11–20 of 136 posts
Go to Google right now and search for "passport renew" I see twelve sites which offer the service with no affiliation. All they do is ask for sensitive personal information, charge you an additional fee (on top of the passport fee) and file on your behalf. Unfortunately I've had friends & family fall for this and similar scams (see also "birth certificate copy" "criminal record" "arrest record" "US travel authorisati…
Dear marketing departments, I do not want relevant ads. I don't like unknown third parties influencing my decisions. If I must see ads, I'd rather see ads for tampons and sports cars and business real estate, because I'm not going to buy those things, so you're not manipulating me.
Please stop perpetuating the lie that you're somehow doing me a favor with "relevant ads", they are exactly what I invest a lot of effort blocking.
Go to Google right now and search for "passport renew" I see twelve sites which offer the service with no affiliation. All they do is ask for sensitive personal information, charge you an additional fee (on top of the passport fee) and file on your behalf. Unfortunately I've had friends & family fall for this and similar scams (see also "birth certificate copy" "criminal record" "arrest record" "US travel authorisati…
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ (transparent and no overhead, works on Android too!)
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock (a handful of websites will detect it - you can then switch to visual blocking for that domain to get around it, for FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... )
https://noscript.net/ (overkill for some, a lot of hand tweaking required to keep the Internet working)
Result: 0 (zero) explicit ads
Long term result: more money being poured into covert marketing
Go to Google right now and search for "passport renew" I see twelve sites which offer the service with no affiliation. All they do is ask for sensitive personal information, charge you an additional fee (on top of the passport fee) and file on your behalf. Unfortunately I've had friends & family fall for this and similar scams (see also "birth certificate copy" "criminal record" "arrest record" "US travel authorisati…
https://i.imgur.com/iimLjyW.png
Can't reproduce
When ads are good, they connect you to products or services you’re interested in and make it easier to get stuff you want. They don't make anything easier. If I want something, I will get it, otherwise it's just annoying. It's great that they are working to make ads safer (which is obviously in their interest as well), but they have already lost me (and I guess many others). Even AdSense ads are obnoxious these days…
>If I want something, I will get it And what are all the ways you can discover things you want? I'd say the top two for most people are word-of-mouth and advertising.
Advertisers: please piss off and let me discover the world on my own.
Do you know if Adsense tried to make any agreement with ad blockers? Their ads are not so bad.
Go to Google right now and search for "passport renew" I see twelve sites which offer the service with no affiliation. All they do is ask for sensitive personal information, charge you an additional fee (on top of the passport fee) and file on your behalf. Unfortunately I've had friends & family fall for this and similar scams (see also "birth certificate copy" "criminal record" "arrest record" "US travel authorisati…
>Go to Google right now and search for "passport renew" I see twelve sites which offer the service with no affiliation. https://i.imgur.com/iimLjyW.png Can't reproduce
I can reproduce 100% of the time: http://i.imgur.com/9KJ4LSm.png
>When ads are good, they connect you to products or services you’re interested in and make it easier to get stuff you want. Dear marketing departments, I do not want relevant ads. I don't like unknown third parties influencing my decisions. If I must see ads, I'd rather see ads for tampons and sports cars and business real estate, because I'm not going to buy those things, so you're not manipulating me. Please stop p…
Don't tell me "I just google for something if I want to consume it," because truly innovative products and services are outside the realm of general imagination, that's what makes them innovative.
And all the great products and services you learned about from word of mouth? Guess how your friends heard about them...
Advertising is annoying as hell, but it has value.
Go to Google right now and search for "passport renew" I see twelve sites which offer the service with no affiliation. All they do is ask for sensitive personal information, charge you an additional fee (on top of the passport fee) and file on your behalf. Unfortunately I've had friends & family fall for this and similar scams (see also "birth certificate copy" "criminal record" "arrest record" "US travel authorisati…
What do you think are additional things that Google could do? I can imagine how hard this is to police. For example: - Let people mark different links as spam - Hire a larger team to police this
Certain searches should NOT be monetised at all. When people are looking at entering sensitive personal information (e.g. passport, visa, birth certificate, arrest record, tax filing) it is too dangerous to allow adverts which may contain phishing scams into the mix.
Too many people click ads thinking they're search results.
