Interesting timing right before a U.S. election. Likely trying to avoid Russian disinformation like in 2016.
It says in the post that they've been verifying political advertisers since 2018. Now it is being extended to all advertisers.
Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
11–20 of 97 posts
Re: Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
#12Would be nice if the information was not two clicks away but rather front and center, especially for political ads, but a really good step nonetheless
This is the plan. Once google have verified the advertisers, they can ‘help users understand the source of the advert’ by replacing the mini Ad icon with the advertisers’ favicon, to increase transparency..
> ...with the advertisers’ favicon, to increase transparency.
My mom thinks any URL with a padlock next to it is über secure [0][1] and that she can give her bank details without worry.
[0] https://zeltser.com/padlock-and-favicon-confusion-in-browser...
[1] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170416-W...
Re: Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
#13This is interesting timing given the general decline of ad revenue due to the COVID economic slowdown. I'm surprised and impressed that they are making things harder for advertisers when then are probably fighting harder for every ad dollar.
Re: Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
#14This is interesting timing given the general decline of ad revenue due to the COVID economic slowdown. I'm surprised and impressed that they are making things harder for advertisers when then are probably fighting harder for every ad dollar.
It doesn't hurt that GOOG has an incredible amount of capital on hand.
Re: Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
#15>This change will make it easier for people to understand who the advertiser is behind the ads they see Call me skeptical, but won't it just lead to shell companies?
Lead to...?
See: Astroturfing (2019), Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Fmh4RdIwswE
Re: Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
#16>This change will make it easier for people to understand who the advertiser is behind the ads they see Call me skeptical, but won't it just lead to shell companies?
Sure, but this puts the spotlight back on the countries which allow shady crap.
Take the United Kingdom. Google says Foo Ltd. are the advertiser, who are Foo Ltd? Well the UK legally requires Foo Ltd. to register with Companies House, a government agency, and this registration legally must identify Persons with Significant Control, actual humans who make decisions for Foo Ltd.
But when you look closer you discover that Foo Ltd has a company secretary who lives in a run down area of an ex-industrial city, and who is listed as secretary for 1800 other companies, and its offices are registered as that person's flat. The PSC section is filled out with the name Offshore Holdings Inc. offering the address of a law firm in the British Virgin Islands, even though the law is clear that Persons means very specifically human individuals.
The UK could clean this up, but of course the people hidden behind this sort of thing are actually wealthy and powerful and are doing all they can to ensure nothing changes. Similar things happen in the US, and in several other developed nations you probably think of as law-abiding and straight dealing. Google can't fix any of that, so this is all you get.
Re: Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
#17Would it possible for me to turn off all the ads from all the advertises? Hypothetically, of course!
They have/had this, but it hasn't proven terribly popular: https://contributor.google.com/
edit: I say "had" because I think it has changed forms over its lifetime. I think originally you could simply load up credits and it would cover ads across the web with blank images.
Re: Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
#18There is a conference going on with Ernst & Young right now about identity verification, an Italian publication is posting verification data on the Ethereum blockchain, for each article. It is mostly for the publisher to protect themselves when people ask about whether they were actually the source, doesn't protect people from sharing fake sources or making it look similar with their own "verification" entries on a blockchain.
Steps!
Re: Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
#19>This change will make it easier for people to understand who the advertiser is behind the ads they see Call me skeptical, but won't it just lead to shell companies?
There are already shell companies. PACs serve to obfuscate the source of funding. I don't see a reason why there will be more shell companies, if the existing ones can be used in this area.
Re: Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
#20Prepare yourself for ads from amorphous organizations with names like The Committee to Re-Establish Democracy or The Project for a New American Freedom. (No idea if these are real, I just made them up.) I suppose it helps to see precisely who is paying for an advertisement, but I don’t think this is actually useful in a real sense.
The only long-term solution is education: foster a sense of skepticism towards all advertising and encourage reading information from a variety of viewpoints. Of course, Google’s entire existence (and having destroyed traditional media’s business model, the media itself) is predicated on ads, so don’t expect anything this lucid soon.