[HN Gopher] Increasing transparency through advertiser identity ...
___________________________________________________________________
Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification
Author : NicoJuicy
Score : 175 points
Date : 2020-04-23 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.blog.google)
| disiplus wrote:
| i think this is a great step. also we as a company dont have
| nothing against that, at least it would be more visible that some
| of our competition is faking a local presence.
| digitalengineer wrote:
| >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?
| ignoramous wrote:
| _Lead to_...?
|
| See: Astroturfing (2019), Last Week Tonight with John Oliver:
| https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Fmh4RdIwswE
|
| And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
| tialaramex wrote:
| 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.
| minikites wrote:
| >But when you look closer you discover
|
| What percentage of people who view the ad are going to do
| this?
| mattnewton wrote:
| More than the number of people who were able to do so
| before. And hopefully if they find something shady they
| will let others know. This is why we require certain
| political ads to be attributed.
| throwaway595 wrote:
| Everyone that installed the browser extension that
| annotates ads for them.
| TrueDuality wrote:
| You're referring to financial shell companies used for tax
| evasion and are a very specific kind of shell company.
|
| Shell companies in general are pretty commonly used and
| pretty common in the US (I can't speak to other countries).
| It's very easy to setup a very basic corporation anywhere in
| the US and can take anywhere from a week to a month depending
| on the state.
|
| That corporation can get paid to run ads by another
| corporation. The new corporation will pay Google to run the
| ads and will still pay taxes, but their name will show up.
| The new corporation is providing a service as a middleman.
|
| There are some specific restrictions on doing this kind of
| thing for other purchases and acting on others behalf, but
| not for ad buys.
| throwaway483284 wrote:
| > 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.
| edoceo wrote:
| Just looked at my LLC. Has business address and agent and
| lists my human name as the Governor of the company. Your
| claim seems incorrect.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| This depends entirely on the state. Four states, notably
| including Delaware, permit registration of an LLC with
| absolutely no public disclosure of parties involved
| beyond the agent. Other states consider this information
| public record but don't make it easily accessible.
| edoceo wrote:
| Ok, makes sense. I'm in WA and we've got what some call
| good FOIA and "sunshine" laws.
| summerlight wrote:
| At least, people maybe able to know the group associated to the
| ads suspiciously tries to hide their identity. Not perfect, but
| still an improved situation.
| lmkg wrote:
| 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.
| timeimp wrote:
| Would it possible for me to turn off all the ads from all the
| advertises?
|
| Hypothetically, of course!
| mankyd wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It would still track you though which is a bigger problem
| than the ads being visible.
| [deleted]
| not2b wrote:
| It is meaningless, because they accept corporate identities, and
| it is trivial to create shell corporations with meaningless
| names, like Americans For Good Stuff And Against Bad Stuff.
| drewg123 wrote:
| This 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.
| frandroid wrote:
| They would rather establish a framework of proof that they
| control rather than have a more onerous and inflexible one
| imposed upon them by the EU. When large companies do due
| diligence to show accountability, it's less likely that a
| government will try to force them to do it.
| javajosh wrote:
| It doesn't hurt that GOOG has an incredible amount of capital
| on hand.
| cypherpunk-inst wrote:
| Very bad, anti-privacy, anti-anonymity development.
|
| As governments around the world get increasingly totalitarian and
| everything gets regulated to death or outright illegal, the
| timing for Google to ban necessarily anonymous individuals,
| organizations and businesses couldn't be worse!
| Animats wrote:
| Interesting. That's what I've been doing with SiteTruth for a
| decade. Unlike Google, I can't make advertisers give me
| documents, so I have to dig into public records.
|
| I look forward to seeing what info Google provides to users. The
| demo is useless. Name and "Location: United States" isn't much. I
| doubt Google will really provide much info about their
| advertisers; they're paying customers. Search users are the
| product.
|
| I'd want to see the actual name and address of the business (as
| required in CA and the EU), business license info (required in
| the UK), incorporation state and serial number (required for an
| EV certificate), and have an option to buy a business credit
| report from D&B. At various times I've put all of those on
| SiteTruth.com.
|
| It's become harder to get the data needed. A decade ago, an
| online-only business with no clear ownership or street address
| was almost always a scam. Now, it's not uncommon, although the
| scam percentage is still high. Businesses are also allowed more
| anonymity now, this being considered "privacy". There are "low-
| doc" states, such as Nevada. Owners of postal mail boxes used to
| be public record; now they're anonymous. D&B used to encourage
| companies to publicize DUNS numbers; now they consider that
| proprietary. It's a great time to be an online scammer.
| pm_me_ur_fullzz wrote:
| There 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!
| throwaway595 wrote:
| If you haven't, check out Decentralized Identifiers [1] and
| Sovrin blockchain [2].
|
| [1] https://w3c.github.io/did-core/
|
| [2] https://sovrin.org
| keiferski wrote:
| 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 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.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Education is a part of that, sure.
|
| 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.
| hardikgupta wrote:
| > 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 anonymous anymore
| (to Google, to law enforcement that may have a warrant, etc).
| Of course, this change comes at the cost of a reduction in
| freedom from the lack of anonymity.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Ad targeting still allows you to fly under the radar of
| someone who could investigate by only targeting the ad to the
| idiots that would swallow it whole and not ask questions
| while everyone else is completely oblivious to the ad's
| existence.
|
| 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.
| nokcha wrote:
| > (besides banning the cancer that is advertising)
|
| Not all advertising (especially in the broad sense of the
| word) is bad. There is one ad in particular in the last
| year that I'm very glad I saw, because it alerted me to the
| existence of a product that has provided a lot of value to
| me. Of course, most advertising nowadays is trash and the
| web is barely usable without an ad-blocker, but in
| principle, I think having unobtrusive ads for vetted
| products isn't such a bad thing.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Not all advertising, especially in the broad sense of the
| word, is bad. Arguably, most of it is.
|
| http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-
| cancer.html
| noizejoy wrote:
| Guitar ads are always welcome in my browser :-)
| clairity wrote:
| yes, there's tension between transparency for businesses and
| privacy for individuals (which is the stance i support). on
| one hand, you want transparency to elucidate crime and even
| neglect and aggression. on the other, the people behind
| companies have the right to privacy as well, lest those
| people be unfairly attacked (e.g., planned parenthood
| workers). the best tradeoff is not obvious here.
| ipython wrote:
| 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.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| 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.
| close04 wrote:
| Until that ownership takes an offshore detour.
| isoos wrote:
| Compliance rules could be extended to include due
| diligence on partners, and block contracts and payments
| to and from entities that have no clear ownership.
| close04 wrote:
| It could but realistically it's unlikely to happen.
| Nobody would ever accept taking responsibility for
| dozens, hundreds, or thousands of partners, and the
| expenses involved in validating every last one of them.
| Not to mention the lost business on either side. Even the
| IRS or banks can't keep up with long ownership chains or
| properly identifying customers and they have a more
| vested interest.
|
| Laws and rules are far slower to adapt than the
| workarounds that bend them. And clear ownership says
| little. Everything can simply point to a more or less
| real identity that nobody will ever find.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm not against such rules. I'm just
| saying that the likelihood of them achieving the results
| we imagine are slim.
| anticensor wrote:
| How hard is a policy stating _maximum of n-levels depth
| of nested ownership allowed and any kind of cyclical
| ownership causes loss of control in both ways_?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Four US states permit entirely anonymous LLCs.
|
| Definitely this policy is an _improvement,_ but many of
| the worst offenders have more than sufficient resources
| to avoid any impact from this change. It 's already the
| norm for political organizations to adopt entirely
| useless names. What's the difference between "People for
| the American Way" and "Citizens United?" And these are
| both decades-old organizations, not a modern occurrence.
|
| Various regulations (some hinging on direct involvement
| in electoral advocacy) require various degrees of
| disclosure of funding sources and beneficial owners, but
| the system is uneven and often minimally enforced. In
| practice I expect a huge number of legal entities running
| advertising whose operators cannot readily be
| ascertained. This is already the case with groups like
| Metric Media Foundation where a good degree of
| investigative journalism was required to figure out who
| was pulling the strings.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Ah, the "freedom" to be shown misleading ads...
| javajosh wrote:
| _> 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.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| We already have laws saying that advertising must be marked
| as such. And the advertising companies are trying to make the
| marks as invisible as possible.
|
| How little font size can you use? Maybe a size that a person
| with perfect eyesight can read, but older people cannot, and
| even the person with perfect eyesight would easily miss it,
| that is technically legal, isn't it? What if the font color
| is hard to distinguish from the background color? How far
| from the advertisement can the warning be placed? If there is
| a warning, and a small advertisement next to it, and then a
| longer unrelated text written in different visual style, but
| still on the same page, it is obvious that the warning
| applies also to that other text, right? Or, if you are
| Google, just say that "everyone knows" that the first two or
| three search results are paid for, so there is no reason to
| mark them explicitly.
|
| (EDIT: What words should you use for the warning.
| "Advertisement?" "Sponsored links?" Is it okay to use some
| words that 90% of your readers would not be sure what they
| mean, but technically they mean what they are supposed to?)
|
| Then there is the question of what exactly counts as "paid
| speech". If I send the money directly to you, obviously. If I
| instead send them to a charity you own? If there is no cash,
| but I give you hundred bottles of wine? Does it make a
| difference if you write wine reviews, and you use samples
| from my gift? If I send you a computer with pre-installed
| software that you review, and I tell you that you don't have
| to send the computer back when you are done? If I invite you
| for an expensive vacation... sorry, I meant "conference",
| paid by my company? Or what if I never give you anything,
| just offer to write the articles for you, so you can give
| them to your boss and take your salary without having to do
| any work? What if you actually pay me for writing the
| content, but I give you a discount if I can choose the topic?
| What if I offer free food for members of the press when they
| provide coverage for my event? What if no transaction ever
| happens, but I will simply provide coverage for my friends
| and ignore the people I don't know.
|
| I am not sure if a clear line can actually be made here.
| Taken to extreme, even private bloggers would not be allowed
| to write blogs about topics they are interested in, without
| providing some disclaimer like "the topic of this article was
| not chosen impartially". That would be silly, wouldn't it?
| But then, everyone with more obvious conflict of interest
| will claim that their case is analogical to this.
| Trickflick wrote:
| Sounds like (a polarized) wanting a yes/no-solution. Maybe
| for a speech solution you can use a transcript (speech to
| text converter) which stretches every possible text
| hyperlinking to (educating) extending webpages with further
| information hyperlinks, on a topic (wiki, translating
| pages,...) -what for sure let 'their' influence on you _um_
| grow and possibly become more polarized ? An example-try:
|
| Methods: language regulation,
| using evaluative Words telling shortend storys
| repetition boasting hints ma(s)king half-
| truth to truth
|
| So now, with that on your mind lets test the transcript
| adding hyperlinks using the named methods... (-;
| tantalor wrote:
| 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?
| javajosh wrote:
| I have to be honest, I'm not sure how to respond. The mean
| part of me wants to call you out for being stupid, the
| angry part for using a strawman, the compassionate part
| wants to dig in and fix your misunderstanding, the wise
| part wants to smile, shake my head, and ignore it. So, as
| usual, I go with the meta part of me and just describe the
| other parts and I'll let you pick.
| dang wrote:
| The problem with this is that you've ruled out the wise
| part by posting it.
| dsl wrote:
| You made absolutely no counter argument, and used way too
| many words to express your core point: "I'm a jerk."
| dang wrote:
| Whoa, even when a comment is bad, please don't respond
| with a worse one. That just takes the thread further in
| the wrong direction. This is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| I don't read the GP comment as being a jerk so much as
| trying to at least avoid the most unproductive kinds of
| argument. Maybe it was a doomed experiment.
| javajosh wrote:
| Yes, it was something of an experiment. I knew that
| ignoring it was best but I had a lot of other reactions,
| and I'd never seen a comment like that before, so I gave
| it a shot. Live and learn!
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| People actually cook lunch for each other all the time
| without making a sales pitch, this idea that nothing
| happens if Google isn't cutting checks is an extremely dim
| view of humanity.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It isn't cynical but one which understands the value of
| specialization and ability to provide. If people cannot
| be supported doing X then doing better at it is limited.
|
| Said paid approach also has implicit patronage as wealth
| reserves the priveledge to devote a large ammount of
| resources including time and not get paid for it while
| monopolizing the prestiege and related benefits of it.
| eli wrote:
| Obviously if you are fundamentally against the concept of
| advertising then no version of AdWords will make you happy
| but.... isn't this change a good thing? Not perfect, but
| definitely good.
| kpmcc wrote:
| Education is certainly one part, but we could also shift
| business models away from advertising. Ads are a cancer on
| content and attention, and the fact that so much of the economy
| is centered around them is mind boggling.
| harikb wrote:
| Banning advertising doesn't make this problem go away unless
| you can also enforce it worldwide. If Google went away, you
| will have Baidu or Yandex pick up the business. Are we in a
| position to regulate them too?
|
| Remember that ads existed before internet. They also had the
| same fundamental problems. Only those days one had to be rich
| to muck with society
| fires10 wrote:
| Is this a case of perfect being the enemy of good?
| lapnitnelav wrote:
| It also doesn't solve the issue that ads are trying to
| address in the first place, which is to promote your
| business.
|
| If you outright ban ads, they'll come back in a sneaky way,
| see influencer marketing / product placement in culture
| (movies mostly) for how it plays out.
|
| It also prevents smaller businesses to compete with the
| larger ones because the larger ones have much more clout
| and branding power.
|
| Not that it makes ads perfect, far from it. But at least
| ads are transparent unlike all the astro-turfing there is
| out there.
| eitland wrote:
| > Banning advertising doesn't make this problem go away
| unless you can also enforce it worldwide.
|
| It makes the problem go away to a certain degree in areas
| were ads are banned. If we banned ads in Europe and US,
| Russians using Yandex and Chinese people using Baidu would
| still see ads but we would not.
|
| However we wouldn't see much at all for a while I guess
| since a number of big internet companies seem to be almost
| clueless when it comes to ordinary decent business models
| like "I pay you money, you provide me service without
| telling every shady tracker in the process.
|
| So I'm not arguing for a ban on advertising as that is
| completely unrealistic, would hurt tje economy badly, woild
| be next to impossible to enforce and also
| counterproductive: I've seen ads that improved my day or
| even my life.
|
| But I certainly wouldn't cried if someone had stopped
| WhatsApp from selling out to Facebook. And I certainly
| wouldn't have cried if online ads became more like ads in
| newspapers and magazines: static, doesn't move, doesn't
| make noise, doesn't send requests, embedded into the page
| server side instead of running giant multi-kilobyte
| applications in _my_ browser.
|
| Maybe I'd even stop blocking ads of they were less dumb,
| more relevant and didn't make my computer crawl.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Ads are often the lowest hanging fruit for ROI. Is it often
| far easier (less time consuming, less resource intensive,
| less risky) to manipulate human perception at large into
| buying your product than providing a functionally better
| product. Techniques are well established and broad reaching
| across all domains since it focuses on the consumer's
| perception. There's a reason businesses pour so much money
| into marketing and advertising.
|
| Even if you do provide a functionally better product/service
| than competitors, it's often easier for a competitor to
| convince consumers their product/service is better than your
| functionally better product/service, if nothing else, by
| hiding in ambiguity and complexity or well crafted claims
| that deceive consumers.
|
| There's also the obvious case that if you have an overall
| better product/service, if people don't know about it, it's
| not likely to succeed by word-of-mouth alone (there are
| exceptions) so advertising to aide discovery provides a
| necessary function but not to the level of manipulative
| practices we have today (marketing) that are employing
| sophisticated psychological techniques and are now even
| driven by targeted behavior data.
|
| It's one thing to inform people "Hey we made this, it exists,
| it does this, and here's the cost, you can get it here..."
| but it's another thing entirely to manipulate consumers
| perception or play on behavioral faults over--I don't know--
| delivering a product or service of genuine value?
|
| Given modern business environments, it seems to me that it's
| often financially best to deliver the minimal functional
| product/service a consumer will accept and convince them its
| better than it is (manipulate perceived value). That, to me
| also, doesn't create a strong economy, it creates a system
| that helps disproportionately redistribute wealth to those
| who can (and will) play that game.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Ads are often the lowest hanging fruit for ROI.
|
| And manufacturing may be cheaper without worrying about
| polluting or waste dumping, but when those were no
| curtailed, manufacturing didn't stop, it just found better
| ways.
| keiferski wrote:
| Sure, I definitely agree. Unfortunately it seems unlikely in
| the short term: Google alone still makes ~85% of its revenue
| from ads.
| alibaba_x wrote:
| Interesting timing right before a U.S. election. Likely trying to
| avoid Russian disinformation like in 2016.
| zebogen wrote:
| It says in the post that they've been verifying political
| advertisers since 2018. Now it is being extended to all
| advertisers.
| corporateslave5 wrote:
| You realize they only spent 100k in Facebook ads in 2016?
| alibaba_x wrote:
| Yes I know, but the whole impeachment thing happened because
| of that modest amount nevertheless.
| jacquesm wrote:
| At least someone gets a good ROI from Facebook ads.
| chatmasta wrote:
| For those interested, Facebook already does something similar,
| and also has an "Ad Library" [0] where you can monitor ads
| related to "social issues, elections or politics." It's pretty
| interesting, worth checking it out.
|
| [0] https://www.facebook.com/ads/library
| 1f60c wrote:
| Google also has a website similar to Facebook's Ad Library:
| https://transparencyreport.google.com/political-ads/region/U...
| [deleted]
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| 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".
| bootlooped wrote:
| If somebody with a blue check mark on Twitter commits a crime,
| is Twitter responsible?
| dsl wrote:
| No, because apparently it's in the public interest that it be
| seen. See https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-we-cant-
| block-trump-be...
| toast0 wrote:
| Verifying the (corporate) identity of the advertisers, doesn't
| affect their responsibility for content (or lack thereof), but
| it might mean you could sue the advertiser without first
| needing to get the information on the advertiser from Google.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Good to know that I'll be able to sue a corporation from
| Antigua that was setup by a shady foreign law firm. I'm sure
| that will go well and be a good use of my resources.
|
| This is all a veil to try and hide the fact that Google wants
| ads to blend in better with results. Every couple of years
| Google makes it harder to distinguish ads from content.
| https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-
| goog...
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Google being culpable for malicious ads will only happen if the
| US finally removes Section 230 immunity. Until then, they'll
| keep profiting off criminal activity whilst claiming it's not
| their fault.
| ericzawo wrote:
| Interesting development -- Will be fun to see who all the
| freelance superstar adsense pros are.
| kvothe_ wrote:
| kj
| vikramkr wrote:
| Would 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
| stestagg wrote:
| 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..
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _...with the advertisers' favicon, to increase
| transparency._
|
| My mom thinks any URL with a _padlock_ next to it is uber
| 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...
| shawnz wrote:
| This is why Chrome and Firefox changed it to a grey padlock
| instead of a green one
|
| https://blog.chromium.org/2018/05/evolving-chromes-
| security-...
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Increased transparency would be having "Advertisement" (no
| abbreviation) _and_ the advertiser 's icon.
|
| Replacing "Ad" with advertiser's icon is simply a method how
| not to display "Ad". I expect that many icons will not be
| company logos, but rather something that seems like it would
| normally appear in a web page: a small arrow, a tiny dot, a
| thumb-up, etc.
|
| Then the Google will have credible deniability: hey, we
| didn't make the icon, the advertiser did, blame him. But of
| course they are the ones who refuses to display "Advertising"
| clearly.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| This has big implications when advertisers get banned due to bad
| behaviors. Previously a bad actor who gets banned could easily
| just quickly reopen a new account. If they need to get verified,
| there are a few steps which increase expenses and turn around
| time. If they need to create a new shell entity every time they
| get banned, it adds significantly to amount of time and money
| required to get their shady advertising out.
|
| This is particularly important right now as the cost of
| advertising on Google (and in general) is going down right now
| because of the pandemic.
| dmix wrote:
| It's a good time to be running shell company services. I wonder
| what kind of turn around time you could achieve...
|
| The hard part will probably be finding an agent to represent
| the company. Assuming they validate bans based on company
| representatives.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-04-23 23:01 UTC)