51–60 of 97 posts
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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.
It would still track you though which is a bigger problem than the ads being visible.
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> 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. Think from the perspective of an advertiser. Earlier, an advertiser could pay for any ad anonymously. Now any ad you want to show can be traced back to you. This is a meaningful difference. Even if you as a viewer can't pinpoint the specific person behind an ad, they are not completely…
Unless there is a government identification with photo of a real person associated with the ad, there is no transparency. Shell corporations and complex ownership structures will obscure any attempt at tracking the source otherwise.
Anything that reduces the difficulty of tracing should be seen as an improvement. It's a long road from here to perfection, but that's no reason not to take a step.
Prepare 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 adv…
But I wouldn't say that this leading to amorphous organizations means it's a failure.
It's giving clear ability to connect content you see with well established government legal frameworks. This can help internet ads follow similar level of scrutiny as traditional ads. Is that framework perfect? Of course not. But it's unified framework, with strong ownership (government), enforcement of best practices (judges), etc.
There's only as much as companies can do. Only small part of those problems is technical. Majority of the issues is much broader legal/free-speech issues, that I personally don't want any private, for profit company, to control. It doesn't mean that I'm excited and confident that governments will do it correctly (for sure they won't), but it's right framework to solve those problems.
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Unless there is a government identification with photo of a real person associated with the ad, there is no transparency. Shell corporations and complex ownership structures will obscure any attempt at tracking the source otherwise.
Corporate structure should be public data and involve real people with verified identities, yes? Anything that reduces the difficulty of tracing should be seen as an improvement. It's a long road from here to perfection, but that's no reason not to take a step.
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> foster a sense of skepticism towards all advertising Here, here. I would go further and say that human society needs a universal convention that flags paid speech as such, and gives people a clear protocol to filter any (or all) paid communication.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If you filter the paid speech then it follows you should also filter out the actual art, cinema, theater, etc. it paid for. Now you are left with what?
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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 th…
> But when you look closer If you have US based LLC there is no looking closer. The only thing public will be your registered agent and company name, nothing else.
With verification, will Google be culpable the next time one of my users is redirected to a tech support scam from a Google ad? At least twice a year at my business users are redirected to tech support scams from Google Search ads. Its always a similar story, "I searched for Amazon and clicked the first link".
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Corporate structure should be public data and involve real people with verified identities, yes? Anything that reduces the difficulty of tracing should be seen as an improvement. It's a long road from here to perfection, but that's no reason not to take a step.
Until that ownership takes an offshore detour.
With verification, will Google be culpable the next time one of my users is redirected to a tech support scam from a Google ad? At least twice a year at my business users are redirected to tech support scams from Google Search ads. Its always a similar story, "I searched for Amazon and clicked the first link".
Prepare 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 adv…
> 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. Think from the perspective of an advertiser. Earlier, an advertiser could pay for any ad anonymously. Now any ad you want to show can be traced back to you. This is a meaningful difference. Even if you as a viewer can't pinpoint the specific person behind an ad, they are not completely…
In fact I'm pretty sure this is happening already regardless of these changes. I recently saw on Reddit that YouTube is promoting ads for very obvious gift card scams, even though I've personally never seen any of those in the few times my ad blocker let me down. Presumably this is because those ads are only targeted to a certain subset of people to both maximise ROI as well as avoid being shown to someone smart enough to identify it as a scam and potentially report it and blow up the whole operation.
A good start (besides banning the cancer that is advertising) would be to have all advertising platforms publish a searchable archive of every ad, who paid for it and the targeting criteria. This means people can at least look behind the curtain and see which ads are out there that they wouldn't normally see due to the targeting criteria not matching them.