The reality is, of course, that Google and its ilk doesn't give a single rat's ass about people falling from scams or getting infected by malware. Scams and malware pays better than "ethical" ads (to the degree that such a thing exists). It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.
there is in the UK. And likely in most other jurisdictions too. But it's about penalizing the advertisers rather than the platform. Which clearly neither works at scale nor across borders.
This definitely feels like a better use case for an "online safety act" -- but instead we got censorship laws....
If it wasn't a threat, they wouldn't police it so hard.
https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/consumer-alerts/fraud-alert-nation...
When you heard the vocal equivalent of large type text every real person knew that it was time to get grandma away from the TV but... the people at the TV network didn't, law enforcement didn't, your congressman didn't, anybody in a position of power didn't. And no wonder people feel cynical, hate the media, distrust the cops, distrust politicians, feel "the game is rigged", etc.
In the USA I’m pretty sure advertising scams - even the more ‘benign’ ones like claiming a product does something it doesn’t do or lying about its efficiency - are illegal. There’s just no - or not nearly enough - enforcement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45424888
(US infocoms, and Google in particular, aren't reputable companies any more. Ban them all.)
The situation’s been like this for a few years now.
The cost of enforcement would break every government's budget. The cost asymmetry is the problem.
For the bulk of legit advertisers, this won't affect the bottom line of a given campaign and will keep out the scammers, etc. Leading to a much higher quality ecosystem. It would also give Google the potential for a higher percentage share of profits in the system. It would also likely reduce the CPM pricing though, possibly to a larger extent than profits from the validation system itself.
But it would be a much healthier overall system.
While it has gotten around the "logical fallacy community", for lack of a better term, in the last few years, it could still stand to be known by more people. It's become very popular. I think there are many who have subconsciously picked it up as just how things are done.
But I don't care* about that, I care that they're visually obnoxious and sometimes slow.
* Well, usually. Way back when, there used to be occasional news about browser sandbox escapes.
Are Meta and TikTok better at filtering scammy ads out? Maybe their ML recommendation systems realize I’d never click on such an ad and the other platforms can’t figure that out.
As if people read only reuptable sites ...
Google disabled the Adblock, Facebook let the ad run on their site, and Microsoft hosted the malicious site on their cloud provider. Shoutout to Microsoft for taking the site down within the hour after I reported it- more than I can say for any of the blatantly illegal or scam ads I’ve seen on YouTube. but still, 3 big tech companies that could have definitely stopped this is they really wanted to.
What did your grandmother need Chrome for? You couldn't find the 5m it would take to set her up with Firefox?
