude Code was linking to a spyware website. It's crazy how this stuff is not monitored at all.
OtomotO 9 hours ago [-]
Because they make money by that.
Sometimes simple answers are not only elegant, but capture the essence of a problem.
shevy-java 9 hours ago [-]
> AI is really good at detecting deceptive adverts - why isn’t Google using it?
Because Google is an adCompany. It will not do anything about ads - quite the
opposite, it has fought down ublock origin. Everyone sees that.
algoth1 9 hours ago [-]
Money
qsbuilder 4 hours ago [-]
its so terrible because most of those ads pray on seniors, I swear i see the Tai Chi ad every single day and reported it so many times.
gagan2020 11 hours ago [-]
To Google,
Don't be Evil
colordrops 11 hours ago [-]
Because google is dodgy.
Pxtl 11 hours ago [-]
Why not?
It's not like they face any consequences for being party to fraud. Laws are for poor people.
tonyhart7 11 hours ago [-]
"Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?"
more like why company still want to receive money ????? is more correct term
demibabs 12 hours ago [-]
> TLDR:
AI is really good at detecting deceptive adverts - why isn’t Google using it?
I have the same question regarding “why is Workday’s resume parser so shit?”
ambione 7 hours ago [-]
google once served me an ad for what I'm pretty sure was CP, and i never reported it to anyone out of fear that just by being served a link to that kind of horrible shit I was somehow going to get in trouble over it. Sounds ridiculous, but as a nobody, pissing off a giga-corporation in an era owned by them probably was the better choice for my financial and overall well-being, even if it felt cowardly. Besides, epstein's guests roam free, unimpeded, and continue with impunity, what positive outcome could I have possibly hoped for?
donkeylazy456 5 hours ago [-]
kidnapping ads, scrolling dark patterns, nsfw context ads, fake medicines...
i would prefer paywall instead.
hnbad 12 hours ago [-]
Google (Alphabet) is a corporation. Corporations follow the profit motive. Furthermore it's a publicly traded corporation. These follow the interests of their shareholders.
What does killing dodgy ads do for Google's bottom line? It's removing paying customers and driving down competition for (and therefore value of) ad space. What's the cost of dodgy ads to Google? The sites that use Google Ads will continue using Google Ads if they do nothing about the dodgy ads. The sites that don't use Google Ads won't be swayed to use Google Ads if they do remove the dodgy ads. Google is not held liable for serving dodgy ads so there's no direct risk associated with serving them.
Why should Google remove the dodgy ads? "Don't be evil"? That motto exceeded its shelf life before it was first publicly posted.
Hanlon's razor is nice and all but there's a difference between malice and amoral apathy. Corporations would sell shredded orphans as fuel if it made economical sense to do so.
hsuduebc2 12 hours ago [-]
It simply increases shareholder value more than if they we're removed. It will only ends when companies will be made at least partially responsible for damages they help to facilitate. Don't be evil my ass.
expedition32 13 hours ago [-]
Not just dodgy some are straight up illegal.
They'll act if someone threatens to sue otherwise Google doesn't give a shit as long as they get paid.
geekamongus 8 hours ago [-]
This type of shit is why I refuse to give up my pi-hole, uBlock, and Firefox.
mito88 12 hours ago [-]
a rhetorical question...
:)
kylepomykala 11 hours ago [-]
"Don't be evil."
riazrizvi 11 hours ago [-]
Because money?
Ask me another.
Razengan 12 hours ago [-]
Has anyone ever actually even purchased anything just because of an ad?
In fact, these days ads have the opposite effect: A repetitive ad turns people off from EVER checking out that product.
F Grammarly and ClickUp etc. I've never tried those products but I have disgust for them thanks to their ads.
cmoski 11 hours ago [-]
One would assume so. How do you think Google, Meta, etc make all their money?
michael_j_x 12 hours ago [-]
imagine if a TV network served scammy ads during prime-time TV.
operatingthetan 11 hours ago [-]
Don't they? Kalshi, crypto stuff, sports betting, random products that lie about what they do.
nephihaha 11 hours ago [-]
The TV here used to advertise payday loans. Some of had them four figure interest on them. There are street loansharks who charge less.
gverrilla 7 hours ago [-]
Mere consequences of the "free market". Applying the so-called "Hanlon's razor" to one of the most malicious actors in the planet is borderline delusional (or malicious :P ).
nullc 10 hours ago [-]
Youtube's bitcoin doubler scams are a great example of this... they run essentially the same videos over and over again, usually Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, or Steve Wozniak, occasionally Warren Buffet and a few others-- with some ticker or scroll telling people about a special promotion where whatever bitcoin you send them will be sent back doubled.
It takes basically nothing to reliably identify these videos. They're extremely heavily promoted with ads running on other videos. Google does nothing with them when reported. Google does not proactively remove them. And because, contrary to the documentation, youtube doesn't pull the verified flag from a channel when its name is changed, these scams go out on channels that look like official sources for the celebrities in them (they steal some random verified channel then change its name to SpaceX (official) or Microstrategy or whatever).
Google even got sued unsuccessfully by Woz and some of the scam victims-- and their response was pound the "S230 is an absolute shield for externally provided material" table and continue to do nothing about the fraud except rake in money from pedaling it. They haven't even fixed the verified flag issue.
(Shades of the same conduct were seen in the old viacom v. youtube case, -- users were reporting copyright infringements so they took away the button.)
I have sympathy for the S230 shield and consider it very important-- but the law is the absolute worst we're allowed to be. They are free to do better (and the CDA shield was designed to assure they can moderate without picking up liability).
Google's conduct is irresponsible, unethical, and may well cost us this important legal protection because if society's choice is liability for hosts OR the biggest and wealthiest companies do nothing while raking in money from even the most flagrant scams we're going to eventually choose liability with dire consequences for free speech.
It's especially ironic that the smaller sites and forums (like HN) would be hit especially hard by a narrowing of S230, but these forms reliably work hard to remove the worse abuse-- and are seldom the source of anything that truly offends the senses at least not for long. Companies like google that don't are ones that are so wealthy and powerful that they're almost intractable to litigate against even without S230 like protection. Loss of it would hurt them gravely but it would hurt everyone smaller more.
fHr 9 hours ago [-]
because they're greedy capitalist mfs making a lot of money of scams
mschuster91 12 hours ago [-]
Google doesn't care because they figured out no one will hold them accountable any more.
The US regulatory authorities DGAF ever since Lina Khan exited the picture and the EU regulatory authorities might have the legal basis to hold Big AdTech accountable, but the EU is at the moment busy trying to fend off BS from the Trump admin, they do not have time and risk appetite (aka Trump retaliating on behalf of Big AdTech) left for scam ads.
BLKNSLVR 6 hours ago [-]
I look forward to any country putting forward very heavy advertising regulation as a proxy for the tax avoidance schemes they all use.
They have been putting thousands of scam adverts on our website for some time. Think "you have been looking at xxx and must pay a $100 fine" type popup nonsense. Hosted on the following websites:
azurestaticapps.net
azurewebsites.net
herokuapp.com
ondigitalocean.app
digitaloceanspaces.com
netlify.app
Google doesn't allow you to block these domains, because they consider them "TLDs" (the scammers use a new subdomain every day eg abcdefg.herokuapp.com). The scammers get banned and return the next day with a new account and subdomain (repeat every day). Therefore we cannot stop them. It's bizarre and baffling. But Google Adsense had to go.
I created a tool that automatically follows ads to try to find scams.
But that was usually reserved to typosquat domain ads or ads on porn websites. I didn't know scammers used normal page ads too.
I know tech support scams used to use google search ads, but I don't think they do that as much anymore, so maybe they have moved onto things like adsense.
These scammers usually do IP address checks to check for residential IP before showing the scam, and some also do some basic fingerprinting checks, so that is how they get past detection. That said, it shouldn't be too difficult for google to do some better checks if they actually cared.
Google is absolutely smart enough to make these attacks un-economical. IMO they are unwilling to incur the loss in revenue this would involve (false positives, banned resellers etc).
As a result, even though "Enhanced" safe browsing can use Gemini Nano to do client side detection of scams and then flag it in google safe browsing for everyone, the entire domain and all subdomains are whitelisted, so that detection never seems to actually fire. https://blog.google/security/using-ai-to-stop-tech-support-s...
I'm not sure which domains this applies to, but it seems to apply to most of the domains that these scammers actually like to use.
Same issue with spam sms in my country: I think they geo-locate it so submitting the link to safe browsing project takes way too long
Is it your website or theirs? YOU are the one putting such ads there as YOU have chosen a sketchy ad company (google).
Brands work as a trust heuristic, so a fallen brand continues to trade on its old reputation for a while.
- Add that attribution -- blame Google (or, supposing the ads are good, credit Google; a good header goes a long way toward swaying people's opinions)
- But it doesn't matter if a single website appropriately attributes Google's highest/lowest-quality ads. The last step (speculative and hand-wavy) is to incorporate that behaviour in some sort of software more people want to use. If you're fighting alone then you'll lose. If you can convince more people that appropriately crediting Google's advertising successes and blaming their malicious failures is advantageous, you'll (by definition) have more traction in the anti-megacorp-endorsed scams and other life-altering consequences.
These companies that abstain from adsense and it’s revenue are WWW vegans.
well thought I was getting some actual useful tip
If people are going to learn to install an extension, it should be UBlock Origin. That will solve more problems than attributing scam ads.
Nobody’s yet cared enough to sue them, or their managers at ICC yet. However, eventually an ambitious lawyer will try to make the case, especially if fraud and human trafficking continues to grow like it is.
Want to take bets on whether the US gov wades in if that happens?
The US gov is directly antagonistic to the ICC and will undermine them whenever possible. This would present them another chance.
If yes, then ... you are profiting from ... that shite. You must be OK with that and it does sound like you are actively complicit with it, despite your protestations.
If you really think that Adsense is awful and might damage your brand then dump it and don't whine on HN!
OK, that's probably a bit unfair because you are dealing with a monopoly with no recourse to arbitration. That's your real problem.
Seems like two things 1) Google is losing at AI and Sundar wants to mask this 2) AI is going to destroy their ad business and they want to get while the getting is good.
Now their product strategy however…
Although I am curious if they are not worried and playing the long game confident that their distribution will eventually help them catch up (and worst case they own some of Anthropic). But obviously Anthropic and OpenAI have their own distribution now too.
Nobody is doing well enough with AI revenue ATM (https://isaiprofitable.com/). At the moment it is probably more about market share of users, that is where the investment capital will need to be clawed back from when it starts to be called back (or replacement money will need to come from if the investment cycle simply stops giving generously).
Online advertising has completely broken from anything resembling the traditional social-contract of magazine ads, billboard, signs, etc. They're preying on your safety and privacy, not just your attention.
[1] https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/media/wisereads/art...
But what I see and hear from technical consumers, businesses, and govts is that they would prefer their data stay local, and like the idea of edge compute being used for AI.
Claude/OpenAI's direction with their Apps enabling deeper integration is a good direction, but the trust with data is still a growing concern. OpenAI's math actions on the NS problem degrades their reputation a lot.
Rank Cloud Approx. annual revenue Growth My assessment
1 AWS ~$129B ~20% Clear leader
2 Microsoft Azure ~$90B ~40%+ Strong #2, rapidly closing
3 Google Cloud ~$59B 36% Fastest-growing historically, but smaller
which is to say that Google is still way behind AWS and Azure. Also, lots and lots of people have switched to using AI-interfaces now, I'm not hearing "I've googled that and that's what I found" anymore, it's all "I've chatgpt-ed and this is what it told me".
If you use it for even 15 minutes you will see this is not true. At all.
I forget the name but I see one LLM chatbox that looked like one of those old world news media websites plastered from top to bottom with jumpy obnoxious ads. It did offer some good models for free. I honestly might even consider using it if I could remember what it was called.
If they turned Gemini into that today I think people would just laugh, shake their head and close the app.
My experience confirms this: many years ago I had a website banned from serving Google Ads. They said my pages didn't have enough content.
Then a competitor started showing ads on the exact same type of pages where I had previously been able to serve them. So I tried getting my website approved again and -- surprise -- now I can serve ads again.
What is not okay is them pushing a huge amount of ads into website, constantly asking you to enable auto-ads and vignette ads and what-not.
Firstly, try to imagine stuffing as many ads as there are on a SERP into a chatbot conversation. Good way to lose users.
Secondly, Google spent decades hyper-optimizing their ad business monopoly for maximum profit, including going to extents that were recently found unlawful. People should really look into the findings of the last two Antitrust cases against Google, both of which it lost but for which it suffered only slaps on wrists. The details are eye-opening, including the bits about how Google, leveraging its prime position as the middle-man playing all sides against each other, manipulated ad auctions to make itself more money at the expense of its customers.
Even Microsoft was dinged for screwing over just their competitors, not their customers.
But now because of the paradigm shift in how people discover information, very little of the Google ad monoploy advantage transfers over. I think their AI business will keep growing, even if they don't have the best models, and it will be an exceptional source of revenue.
But it will still be no match to their ad business -- a cash cow of incomprehensible proportions -- and that is the fundamental problem they face today.
AI probably would help their display ad business overall -- they finally just launched a "have Gemini create your ad!" feature, and I imagine having to hire a designer was a common blocker for SMBs.
But I wouldn't write off ads yet. It seems plausible to me that LLMs will be able to slightly alter their output to casually mention paying brands and to profile users better than we could before.
That's good. I hate ads. I will fight them down until they are gone.
But I don't think this is the case here. Ads are still pushed down onto the people willy-nilly style.
There's zero chance that AI destroys their ad business. I get served ads from Amazon in podcast RSS feeds that were directly derived from things I said in Gemini chats. It's definitely not destroying ads lol
I'm surprised by the weird levels of incompetence on this website, use your brain or have you already hawked that off to your favorite AI lab.
The difference for the newspaper and magazine ads is you couldn't just click on it in an instant. You had to spend a lot more effort and had more chances to realize it is a scam.
Not trying to justify either, BTW. Its just scary how many different ways there are to defraud people.
The change has to start with Google, and they can't be bothered to do so, thus far.
In my state, which perhaps takes liability too far in the other direction, if I serve sober you a single beer, you proceed to visit a second bar, have ten shots of tequila in an hour, and kill a man driving home - I share equal liability as the tequila bar.
Perhaps there is a middle ground in this world where a firm that makes billions has to have some basic “Know Your Customer” systems to prevent abuse?
The reason for that is that you've been serving a hard drug to a customer. Don't do that if you cannot bear the responsibility (liability). In order to bear the liability, the price has to go up, including perhaps a safe escort home of the drug user, but of course that would be too expensive/socialist/authoritarian (blimey they want us to take responsible action regarding our customers! I knew a club here for young people where it was very normal to have them taxi'd home. Son, wanna go out? The taxi is part of the price), and lead to 'off the record' drug usage. Which is how we ended up in opioid crisis.
If alcohol would only be invented today, there's no chance it would be legal in the current umbrella of drugs. And, for good reason: it is too addictive, too harmful for self and their environment. Compare with the various empathogens or harmfulness of psychedelic drugs. These cause, normalized, far less damage to both user and their environment.
I abstain from drinking (I am sensitive to addiction which is how I ended up to that conclusion), and this weekend I had a tiramisu (it was on sale, wife bought it). Did I notice that? Oh hell, yes. Would you serve a child tiramisu? No, we should not.
Like you, I abstain. Yet I do have to deal with bartenders, and I will say that some are responsible and some are not. (I have pissed off some fairly powerful people along with people who commerially produce alcohol, and ought to know better, that they cannot serve alcohol because they are unlicensed, uncertified, or uninsured.)
Either way, I agree with the literal interpretation. They should vet the ads they serve and are complicit in this mess if they serve ads through Google et al.
They said they investigated it and concluded it did not break any rules and no actions where taken.
It's not magic because it relies on the "fuel" of cool water to evaporate.
YouTube adverts frequently contain fraudulent, misleading information. It appears that no law is being broken.
ETA: the ads I've seen are still deceptive because they're claiming this is revolutionary new technology, which of course it isn't.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj6g41pzy41o
https://frinkiac.com/comic?b=AQIBBlMwNkUyMafYCwABEvQBygNqSSB...
Normally I have an ad-blocker and don't see any ads, but I happened to be using the YouTube app recently on my iPad so I was subjected to this insanity.
I guess scammer money is as green as anyone else's.
And it just so happens that someone doing something for their personalized financial gain is a super strong negative indicator of everything.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=f9MbhNJ5EIU
I loaded a stock web browser on VPN and checked Youtube looking for ads. Holy shit, it's all scams. Sample size of three, but not a single ad was a known company or a decent product.
“ My development environment was infected by unknown malicious software, as a result of which a few builds may have been affected. Once the issue was detected, I secured everything with a full disk wipe, restored a clean setup, and now all builds are scanned with VirusTotal. The F-Droid version will also be verified before release.
Public keys may have been compromised, which is why I am sharing this issue.”
I use other means when I must have access to content that is only on youtube. I'm not paying money into a company so happy to allow as much scammy crap as the adverts on there are full off.
The Internet is unusable these days without ublock origin or a pihole.
You can change it manually, but it's a defeat of the entire purpose..they intentionally removed the setting to apply the max. quality available to all videos you watch, while already charging you a monthly subscription for the goddamn premium. What a bunch of goo(gl)ns
1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.
2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.
As to why Google doesn't use AI to review them? Google would rather use the AI in a way that makes them more money, than review ads and if AI decides to take them down then that's less money for Google.
(To be clear: I don't work for Google in any way, these are just my guesses)
I have reported so many of those dodgy, scammy, sexualized ads on YouTube, that YouTube/Google has removed the option to report advertisements from my account.
They don't care as long as they're getting paid and there's no immediate liability for them.
Nowadays, Google will serve you those exact ads if you go to any major news outlet.
That's what I do and why I don't even know what brooklinen is.
Don't use that. Use Ublock Origin.
Then there's the profits from scams, Meta is the only one with the stones to admit they like scam ads because they make up 10% of their revenue. I doubt it's a massive coincidence all the other big platforms are overrun with scams they do as little as possible to police.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#False_information
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-failed-to-catch-hundreds-of...
Adding friction to the process (on the advertiser side) means less money for Google: 1) due to the cost of implementing the checking, 2) because some legitimate advertisers will be falsely denied, 3) because the scam ads were still paying money.
Not adding the friction doesn't seem to come with any serious downside. One would expect that it would, e.g. due to publishers removing the most profitable properties from the ad network or governments legislating this out of existence, but that doesn't seem to happen.
So, given these incentives, the outcome is inevitable.
If Google had to pay a massive fine for every scam ad that gets through, or was liable for the damages the ads cause, etc. - or otherwise had a strong incentive - suddenly there would be enough resources to make sure every ad is reviewed, advertisers that push scam ads get fully banned on the first offense rather than being given second, third, and fourth chances, etc.
The "more than can be reviewed" might have been a logical conclusion in a purely human based workflow, even if you have the lowest cost per head click workers in like, an external contractor call centre type environment in Bangladesh.
As the author points out, the ordinary consumer class version of publicly available Gemini very accurately classifies the ad as malicious. I really doubt that there are THAT MANY unique new ads being submitted per day that they can't afford the compute to run them through a similar classifier.
More than can be reviewed for the time and money they’re willing to spend.
Even before AI, they absolutely could’ve done it.
They have literally destroyed their own reputation, and all the reputations of legitimate products that might appear along these scams. Do you think anyone would want their car, smartphone, or tax software appear next to actual credit card scams?
TV has standards for decency, and factuality, and might ban entire categories of ads (financial services) altogether.
I would say it's just because there's no incentive to do anything unless a huge media storm breaks out or something.
turning a blind eye to this stuff probably makes them good money
Is it enough? Probably not, based on this article. Are their policies strict enough? IMHO no way, considering Youtube left an ad up for "Ukranian women" in the early years of the war which wtf. But they certainly do try.
Like most businesses, the actual people involved are also well-intentioned, at least in the abstract; they wanted to make ads that sell products without annoying people. Obviously there's material conditions beneath and around all that, but we don't need to explain that part here ;)
If only there was a technology which could automate this... But we all know, AI is only used on users, not customers - and users get the two line perl script "AI" which says "We have reviewed your claim and decided to ignore it".
In any other normal market, the middleman would be held accountable. Big tech? Not so much. We seen the slap on the wrist regarding Microsoft at the start of the century/millennium. We can also witness the same with regards to the garbage coming from China, where China doesn't take responsibility. Learned from the best.
I have no idea how you can get that wording and that landing page get passed the google review.
I’ve done a lot of ads on google and every time my ad was just a little off (use of trademark word or competitor’s name with a reserved keyword) it will be blocked.
She clicked it, it was basically ourplacce.it, but like, not an easy thing to flag on her phone. Made it all the way through the purchase process until I got this from Citi: Please use only to complete your purchase with Grand Egypti for 9000.00 EGP using card ending 3551
I'm like "what the hell are you buying?" and sure enough, it's all scams the whole way down.
There's simply no excuse for Google to not use their advanced AI to block this sort of copycat/lookalike/impersonation scam every day of the week, at scale. The excuse, obviously, is revenue, but it's really upsetting how many people it's hurting.
If you are reliant on ad revenue, you should be expressing your displeasure to google right now.
Like, Google removing Adblock directly caused that. Facebook allowing the ad caused that. The ad led to malicious page that was also hosted on a Microsoft thing, and I ended up reporting it to them too. Microsoft at least promptly took it down within a half hour after I reported it. But these big companies have almost no incentive to stop this, and some of them directly profit off of these scams happening.
Not me.
Is that because I stuck with Firefox?
* Got me a "BearSkin" jacket from youtube's incessant advertisement.
* Signed up for a $250 subscription to "The Daily Beast" when she was watching youtube tv right before bed and probably subscribed when she meant to just view.
* Signed up for Norton Antivirus when she got a gif that looks like a popup that tells you have a virus and it opens to a Subscription Plan on her phone.
None of these things were things she particularly wanted, some she didn't even consent to, but a combination of paid promotion / advertisement / confusion about the UI is basically doing things against her will.
I literally got her Youtube Premium just so she stops seeing all the ads that are feeding on her. It is a problem.
I don't blame you for your solution but it is so sad that we have to basically pay protection money to Google now so that our loved ones don't get scammed and robbed while they are consuming addictive/slop content.
It isn't even a shakedown, they are genuinely protecting you from others. But how did we get to the point on the web that this is needed?
I’ve never seen that. I report ads on YouTube all the time. I’ve reported ads for illegal drugs, illegal firearms, pornography, and all sorts of various scams. I’ve seen similar advertising to the example in this article, mimicking the phone’s UI. Ive reported them. I’ve never once seen Google reply to any of my reports to confirm what happened. I’ve always wondered, and since I continue to see the ads I just assume my reports go straight into a trash bin.
The illegal firearm ad I saw (more than a year ago, now) I was so shocked that I took screenshots and reported it multiple times. The ad advertised that the weapon was “easy to sneak through security” and “didn’t require an id to purchase” I saw the ad several times across multiple weeks. I reported it every time. I don’t think Google ever did anything about it. If they did, it took them weeks
It's so common and so clearly reported by many people that I'm left to assume Google likes the engagement the profiles bring and chooses to leave them up.
And since, as this article points out, Google does not need reports if they actually wanted to block such ads, it seems completely pointless.
Because some of us don't want to give in to the dead internet theory yet.
90% of the ads I see on YouTube are obvious scams. Many from untraceable shady overseas organizations.
You can see the data if you report them. It's always some unheard of outfit out of Hong Kong or Brazil. I want to know who is funding this.
You don't need to be Kreskin to figure this one out.
It's a network made by snake-oil salesman. People on Brazil yearns for passive-income, and they get told by a lot of influencers that dropshipping is what will give them their freedom.
Then you have thousands of people dumping fake ads about borderline fake products on Meta and Google. It's actually a hive-mind.
That's at least something. Last I was on a streaming service, they were very fastidious about not revealing who was behind a spammer's rotating "music labels", despite them by law having some kind of payment details for them.
If you are lucky, your third-hand owner still checks the oil and puts quality tires on it. If you are not, your third-hand owner pours customer relationships down the drain and doubles down on indiscriminate cost-cutting, alienating good people from the organization.
When we asked our reps, they dance around the question by saying they would "escalate to engineering" or some bs like that.
Google just makes far too much money to stop. My guess is that its >40% of AdX display revenue, based on the % of scam ads that come through ad manager.
Context: our site did ~$5m AdX revenue annually, mostly US audience. High CPM niche. This was ~7 years ago till 2 years ago when we sold the business, I would guess it's still happening based on ads I see browsing the internet.
Just try to convince Google to remove "MapsQuest Driving Directions", a browser hijacking extension advertiser who clearly impersonates one of Google's competitors: It's an extremely high value scam targeting seniors (the folks who mostly look for MapQuest on... Google) and it makes them way too much money for them to stop it.
I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low quality were grating on me. I thought: being rich is never having to watch another ad. Why am I letting these ads own spaced repetition slots in my brain that could be filled with knowledge? Instead of learning, my mental energy is being taken up by psychological manipulation to purchase? The relentless repetition of the mind-numbing ad interspersed throughout otherwise educational content.
Being rich is owning the real-estate of my own mind. I sometimes feel like a digital serf in my own head.
See the headline of this article for Exhibit (I've actually run out of letters in the alphabet) why adblocking is a moral imperative.
Now, there may be another "why don't you just ..." or "well, actually ..." response you have queued up, maybe some ramblings about a pi hole, or some anti-Apple hate, or some other solutioneering. Go ahead, tell me.
But it is the structure of incentive that forces this. The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid. And Google offers an option: Youtube Premium. That give both me and the creator what we want and (for the time being) removes the ads.
So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.
I think about libraries and how the world would be if instead of a free public resource, you had to watch ads before you were allowed to take out a book.
It is just the case that in this modern social media world, if you want your ideas to spread you have to put them onto social media. And if I want access to those ideas I have to consume them through social media. There is nothing about that environment that is my choice, it is the environment that I find myself in.
And I have few choices to get around it. I can twist up into a pretzel trying to block the onslaught with more "why don't you just..." advice. Or I could pay to make it go away. Or I could just go off-grid and forego access.
And when you look close at the options, it becomes clear that sovereignty of my own mind has a price. Freedom of mind is not free in this modern world, if it ever really was.
You also have no obligation to watch ads for creators to get paid. They can also set up things like Patreon if they would like. The ads are very lucrative, and that's their choice. But you are free to make choices too, if you would like to.
The world would honestly be better if they didnt.
Nope.
They may get paid, they may not. That's the risk they've chosen. They may also get their Google account banned with no recourse for something minor or even non-existent.
> So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.
That's what they want you to think, you've been watching too many ads.
That is an active choice, not forced in any way.
> The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid.
There are better ways, and we would all be better off except for the small group of greedheads benefiting from the chaos
The ad supported internet is dying. Good riddance
They're like Dr. Frankenstein, creating a monster and then just letting it roam the countryside. But worse, because they profit (immensely) from the chaos their monster wreaks.
https://imgur.com/a/HZwfyNH
It's not advertising anything, it's just a straight up scam exploit site. It uses exclusively stolen or fake accounts. The links are shown as "amazon.de" or similar but of course do not go there, no doubt just a bug X haven't gotten around to fixing just yet.
This is on the kind of level where if we had actual law enforcement for tech companies, the next time some X executive lands in Europe they would be in cuffs.
You don't have to be rich to avoid getting those ads. You can make them go away for ~$15 a month. If you can't afford that, you have bigger problems in your life than YouTube ads, and your first step towards fixing them is to spend less time watching YouTube.
I’ve reported these multiple times. They always get to the top of search results via paid placement, and Google always responds to the reports saying they found nothing wrong with them, even when provided with detailed evidence of the fraud.
There has to be a way to enforce positive identification, right?
Google already does this for Google play developers. I can't use a US credit card to pay for the USD 25 fee for a student on Bangladesh for example because I understand the payment method is one of the signals they use to make sure the student developer is a real person.
Is this something Google won't do on its own without being forced to act?
[1]: https://malcontentcomics.com/systemsboy/2009/09/the-google-a...
To me this signals a huge opportunity for other companies to dive into. If a new internet search company appeared that returned actual useful search results and clearly delineated ads (like Google used to) I would switch to it almost immediately.
The only way these companies are ever going to change their game is when people vote with their feet!
Also, I type in something in the search bar and...nothing happens. There's a pop-up below the search bar which tells me nothing is saved with a "Dismiss" button. When I press it I'm being directed to the homepage telling me to pay-up.
To comment on this one: as long as there is no backlash from their real customers (those that buy ads) nothing will change.
[0] https://blog.miloslavhomer.cz/how-google-sees-your-site/
Now, it seems like they just approve anything.
I try blocking the most obvious scams by blocking the announcers but it's basically impossible because the same dodgy ones keep coming back with a new name.
Also hard because they're not always in a language you understand.
I don't think I should do all this work instead of the biggest ad company in the world just to earn 5€ per day, but I'm also not aware of any better alternative.
Google has no interest in policing that because money and won't until they are forced to and since they are a transnational that's difficult since it requires multiple countries to do it with the added wrinkle that if you even hint at the possibility that just maybe you might consider doing something about US big tech you get immediate screaming from across the Atlantic.
And I suspect (would love some real data from scammy advertisers) that this is a bigger factor than most folks appreciate.
If you're a regular business that sells clothes or food or SaaS or insurance or whatever, online ads are a) not your whole customer acquisition system (you have regular marketing, word of mouth, maybe sales people, maybe brick-and-mortar brand presence, physical advertising, etc.) and b) not part of your expense sheet that you want to spend tons of time on.
The "b)" there leads companies to either overspend on stupid (but unlikely to be flagged) ads, or to try to keep their ad spend as low as possible for the highest reward, because they think of it like opex. After all, they have all the normal expenses of a normal business to worry about in addition to ad spend. Sure, there are outliers here who spend almost all their non-product money on online ads, but not most ordinary companies from Verizon to Dave's Local Auto Insurance to Safeway.
So "good"/ordinary advertisers aren't generating super high flag rates, but they're probably either a) spending lots of money without churn/support-needs risk or b) aren't spending that much ... compared to scam-ads-only businesses. Sure, google would prefer more upstanding customers in category "a)", but they're a near-monopoly and some of that growth is expensive to chase, while the scammers are beating a path to their door.
If you're a scam-ad business that produces malware or LLM-written gacha games or whatever, your product expenses are minimal and, if your business is lucrative, you can spend very large amounts of your balance sheet on ads for scam delivery channels. Tiny businesses in this area are likely to have whale-sized ad spends and a strong likelihood of growth (vertical as they get bigger/greedier, or horizontal as they keep spinning up new businesses to keep ahead of the law and bad press). I bet they punch above their weight ad-spend-wise, in other words.
You thought the unit economics of a SaaS business were good? Well, wait until you see the unit economics of a Play Store whitelabeled gacha game app with a credential stealer inside!
As much as I personally disliked Susan Wojcicki, she kinda sort kept Youtube shenanigans in check. Yes, there were baity, inappropriate ads, but after she left it has gotten out of control.
Google signaled with "Lake America" they are playing along, and I don't think any real consquences will come of it as long as they keep pulling in billions and the QoQ keeps going.
I mean apple music/tv/icloud are always pinging me with "free 3 month subscriptions".
MS is no better with the "lets finish setting up your pc with one drive..." to which the options are [yes/ remind me again later]
I've moved mostly to linux and its refresing.
-A
The publishers (websites or apps owners) that provide free content to users need a way to support the free content, and typically it's either donation (like wikimedia) or ads. To most publishers, ads revenue is far more predictable. By right most publishers also would like the ads to be reliable and relevant to the users consuming their content, but that's usually a secondary concern, compared to the revenue.
The users viewing the content are often annoyed by the ads, but as long as the ads are not too intrusive, they usually tolerate the ads. If the users occasionally find ads are actually useful, that's great, but most of the time in my experience, when I click into an ad it's usually a mis-click, not because I'm genuinely interested in this ad.
The advertisers need a way to reach more potential customers. Most advertisers are honest players in the game with real products or services to offer to users, trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc. But there are always scammers that try to cheat the game, showing dodgy ads to rip off users whenever possible.
Google as an ad-tech platform sits between these 3 parties, trying to show the most relevant ad from advertisers in a publisher's ad-slot to the user. But the system has evolved into a complex maze over the years that likely nobody knows the full picture any more. New legal requirements and regulatory policies and industry landscape shifts keep pushing the system to extremes. There are teams to fight ad spams, but there are also business goals to make more money to fund the AI initiatives. The scammers keep finding new loopholes in the system, and the teams fighting the scammers are often steps behind, due to limited resource and budget. End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters.
In an ideal world, ad-tech platforms should optimize for satisfying all 3 parties at the same time: publishers, advertisers, and end users, in addition to making money for themselves. But that's probably hard to achieve, given the dynamic nature of the world. AI can help fight scams, but AI can also help finding loopholes in the scam-fighting system. It's a sad state of the world.
Yeah, but
> trying to find ways to maximize the impression, click-through and conversion rate by optimizing their creatives, targeting, and bidding strategies etc
Rapidly turns them malicious and anti-human, preying on psychological bugs.
> End result is many dodgy ads keep slipping through the policy filters.
Therefore their platform / process is not fit for purpose, no advertising platform has effectively solved scaling.
I have to believe Tim Cook never actually tried to use it. I don’t know how any executive using that app could allow it out the door… not at a company that claims to pride themselves on providing a good user experience.
People at Alphabet and all website owners which use AdSense and showed scam and malicious ads must be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced jail time in order to stop this mess.
But it looks like all the countries are busy age restricting Internet instead. By age restricting, it means private information gathering which fuel ad companies more.
I'm sure if I submitted an app that on the iOS app store that mimicked a system warning that tried to scare people into giving me access, it would not pass the review process.
If instead I decided to embed a WebView and later changed the html to do the same I would likely get booted from the app store (afair Apple's very particular about serving remote content in PWAs, and changing said content, even under benign circumstances).
iOS seems to have less scareware and shady apps than Android anyways.
I once got a crypto-wallet PK leaked by a fake wallet app impersonating another very known brand. Found out on reddit it was a fake... After a few months the real app came out but yeah...
Relatedly, DMCA should be expanded to harmful ads content.
And they, apparently, won't do anything about it.
A couple months ago I went searching for the book "Regime Change" by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, an NYT bestseller. The top search result at the time used the exact official cover art and author names, and was otherwise in every way indistinguishable from the real book.
I foolishly bought it and started reading. I quickly noticed that the text seemed like more of a mediocre college paper than a bestselling book. After a few pages I was like... wtf is this. Jumped to the end of the book and found an "Abort the author" section naming a fellow named Marcus Whitfield as the author.
I dutifully opened a ticket with Google suggesting that they should really remove this book. They refunded me, but told me they couldn't remove the book because their policy states that only the true copyright holder could request a take down, and I am not that.
WTF? I wasn't even claiming a copyright issue. I was claiming false advertising and fraud. I was claiming that Google Play's store was listing an obviously, maliciously fake book, selling it for real money, and that they should stop doing that. They take a 30% cut! How are they not doing even the most basic vetting of these listings? A human could trivially identify it as fake in 30 seconds and an AI even faster.
It appears that since then, the actual real book has risen to #1 in the search results (I think; it's hard to tell), and the exact listing that got me is gone, but there are still a whole lot of obvious fakes after it:
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=%22regime%20change%22...
And if you search for any other popular book, you get the same thing.
(Of course, no real publisher actually cares about Google Play Books, because nobody uses it, so nobody files takedown requests, presumably. Also presumably no engineers work on it, and that's why it's a wasteland. What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down?)
Shame that was untrue.
> What I don't get is why haven't they shut it down
Likely just because it's profitable enough. If nothing else, that seems to be the #1 guiding principle.
Firefox + uBlock Origin: https://ublockorigin.com/
Brave Browser
Invidious: https://invidious.io/
Revanced: https://revanced.app/
SkyTube: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/free.rm.skytube.oss/
Clipious (app client for Invidious instances): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.lamarios.clipious...
I've said this before, elsewhere, with this kind of thing plus the LG / Smart TV surveillance, it feels as if we're living in the paperclip maximiser world, except it's "advertising" instead of paperclips.
[0]: https://www.securityweek.com/fbi-recommends-ad-blockers-cybe...
Edited to add: Remember when 'piracy funds terrorism' was a thing? Surely Google is providing material assistance in funding organised crime and / or terrorism in their reckless indifference to what they allow their platform to promote?
That's the biggest 'trick' companies like Google have pulled here. They've somehow tricked the regulators into thinking that because they're big companies serving a lot of customers over the internet, that any sort of fraud or product liability laws are irrelevant to them.
Because any other company doing this would get sued into oblivion, shut down and the executives criminally charged. If a brick and mortar business let blatant scammers and criminals advertise in their physical stores, that would be seen as a serious crime.
Same with a retailer that sold dangerous or counterfeit products, or one that turned their stores into surveillance panopticons where customer data was collected illegally and sold to the highest bidder.
Google, Amazon, Meta etc are doing things that would get a normal business owner sent to prison.
The solution isn't just technical, it's about being willing to enforce the law for internet businesses the same way we do for offline ones. If Sundar Pichai and the board were looking at 10-20 years in prison for fraud or cyber offences, then Google would fix those dodgy ads real quick...
Is it false ?
As much as we can lament the current state of affair, we must acknowledge everything that has been thrown at any of the bigger companies has resulted in slap on the wrists at most.
At this exact moment in the US money is straight power, in it's rawest form.
If they really wanted to fix these issues, antitrust could be a real thing again, and companies like Google would be forcefully broken up and barred from remerging later down the line. If Google doesn't have Gmail, Chrome, Android or YouTube and all these things are separate businesses, then their power is severely curtailed.
They could also arrest CEOs, board members and other people with a large amount of power at these organisations and charge them for the actions of the business.
Or levvy percentage based fines that obliterate the company's ability to function. Could Google function if it was charged 50-60% of a year's worldwide revenue until an issue was fixed? It'd probably have to cut way back on everything in that scenario.
The issue is that the government has been so thoroughly captured by corporate interests that noone faces meaningful consequences if they earn more than a billion dollars a year.
(Could also argue that the scam ad that won the slot for 10 cents would have gone for 9 cents without the scam and Meta's marginal revenue was only 1 cent... but if every ad is 1 cent more...)
Same problem when you want to buy a home in a place where real estate became a means for money laundering or uninhabited store of value
They're probably taking that into account in their 10% of profit coming from ads estimate.
Google bans people, but mostly the innocent ones. If you're running blackhat, you've built a setup that gives you very good avoidance, and the bans are calculated into your sheets. The reviewer and the system sees something else than the customer clicking the ad. And even if they get banned, they will just burn a cc and domain and then get back to printing after a few hours.
While a legitimate business never suspects it can get banned, and when it does, the process is Kafkaesque.
Our case: a month of back and forth on the appeal, no success. The best we got was a suggestion to read the TOS and check whether we had any "brand affiliations" we don't have in real life. Previous replies were pasted slop. We don't have any affiliations, and we still have no clue what they were talking about. Meanwhile our conversion rate on other ad platforms was decimated by us constantly changing stuff to please the Google reviewer.
There is a 3rd option: malicious stupidity / aka wilful ignorance.
Google is a collection of individuals, so it's very likely both sides of Hanlon's razor are true: a little malice from those in control, persisting a state of stupidity for those executing the process.
As others have pointed out, there will be resistance to improving a process that negatively impacts their bottom line. Incentives, dictate long term behaviour of organisations; whereas Hanlon's razor works better at an individual level IME.
Simple as that.
Because they can. There's no meaningful way to prevent them from doing so.
They should let people have more control over what ads they do and don't see.
If Google served me ads on stuff I was interested in (I'd be happy to tell them) rather than women's clothing, they I might buy it. I'm a guy - show me as many skimpily dressed women as you like, but I have no need for women's clothes! Try it once or a hundred times it you must, but maybe after the millionth non-purchase you'd think they might figure it out and use that screen real-estate to serve an ad for something that my purchase history or what they know about me indicates I might have some interest in!
Dumb as a rock.
It's like the whole purpose of ads, they're not trying to sell you stuff you need - they want your money.
Google wants the advertizers' money, who are really being scammed by Google if they pay every time Google serves an ad to me that Google presumably knows is not going to result in a purchase. I guess Google don't care - if they get paid for click-thrus and I occasionally do that, but never buy, then Google still gets their money.
2023: $32B
2025: $91B
2027: $300B (projected)
2029: $400B (projected)
“I’m happy to go bankrupt rather than lose this race” -Larry Page
Because you're using an application which presents those ads to you.
Avoid Google/Alphabet application as much as is possible, and you'll see a lot less / none of this kind of ads.
It looks like you're using their YouTube client. Try NewPipe:
https://newpipe.net/
there are no ads with NewPipe.
The cost of strictly enforcing stated rules for ads is felt immediately and fully by Google. It is concrete, measurable, and probably non-insignificant; the benefit is essentially goodwill from the narrow sliver of the web that is verbal about this. That is intangible, difficult to measure, even harder to assign a reasonable dollar value to (meaning the ROI could look negative), and the benefit would accrue to parties other than Google who might not even notice.
I reported months ago that Google's continual growth rate in revenues from Ads should be heeded with caution - its not from AI/LLMs.
They are juicing and juicing and juicing their existing assets for all the cash flows they can generate! That's why the revenues keep growing. They did not go to such extremities in the past - and they probably strategically held back.
Meta is facing the same predicament btw - both entities claim the growth is coming from new AI investments. The amount of impersination/Scam ad's I've seen on IG is hilarious. That is a flat out lie its from investments they made pre-LLM hype + efficiency gains.
Bonus points if you can get banned for any reason, by contrast, on sites like Facebook
Fuck all of you. Shut them all down, jail time for execs
That is it. They don't do it because it goes against their interests. Google is a scummy company doing scummy things. There is very little else to it.
Sometimes simple answers are not only elegant, but capture the essence of a problem.
Because Google is an adCompany. It will not do anything about ads - quite the opposite, it has fought down ublock origin. Everyone sees that.
Don't be Evil
It's not like they face any consequences for being party to fraud. Laws are for poor people.
more like why company still want to receive money ????? is more correct term
I have the same question regarding “why is Workday’s resume parser so shit?”
What does killing dodgy ads do for Google's bottom line? It's removing paying customers and driving down competition for (and therefore value of) ad space. What's the cost of dodgy ads to Google? The sites that use Google Ads will continue using Google Ads if they do nothing about the dodgy ads. The sites that don't use Google Ads won't be swayed to use Google Ads if they do remove the dodgy ads. Google is not held liable for serving dodgy ads so there's no direct risk associated with serving them.
Why should Google remove the dodgy ads? "Don't be evil"? That motto exceeded its shelf life before it was first publicly posted.
Hanlon's razor is nice and all but there's a difference between malice and amoral apathy. Corporations would sell shredded orphans as fuel if it made economical sense to do so.
They'll act if someone threatens to sue otherwise Google doesn't give a shit as long as they get paid.
:)
Ask me another.
In fact, these days ads have the opposite effect: A repetitive ad turns people off from EVER checking out that product.
F Grammarly and ClickUp etc. I've never tried those products but I have disgust for them thanks to their ads.
It takes basically nothing to reliably identify these videos. They're extremely heavily promoted with ads running on other videos. Google does nothing with them when reported. Google does not proactively remove them. And because, contrary to the documentation, youtube doesn't pull the verified flag from a channel when its name is changed, these scams go out on channels that look like official sources for the celebrities in them (they steal some random verified channel then change its name to SpaceX (official) or Microstrategy or whatever).
Google even got sued unsuccessfully by Woz and some of the scam victims-- and their response was pound the "S230 is an absolute shield for externally provided material" table and continue to do nothing about the fraud except rake in money from pedaling it. They haven't even fixed the verified flag issue.
(Shades of the same conduct were seen in the old viacom v. youtube case, -- users were reporting copyright infringements so they took away the button.)
I have sympathy for the S230 shield and consider it very important-- but the law is the absolute worst we're allowed to be. They are free to do better (and the CDA shield was designed to assure they can moderate without picking up liability).
Google's conduct is irresponsible, unethical, and may well cost us this important legal protection because if society's choice is liability for hosts OR the biggest and wealthiest companies do nothing while raking in money from even the most flagrant scams we're going to eventually choose liability with dire consequences for free speech.
It's especially ironic that the smaller sites and forums (like HN) would be hit especially hard by a narrowing of S230, but these forms reliably work hard to remove the worse abuse-- and are seldom the source of anything that truly offends the senses at least not for long. Companies like google that don't are ones that are so wealthy and powerful that they're almost intractable to litigate against even without S230 like protection. Loss of it would hurt them gravely but it would hurt everyone smaller more.
The US regulatory authorities DGAF ever since Lina Khan exited the picture and the EU regulatory authorities might have the legal basis to hold Big AdTech accountable, but the EU is at the moment busy trying to fend off BS from the Trump admin, they do not have time and risk appetite (aka Trump retaliating on behalf of Big AdTech) left for scam ads.