Why is there so much attention on Google? It's market cap is $800B. Amazon and Microsoft are roughly $1T. Facebook is $600B. We're not a bunch of rubes here, to have this many articles proposing sanctions and/or breakup of Google has all the fingerprints of coordinated action. It's less than a month after the US president saying he would sue them because he felt they didn't give conservative sources favorable enough…
Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform
#42It's amazing how many scams and malware-serving websites are in Google Ads, and how aggressively Google refuses to address it. I've actually had Googlers (here on HN) go and report and have removed the malicious sites I reported, just to see them back a handful of hours later, without so much as rotating domain names out. Google must be stripped of any profit from criminal activity on their platform. When a fraudulen…
Google has a strong incentive to be ineffective at catching fraud on their platform, and despite the company line, it shows through their actions.
Indeed. I think it's fundamentally key to fixing this that profit from fraudulent activity be confiscated. (I'm sure we can find a responsible way to spend it, compensating victims of fraud or something similar.)
With ad slots being an auction of sorts, Google benefits from increased bidding when there are more bidders... including fraudulent ones. So there's zero reason for them to prevent fraud. If upon a fraudulent account being reported and shut down, they lost all of their profit from that account's history, they would have a significant incentive to prevent fraud on the platform, since any fraudulent "winners" would completely zero out an ad slot for them.
Re: Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform
#43It's amazing how many scams and malware-serving websites are in Google Ads, and how aggressively Google refuses to address it. I've actually had Googlers (here on HN) go and report and have removed the malicious sites I reported, just to see them back a handful of hours later, without so much as rotating domain names out. Google must be stripped of any profit from criminal activity on their platform. When a fraudulen…
In a way Google probably fears addressing these issues because once they take ownership of them, they are going to be forever saddled and blamed when bad ads get through their review system or when shitty videos get promoted on youtube or when people get some "racist" result when they ask OK Google about $stereotype. Google's main source of cash is replacing humans with automation. For them re-introducing humans (i.e. risk) into the equation means seeing dollar bills grow wings and fly off. Most internet companies do not want their services to have a human labor component. It used to be a joke that you could never call anyone at Google to get any of their shit fixed. They just farmed it out to the "community". But whose laughing now? They used to "organize the worlds information", but 'information' soon changed to 'content', and 'content' to 'content farm'. I doubt any significant percentage of their users are ever going to switch away from Google. There is almost no way to detect if you should have gotten a better search result or a better ranking. The results are OK as long as you get a link that is vaguely useful. Its been years since you could even look at the actual results. They claim a query has a millions of results, but you can't even go past page 20. #Fail ? Us nerds made them popular by recommending them to our friends and family and/or surreptitiously installing Chrome to escape the tech-support-calls-from-hell for IE toolbars and shit. We're partly responsible too..
Re: Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform
#44Reminds me of the Reply All episode about locksmiths & Google Maps ( https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2ho87 )
Interestingly enough, Google responded to that with a product offering: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+certified+locksmith Not sure how well it works, as I haven't needed a locksmith in a long time. But for what it's worth, there is that.
Nothing comes up related to what you described, I just see a bunch of listings for Angie's list.
Re: Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform
#45It is such a difficult balance to be had since by taking a position of trying to resolve any/all frauds in the platform, they create a can of worm that is difficult, if not impossible to fill. The failure of finding all the frauds, illegal activity would prohibitively expensive, if not destructive to the platform itself (Think false-positives, etc).
For them, it is better/easier to say "we have the platform, we remove what we are legally bound to remove, everything else is on the user to be mindful of".
Re: Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform
#46Was expecting to see various types fraud that google profits from, instead it seems to be focused mainly on "(business) identity theft via google maps" - right? Thought for sure there would be info about things like taking ads for "flashplayer" that installed malware, things like taking money for ads for "walmart" searches instead of just listed the organic result, because there is implied threat of NOT listing walma…
Funnier than the flashplayer ads, is that "Google Chrome" was (is?) a heavy ad target for malware.
Re: Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform
#47It's amazing how many scams and malware-serving websites are in Google Ads, and how aggressively Google refuses to address it. I've actually had Googlers (here on HN) go and report and have removed the malicious sites I reported, just to see them back a handful of hours later, without so much as rotating domain names out. Google must be stripped of any profit from criminal activity on their platform. When a fraudulen…
In a way Google probably fears addressing these issues because once they take ownership of them, they are going to be forever saddled and blamed when bad ads get through their review system or when shitty videos get promoted on youtube or when people get some "racist" result when they ask OK Google about $stereotype. Google's main source of cash is replacing humans with automation. For them re-introducing humans (i.e…
They're already heavily tweaking YouTube and Search results. They really shouldn't have section 230 protections for their ad platforms.
Re: Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform
#48It's amazing how many scams and malware-serving websites are in Google Ads, and how aggressively Google refuses to address it. I've actually had Googlers (here on HN) go and report and have removed the malicious sites I reported, just to see them back a handful of hours later, without so much as rotating domain names out. Google must be stripped of any profit from criminal activity on their platform. When a fraudulen…
> Section 230 absolutely has to go for order and justice to prevail.
For those who are unfamiliar with the reference, section 230 is a provision of a telecommunications act that gives legal immunity to platform providers that host user-provided content [0]. Getting rid of it would absolutely kill this site and 99.99% of similar sites by effectively requiring all user generated content to go through legal review. Absent review, a malevolently minded individual could post libelous or other illegal content on a website and have the site itself be sued. It would have a terribly chilling effect on the internet as we know it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Re: Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform
#49Why is there so much attention on Google? It's market cap is $800B. Amazon and Microsoft are roughly $1T. Facebook is $600B. We're not a bunch of rubes here, to have this many articles proposing sanctions and/or breakup of Google has all the fingerprints of coordinated action. It's less than a month after the US president saying he would sue them because he felt they didn't give conservative sources favorable enough…
The top 10 tech companies are interchangeably flamed here and all over the internet and for good reason. This isn't a google problem, you just happen to be in a google thread.
Re: Google Legally Profits from Fraud on Its Platform
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly enough, Google responded to that with a product offering: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+certified+locksmith Not sure how well it works, as I haven't needed a locksmith in a long time. But for what it's worth, there is that.
Nothing comes up related to what you described, I just see a bunch of listings for Angie's list.
You might need to disable your ad-blocker